"Heart" Still Has One

As she began to sing another of their decades past hits, Ann Wilson looked at the half moon over the Hollywood Bowl. I wondered if she felt as wistful as I did, we of the same baby boomer generation. She, of course, was one half of a powerhouse 70s ad 80s group. Me, I had I suppose, a measure of quiet success, for a time, and Ann and her sister, Nancy, provided a psychic comfort as I have traveled my far more anonymous road.

Somehow, watching them storm the Bowl, their voices as strong as when they were young and hot on the charts I felt like they were standing for me, proving it ain't ever over till it's over. A woman over 60 (Ann is  65; Nancy is 61) remains a force even as the world tries to make her invisible. They may not look as they did back in their salad days--sometimes the lighting enhanced the facial imperfections that are less able to be well hidden past the age of 40, particularly in Ann. But they provided to me, a contemporary, the formidable fuel of optimism.

And confirmed what  I have always known, but is frequently rejected in a disposable, change it up society--just because something is new, it isn't necessarily better.

The opening act was Liv Warfield. I had never heard of her and as has happened with many a younger artist, I hoped I would fall in love with her music and her style of performing. She was energetic; she had a voice to blow off the roof as Thomas Wilkins, the conductor of the Bowl for the performances promised. My friend Connie noticed the sweat pouring from her (on the big screen it was actually a little alarming) face and wondered why someone didn't hand her a towel. The problem I was having with the performance came into focus at that question. It seemed that she was overdoing it. Like the sweat pouring from her head was somehow to be a proof to the audience of true art. I found myself distracted rather than entertained. Plus, like me, she was a plus size woman who was wearing an outfit way too tight and as my companion on the other side said, "one size too small." She tugged often at both her leather pants and the too short top in an effort to hide a significant bulge caused by the tight clothes.

I found myself leaving just at the last song or so to go to the restroom, rather than to wait for the official intermission.

I really wasn't expecting much of Heart. I have seen several groups and bands past their heydays doing the rounds of comeback and or farewell concerts, and there have been several that were disappointing. No range. No presentation. I remember seeing the Moody Blues a few years ago, as much a favorite as Heart, and, while it might have been an off night, I felt a tiredness. The same with Hall and Oates. Oh, they were all right. But age had not created the vintage of days gone by.

But then I was amazed. And not one drop of sweat that I could see, despite the clear intensity. They were authentic and still relevant. I know. The audience ate it up, and they weren't all born the same year in antediluvian  times as I was. In fact, in front of us there were a couple of guys who were probably born the same year that Heart began their record making, or perhaps well later, who were gyrating wildly at every song.

I remember thinking how wonderful it was that these two sisters have managed to maintain a relationship on and off stage. They clearly like and respect one another.

I reveal now a secret. I have had my hour or two listening to a group and singing along loudly, with the occasional air guitar riff. And I remember harboring a fantasy of being on stage with them, and getting to strut with the microphone hitting someplace close to the high notes on a tune like "Crazy for You", or "How do I Get You Alone". Actually, truth be told, I still harbor it. I may have to settle for karaoke at Connie and Leo's, and that could be mighty fine, but hey girls, tell me, would you consider it?

When I see these groups of yore there is even something more I feel. I don't think I can quite explain it in writing. Maybe you have felt it. Maybe not. I see them up there on a stage, having been weathered by life, just like me, but they seen by the whole world, somehow give me a strength and more than that, provide a sense of camaraderie. Time moves on for all of us. There have been triumphs and battles lost. There are scars. But there are also good memories. We all share in these things regardless of our roles in life.

And quite simply, in the case of Heart, they still got it! And to paraphrase an Elton John, we are all still standing! Life is still full of possibility.

Doing the Laundry and Other Memories of My Mother

There is no special occasion that causes today's entry. It is not my mother's birthday.  It is not anywhere near the anniversary of her death.

They say that our senses, especially our sense of smell, generate memories. That's what happened. I was in the garage of my building getting ready to get into my car and there was this strong, pleasant, fresh smell of some one's detergent from the laundry room, on the same basement floor.

We Bronx-ites of the 50s and 60s and even the 70s had generally two ways of doing the laundry. There was the Laundromat, usually one in every neighborhood's block or the basement machines in your building. When I was very young, in our large tenement building, there were no machines in the basement, so it was the local Laundromat we would go. Certain items might be done by hand and carted up to the roof, which alternated as "Tar Beach" for summer tanning, hung on the lines used by the whole building. Some folks hung their lingerie, for example, on a line stretched across the outside of the apartment window. We lived on the fourth floor of the five floor walk up so getting to the roof was only one flight and an additional stairwell to the creaky iron door and the plastic line. My mother ever so carefully lined up the items for drying with wooden clothespins and painstakingly clipped on each item. When I was too young to be by myself in our one-bedroom apartment (I had the bedroom; my parents had the Castro-Convertible in the living room that for parties managed somehow to look a lot like a cozy nightclub--another tale to come),  I would trudge up there with her, bored for the most part taking the measure of the whole length of the roof, and if I was lucky to find one, popping the odd tar bubble with my shoes. Sometimes, I could hear the sound of a practicing violinist in the building opposite us on the alley side. I could never quite discern where the sound came from as all the windows were curtained--but when I see the movie "Rear Window" where the sounds and sights of the too close neighbors Jimmy Stewart watches while he recuperates with his broken leg, I always recognize a similar experience. It was only a matter of feet, I never was good at exact distances, from our building's back to that building's back. I am trying to remember what detergent my mother used, and what softener; there was always a softener. Whatever it was, that scent in my garage brought it all back. My mother was serious about her home making activities. Is every mother like that? Probably. But my mother seemed more serious than most and I don't remember chit-chatting with her while she did her work. I just wandered, looking over the edge toward our courtyard, with its fountain that never in my memory was ever used as a fountain but rather as a planter--until the landlord began to take less and less care and then it wasn't even much of a planter. When we moved to a more upscale building when I was sixteen, we had the machines in the basement, including a dryer! and to the extent I would join her for a foray into clothes washing, I was amazed by her skill in perfect folding of every item.  I think, when I look back, that I joined her more after she was diagnosed with a terminal breast cancer--mostly to keep an eye on her-though she did not slow down after that diagnosis.

I am having a cascade of memory now.

This is my mother. Likely this picture was taken some five or more years before I was born. After I was born she avoided being photographed. Until she was sick, I knew her as an overweight woman, and she covered up completely in an effort to hide it. A friend who saw this photograph just before I posted it said "She looks like a gypsy".  I never thought about it. My mother always dressed differently from other women, and certainly very differently from other mothers in the Bronx. One person sees a "gypsy"; I see only a fashion plate, an iconoclastic fashion plate. Even after she was heavy, she still dressed with panache. When she went out, there was no such thing as "casual" for her. If it didn't match she didn't go out.

My relationship with my mother did not become a warm one, in my experience of it, until she became terminally ill. By then she was buying me supplies of Bazooka Bubble Gum to be stashed in an old Barracini container. She was insisting on lunches with me at Krum's on Fordham Road and my need for an ice cream cone for dessert. I inherited my mother's tendency to weight, so believe me, I didn't need it, but mother-ly softness touched me with both joy and sadness. Before that, it always seemed that I was one step from violating a probation that I didn't recall being imposed or being deserved. Long ago I came to realize that it all had nothing to do with me, though her internal secrets to explain them were never revealed to confirm my speculations. There were only hints. My father thought she had not really wanted to marry, yet, she did. She wanted to be a model, but never seemed to have the drive to pursue it, except superficially. It always seemed to me she never wanted a child yet there I came some 8 or 9 years into the marriage conceived during a rare trip she agreed to make, to Canada. It is ironic that I probably have had more of the life she wanted. I have no complaints, but as you know, the grass truly is always greener on the other side.

But there were Bronx mother daughter moments. There was a deli like grocery store on Mt. Eden Avenue that had dill pickles in a barrel, and she and the store owner would let me reach in for my pick of the biggest. At the A and P "around the corner" from our building, she'd make sure that I'd get a slice of extra thin American Cheese from the meat department. There was a night when neither of could sleep and while dad was sleeping soundly in the convertible bed, she let me lean against her, something that she never did, and together we watched the Late Late Show movie on Channel 9. My first and only dog Bruno fell in love with my mother. She couldn't leave the building without evoking extended howling. And by the time she came home her clothes had been pulled by him from their hangers to sit on and derive emotional comfort. There was the bus trip to Freehold, New Jersey, after she got sick to visit with relatives she had eschewed entirely in my life's memory, including her favorite aunt, Mary, her mother's sister, by then already well over 90. We took the bus, my father worried to anger about her travelling in her clearly deteriorating condition, and no one said anything about her clearly yellow color (the result of the cancer going to her liver by the time she was diagnosed), and pretended that it wasn't odd she had made a sudden visit after at least a decade. She was relaxed as I had never seen her and I had to interdict thoughts that I was actually grateful to a condition that somehow had broken down her thick emotional walls. She was inviting my friends over to the apartment, something that had virtually been forbidden in my younger days.

There will probably be many things I write of her as blog days go by. I will probably add some more of Dad's "Myra" stories.  Myra is a thinly disguised version of my mother in dad's writings; his experience of a clearly reluctant wife and mother, a woman who would rather have been a Rita Hayworth in Hollywood than a first generation American-Irish daughter trapped in a cement jungle Bronx.

She was a autodidact sophisticate in a land where that was no more than putting on airs. She was for real, but in that environment, it was eccentric. She claimed many people, with first names only, that dad and I never met, as her friends. All of them were super rich, she averred matter of factly. She made trips to downtown New York that she never explained, except to say that she was working with these friends, she, as a hand model. There was Robert (pronounced as Robaire), Evelyn (Eve-lyn), and Lisa (pronounced "Leeza"). Dad said that mom passed on an invitation for a flight in a private plane by one of these friends, but Dad declined, feeling that he couldn't compete with such people. He should have gone. Then maybe we would know if these friends were real or imagined. I'd go through Vogue or Bazaar magazines and I would try to guess which hand was my mother's. I couldn't be sure. The hands in the glossy photos were highly decorated and air brushed. "Yes," she might occasionally say, "those are mine." I never knew if I should believe her. She did have well groomed nails, too long for any manual work, and certainly useless on a typewriter.

If it seems that my descriptions of her are sketchy, I agree, they are.  She was with me for 20 years, and she was pure enigma.  Really, she was enigma to everyone who knew her, but particularly those closest to her.

She gave me life, she gave me my education and my drive, she gave me my the Catholicism she never practiced herself, and she gave me my love for cats (we share an uncanny rapport with them). That's a great deal for one short life.

I have no doubt I will write of my mother, as well as dad, again and again and she will live on in the internet ether as well as heaven where I know she found the happiness that eluded her in this life.

Endings, and Beginnings

Since I am on a new trail of blogging, I suppose this is a beginning of sorts. "What to do?" I ask myself.

I began the blog Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon, in honor of my dad, because I realized that, having had no children myself, I was the end of his family line. While I believe in immortality, the kind with God in heaven, there remains a very human bound part of me who would like there to have been some evidence of my dad's existence here, on this earth. And of my mother. So that was the idea behind that blog. Now, because of my computer awkwardness, I am going to merge it with this one, out of necessity--to house a memory of them on the internet, in whatever form into which it will evolve.

One of my undeveloped interests since my career's cessation has been archiving. Naturally, there are the well known ones, like the Library of Congress, or one of the many big libraries in various cities where the papers of the famous or otherwise historically significant are housed. But I have always been fascinated equally with the stories of what I suppose one would call the "regular person", like my dad, like me. As I recently cleaned out the apartment of a friend, I saw that she had very old photographs of the family of a woman whose estate she had administered, long since dead herself. My friend must have had no one to give them to. Now I have them, and I add them to my own photographs and the photos of others I have assisted, to my personal inventory. There is no real place, that I have found so far, that would want them. If they have a particular significance, say,  as those of a priest, I could pass them on to the Catholic Archivists (there are some) because the life of that priest is part of the history of the Church. But with my friend's friend, my elderly friend herself, dad, and me. . . .our photos, our mementos, our writings are bound for the trash heap once I am gone.

Years ago, I suspect I might have mentioned in one of my blogs, I went to a memory exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Aside from a focus on Alzheimer's and its effect on families and the sufferer, there were smaller exhibits on individuals and their family mementos, and a book in which the guests could write to leave their first memories (often not independent memories but the result of family storytelling when a child was young). I suppose there began my more intense interest in keeping things that bespoke the life of an individual who owned them. A friend once derisively (in my view) asked me whether I thought my writing was worthy of the kind of treatment one might give to a great figure. He did not ask it quite like that. He was asking it in a joking nudge. I was hurt nonetheless. He is a writer. He writes scripts, by which I presume, he has hoped to be remembered as well as to make money. It is not about worthiness, I should have said, if I had thought of it, but about a person, a time, and a place. A marker of existence. A connection to others who exist with and before and after. It is how community memory, how history itself is made. In some fashion or another, I have come to believe, we are all of some interest to the next generations, to history itself. Some may have more gravitas than others to be sure, but every being has had a story, long or short. Anyway, one aspect of this new chapter on the blogosphere will be a form of personal archiving. This person. This Djinn. This Djinn's family. This Djinn's friends. Ok, this Djinn's cats too! I shall start with some photos, with more to follow. There will probably be no order to the entries on my family and friends. There might be a bunch of photos. There might be one of dad's stories. Or his letters, or the letters of an old friend, some still alive (with appropriate reductions if anything too personal was discussed) some now gone to their rewards. I am not sure. I am playing it all by ear, or fingers in this case. So, today I went through a few photos, mostly of me, but also of my family. The first.

Indeed, the awkward age started early! Right after birth, which this photo of presents. Long before I ever saw it, my dad regaled me with his view of my less than sterling looks upon my entry into the world, in particular the shock of black hair. I hate to agree, but I do, and note that I look stunned at the very least. I am told that I did not have much room in utero so that, as commonly happened in such cases, I wore leg braces for a number of months to keep me from becoming pigeon toed. Naturally I remember none of this. I read or heard somewhere that babies usually have blue eyes when they are born. Mine appear to be as black as my hair. Not a pretty picture. I hope you will agree that things improved a bit.

Still have those dark eyes, but at least the hair has lightened considerably. I still look stunned. It could be that it turned out I was very near sighted.  This was my first Christmas. The man holding me is my Grandfather, Andrew. He died a year later. My mother's father, he was the superintendant of the building in which we lived for sixteen years. It was a three pronged building, each edifice sharing a courtyard and the roof but each with a different address. And my mother's two married sisters, and one unmarried one, along with their parents all lived, as far as I always knew and saw, in the building. (There is a separate story here about the unmarried daughter, but I'll save that for another entry).  My mother and her youngest sister, Teri, lived next door to each other in the middle section, on the walk-up's fourth floor. Hard to believe in this day and age when people look younger than their years, but my grandfather was not quite seventy when this picture was taken.

He was born in Ireland and I am told was not a man of many words, until he was drunk. He lived for a time in the boiler room having been banished there by his wife for reasons that have never been revealed given the entrenched secrecy of my family. My father once was summoned to go drinking with the old man, who in the crowded bar announced he had sailed to Copenhagen (what that had to do with anything I cannot say) and challenged every man in the place to a fight.  Happily, it seems no one took him up on the challenge, but out cold from drink, my father carried him back to the boiler room. Whether my Grandfather's request to my father that he not tell my mother of his shameful behavior was a sign that my mother had a favored place in his heart, I will never know.  I was his first grandchild, the only one he would ever see. He worked a second job at a meatpacking plant, named Wilson, and he was convinced that I should be given a great deal of meat and orange juice in order to thrive. I know so little else about him, and so far as I know this is one of only three photographs I have of him.

Oh, this is a favorite, but not necessarily because of the photo itself, but where I was when it was taken. My Uncle Frank was a bus driver in the Bronx, and his route was along Woodlawn. My dad took me on a jaunt to join Uncle Frank during a break, when his bus was "laying over".  That's Djinn at the wheel. Dressed to the nines and ready to drive! My favorite was using the lever on the right of me to pull open and shut the door, endlessly. I road many buses after that, so many that I avoid them assiduously these days in California, but never in the driver's seat!

To conclude the beginning of the archive Djinn, I leave you with a rare photo in which my mother and father appear sort of together. This in Monticello, New York, just off Sackett Lake Road, in what was once known as the "Borscht Belt", the locale for many a grand hotel with the best comedians, the Laurel, the Concord, all gone long ago. My Aunt Rita and Uncle Ben (the upper left) owned a little summer place with two large bedrooms, one tiny one off the kitchen and the cutest nook you'd ever see for breakfast.  I spent a number of weeks up there over the years, but it was unusual for all the sisters and in laws to be there together, even for a day. We called it "the country" although it was oly 90 miles from the heart of New York. There I saw my first cow, and deer.  It was rural life itself compared to the concrete world back over the George Washington Bridge. My father is in between my cousin Barbara (who died far too early at the age of 35 in 1992) on the chaise lounge basking in the sun. My unsmiling mother in the middle, seated, is wrapped up from head to toe, looking severe as I would know her to be through most of our short relationship. Next to her is Grandma (yes, I agree the hat looks silly to our modern eyes), wearing one of her indistinguishable house dresses, but comfortable in her bare feet. She had bunions on those feet.  One could not help but stare at them. Next to Ben and Rita is my Aunt Kathleen, our maiden aunt. In the distance is my Uncle Ben's rambler. I remember one year cleaning it or one like it as it sat in that very spot. As I attempted to remove the debris from the mat under the steering wheel, I remember wondering what it would be like for me to drive. And the idea of becoming old enough ever to do that seemed too remote for imagination.

Likely the person taking the picture is the other sister, Teri. So much comes up within me in looking at this photo.

Happy family? You'd think so, as you would I suppose, think of any family pictured like this in millions of albums gathering dust on shelves all over the world. But no, not particularly. Perhaps a tell tale sign is the two women who are grossly overweight, my mother and her eldest sister, Kathleen. I would learn of other things as life progressed, some things I may never mention here, but common in their terribleness. The secrets of sadness had begun long before this picture was taken in the early 1960s.

I was home sick on my first alone visits to Monticello. I can remember, maybe it was the weekend this picture was taken, lying in in the bed next to my cousin Barbara's wishing my parents might see I wanted to go home. My mother would be hard about such things. I chose to be there I either heard her say or imagine her to say, so I would have to go through with it. Of course, in just a short time, I became reasonably content. Aunt Rita allowed me a latitude that my mother never did. I did not have to have perfect curls in my hair. My sneakers could get dirty. I could indulge my intense love of running around with all the kids that gathered on that lawn from morning till the summer dark. I can remember running so much that getting a glass of water inside the house felt like pure joy itself. Oh, more there will be in these pages of Monticello. The other day I was sitting on the patio of a friend who lives in the hills of Studio City. There was this sudden scent of summer. Can't explain it. Warm air with grass, or something like that. Something buzzed in a nearby tree, and I was vaulted back to some otherwise indistinguishable summer day under the big maple tree that edged the dirt road by the Sackett Lake house. I was lying on my back looking at the veins of individual leaves. And I had nothing in my mind except those leaves and being purely content with cushion of the grass on my back. I must have breathed deep as I just did in writing this memory of myself, somewhere between age 10 and 14, doing nothing, being nothing and simply content.

Maybe that's why I so enjoy being on a patio or a terrace or a back yard of a church, for it brings that contentment with it again.

Why Chapter Three?

Chapter 2  THREE

It's going on one in the morning. I have been going crazy with my second chapter blog siince I downloaded Microsoft 10. I can't find my dashboards for DjinnfromtheBronxTwo.blogspot.com and the correlative Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon.blogspot.com.  So I can't add to either!

A long time ago I added a Chapter Three blog when I had this very same problem, but it resolved itself, magically, so I forgot about that addition. Until I downloaded Windows 10. So, I enter DjinnfromtheBronxTwo, but when I sign in, I am led instead to the dashboard for that once forgotten Chapter Three.  If none of this is making sense to you, you can imagine my techno frustration in trying to sort it out. I looked at the google boards for a solution. I found similar problems and tried one proffered fix, related to opening two browsers (purportedly the problem is that I have different passwords or e mails or something on each of these).  I see from reading the web boards that others have had this mystery but I simply am not saavy enough with internet codes to take a chance on another effort to correct the problem.  I could hire someone.  Maybe I will, one day, but for now. .  .

Welcome to Chapter Three of DjinnfromtheBronx!

What will I do with it? I will combine some of the material from the other two.  I will continue posting my late father's Camp Gordon letters to my mother in this fresh forum for example.

Perhaps it is a good thing, this computer catastrophe.  I suppose in an existential way I am ready for a new blog chapter. The last several months have felt like yet another page's turning.
The page may have been edging on a turn for many months or a year or two but I have perhaps been resisting it.

Since the loss of my 25 year career (four years ago I might have said that it wasn't lost, but rather grasped and thrown into the rapids by political currents over which I had no control; I have noted that those currents flow today tossing others into the same rapids) I have experimented with various activities. Voice over. Reading for the blind. Taking a trip to Europe. I did write that memoir. I had someone look at it. Her critique was detailed and sound. I decided I need to put the book away. Except to change the title and write a few new paragraphs of introduction, I haven't gotten back to it. And I haven't found that niche of interest to carry me contentedly along. Partly, it has been because of other life events distracting me.  It seems that I have a bit of a helping nature, which seems odd to me because I lack the kind of loving nature I have observed to be more intensely present in others who help; in fact, I have often wondered whether I am capable of love even when I am doing "good", and the needs of various individuals have been placed squarely in my path. I have taken on the needs, albeit sometimes with a "why me?" resignation. But the point is,  I seem not to have the expanse of time that I anticipated. Partly, though, I think I am just a little lazy about the things I claim to want to do.

A large portion of a most recent ongoing task in helping another was just completed. Other consuming aspects will likely loom in the near future, but for the moment, I have a little time to think. And courtesy of this computer glitch, it has occurred to me that there is something slightly Providential in my having a "new" blog or a new branch of the old ones. Everything about the other chapters has come to seem a bit distant. I have left them behind or they have slipped behind me. Does that make any sense? Until July 2011, everything had been, more or less, linear. Go to school. Get a job, make a career, advance, maybe get married (I did want to once), have a plan, of some sort.

But after July 2011, I may have tried to plan; hence my initial efforts at specific activities, but something very different from before took hold. I was looking at the present moment, instead of the past and the future. I had no idea what to do with that. I don't know that I do know now.

My Catholicism definitely has taken a key place in the present moment. Maybe that's why I help, because I believe in service; it is an act of will not emotion. If I relied on my emotional dimension, I think I'd be a hermit.

Something is a stirrin' in me, around me. I think for the good. I have had plenty of Graces come to me these last years, though I think my resistance to them is a bit troubling and inexplicable. So maybe the computer problem can be looked upon as an opportunity to explore whatever this chapter is going to be in one ordinary life.  Since I believe that we are all part of a cosmic tapestry overseen by a mysterious but redeeming Creator I believe each ordinary life is extraordinary--because it is unique. Mine, and yours.

So, we shall see where this goes.