Half Century In Memoriam: Rosetta Gochis, My Mother

I had planned to be more attentive to the anniversary of my mother's death on November 25, 1974, fifty full years since the day at Bronx Lebanon Hospital I was quickly ushered out of her room to the realization that she had just passed. But this past week, I managed to get the first real flu I have had in many a year, and so an entire week got away from me while I tried to escape from the misery of stuffed head, stuffed nose, nausea, and wild nighttime coughing instead of reflection and prayer over the enigma that she was, and will always be to me.

I write with a sadness compounded by the fact that one of my few friends who knew my mother well, who in many ways was more like the daughter my mother would have liked to have had, with whom I would have loved to share this day of remembrance, has unfriended and blocked me (along with at least one other friend) because of my expression of my political beliefs. So, in a way, I write of two variations of an experience of death. Much of life is indeed defined by loss and how we handle it. 

I mention my friend, (and she remains my friend, whatever she considers me to be after all these years, since we were about 12), because the last picture I have of my mother, fuzzy and imperfect, 

was taken at the wedding of my friend's sister. It was October, 1974. For most of the years I experienced my mother, she was not particularly interested in gatherings outside her immediate family. She had a distinctly anti-social streak, as far as I could ascertain, along with huge expectations of the world and those in her immediate orbit, in which mostly, it seemed, we all failed. She had dreams that did not include living in a one bedroom apartment in the Mt. Eden Section of the Bronx, and even an improved location near Riverdale. She had married at 18, for reasons that were not clear to any of us, including my father, who often said, after she died, that he had committed a sin in marrying her. She wanted him to provide a Manhattan life on a Bronx salary. He did very well by her and by me, but he never did get her the place with a doorman. My mother was a dreamer, so much so, that I believe she invented a whole other life--though even that is not entirely certain, that it was an invention--full of people with only first names, allegedly in the modelling industry, name Robert (pronounced "Robaire"), Lisa (pronounced "Leeza"), and Evelyn (pronounced "EVE-lyn") with whom she worked as a hand model in some undisclosed location in Manhattan. It was my therapist, of many years ago, who reminded me that I once described her as a "cold volcano" during one of our sessions. The family refrain regarding my mother was "That's just Rosetta". My father and I walked on eggshells. And then she got sick. Very sick, in June 1973. She had not been to any doctor since I was born nearly 20 years before. But it was hard even for her to ignore a rock hard place in torso, and the fact that she was turning yellow from the jaundice that meant it had spread. Metastatic. The first time I think I ever heard the word. Metastatic breast cancer. She was terminal. My father and I never agreed on what were our next instructions, but I know for a fact that for the remaining 14 months of her life, a gift, given the prognosis, no one ever mentioned the word "cancer" to her or to anyone regarding her. The view of doctors "in those days" was that the patient would not fight hard for survival if she knew for certain it was cancer. Of course, as the several articles I found after her death about miracle cures for cancer demonstrated, she knew. 

But something in her changed. The parapets, the walls, the moat that had surrounded her and separated us from her, fell or disappeared. Although religion did not feature in the change (looking back I wish it had, but then even I wasn't practicing anything, well into what would become an over a decade lapse), she did seem to appreciate life in general and her life in a way I had never seen. My father went into overprotection mode. Angry overprotection mode. He and I clashed. My mother had become. . . .well, mother-like, in the emotional sense. But we really couldn't talk about it. She visited relatives that she had ignored for years. She met with my aunt downtown at Schrafts. Despite the treatments and the side effects, which for her in the early days of chemotherapy, were fairly minimal (as such things can be reckoned in a horrible situation), she seemed, well, happy. The picture above was an example of the changed woman--she was enjoying herself, sick as she was, she was enjoying herself. I never sensed before that she enjoyed herself much. It was nice to see. But not to be commented upon, certainly not to her. 

I remember picking out that wig with her, somewhere on Fordham Road. It really did seem like her own hair--although it was the first time in years, in all my knowing her, that I had seen her in other than other than a tight, torturous bun. As a young woman, there were many shots of her with long flowing brown black hair. But not in my childhood or teen years. And then once she got sick, she did indeed, "let her hair down". 

That friend who has blocked me came over to the house and the two of them bonded over fun furs, these little fake fur jackets my mother had bought, the two of them going through the closet and trying them on. My mother was a giddy teenager with my friend. By this time, my relationship with her had become complicated. I couldn't relax with her the way I wanted. But I was glad to see her free in a way that maybe she had never known. And so, even if my friend never unblocks me, as it were, I won't forget that little moment of joy that she gave to my mother, which I couldn't. 

A month later, my mother calmly told my father she needed to go to the hospital. She applied her makeup and they went to the hospital. I left from the college radio station, WFUV, to take the bus to meet them at the hospital. Assigned to her room she got into bed and fell into a coma on November 15, 1974, never recovering consciousness, and dying on Monday, the 25th. Thanksgiving was Thursday, November 28 and it was necessary to hasten the wake and funeral. The wake was on Tuesday. Burial was on Wednesday. 

Today is Monday, the 25th.  Thanksgiving will be the 28th as it was all those years ago. I haven't had the heart for Thanksgiving, the holiday, since then. Maybe, particularly this year, that is true, though happily I will spend it with friends. 

I arranged for a perpetual enrollment (via the Seraphic Mass Association) for my mother, who I hope, I believe, has finally found the happiness life did not afford her in the hands of a loving God. 

Rest in Peace, innocent, sad irish girl, dead at 48. 

Life Matchbook by Matchbook

I have quite a number of elderly friends, mostly from my parish in Los Angeles. We seem to have and had a number of people who have lived to be nonogenarians. 

Pretty much after the death of my father in 2008, himself, briefly, a nonogenarian, it seems that Providence, for I can think of no other cause, has asked that I assist others in that decade. This does not come easy to me, which is, perhaps why God seems to insist on my doing so, until it does become easy to do His apparent Will. The deeply personal aspect of helping an elderly individual is antithetical to my nature, one that seems to rebel against close human interaction. I was raised an only child in a familial triangle in which physical warmth was rare. I never married. I live alone. Or, it's just some nature-nuture thing. Suffice it to say whatever it is that makes me resistant in helping people so personally is being ignored by my Lord God.  I am wondering if He is offering a hint, that He asks me to trust Him that I can do whatever He asks, another of my resistances generated by lifelong anxiety. And add to that some guilt that there are those (slightly younger) that I have not helped as much as I might if I had not had all these years of other elders falling into my orbit. One is my aunt, who is cared for by my cousin. I believe I should be doing more for them, but the anxiety of dealing with those that already are on my schedule (and have been for some time) has made me less active with her than I otherwise would be. 

That's not the crux of today's entry, just an entre, as it were, to it. There are realities to getting old, many realities, practical, emotional and spiritual. I want to focus on one of the practicalities I have observed--the cluttered apartment or house that becomes an especial burden at the end of life. At a time when folks should be letting go of stuff (and as you know I had already been on a so far unsuccessful "get rid of stuff" trend) they seem to bring it in, or, at least there is no doubt it surely seems to grow. I have in the last 16 years, four times had to clean out the space of a person who either needed a care home or died. "Overwhelming" does not begin to describe it. I have already noted in a prior entry that I am terrified that I will be one of those elders, as I am merely one generation behind the nonogenarians, and I do have that clutter tendency. What I already knew and is seared into my head is that none of this material matters, not the expensive nor the cheap. When we are gone, so is that stuff. Oh, someone might keep a memento. But then that person dies and the next in line has no use for it, and it holds no memories for them. Maybe an item or two will have historic value, but the person attached to it years before may or may no longer be remembered. When we leave this earth, what we had is either inherited or its trash, but either way, it's value is transient. Everything in my apartment has a story--for me. But to others, it is ephemera. 

So. Back when most restaurants had matchbooks which advertised the glamor of eating in their particular venues, I was one of those people who took a book as a token of the dining experience, and as a memento of times spent with friends. Long ago restaurants ceased creating and providing matchbooks, often themselves mini pieces of art, but from New York to California and visits to places in between, I ended up with a fair collection.  Quite a number of the books are reminders of restaurants famous and long gone. Some just have a personal connection to me--a favorite that seemed would always be there for breakfast, lunch or dinner, but wasn't. I have twice offered the collection to a local vintage collector who has family connections to old Hollywood. But she has twice asked me to hold onto them until she recontacts me, and the gap between those times has been a couple of years. So I found someone else, from a matchbook collecting society of some sort. 

I went through them again today, kind of a reaction to having had to get another of my elderly friends (the second in three weeks) to the hospital for emergency care. As the paramedics and ambulance personnel checked him out in his bedroom and arranged for transport, I sat on the couch of his living room noticing just how much stuff he clearly could not care for had developed over the years since last I had been in that apartment. I know that some of it is likely valuable, but the valuable and the not valuable all merged into one large disheveled clump of STUFF. I could tell some of it clearly had meaning for him, certain books, certain pictures. When I got home I just wanted to get rid of something, and the matchbooks just beckoned, and of course, as I gathered them into a shopping bag, the memories came tumbling back of several of the places represented. I can get rid of the matchbooks; I should get rid of the matchbooks; the memories are left to me at least until I am a memory. Moments of my life reflected in a matchbook. I met up with a lovely woman, Denise, who is part of a club that collects and trades matchbooks of these sort and I donated my collection of the last 50 or so years. I took photos of the ones that hit my heart. 

Maybe some of these places hold memories for you. 

Peppercorns:  That was a place I went to with college friends quite often in my late college and early law school years. It was on Grey Oaks Avenue, Yonkers, New York right near the Saw Mill Parkway. They often had musicians playing that late 70s folk type music. It was comfortable. Dark. Casual. Cozy. I am trying to remember what my favorite drink there was. Bourbon Sour? Dacquiri? One of my friends who had a crush on a waitress there might remember? It was there I told Len and Andrew (do they remember?) after I had first visited Los Angeles that I wanted to move here. I seem to recall a particular evening pronouncing that intention. I was really set on it. And surprise of surprises in 1981, I did it!

Baci:  This was a little Italian place on Beverly Boulevard, with a small, but natural back patio. It was near my apartment on Spaulding Avenue in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, and it was a place that my father, friends and I went for many evening meals. In Los Angeles, if you really wanted to see a celebrity (and best if you are not actually looking for them), the local eateries and shopping venues used to be (and still are a little) places to encounter them, not in the tourist sites. And so this was one of the places in which I early spied a celebrity, Rod Stewart and a wife, though I am not sure which one, along with a little boy in his arms. It was there that my father met up with my friend Susan's father, both men old time New Yorker's which always provides a commonality. I don't recall when that place closed but it is at minium 20 years and almost all of the descendants have opened and closed quickly. 

Mirabelle:  Mirabelle was a discovery early in my sojourn in Los Angeles, even before West Hollywood became a city of its own in the county. It was on the Sunset Strip. My first visit there was with a college friend who had moved back to Los Angeles with her father before she graduated with us from Fordham, her father being in the entertainment industry. I was newly relocated to California and considering a return to the Catholic faith. As we munched, she told me of a little Church around the corner, on Holloway Drive. I was so new to Los Angeles, I did not know that there was a street between Sunset and Santa Monica named Holloway. Not long after I repaired to the little Church where I have been a parishioner for 40 plus years. It turned out, I would find, that the parishioners often went there after Sunday Mass for Brunch. The restaurant was run by a Greek man named George (what else?) and our Greek-Mexican pastor, Monsignor Parnassus, knew him well. It was casual, and bright, and the food was solidly good. Because they knew so many of us, substitutions were never a problem. The restaurant had been there since 1974 or so, and seemed like one of those places that would survive forever. But the 90s came, and the 2000s and the generational interests shifted. George tried to modernize the place, make it "hip" or whatever was the current word for updating. The new furniture was garish. No substitutions were allowed. Business did not increase. It decreased. Again what about 15 or 20 years ago (time is passing so quickly I can't recall really), George gave up the dining ghost, and retired. This space has also been innumerable restaurants that did not survive. Right now, it is again being remodeled by someone who clearly does not know that in the absence of great luck he or she will have none. Although I have no matches from it, there is another place on Holloway Drive, Dialogue, that used to be a sleepy sort of coffee shop type locale, and it was a place that we parishioners also used to go to, if Mirabelle's was not the particular choice. Some years ago, a retired couple bought it, and while it became a bit more upscale, it remained sleepy and always with available tables until one of their sons inherited it. He made it very successful among the z generation. It is always crowded. The old attentiveness is gone. The wait time for a take-out meal (also for which we parishioners liked it) is very long. So, it is alas no longer a favorite place. I am more likely to run to the Subway on Sunset for a quick sandwich. 

Sarno's:  There was a loss. On Vermont Avenue, Los Feliz, it was a place for food and opera by the waiters and waitresses. I can't say that I went there often, but it was authentic Hollywood of golden days opened in the 1940s in a building built in the 1920s initially only as a bakery, but later adding the coffee shop/restaurant.  I am not sure, but I think it was there I saw George Takei of Star Trek fame having a meal. The end of that famed place was of movie vintage.  But just as in a movie, in 1987, Albert Sarno, the progeny of the original owners, was shot to death near his home on Los Feliz Boulevard. Albert's wife kept the place going until 2000.

Yesterday's:  This goes back to before my actual move to Los Angeles. It was 1977 and I was in between semesters at Law School in New York. I had a week to do something and I decided, if I could stay with my father's youngest brother and his family, (whom I hardly knew, so they were very kind indeed) I would make a visit to California. I had a college friend (we still are), Dennis Vellucci, who was a fellow at USC and lived in Santa Monica. I didn't drive then, so he volunteered to show me the town. At that time, a big part of the town was Westwood, the college community by UCLA. It was a hopping place, lots of restaurants, lots of activity (Tower Records, Bullocks, Mario's Restaurant--there's a matchbook pictured here- Stan's Donuts, Monty's Steak House, Flax, Alice's Restaurant, lots of movie theatres).  And the place he took me to was Yesterday's, a two tier restaurant, with live music and great drinks (I loved frozen dacquiris). When I came back as a visitor in 1978, I went back there and a brought a friend or two. And when I moved to Los Angeles, I went there as often as I could. In the 90s, when all of Westwood was seeing a slump and gangs were maurauding and scaring visitors away, it closed, as did so many of the other places I mentioned in the parenthesis). I haven't spent much time in Westwood since then, and still they have a hard time keeping restaurants and businesses. 

Barney's Beanery:  Happily this restaurant is still there at the crossroad of Santa Monica and Holloway. It is, as you may know, the last place that Janis Joplin ate before she overdosed in the 1970s at the age of 27. It was a go to for the rock crowd back in the day with memorabilia galore. To me it's gotten a little seedy over the years, but back in the 90s I fairly well frequented it, including during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that put a curfew on ordinary citizens--something new for me. I was there with my friend Andrew in the daylight hours one day before curfew, when a bunch of firefighters came in for a well deserved meal. Just as their food was served, they got a call. And out they went. The waitress seemed unphased, and the food was kept warm, if I remember, and they came back pretty quickly as another company had already answered the call. 

I could go on and on, but here is one more from the photos, and if you, the reader are inclined, feel free to ask me in the comments about one of the places I haven't mentioned. Not all, but most have some small story attached. So, here's the last for this entry.

Carlos and Charlies:  Here I only have a drink ticket. It was a Mexican Restaurant also on Sunset not far from where I live now. They had the best tuna based dip for tortilla chips. I went there early in my life in Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, with the staff of my then law office boss, and partners, for one of my opportunities to see Joan Rivers. And I brought a friend or two there when a choice of restaurant was sought. They too, in the 90s saw a downturn and ultimately it closed, and so far as I can tell it has never been another restaurant, but some kind of office building.

I loved Los Angeles, when I first visited and for the first 20 or so years I lived here. As time has worn on, as has been true of most major cities, the allegedly progressive politics that promised a better town made it so much worse. Oh, I know, you might not agree, depending on your affiliations. There are, however, only three things that keep me here now.  First, I am too old to leave and start a new life in a more policy attractive state. Second, I have more people here than elsewhere, and I am ensconced in a nice, presently safe home. Third, you still can't beat the weather.