Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? A Take on Francois Villon's Famous Title By my Father

I might have mentioned in other blog entries that my father wrote short stories featuring a character named "Myra" who was a thinly disguised version of my mother. Here is a short short one.


Deciding what to keep and what to relegate to the yard sale pile is always a source of contention for Myra and me.  She has a simple philosophy. If it has no immediate use, dump it.  Terse. Laconic. Succinct.

My reverie is interrupted.  I hear Myra's voice from the corner of the dusty attic  Clearly she has discovered another of my treasures to dispose of.

"What's this," she says, holding up an album that has been carefully wrapped in plastic and tied with a string.  I recognize it immediately.  My heart skips a beat.

"Nothing important," I reply.  I don't know why I lied.  After all, it is nothing ore than an autograph album from an elementary school ceremonial.  It was our custom in those days, to inscribe some epigram of farewell in one another's book.  Today was graduation day. We were going on to High School.

Myra undid the string, sat on an orange crate, and began leafing through the album.

Perhaps it wasn't guilt. I felt that something private, something sacrosanct, was being invaded.

It was important, perhaps the most important:  The written exchanges of farewell was a rite of passage and the end of childhood years.  It was more than a matter of self-image, on how many students wanted to exchange amenities with me.

"Who was Estelle Abrams," came the voice from the orange crate.

"A mousy little girl," I said.

"Were you really?" added Myra.

"Really what?" I answered.

""The cleverest, she wrote, 'to the cleverest in the class.'"

I did not answer.

"And Selma Rabinowitz?" Myra followed up.

"Certainly not mousy," I admitted.  'Don't do anything I wouldn't do,' Selma had written.
Selma had grown to a challenging presence during school.  A daughter of Eve with all the primordial attributes intended by the Creator. But she hadn't been Elise.

These are reflections of memory matured by the passage of time.  There is no possibility of comprehension by the mature mind of the unexplored internal world of youth; of boys awakening from the slumber of childhood, thence to an epiphany of beauty that comes once in a lifetime.

On that day I suffered the importunities necessary to the ritual. All else was peripheral, wearisome. I was waiting for Elise.



The class comedian and curse of the perpetually hysterical Miss Hurley, who taught Geography, made his mark.  What he wrote and what Oscar Schaeffer scribbled eludes me as of no consequential. Harold Steckel, fat and elliptical in shape, plagiarized Shakespeare, to wit:

"Is this a dagger which I see before me?" hardly appropriate to a graduation ceremony.  Bernice Cohen held my hand between her overly warm palms.  Still, Elise did not come.

"Honey," came the voice from the orange crate.  "Who was Elise?"

"Just another girl," I said.

I remembered the shy, tentative approach, her album offered to me as if she anticipated rejection. I do not recall what I wrote.

"Goodbye is a very sad word," was her phrase in mine.

"Honey?" came the voice again from the crate.

"Yes, Myra."  I held my breath.

"Was Elise pretty?"

"She was, Myra."

"Prettier than me?"

Maggie's Plan and the Easy Devolution of Life, Boundaries and Old Fashioned Story Telling

 There was hope that this film, well reviewed by critics, and recommended by a friend mutual to Len Speaks and me, would finally conquer the spate of films well reviewed by critics and recommended by friends that were just awful. Hello My Name is Doris, The Meddler and The Family Fang.

I report thusly. I didn't hate Maggie's Plan. I even kind of liked it. So, here's the story. Maggie (played by Greta Gerwig) is a thirty something single working at the New School in Manhattan who wants a child but has no romantic prospect. She has singled out a mathematician-pickle maker (yes, yes, that's what he is) friend, Guy (Travis Fimmell) to be the donor of sperm. He suggests the usual method of delivery. She declines, preferring a messy self injection in her bathtub. As this chapter of her solo life is about to unfold, she has met an adjunct professor of anthropology, John (Ethan Hawke) also at the New School, who fancies himself a novelist, but whose incipient talents appear to be a matter of indifference to his wife (Jullianne Moore) a rather famous professor at Columbia. In fact, John unknowingly interrupts the sperm injection  by appearing at Maggie's apartment so that further chapters of his novel (a thinly disguised lament on his married life with Georgette, his wife) may be praised unflinchingly by Maggie. On this is their quickie relationship built, and Maggie forgoes self insemination for the usual kind with her adjunct professor whom she also marries leaving the older Georgette in the proverbial dust of her older age. Maggie and John have a child who it is suggested might be Guy's mathematically inclined progeny-so that the injection of his sperm might not have been a-miss. This avenue is left unexplored in the movie.  But Georgette, and John's two children by their marriage, are still very much part of John and Maggie's life, well, more Maggie as she becomes the soccer mom Georgette never was and John could remain an absentee father.  Maggie realizes after her daughter is about two or three that her marriage to John was based on the flimsiest of premises, that John isn't much of a writer, but he is very much self absorbed, and hatches the plan of the title to give him back to Georgette, with whom she has developed a solidly cool friendship. Georgette and John it turns out are really perfect for each other as ships passing in the night who happened to manage to have two children who will probably end up in a years long unsuccessful therapy (that could be another movie entirely).

So Maggie sets it up that John will meet up "by chance" with Georgette at a conference in Canada. And that faithfulness will once again go by the boards (that's my take) and the ships will collide over anthropology talk and snow bound rebound romance. And so it happens. Oh, yes, What was wanted was not really what was wanted and the ships, so to speak, are righted.

In the old days of movies, everyone would have been punished. Not that I am suggesting I want this to have happened to Maggie, Georgette et. al. I am a creature of the generation in which I live, and so, as I said, I found the film distressingly enjoyable. Distressingly, because everything about it just proves we are living in a cesspool of moral confusion. No boundaries. Feel it. Do it. Three kids? Good luck to them. This is our world. There are no bright lines. And doing what is right? Like not having affairs on a spouse? Like delaying gratification?

What bothers me? It is that I am so immersed in the ambiguities of my society, of everything around me, I actually am NOT bothered by the fact that these people have no rules or respect for other human beings such that they recognize the destruction they wreck.

The old movies? Well, they were full of it too, right?  I mean, it was never boy meets girl, girl marries boy and they live happily ever after. Fact is, boy met girl, boy married girl, they had children who heard them fight night after night their whole lives, but "stayed together " for the kids. That wasn't better was it?

I'm thinking that maybe what was better is that there were rules, and rights and obligations. The weakness of those times was that there was a pretense that no one ever failed and that caused too many heartaches, but at least there was some ideal, some things that were transgressions, that weren't, shall we say, a good idea.

There is nothing to guide us anymore. Well, there is, but that seems rather, how shall we say, amusingly outre.

I guess it would be too boring for Maggie to meet a nice guy, get married, form a little society with two and one half children, and celebrate her 50th anniversary. It wouldn't make much of a movie these days.  But I think I just might watch "How Green Was My Valley" tonight about two heroic people who fell in love but did not break up families to indulge themselves.

There Were No Tears

Whenever Dad spoke of his parents, it was not with warmth.  He would begin a tale of familial woe with the words, "My parent were peasants. . . .". But there was something else, a deep regret, a deep sadness, so much so that once or twice, after several glasses of wine, he actually broke down. He considered that crack in the facade "shameful". The best I can ascertain, as nothing was ever discussed, on either side of the family tree, is that Dad's father was an unbending Greek who tried to build an ethnic moat around his children, though having married out of the group, to a first generation Italian girl. He drank, sang Greek songs and was abusive to wife and children. His wife, a burly four foot eleven terror, unlikely thus to find someone with whom to stray, would berate him as he had the home brew brought up from the basement with the words to his eldest daughter, "Georgia, catch me some wine." There were nine children, only seven of whom survived,into adulthood, and only three into old age.  Of those who survived, there was among them little happiness.

The story that follows is a rare one exposing his real family pain, with a bit of forgiveness mixed therein--though fictionalized in large part. He would never say which was fiction and which was truth, but I can guess. Maybe so can you.

There Were No Tears

Funny what the smell of flowers does to me.  I suppose I ought to have a little more sense, now, but you know how it is--you just don't get rid of those things so easy.

I guess it all goes back to the time Grandpa died.  Now mind you, I liked the old guy, but you know how a kid is about such things.  Well, Mom didn't--she said I had to pay my respects to the dead--and she dragged me into the parlor where they had him laid out.  I remember I put up quite a scrap  In fact, I don't think she'd have got me in there if it wasn't for what she said.

"He''ll come back and haunt you every night."  She wasn't just trying to frighten me---I know that now--Mom was pretty superstitious herself.  You know how the old people are from the other side. Well, that clinched it.  I quit fighting and let her take me by the hand.

The parlor door was closed--we had one of those old fashioned houses that still had rooms with two sliding doors.  With her free hand, Mom slid open one of the doors, never letting go of me for a second, then she pushed me into the room.

It was pretty hot that day--I think it was one of those unseasonably warm Fall spells we were having--and the room was crowded with friends and relatives, some sitting on those chairs the undertakers rent out, others standing around gabbing, and all around there were wreaths and bouquets in all kinds of shapes, crosses, archways and I don't remember what else, and the air was moist and thick with the sickening sweet perfume of dying flowers. 

I wanted to vomit. Behind me Mom kept pushing me toward the casket. "Kiss your grandfather for the last time," she kept saying, "go on, now, kiss him goodbye," and she started crying, "O Dio. . .Dio. . .mio Padre. . .Padre mio. . ."

I tried not to look at him as I bent forward to kiss him.  His forehead was cold, like marble, and he smelt sweet and damp--later on someone told me it was embalming fluid. I was scared.  My lips barely touched his stone-like brow and I turned and ran from the room.  Outside I puked. My stomach kept retching and retching until it hurt.

And that night it seemed the smell of flowers was all over the house, wherever I went. I couldn't seem to get that damp-sweet fragrance off my mind.  And then I dreamed. I forget what it was about but I know it was something that would scare the pants off a nine year old kid--and there were flowers in the dream--that much I do remember. Then finally I slept but it was only after Mom said I could have the light on that night.

Well, I don't mean to say that it's anything like that now.  There's the same wreaths and crosses--though mostly crosses--and the friends and relatives are all sitting around on those hard-backed wooden chairs and there's that sick-sweet smell of flowers in the air. There's not much weeping, now, just an occasional sob.  They're getting ready for the final goodbyes and I guess that's when it will really break out.

Not that he was ever really tough. Oh, I guess a lot of the things he did just can't be glossed over like that, but I think I know why he did them. In his own peculiar way he must have wanted the best for all of us; but I don't think that the others would believe that if I told them.  You really can't blame them, though. It isn't easy to forgive a man who's played God all his life and made a mess of a lot of other people's lives. 

There's Emilio going over now.  He bends over to kiss his brother. I wonder what he's thinking? I wonder what I would feel in his place?

Uncle Emilio--we all call him Uncle Mil--was always a gentle quiet kind of guy, reserved--Mom used to say he'd had a good education on the other side--thoughtful, the kind of guy you'd like to know, but can never get close to.  He used to come over to the house once in a while with his wife.  Funny about his wife--at least it seemed so then--he never used to talk to her much except maybe to say yes or no to a question, and she seemed always to be waiting on him hand and foot.  Of course we never thought this was the least bit out of the way--lots of the old people say that when you go back to the old country to get married you really get a wife.  When I got older I began to understand about such things, and then later Mom let the whole story slip in an argument with the old man.  I kind of felt sorry for Uncle Mil after that.  The girl he wanted to marry was really beautiful. I wasn't to young to be able to see that he must have loved her very much. But the old man was always so dead set against American girls--they bobbed their hair and wore short skirts. I don't exactly know what happened, but after a while she didn't come to the store anymore to see Mil and the same year Mil sailed for Europe "to pick himself a lemon in the Garden of Eden" as Mom used to put it.  But I think she was being just a little spiteful.  

Take for example Gino's wife.  Gino is the old man's youngest brother.  I think he was about fourteen when the old man brought him over. Gino's wife never had much use for any of us and most especially she hated the old man. Seems she felt the old man cheated his brother and kept too large a slice of the business for himself.  Course that isn't true at all, since the business was his in the first place and making his brothers partners was pretty dumb the way I see it. But's that how the old man was, I guess. Anyway, I don't think it was the old man she hated so much.  The way I figure it, she never did hit it off with her husband but if she had any complaints along those lines, I know she'd be too scared to air them.  Gino's been here a long time but those old country ideas don't die so easy.

Gino really hated the old man though.  At a time like this your imagination kind of plays tricks with you but the way he looks over at the coffin now and then gives me goosebumps. 

Years ago he was a pretty happy-go-lucky fellow, I understand, liked his good times and didn't care too much about the business.  He used to be crazy about the movies, especially the pictures with Douglas Fairbanks.  You know how it is with a lot of these very little guys, they like to identify themselves with big heroes.  He was a great story-teller--when he could get someone to listen to him. I used to be crazy about the stories he' tell, especially about a character named D'Artagnan.  Well, the old man never had too much patience with Gino and I must say he did have a nasty tongue.  I suppose he thought it was all for Gino's own good, but these little fellows don't like you to make a fool of them all the time, particularly in front of people.  I used to wonder why he took a lot of the stuff he did.  You'd think he'd know things are different over here.  Well that's something that's hard to explain about old country people.  I don't really understand it very well.

Then again you can't explain it by putting the label "old-country" on it.  For example, Mom was born here; 'course her folks were old country--but still she shouldn't have taken what she did.  She's over there crying now, but that's only because it's the thing she's supposed to do.  I heard her cry when her father went and then a little later when her mother died and it's not the same thing.  I don't guess she really hates him anymore--I don't think there's that much feeling in her one way or another. Not for a long time. She looks so old and beaten--I wonder if she's ever laughed or smiled as if it were coming from inside.  Funny not being able to picture your own Mom smiling. But you just don't laugh away thirty-nine years of struggle--of continuous child bearing--she had nine though there's just three of us left--you just don't smile away the physical beatings the unjust accusation of a bitterly jealous man. But that's just it. He loved her very much.  If he had only been less proud--less old country--if he had only known that all she needed was a caress, a soft word, a little trinket, a little love that shows, that's all it would ave taken.  But he didn't know. I know he didn't.

He didn't understand Tina either.  God!  How they grew to hate each other. She's got her wish now  I wonder how she feels? I wonder if it's enough for her to see her father dead?  Her eyes are cold and her mouth a tight thin line.  She used to have such a pretty mouth and laughing eyes.  She was so much in love with Jeff.  I could always tell when she was sneaking out to keep a date with him--the old man never would have heard of bringing a fellow to the house.  Where he came from the father arranged such things.  And sometimes I used to be her alibi  We'd tell the old man we were going to the movies together and she'd meet Jeff and I'd it it out alone in the show.  A lot of times I had to see the features over twice and then she'd finally pick me up and we'd rush ho together. And she'd be laughing and her cheeks would be flushed with happiness. She'd be so pretty.  Ad then one day the old man got wise, somehow, and he caught them together.  "You little whore--you dirty little whore!"

But she didn't stop seeing Jeff after that.  It seemed to me she had a lot of nerve in those days.  She'd just get dressed up and off she'd go--and she didn't seem to care whether the old man knew or not. What's even funnier, he didn't say a word to her--it was almost as if she no longer existed for him.
Then--it was all so sudden--she didn't go out anymore and her eyes didn't smile and she never laughed. She just kept to her room all the time.  And all the time Mom was like a mother hen, bringing her chicken soups and milk and the kind of food they tell you builds up.  Often Tina would cry for hours and the sobbing made you feel funny all over.  And she would say over and over "I wish he were dead. . .I wish he were dead. . . I wish he were dead."  Then she went away for a while to my Aunt Rosa and we all knew shy; but no one ever mentioned it.  She's got her wish now.  I wonder how she feels?

I know it's different with Elsa. How she cried yesterday! She really loved her father. I'll never understand how she could. They say you don't take anything with you when you go but he did.  When they close the lid for the last time, Elsa will be locked within the coffin. She's only thirty-seven. But she's dead as the still body in the coffin.

Once she wanted to marry.  It seems that's all she wanted out of life, to marry and have kids and keep a house for her family.  There was a fellow.  He was going to be a doctor  I called him "Doc". He just didn't believe people acted this way these days anymore.  He was all for coming to the house and asking the old man outright.  But she begged him not to--she was so scared-so timid.  and the months passed into years and finally "Doc" didn't ask anymore. Then she read in the local news he'd married and she cried, not out loud like some girls would have--just a few tears trickled down her cheeks. She locked the pain in her heart with her cries.

Yet yesterday, she cried and her thin little body shook with tremendous sobs. "Come back, Papa" she cried, "Papa, Papa please come back."  They had to drag her from the coffin. 

Well, I wonder what he's saying, if there's such a thing as the beyond.  I know he saw it all before he went---at least a little. You see I watched him go, little by little.  For him the nights were long. He didn't sleep. Sometimes, the pain would be intense and he would moan and I would know it must have been terrible because he hated any show of weakness.  And even though I needed sleep I used to sit up with him at night and we would talk.  Sometimes I would carry him downstairs in the daytime and wheel him to the park.  Once he cried a little.  I made believe I didn't notice.  "It's so beautiful here," he said.  It was as if he had never seen beauty before.  It was Spring in the park and life was beginning again.  And we would talk some more and then, suddenly I think I saw, I think I knew what he had been trying to do.  I don't guess I can really put it into words. I suppose it's something we all want one way or another.  We've got to leave our mark here some way--you just can't leave it all cold.  "Dust thou art, unto dust.  .," what a terrible prophesy.  The artist must know what I mean, the sculptor must know as he chips away at stony formlessness.

There's activity in the room though no one is really moving.  It's almost as if the room itself just heaved a big sigh.  They're getting ready to close the lid now.  Yes Pop. You left your mark.  It doesn't show but it's there nevertheless, raw and bleeding.  

But you just didn't know.  I know you didn't.

Southern Hospitality

It drives me crazy that I began other blogs some years ago, and because of a combination of computer glitch and my poor expertise in relation to it, I cannot access them any longer so I can add to them. There is DjinnfromtheBronxTwo, and Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon, the latter intended to be entirely about my father and his life before, and after, my mother, and to include his writing.  Losing access meant losing momentum, even more so than has the interruption of life's ordinary activities. I have this current blog, DjinnfromtheBronxChapterThree in which I now intend to carry on the entries about and writing of my father. It would be my goal to get EVERYTHING he wrote on the blog, to scan as many photos of him, my mother, me, my relatives, and friends on here, my way of leaving something behind that won't end up in a trash can because I have no descendants. It would be a lot to hope that some of this stuff ends up in a shop somewhere--and that maybe some soul who likes personal histories would pick it up and cherish it, as I have items of people I never knew. But assuming that will not be likely, this is my family/personal archive.

So, today's entry is another of Dad's stories, one that he did in his life history class with Bea Mitz many years ago.  Hence the title of this entry--Southern Hospitality.

Sergeant Greenspan was my friend, an unusual circumstance in the military of 1942, Enlisted men, generally, had no friends in the upper ranks. But the Sergeant and I shared a bond, practically non-existent in South Carolina, land of Magnolias and mint juleps, because of our common roots in the Bronx.  We bonded, if only for the need to communicate in a comprehensible language.  After basic training concluded, passes were given and Greenspan and I made scouting missions to Columbia, the nearest town to our digs at Fort Jackson.  These missions were generally fruitless in terms of scrounging a date.  After several attempts, we decided the best we could hope for in a town outnumbered three to one by soldiers was a butterflied shrimp dinner at a Greek restaurant on Main Street.

So imagine my surprise when Greenspan collared me and announced, "We got dates for Saturday night."  It turned out that the sergeant, whose functions made him privy to select information in the orderly room, preempted an invitation before it could be seen by anyone else.  It read: 'Two girls will entertain a pair of GIs for dinner and Bridge, Saturday evening, eight p.m.'.

"But I don't play Bridge," I protested.  "Never mind," said Greenspan, "I'll teach you some preliminary basics. I don't plan to waste a Saturday night at cards, anyhow."  He was as good as his word. At least he tried. Even though I quickly forgot his Bridge instructions, I decided to trust to Providence that all would go well with this gala evening. 

Saturday night arrived and so did Sergeant Greenspan resplendent in his dress uniform. His trousers had creases that appeared to be permanently installed; his shoes were spit shined.  I could not emulate his sartorial elegance but my uniform was newly starched for the occasion.

It was an evening to splurge. We shared a taxi, avoiding the buses crowded with GI's. We arrived at the address early. Greenspan took time to tell me his "military" plan for the evening.  At precisely one minute before the appointed hour, I knocked on the door of a Civil War vintage frame house.  I heard footsteps approaching the entry.  The door opened slowly and there stood a woman of advanced age, perhaps in her late sixties.

She smiled and called to someone upstairs, "The boys are here Hannah."  Shen then opened the door wide to admit us and added, "The other girl will be down in a minute."  

Hating, Leaving, Visiting and Warming Back Up to, New York

The title is a variation of the one in a book I found at the Strand in the Village--called Goodbye to All That: Loving and Leaving New York".  My title reflects the circle of my particular relationship with the place.

I must have mentioned somewhere in the various incarnations of this blog that in the late 1970s and the very beginning of the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, I had a dark epiphany on the Express Bus to Manhattan on my way to work. Not only the morning but the streets and the buildings that passed before my eyes looked dreary and dead. This was the Koch years, when the city was crime ridden. You couldn't walk in Central Park. Bryant Park was needle park. The subway was cold in winter, hot in summer and devoured by graffitti. Folks might have been singing the praises of the place since the 1920s, but for me it was an overwhelming world smelling of trash, turds and tar all at once.

Most of my immediate family had lived, and died, in the Bronx or Manhattan, or, if they got out, in the "wilds" of New Jersey. A couple of my braver, more securely employed friends, lived, as roommates, in brownstones in the still seedy but slowly up and coming area of Columbus Avenue. Yes, there were half price Broadway tickets and restaurant evenings out, but only if someone had a car, the subways at night were no where to be.  I had good friends from college I didn't want to leave, and some family, but the natural gray within me--I tended toward anxiety, obsessiveness and depression anyway--was burgeoning as the press of the seemingly decaying city pressed from the outside. I had seen the more open space and the nearly always blue sky of California, and the blue ocean so nearby urban Los Angeles, and I was craving, well, anything else than where I was. I worked in a cramped, virtually windowless office on Madison Avenue, by Grand Central, with a screamer of a lawyer whose favorite word began with "F". I was loved by my widowed father but his overprotective fearfulness for me  had since become my fearfulness for myself.

I had to escape. Maybe I didn't really hate New York, though it surely felt like it.  Maybe I had to reject New York in order to try something different from the life I had always known. I had to show some gumption.

I have told that tale here, the six week plan, finding a job, taking the California Bar. Although I was in "Hollywood" where the sitcoms were mostly still written, I had little time for that dream with long work hours.  I lost a writing partner who remained in New York and connected with another aspirant. I was sad at the loss, but I have never otherwise regretted the now 35 year arc of this life.

I never really became a Californian, at least in my soul. The antipathy for New York that drove me out of it to the land of palm trees did not change the fact I was a New Yorker, and always would be. Why did that mean something? I don't know. It just did. It does. The extremes, the energy, the intensity--I suppose I am much like New York, the good and the bad of it. I think I wanted to like it again, though I knew I'd never go back to three months of humidity and five or so of cold and slush. I came back every few years and after a while the smells and sounds became less unpleasant and the city was cleaning itself up. Formerly dank and dangerous parks developed flowers and restaurants and the flow of business people eating lunch and sharing after five happy hours. A revitalization began.

My last visit, until the middle of this month when I picked up that book about New York vibes at the Strand, had been in June 2010. I had a short, happy, and what would be a final encounter with a college friend, Noreen, who would die toward the end of that year. I enjoyed myself, but was delighted to leave behind a week's worth of humidity. After I lost my job in 2011 in a political shake-up that ultimately would claim nearly all of the management team, moved apartments, made a short trip to Boston for a graduation,  I just didn't get back to New York.

But this time, with another graduation to attend in the Boston area, and in real need of a change, and the realization that six years away from the few family members I have in the area was too long, particularly for an 89 year old aunt, my mother's sister, I felt myself being drawn back.

I stayed at the Old Roosevelt Hotel on East 45th Street, a place where Guy Lombardo once held his New Year's orchestral bashes in days gone by. The location allowed me to walk, and walk, and walk, east side to west side, uptown to the 60s and 70s. Maybe it was nostalgia, seeing my aunt in her Manhattan high rise, looking through old photos with her, and my cousin Carol and her husband, walking past the horse carriages awaiting passengers for a Central Park tour, attending Mass at the renovated St. Patrick's Cathedral, reconnecting in person with a childhood friend I had not actually seen (though we had spoken) in about 35 years. I shed a tear at the site of the new World Trade Center.  The speed of the city has, if that is possible, increased. There are even more people, from even more places, walking criss-cross and parallel to each other. Everything is hawked on street corners, from food to clothes. Bringing the LIRR railroad to Grand Central, meant jackhammers in the night. I supped at  Circo, took in The King and I, driven in a town car hired by my childhood friend. I spent many hours with my aunt and cousin, the only thing I had "planned" and everything else just happened, catching up with a few, though not nearly as many people I might have hoped, and always on the fly, at restaurants they chose, French, American bar (PJ Clarke's), Greek (in Hell's Kitchen, still a mix of seedy and slow to develop gentrification), Middle Eastern.

I was oddly relaxed in the midst of a whirlwind. I didn't live in New York, but I wasn't a tourist. That appealed to me.

As I sit on the terrace of my little West Hollywood condo, the palm trees being brushed by a late afternoon breeze, I know that I would never be happy living in the chaos of Manhattan or even the suburbs of Westchester.  I like my life in California. Still, although I may not love New
York enough to go back to it, I like it again, very much.

I'm a Millenial; I Have a Porsche; I Can Do What I Want!

Ok, it could be, "I'm a Millenial; I have a BMW; I can do what I want!".  I have no chance with my Toyota Rav4. Oh, and I'm not a Millenial. I am not even in the same territory as a Millenial. That's a subject for another day.

It's bad enough that traffic in Los Angeles is apparently the worst in the country. The powers that be encourage use of public transportation, but public transportation in Southern California has nothing in common with say that of New York or San Francisco. You can go from certain cities to others, but the lines are just too short. Truth be told, though, even if they extended and connected the lines, I wouldn't ride. Been there. Done that. For 27 years as a Bronx-ite. And you can sell it any way you want, being one of the sardines in the car isn't something I plan on going back to, God willing and the creek don't rise.

I love to drive. I just don't love the twenty somethings who think I can read their minds as they dart in front of me with their cool cars with nary a signal.

You'd think it would be only the guys. Oh, no. Often it is the young women with a left hand flung with studied casual-ness out the window, flicking a cigarette. She must not mind if I get the benefit of the second hand ashes flying back my way.

So, I might be at a cross-walk waiting for that pedestrian with an I-phone in one hand and a Starbuck's half-caf, soy latte in the other to pass, and an impatient young one with places to go and people to see, will give several short irritated honks. I have, on occasion, put my left hand out of the window--and pointed, using my index finger--I promise-at the person in front of my car inhibiting my ability to get out of the way.

Such haste resulted in a happily not serious accident a few months ago. I was on Fountain Avenue. A young woman left her garage and instead of turning right, she blocked my way to turn left. The young men behind me were clearly impatient as I heard them move around to my left and smack into the young woman's car before she'd quite completed the turn. No one was hurt. But it was a clear case of comparative negligence.

Uh, oh, I may break out in a chorus of "What's the Matter With Kids Today" from Bye Bye Birdie.

Not all of them, of course, (I know several who are terrific, whose parents taught them that the sun does not shine out of their, well you know) but here in La La land, way too many.

Hey kids, go ahead vote for Bernie. He believes in redistribution of money and property. Maybe I can have your Porsche. Happy to give you my Rav4.

Contrasts

These two images have nothing obvious in common, except that I saw the two films, one for the movies, one for television, and made some fifty years apart, today. And they spawn thoughts, such as they are.

Let me recapitulate. I have been felled by one of those colds that you think is gone, and you go out and live your life as usual, and the darn thing comes back in full force. That has been the last two weeks for me. And then today, I really really think, as the sun sets, I think "Yes, I am over it, this damnable cold."  And a friend calls and says, "Wanna see a movie?"  And I suck in my breath for fear of tempting the cold gods and say, "yes."  And the movie we select is "Hello, My Name is Doris" which has received laudable reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gives is 83 percent.

So, off we go, Len Speaks and I, to my local theatre, the Sundance, where no one under 21 is allowed and where one can purchase and eat a full meal, with wine or beer, at one's seat, built in tables to your left or right provided. Good. Not very far from my bedroom, or living room. Literally, it is three and a half blocks away.

I loved what the movie tried to do. A woman of a certain age, who has given up much of her life to take care of her mother, while the rest of her family fulfilled their dreams, finds herself "free".  Mother has died. But she has forfeited the joys of a younger life and a middle age life in order to be a care giver and now, all that remains of her is a caregiver minus an object of care. She could have married, was even engaged once, we find out in the course of things, but she could not leave New York to be with her sole beloved. The choices she made, while good and true, have limited her own existence. And now? She remains an employee of what once was a staid company, but was bought out by millennial hipsters. It is a Google of apparel. Chairs are swapped for exercise balls (that was one really idiotic screenwriting choice I thought among others, that doomed this film), and everyone talks in this techno, babble speak. She is probably like 65 or 70 and they are like 25 or 20. She survived the merger, although how that was possible is beyond logic. It is not that she is older. It is that she is not like any older person I have ever seen. She wears mismatched colors and skeins. She has this odd ribbon in her hair all the time. She wears the cat glasses, with sparkles, that were left behind in the 1960s. She would not have survived the merger as the only older person to keep a job. I have friends, my age or more, who work for such companies, but they are mainstream stylish for their generations. And, our Doris is a hoarder besides. Doris basically sets her sights on a new young executive, John, as a potential break out for the first time in 45 years dating object. There is comedy, of sorts. And tragedy of sorts. She has friends and family whose stories are half developed. I thought of this film as a trying for a "Being There" vibe, mixed with Walter Mitty touches (Doris has these reveries). I wanted it to work. I really did, because I resonate with the road not traveled so far and hope that it is possible for a way late start, but it just was a mish mash from start to finish.

I did enjoy my chicken barbecue quesadilla and two craft beers. And it was nice to spend a few hours with a friend after a nearly monastic couple of weeks.

When I got home, I flipped to METV and there was Star Trek. I was fifteen minutes late for the beginning, but I have seen the episode who knows how many times since it's denouement in 1960 something. "The City on The Edge of Forever" written by science fiction scribe Harlan Ellison. Dr. McCoy, one of the triumvirate of the universe of Star Trek, is accidentally injected with a drug that generates paranoia. This is not a good place for him to be paranoid as the crew, the stalwart Captain Kirk and the loyal Mr. Spock among them are on  a planet with an arch that has the ability to send those who pass through it back in time. The Dr. flees through the portal. And as in all such time travel tales, the other heroes, Kirk and McCoy, must get him back before he changes the trajectory of history so much so that their very existence is in peril. But the tale of the threesome, once on earth, each drawn to one woman, a generous, forward thinking settlement worker of 1930 earth, Edith Keeler, is powerful and timeless in a time travelling tale. She is the focal point. Kirk and Spock become her charges, helping around the mission, and she and Kirk discover a kinship first, and then a love of the ages. The problem is as it turns out is that in the original skein of time, she died in an auto accident, and that death was essential in preventing a sequence of events that would have allowed Germany to win World War Two. In order to preserve the integrity of the time line, Edith Keeler must die. Heart or History? The emotion and happiness of one or the preservation of millions. Edith Keeler finds McCoy before they do. She helps him. As she and Kirk are walking on the way to a Clark Gable movie, she mentions McCoy's name. Kirk runs across the street to the settlement house, and the three men are reunited. As Edith distractedly walks across the street toward them, she does not see the truck barreling toward her. McCoy sees it and begins to intercept her. Kirk holds him back in an heroic reflex, closing his eyes against the unthinkable. Spock absorbs his friend's expression. McCoy, knowing none of the backstory, chides Kirk, "Jim, do you know what you did, I could have saved her!"  Spock responds for his friend, "He knows, doctor. He knows."

A little television show a half century old writes about sacrifice. They really don't make 'em like they used to. I am afraid "My Name is Doris" will fade into obscurity. But I think "City on the Edge of Forever" will find its way into the data banks of the 24th century, if we make it that far as a species.