Blast from the Past

Funny how things pop into your mind. And what provokes them. I have been having a lazy day. Got up late. Talked to my Aunt Teri, the last of my mother's three sisters still alive, who called from Manhattan, which is already seeing snow and wind of the Blizzard of 2016. Had just decided to take a late shower and thought I'd switch on one of the DIRECTV digital stations in the 800s on the dial for some music background for my ablutions.

Wasn't feeling in a classical mood. Nor was I of a rockin' disposition. And then I lighted on the instrumental station. I went into the kitchen to see if one of the hummingbirds that have taken to the feeder was whisking about. I could hear them. Their wing sounds are palpable to the ear. The TV was playing "Send in the Clowns". I found myself tearing up and harking back to many years ago when I was a child in New York, in the Bronx, in that little apartment near the Grand Concourse. 

It might have been a day off from school, because of a snow storm, relatively rare in the city (just as this weekend in the City I left 35 years ago) but always welcome. And with my mother puttering around, windexing the many mirrors, dusting, making a list for the A and P, the background sounds were the instrumentals of WPAT. They came to call it elevator music, something you pay no attention to these days. But it was my mother's favorite station. And pretty much the only one allowed in our house when dad wasn't accompanying his vinyl Latin or Italian records on his mandolin.

When I think of it, I think of her, as I did, standing in the kitchen 50 years and 3000 miles away from that place and time. 

Cozy wouldn't be the word I'd use to describe life with my mother, but in those moments, warm and safe in the large tri-part five story brick building in that 50.00 one bedroom apartment with my mother silently shuffling around, cozy is the only way to describe the feeling then, and now, as I remember it.

My mother has been dead 42 years. I can hardly conjure that life of ours any longer, so much has happened since then, until I heard a little instrumental and there was WPAT, and my mother, as they were. As another song says, "The Way We Were". 

Back to California on a hazy sunny January 2016 day, and the shower I put off to bask in a serene sensation of the past.

Thoughts (Out of Left Field) about Janis Joplin

The other night I was flipping the television dials. How many channels do I have? Still, I could not find anything I wanted to watch. So I went on the paid DirecTV menu and found a documentary on Janis Joplin. For $5.99.  I could have seen it when it came out for free on PBS on American Masters. Well therein lies a lament for another time.

Anyway. I don't know what it is about Janis Joplin. She has been dead since 1970. I was 16 years old, and one would think that she was part of the tapestry of my baby boomer life of those days. She wasn't. Oh, I was aware of her. The sixties were not a decade to be ignored and neither was the change from what some might have called traditional and staid, to anti-establishment and free wheeling without impact on the most overprotected teenager. Still, at that point, as a Sophomore in high school, I was just starting to catch up to my generation. Well, truth be told, I never caught up. I was one of those few of my generation who stayed staid, as it were, while my peers were free wheeling it.

I probably, no, I did, mimic, my parents' disdain for rock and roll, while secretly wanting to partake in that small taste of the "illicit". Well, for a while. But I was immersed in the culture, even with all the boundaries placed by Catholic School and strict parents and the music at least leaked into my bedroom and onto my portable vinyl turntable. But I started in bubble gum, like The Monkees, not in blues inspired screaming (in Joplin's case) rock and roll.

But as the years have passed I realize that I have absorbed the music of my generation and much of it I like. When I had a career, I used to drive up to San Francisco to teach classes at our office up there, and as I drove on the 5, I reveled in singing along, as loudly as I could manage, to Janis' rendition of "Me and Bobby McGee".

I knew the story somewhat. She left home pretty young, feeling penned in by her small town family and their small town values. Now there was a girl, about 11 years older than me, so likely more easily captured by the changing culture, who bought it all. Free love and drugs. Lots and lots of both. She had her last meal at Barney's Beanery (which is probably still on the Hollywood Van Tours) and then went back to the Landmark Hotel where she overdosed and died beside her bed. She was 27.

But I would occasionally see clips of her, one in particular, that just made me so sad. She told Dick Cavett that she was going back to her high school for the tenth year reunion. It became clear that she was hoping to go back triumphant to a student body that had rejected her for being different. She didn't want the traditional. She didn't want the ordinary career. She just had to give in to her inner energy, call it even her inner animal. They thought her a fool when she came in her odd headdress and slightly addled presentation. There is a clip of her unwelcome visit. And she hurt again. And all that success, all that love on the stage from her millions of fans could not compensate. Did she have a spiritual life? There is no mention of religion in the documentary, old time or otherwise. Would that have given her succor?

In conversation, she seemed nearly shy and exhibited a lingering old school girlishness. When she sang, she exploded, and truth be told, watching her I was just a little wistful that I didn't, just a little, rebel when I had the chance (if I had the chance which I am not sure about).

I just couldn't take my eyes off her cavorting in these 45 year old clips. Such a walking contradiction this girl. I wish I could talk to her. I would ask her if it was worth it, burning through her life. 27 is very young. I cannot imagine that the answer would be yes. She had a brother and sister who lived, it appears, ordinary lives. Would she have wanted that, finally?

We have nothing in common right? We are all human. Of course we do. Paradoxically, perhaps, as the 60s concluded and the 70s began, those of us who did not join the rock train (with all its life style connotations and denotations) found ourselves unwelcome to members of our own generation. We weren't "groovy", or "cool". We were "repressed".  Well, maybe they were right about that. It hurt to be rejected. But I found my niche in this world. And am grateful for things as they happened in largest part.

I was whatever one calls a female nerd. Still am, truth be told. Do I regret being so determinedly a rule follower, now that I am approaching a senior hood that Janis never did? Yeah. Sometimes I do. It is ever so transient, but it is palpable. And then I dismiss it. I am alive. And there is still time to have adventures. I don't need to use drugs to have them. I just need to let go of long standing fears. There is something between staid and reckless.

"I'll Be Me"

I know. My entries of late, infrequent as I know they are, have also been on "serious" subjects. More than one of my readers have suggested that they have been downright depressing. So, given that my subject today is that disease, often put under the general labels of Alzheimer's or dementia, I realize that I am taking a chance on driving my few "fans" away.

For me, though, neither this subject, as poignantly presented by a documentary on the Wrecking Crew member turned famous singer, songwriter, and actor, nor the others on which I have found myself reflecting in these pages, is coming from a depressive place within me. Struggle as I have, and do, as we all have and done, with internal demons, I am actually mostly in one of the most psychologically happy places that I have been in many a year. I guess I just don't actually find the subjects of old age and the diminished condition that often (not always as I can attest in dealing with one 94 year old with a quick memory) is consequent to the gift of long life depressing. I wish I could explain why with any clarity. It might be the result of my faith, which fitful though it is, grounds me in a sense of purpose, notwithstanding the presence of struggle and suffering, or even because of the presence of struggle and suffering. As a practicing (emphasis on it being practice) Catholic, I have come more and more to immerse myself in the Theology of Suffering, that starts with the Fall of Adam and Eve, moves through the events of the Old Testament, into the New with Christ's entry into time and the paradoxical transformation of Suffering via Resurrection. But trying to talk about that just gets too knotty, even to me. Maybe it is more visceral than intellectual. I really see I can't explain why it is not depressing to me (maybe it will be when my version happens to me if I live long enough), except to say that in all of this is an experience of the heroic spark of life in we human beings. A feisty spark that makes me want to smile and cry at the same time.

Let me put it imperfectly this way as it pertains to the Glen Campbell documentary, "I'll Be Me", I never appreciated the talent, the essence of a person (in this case one I don't know personally, but it is true or truer to me in the case of someone I have known) until being exposed to the reality of its loss.
Until then, the brilliance, the warmth, the whatever identifies a friend, a relative, a performer, a writer, you name it, we/I take for granted.

Glen Campbell has been around for most of my life. I used to watch his television show. I loved some of his songs back in the sixties. I can still remember singing along to Wichita Lineman in our first Bronx apartment, wishing I had that depth of voice. He was this young, brash character in True Grit. It was only recently I found out that he was part of that sessions group that backed up many a famous album without credit in the 1960s, before singular fame found him. But in many ways, as many human beings are to us, he was a backdrop to my life. As if he'd always be there. Always as he was.

In 2011 besieged by forgetfulness, Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He was forgetting major things. He was forgetting names of people he loved. His wife (he has had several and a number of kids, three of whom are musicians in this documentary) thought to take one more tour, a final tour. Glen Campbell probably did not realize it was a final tour. He heard the diagnosis, but as you watch, it is not clear he really understands the enormity of it. He does what we all do. He attributes the problems he is having to something insignificant--he doesn't need the information he can't recall any longer. What he still has, for the duration of most of the film, for about one year, is the music that is in his bones. When his wife suggests the filming of the tour, as if it is sort of a fictional movie, Glen provides the title. He says, "I''ll be me."  And that of course is what we see. As he is losing pieces of himself, the memories of a successful professional life, and the joys and sadness of his personal life, in the music he is still very much present and whole.

He is ordinary. He is extraordinary. At once. He is a human being whose brilliance is oddly not diminished through the movie, despite the soon to be crippling disease. We know how it's going to end. He won't be able to continue after a while. But we capture him while he still can, for posterity. For us. For his family. To give impetus to fight a disease that will affect many a baby boomer just behind him.

All Alzheimer's is a form of dementia, but not all dementia is Alzheimer's. I have known or do know several people who have had the stroke induced type of dementia. The symptoms are much the same. You become the repository of their memories because they no longer have them. And yet, in every one, there is this kernel, this insistence on remaining, "me". And it is miraculous even as each loss of the everyday person you used to know occurs. Words really can't express.

This movie. This following of Glen Campbell, who now I have read is probably close to death, three years after the end of this documentary, if you watch it, you come away with an affection, an appreciation, an amazement at the human spirit that just can't be expressed. But most of all for me at least it can't be summed up with the word, "depressing." Oh, to be sure, sad, depressing, are there, but the totality is neither. Awe maybe. Or maybe, because of my faith, I see something that is intended to be, will be, eternal, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

I'Anyway, I recommend the documentary, for what that is worth.

An Average Catholic's Take on "Spotlight"

Flannery O' Connor, a Catholic novelist, wrote dark, even gruesome short stories aimed to highlight the depths of the depravity caused by the human hubris that lost Paradise, and the Redemption given to us--if and only if Redemption is individually, and freely, accepted. The sin of disobedience threw us out of Eden collectively. Christians believe that we have the gift of Redemption in our hands, the result of a death on a cross that paradoxically reopened the door to that same Eden. Only we must assent to it and behave as if heaven--that is the eternal joy of God's Presence--is something of value.

O'Connor was known for her bluntness in her journal writing, much of which was published in the book "Habit of Being".  A fragment of one observation ran through my mind as I watched the movie "Spotlight" this past weekend.  She wrote in part, ". . . the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the Body of Christ and that on this we are fed.  It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the Divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it."



As you probably know, "Spotlight" is about the Boston Globe's investigation into what became the biggest modern scandal of the Catholic Church, the molestation of its school children by priests made even more horrible, if that is possible, by virtue of the before and after the fact complicity of many in the hierarchy. The movie rendition of the work of the team that untied the knot of secrecy and deceit is superbly ordinary. Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Liev Shreiber, John Slattery, Billy Cruddup, Rachel McAdams, so recreate the time and tale that I forgot they were actors and not the actual men and women who were the first to be jolted by those who profess good doing the profoundest evil.



The ordinary face of evil. Former Massachusetts priest John Geoghan, killed in prison in 2004. 

One of the experts in the movie who talks to the reporters is disillusioned former priest and therapist Richard Sipe (only by telephone, the voice of Richard Jenkins). Asked whether he practices Roman Catholicism any longer he says, I paraphrase, that he does not, as he does not believe in an institution founded by men, although he does believe in the Eternal. Which brings me back to Flannery O'Connor and why I am guessing she, and I, and many Catholics who stay with the "Institution" do so. It is because we believe that it was "instituted" by Christ Himself when he made Peter, who betrayed Christ as egregiously as any human being could deny a friend, the leader of His Divine movement. The job of the human beings was to preach the truth, and to seek to live up that truth, but no one within the Church or without it, is free of the consequence of the disobedience of sin, the grand "No!" that was spoken to God before and since time. The failures within the Church are spectacular. They have been throughout the 2000 plus year history. This is not a rationalization. It is truth. Is the solution to leave? I understand feeling that way. I was myself lapsed for 13 years, although my reasons were far more ego-centric than philosophical.  And yet, despite our failures, the Church has managed to survive. Left to us alone, we human beings, it should not have survived. Neither we nor our cousins the Jews should have our faiths still, for by ourselves, we are worse than useless. But the Message being transmitted through time by these imperfect creatures is immutable. And He has used us imperfect beings to transmit it so that some, many, will follow the Royal Road Christ trod to our salvation.

There is a misunderstanding on the part of those who observe and comment about the Church--in large part the result of another failure by clergy who themselves have a prideful misunderstanding--and for whom "gotcha" is a delightful sport, that Catholic Christians believe somehow we are holier, less inclined toward evil, than other people. That is simply not correct. The Church, that very Institution is a "hospital for sinners". And some of us simply don't get well because we do not follow the prescriptions AND proscriptions of the Divine Doctor, Christ the Founder, the Head of the Church. The rest of us, all of us, are His patients, and His servants. We believe that the medicine of Grace handed to Peter and from thence to now can heal us. And so we endure the suffering of the world at large and that which we cause ourselves.

My late pastor during a homily many years ago at my home parish suddenly said, "Do you know that the devil is sitting right next to you?" He was pointing out that even within those walls the tempter was speaking to us, telling us that the truth was a lie and that we were free to do whatever was against God and man, should our little hearts desire. We are not immune. In fact, perhaps we should be more vigilant.

Mary McCarthy, a lapsed Catholic, who once had Flannery O'Connor to a dinner party opined on the mere symbolism of Communion, which Catholics believe is not symbol but the substantial Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ in the form of bread. O'Connor could not contain herself and said, "If it is just a symbol, then the hell with it!".  I have thought about it over and over. If I truly believe that it is God Himself who gives me strength every time I receive the Eucharist, then I can't leave, because that is the essence of the Institution handed to Peter and through time to here, my life, in West Hollywood.

 It is hard enough to be good with the Eucharist. Without it, I would be doomed. Without it, I would not endure my Church.

"Spotlight" wasn't only a good movie, but one that engenders deep reflection.

Marie C. RIP

She couldn't see her food. I was one of several people who would direct her fork to various portions of her meal. I did not do it often, because it seemed it embarrassed her.

Just after my elderly friend went to live there, just under six months ago,Marie was one of the first residents of the nursing home I met. I had spied the baby grand piano and made a feeble effort to play one of the few pieces for which I still had "finger memory", the "Arogonnaise" by Jules Massenet.  I only got a few musical lines in before that lingering memory stopped abruptly. I got up and I said to Marie who came up in her wheel chair that I no longer really could play. She, who apparently had some musical training, seemed to think that I was quite good.  I liked her for the encouragement. I thought of her as one of the "strong" ones, not so much of body, but of mind.

There are three groups at the nursing home. There are those whose bodies and minds have fully crumbled from old age. They cannot leave their chairs but also, whether it be Alzeimher's or other forms of dementia, they cannot speak at all or speak only the occasional word salad. They have truly made the circle back to baby hood.  They are pure emotion, with the occasional spark of the persons they once were. There are those who are able to walk but whose memory loss has become significant enough that they could no longer live alone and take care of their day to day affairs and personal needs. They speak. They understand things and can respond to instruction or convey their wishes, but the forgetfulness does not allow them the independence of old.  But they have not lost their selves, their essence. And then there is the third group, who but for their failed bodies, seem ageless, even if well over 90. They are still engaged in everything around them and like to read, or watch television or take day trips, or visit their families. When I met her, Marie was closer to this last category. I sensed she was wending her way to forgetfulness, but she sat with her confreres at dinner and communicated and though her vision was failing her, she'd eat without assistance and heartily. She talked with Neal, a non-resident of 93 whose wife died in the home over a year ago, but who continues to take dinner with his wife's comrades, and Imogen, a resident, at the extreme end of the table. And she negotiated around the room easily with her chair.

And then about two months ago, something happened. We used to exchange easy hellos, though I know she was a little deaf and I'd have to say hello twice. She had a sparkle in her eye, and even a bit of a smile. And then I noticed she had no idea who I was, the person who visits her friend nearly every day. And she was asking about going home, as if she did not realize that she was already home. She was suddenly discombobulated. She was restless. She couldn't manage to eat without some help.

And then there were evening meals that she did not leave her room. I found out that one of her children was a volunteer musician at the home, and she had other siblings. One would come every morning and every evening to be with Marie. Others lived elsewhere in the country, but they became in the last month or two, regular visitors. I sensed a family rift by the timing of visits and the body language when they were visiting at the same time.

"Hyppa" laws being what they are, the staff could never be quizzed about the health of a resident. So, information came via other residents and the occasional vague update from a family member. I never found out what were the particulars, but only that apparently Marie was now at the hospice stage. How surprising that was to me. She seemed so solid when I had first engaged her, but perhaps that was only an illusion. And of course the reality is that I had not seen her before, when she was the busy mother of six kids and a beloved grandmother. A conversation with one son made it clear that there was not agreement over the way the last days were to be handled. Or were being handled. A bitterness was rising among the siblings, something Marie would probably have not liked.

The nuns who nurse and administer hovered around.

I heard nothing for days, and then, this past Monday, the volunteering guitar playing daughter said to those gathered in he activity room, "This is the last song I played for my mother." Last song?
"Did your mother die?"   "Yes", said her daughter, "she died Friday morning."

"I'm so sorry" I said beginning to tear up.  Her daughter insisted it was a good thing. She was ready.

I hardly knew Marie and yet, I had to be at her funeral yesterday, at Holy Cross, just down the hill from the home. There were several staff and another friend of mine who met Marie as I had. I learned that Marie and I shared the same birthday, albeit hers was 31 years before mine. She had been a junior high teacher as well as playing the guitar. She had lived in New York, my home town, among other places. And she probably hadn't been in as good shape as I thought when I met her. She had had a major stroke. She had lived with one of the children until, as happens, it became too much to assist with her needs.

The priest, obviously a long time friend of the family, and in the "know" about the divisions illness and death can cause in a family, reminded them that their mom was in heaven and saw everything now. Nothing was hidden from her. And she would want them to love one another, and to forgive. I had the sense that this was a pointed effort at mediating some hard feelings that inevitably afflict relationships among the children of the dead parent. I admit it, at such moments, I am glad I was an only child.

There was no pamphlet or photo board. I would have liked to have seen these things to have more of a sense of a woman I encountered for only a few months, and find myself mourning.

She is with God. I believe that. And I am so glad our lives touched every so fleetingly.

Time Out of Mind at the Sundance West Hollywood

On Saturday last it appeared that there was no movie for my friend Len Speaks and I to see.

I had no other plan, but I was restless. So I decided to try one more time to find something, near my condo, as I was restless, but lazy, to attend. The only thing was a newly released Richard Gere movie in which he plays a homeless man.

I debated whether going off to see this movie would only increase my restlessness, and provoke my dysthymic mood into something more dark. And then I made a kind of "let's see how I feel when I walk over there" decision. I dressed and went over to the Sunset strip mall that houses the Sundance West Hollywood. The dispositive factor--Richard Gere was going to appear and speak about the movie.


Funny how ordinary and "famous" lives overlap in this town. Back in 1981, just after I moved to Los Angeles, I was at Venice Beach and Gere was making a movie. I can't remember if it was "Breathless" or "America Gigolo".  I remember he was wearing these plaid like pants and he was good looking. And here we are, both a lot older, our paths crossing again, with me, as usual, in the crowd. Not complaining. So, I bought the ticket. I had an appetizer lettuce cup with tasty diced chicken and a glass of sparkling wine at Wokcano and people watched.

Inside the Sundance, I got my second drink to nurse through the movie, a large glass of Proseco (it's an entirely 21 plus theatre) and hoped I had not made a mistake in taking my restless self out.

I was fascinated from start to finish. And provoked to consider, yet again, my own disposition toward the homeless. In my life I have twice been involved with charities to assist men, and women, to transition back to lives off the street, for a combined period of about four years. And I have never found discourse on the subject to be particularly useful because it is a complicated problem that involves more than just a willingness to help, or money. And that's what this movie showed, one soul, and the attendant complications of addressing his homelessness.

We have no idea what this man's story is when we first see him sleeping in a bathtub in a crummy apartment that appears to have been abandoned, presumably, if you are to believe his story when he is discovered by the manager of the building trying to fix the place for the next tenants, by a friend of his named "Sheila". "Sheila" is invoked over and over until you are pretty sure that no such person exists and that he got into the apartment, which he does a second time, simply by ringing various doorbells from downstairs until someone reflexively buzzes him in. We get to know him in much the same way as we get to know homeless people we see all the time on certain corners. We learn his name in one encounter --this fictional character is named George.  We feel the boredom of his life, moving from benches, to hospital waiting room where he is thrown out, despite the occasional kindness of a staffer. We see that he spends what money he begs on beer or hard alcohol. We see him following a girl who turns out to be his adult daughter, who, one begins to see has become hard toward him only after being unable to address whatever deep seated fracture in his soul that keeps him homeless.  He is, as a character played with sad fervor by Ben Vereen, "reduced", but that reduction appears to have been a combination of circumstance (his wife died, he lost his job, his house, but what finally threw him over the edge to being a street person where someone else would have rebounded is never made clear just as they are not clear in real life) and self-sabotage.

He is an unnecessary prop in the buzz of New York life in the winter, sometimes very cold and sometimes not. He has no identification. One wonders why instead of asking his daughter for money or grubbing a beer at the bar at which she works, he doesn't seek information that will help him get identification. He is able to scavenge, but unable to produce. He wants relationship, but he does everything he can to discourage it.

The movie is unrelenting in its lack of answers, just like life is when we see people on La Cienega here in Los Angeles taking turns begging at the same small island in traffic. Is it that he just needs a break, or does he want to stay homeless? I should qualify--it is not entirely unrelenting for at the end, the daughter, Maggie, having rebuffed him, having protected herself against his apparently intractable condition, does relent, and chases after him. Will there be a happy ending? Will something change in his street, to shelter, to street life? I have to say I was left with the feeling, "probably not." But I was still glad she went after him at the end.

There was no proselytizing in this movie. I liked that. The problem is difficult. As Gere said in his live talk, it's really about the bigger existential picture, who are we in this life? What forces form us? What is being known? What is being anonymous and alone? We are, none of us, more than few steps away from the life of George, or the lives of the real people we see on the street. Doesn't help the problem? No. But it's good to be aware. Keeps you humble. And the glib answers. That's all that can be said for them, they are glib.

I knew a man once who lived next to a dumpster in an alley off Fairfax Avenue. He was a tall, good looking black man, with all sorts of ideas for gadgets and talked of creating his own business. He'd sell bottles of water along the street.  I worked with a small transitional homeless residence through my Church. Robert became one of the residents in one of four single rooms with a common area of living room and kitchenette. The residence staff helped him get a regular job at a local eatery. He had the transition to "regular" life in his hand. But he didn't like to be with other men in a residence. He didn't like rules, like no drugs and no women. And so he went back to the dumpster.  I haven't seen him in a long time. Sometimes it's like that.

I wasn't depressed after the movie, maybe because I appreciated its preach free style. And yet, it reminded me, you do what you can. You help where you can. That's all.

As to Richard Gere? During the movie I forgot that there was an actor on screen. After the movie, he was funny, articulate and sensitive. I love Hollywood.

Mom's Side

My given name and surname would offer no indication that I am fully half of Irish descent.

My given name, in particular, was a source of great confusion to the nuns of my Catholic grammar and high school. I could almost guarantee that in going through any attendance list, Mother so and so would be rolling along with the children's names until she stopped abruptly at mine. an Arabic inspired first name and Greek last name. The first name was an adaptation from the title of a poem by Victor Hugo, about the "Djinns", who are often mischievous spirits in Arabian mythology. I usually did not admit to anyone that I could not be baptized under my first name because no saint ever bore it. These days however you will find the name all over the net, it having become somehow, somewhat, cool.

But I digress. I don't know much about the immigration of my grandparents from Ireland. I have heard that it was around 1912, although some members of grand-dad's side had come earlier, in the mid 1800s, helped to build some of New York's brownstones and then gone back to the old sod for a while. My grandfather, as I have written, died the year after I was born, about 70 years old, if that, but looking a great deal older, no doubt the result of hard life experience. Grandma lived about thirty years longer, dying only a few months after one of her daughters at too young an age, my mother.

I only remember my grandmother as old, white haired, clad in a perpetual house dress, speaking in a brogue accented English very little. Occasionally, she and my maiden aunt, my mother's eldest sister, would baby sit me. I went to their sparse one bedroom apartment in the building attached to my own. In a mind bending revelation only a few years ago, it turned out that my aunt actually did not have her residence in that apartment, but when she "visited" my grandmother, she would usurp the bedroom leaving Grandma to the convertible couch in the main room.

They hardly spoke to one another and whatever else I did not know, I knew they did not much like each other. There was never anything in the refrigerator, except maybe a carton of milk, some bread, and condiments. I found I really enjoyed mustard sandwiches, which I made while waiting for "Gunsmoke" to come on after the tedious (for a child) "Lawrence Welk" and his bubbles. I was grateful I did not have to be left with them often. They were kind enough, but cool.

I saw more of my grandmother when I went to Monticello in the summers to join my cousins. She stayed with her other daughter, Rita, and her family for those months. She'd putter about the grass in her bare bunioned feet. She seemed more relaxed in that atmosphere than in the Bronx, but again, the interaction was remote, except for the occasional moment when she would call us kids out for being a bit rowdy.

Funny, that these are the people with whom I spent my formative years, and I did not know them at all. 

Some years ago, my maiden Aunt Kathleen sent me a photograph of Grandma when she was young.

There is something in her face that is determined. I recognize the family mouth, resolute.
I see a great deal of my mother in this younger picture, something I never did when each was older.

Perhaps a softer version, as befits the first generation American to whom more comforts were available, though in the 30s and 40s, certainly not as much as we have today.

I know as little of my mother as I do of my grandmother. I asked one of my other aunts, Teri, to record her memories of their childhood and their relationships in an effort to learn about the interior life of my mother. Over two tapes, she recorded many events, but nothing that explained the individuals, in particular, my other who I knew as a child. I wonder sometimes if my mother had lived to her old age (she would be close to 90), whether she would have finally revealed the reasons for her sadness and dissatisfaction.

I have so little information that I cannot really even speculate about it, though, of course, I have tried.

Once upon a time there were four girls, the daughters of a lovely Irish lass. One of them was my mother.