Memory

Another story of dad's that was somehow separated from the rest. I like this one very much. I have the sense that he is combining several memories into a fictional story. There was a girl, but I think she was in Georgia, who had nine brothers. There used to be a photo, but I think it was tossed out with some of dad's books, accidentally, of a blond long haired girl wearing a grass skirt, giving the photographer, whom I assume to have been my father, a come hither look. Then in terms of a cruise, the only cruise (other than the one in World War II, which was not a cruise at all) that he took was when I got him a three day weekend one to Mexico. And I know for a fact there was no old love on that trip. But this is a sweet one, I think.

For a while I stood at the prow and watched the cruise ship pierce the waves  I was bored.  An itinerant bartender coaxed me into buying a Margarita, which I drank quickly without appreciable enhancement of my mood.

I made a brief tour of the gambling room, where a deft fingered young woman dealt me two poker hands that cost me fifty dollars in a trice.

I am a quick learner.  I ceded the field, with celerity.  I then felt that the ship was beginning to toss a little, though I could not be sure it wasn't the lavish dessert served at dinner that caused the feeling of motion.

I made my way to the bar where I felt I could commiserate with my distress over a dram or two. There was only one other patron, an elderly woman, bejeweled, wearing a hat which though elegant, was an accessory of another day.  She was sitting before a tall tropical drink.  I had the feeling she had been observing me since my arrival at the bar with intense curiosity.  I was right.

"Sam," she exclaimed, "Is that you?"

I was startled at the ferocity of this greeting.  Then again.

"By Jesus, it is you!" She then picked up her drink, circled the bar and took the stool next to me and repeated the phrase without the sacrilege.

"It is you, damned if you haven't changed a mite.  You still have that scoundrelly look--Warren, Ohio, 1943.  Sam, how could you have forgotten so soon, a mere fifty years ago?"

"Alma," I said, "it's really you."  It was, truly, even under the erosive wear of half a century.  Her gray eyes the same as they were then, quick to laughter, adventurous, even daring in aspect.  I did not concede the "scoundrelly" description.  As I remembered, I was the innocent one.  In my salad years, there was nothing predatory about my approach to women.  I entered into that fray with the conviction that there were two kinds of women, the good and the bad.  She seemed to me to be in the former category.  What else?  She was Italian and she had nine brothers.

"Let me buy you another drink," she laughed. "Let us celebrate an ancient promise you broke fifty years ago."

"What promise?" I asked.

"You never came back," she replied.

"Alma, there was a war going on.  I was on a priority shipping list."

She smiled, leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.  "You were cute enough to eat," she said.  "A shiny new second lieutenant.  We were alone in the bus.  We started kissing in five minutes and necked all the way to Warren."

I recalled the incident, though I can admit, now there was some doubt I had categorized her correctly.

"Now, Alma, be fair.  I never promised anything.  How could I have?"

She laughed and I recalled that deep-throated sound of her voice. "Anyway," she said, "you were a scoundrel.  Remember you told me you could not get a pass for one of our dates and I found you out with that short-skirted Polish girl.  I gave her 'what for'."

Indeed she did though she never confided in me the message that sent the Polish girl from the restaurant premises, so hurriedly that she left her purse on the table.  I thought it a good time to ask.

"Come on, Alma, you can tell me now. What did you say to her that sent her off so fast?"

"Simple.  I said 'If you're not out of here before I count ten, I'll twist your head off and send it to you."

"There, you see," I noted, "You were the aggressive one.  Remember?  In those days a girl did not force herself past a reluctant hotel clerk into a guy's room."

"I never," she protested.

"You did.  Easter morning. The phone rang and the clerk announced, 'There's a young lady who wishes to come up.'  You said you wanted to take me to church for Easter services.  Then you arrayed yourself languorously on the bed.  I was not equipped for 'languorous' in those days.  Besides I wasn't Catholic."

"I did my best,"  She laughed that primordial laugh, "to convert you."

"To Catholicism?"

"That also," she laughed again.

Indeed, she took me to Easter services.  Rather, she paraded me before the faithful, introduced me to the Monsignor and invited me to a home cooked Italian dinner at her aunt's house.

"You said it was a family dinner. But the house was empty except for me and you!"

"How was the dinner?" She laughed.

"Delicious," I said, as indeed it was.

"And the dessert? She laughed once more as surely as Eve must have laughed when she told Adam he surely would not die.

"It was always superb, Alma. I guess there is no harm in a small confession. I really thought seriously about coming back."

She took my hand, held it between her own, and pressed it warmly against her breast. "I waited.  You were a scoundrel.

"Alma," I said, "remember the night you held up your hand to show me your engagement ring?"

"Like it was yesterday," she admitted.

"Whatever happened to the guy?"

"He's downstairs in the cabin," she said.  "He can't stand heights and always gets sick on cruises.  HE came back, so I married him.  It was the proper thing to do."

Matches of Memories

With all my reorganizing of photos (with all that work I only saved one large cubbie in my library cupboard), I have been running into other objects collecting dust.  I have two fancy shoe size storage boxes full of matchbooks I have collected in the last 40 years. Today, you rarely find matchbooks in restaurants. Mostly it is business cards. Somehow it's just not the same. Having matchbooks is a walk through culinary history. And personal history. Out of the like 100 or 200 books I have, with a few repeats, I picked a few that send me back in time. Scandia, Perrino's, Chasen's, The Brown Derby, and the upside down one in the green, (bad scanning) is Carlos and Charlies.

Scandia was on the Strip, one of the last of the hot places, like Ciro's, or Mocambo. I had just ond chance to go there, when I was first working in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. My old boss, a solo practitioner who liked to go to the best places, took a bunch of his staff there. The outside looked like a ski chalet. The inside was fancy, the kind of place where you worried about which fork you used. I don't remember what I ate, but I know it was great. And as with all the other places from which I got my matchbooks, I felt special getting to go there, Bronx girl making good.

I realize that pretty much all these restaurants I went to in the 1980s, when I was working for that lawyer, and maybe in the beginning of my days as a prosecutor at the State Bar. Scandia closed in 1989, and the others weren't far behind, except maybe Kate Mantilini, which only closed a few years ago.

Where Perino's used to stand, on Wilshire Boulevard there is now a boxy apartment building that has taken the name. I went there at least two times, and much like Chasen's, which was on Beverly Boulevard, closed in 1995, and is now the site of Bristol Farms, which incorporated a small part of the Chasen facade, Perino's had luxurious booths and tasteful fixtures. These were places that had waiters of many years service, and moveable trays of food kept warm by sterno. Certain items were prepared right in front of you. We had office parties at one of the few remaining Brown Derby's, this one on Vine Street in Hollywood. Those matches are from a Christmas party that the firm had there. And Carlos and Charlies had he best dip I ever enjoyed, tuna based and addictive. I saw Joan Rivers there. I saw Joan Rivers in lots of venues, including the old Century City Complex that housed the Shubert Theater. When the public was notified that Chasen's was going to close, it became popular again, and I made reservations there for a friend's birthday, someone I knew would appreciate the magic of days past. You could imagine the good old days of after Oscar night late chili dinners.

By the time I got to Hollywood in the 1980s, many of the more glamorous and historical, from a celebrity point of view, places had already closed. I got to experience the tail end of glittering LA.

For a long time after its closing, Scandia's bones, the building itself, remained standing. Somehow that was a comfort, though I'm not sure why. Then one day a few months ago I was walking along Sunset and I noticed that where Scandia had stood, contractors were breaking ground on another monstrous probably mixed use facility. I felt surprisingly sad over inanimate architecture, but really its about the passage of time and how so much is lost to us and then forgotten. There are still one or two such places left, like Musso and Frank, on Hollywood Boulevard, and it's nice every once in a while to step into the way way back machine. Then back to the disposable now.

I think it's time to use the matches.






'

When Jimmy Stewart Perked Up My Mood

I have been going through memorabilia. I threw a lot away, and I kept a lot. Photos. Letters. Cards. Yup, still have a few for all the stuff I threw out this weekend. I used to call it the "Memory Drawer" and then one drawer got too full, then another, and my memories were all over the place in various boxes in various cubbies.

One item brought me back to my early days in Los Angeles. I've written about the move, one of two risks I ever took in my life, thus far. It was November, 1981 and I had just moved into my own apartment. I had borrowed some furniture from my uncle's garage stash, bought a two hundred dollar bed, a small color television and some Pier One table and chairs for dining. I alsao adopted the first of my many California cats.

But I had a few days of doubt and loneliness. As the Christmas season approached, movies for the season were being run and I watched, for probably the 50th time, "It's a Wonderful Life", with Jimmy Stewart, Ward Bond, Beulah Bondi, and all those great actors of days gone by. I had always loved Jimmy Stewart and felt there was a depth in the roles he had after World War II. We have come to know that as a pilot in the war, he had come away likely with a case of PTSD. "It's a Wonderful Life" was his first film after the war, released in 1946, and gone is the innocent young man replaced with a man who is solid, good, but itchy for a life other than the one he has in the role of George Bailey. And so responsible, kind a man, that he gives up his dreams to stay in his native community of Bedford Falls. When he is accused of a shortfall in the books he did not cause, he wonders about the life he has led, and the unfairness of someone who did good being targeted by evil, and he considers killing himself, but is intercepted by an angel named Clarence who shows him what the lives of others would have been if George had never existed.

That holiday season in 1981 when I was a 27 year old transplant to Los Angeles, the actor's performance touched me deeply. I knew James Stewart lived somewhere on Rodeo Drive, and I figured that I could send a letter telling him how this movie, this moment, made a particular difference and it would get there. The mail service knew where he lived. He probably got lots of mail over the years there. I hoped it would get to him, and it would make a difference that yet another someone of a later generation still appreciated the movie and his work. I mailed my letter and forgot about it.

A few months later when I picked up my mail, there was a little envelope containing a simple "Thank you" card. I couldn't imagine why anyone would send me a "Thank You".  I hadn't done anything for anyone. I hardly knew anyone in Los Angeles. When I opened it I was touched. Jimmy Stewart, I would hear later, answered all his fan mail, personally, even at this stage of his life, when he was over 70 years old.

For many years, the note was in a frame along with a photo of Mr. Stewart, hung in my kitchen. You can tell. It's a little yellowed at the bottom. Then it found its way back into my memory files, the hard copy ones. Every once in a while I'd come upon it and feel bad that it could end up in a trash bin somewhere when someone cleans out the paper I have collected over the years. It is so small. It could easily be overlooked.

Anyway, I am thinking maybe I ought to go to an auction house with it. So I went on line to see if it could be authenticated other than by provenance, meaning that I sent a letter and I got this back. I thought the handwriting was Mr. Stewart's as somehow or another I recognized it. But in doing the internet research I found other notes he wrote to other people, friends and fans, and as to the fans, it seems he often used much the same language as what he wrote to me, specifically calling the person's correspondence, a "kind and thoughtful letter."  Mine had a little extra, "I want you to know." which I of course take as something more personal. 

Before I got this note, I had seen Mr. Stewart in person, once at the Johnny Carson show, an episode that turns up often on favorite Carson show reels, and twice, at the Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon that he did yearly for St. John's Hospital, where he did hosting and award giving duties, once along with actor Robert Wagner. 

This is my only autograph. I rarely write to celebrities. The only other was to Peter O'Toole after I saw him in Pygmalion in New York. I admired him for his acting prowess and his passion. I admired Mr. Stewart for his grounded goodness and his quiet strong presence. I do wish I had had the chance to speak to him and get his take on his own life.  But I have always been impressed that he took the time tor write to a lonely young woman just starting out on her new life in an unfamiliar place. It only made me appreciate him more, as a human being, not merely an actor. 

Remembering Archbishop George Hugh Niederauer

He was a literate, witty, kind man, who dearly loved the Church he served. We never had the chance to have an extended or deep conversation, but I did know him sufficiently to consider him a friend. And, once again, this blessing was all because of St. Victor's Church, where I have been parishioner since 1983.

At the time I first met him, along with the several remaining "old timer's" of our parish, he was rector of St. John's Seminary, teacher and spiritual director. This was sometime around the late 1980s. He had well known friends in the California area, like the man who would become Cardinal William Levada and Archbishop/Cardinal Roger Mahony. Those two men had been at St. John's with him, when they all were students. But he also was a friend to our then pastor, Monsignor George Parnassus, something of a big brother, at nine years older, and when he was available during his tenure as rector, he'd come down from Camarillo some Sundays, and celebrate Mass for us, as well as often to join in parish celebrations. When his five year term as rector ended, he became involved in the House of Prayer, in Los Angeles, but now could spend more Sundays and other occasions with us at St. Victor.

He was one of the few people who could jest about Monsignor's formal, professorial way of being. At the time they were both Monsignors, and when someone would run in the sacristy and say, "I'm looking for the Monsignor!", he'd say that he was just "a" Monsignor, but that our pastor was "the" Monsignor.

He could call up quotes from prose and poetry. He was an old movie fan, and we often talked about the classics.  He was a fan of and expert about Flannery O'Connor. Because of him, I made another stab at reading her short stories in order to understand how her grotesque tales were in fact optimistic about Catholic theology and the meaning of redemption in a fallen world. I never quite warmed up to O'Connor's fiction, but I did become an admirer of her letters, and thought, and her stoicism.

He even got to know my father, then a non-practicing Greek Orthodox who appreciated the intellects of my pastor and his friend. Though Dad was not a regular Churchgoer until 2003 when he finally decided he would convert to Catholicism,  he was very much part of our parish through all the years that the two Monsignors were together at St. Victor. But that didn't last terribly long.

When he was designated to become the Bishop of Salt Lake City, I have a vague memory of some conversation in the sacristy before Mass among the lector (me) and the servers and one or more of us asking how he felt about the new position. He responded in a priestly fashion, that it was apparently the Will of God that he do this. I could only imagine how hard it would be to go to an unfamiliar place where he knew few if anyone inside or outside of the Church.  I was among the lucky invitees, along with my father, to the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake to attend his installation in 1995. I had lunch with him, once, on a second trip to Salt Lake, along with a friend who had moved there in 1995.

It was hard to stay in touch, but occasionally I would send a note, and he always sent Christmas cards to Dad and to me and his other friends at St. Victor's. Then in 2006, he would be coming back to California, to become the Archbishop of San Francisco. I was able to go the Cathedral to see that installation, although this time, I didn't get to talk to him afterward. I let him know when my dad died in 2008. When his friend Monsignor Parnassus died in 2013, I got to speak with him a few times, to get some advice I needed at the time, but far too much in passing on a personal level. I never got to speak with him after the funeral. He had already retired as Archbishop by then, likely because of health issues that had been thrust upon him by circumstances. Still I got a Christmas card as did his friends and acquaintances at St. Victor, and I wrote him a note in early 2017 to say that I hadn't sent any cards in 2016, and that I was however thinking of him.

I heard that he was having new health issues and he was residing somewhere where he could be cared for, but somehow, despite all the losses of this past year, it didn't occur to me that he was on the precipice of death. I realize I had that feeling about dad even when he was in extremis at Cedars. He had had so many close calls and he always came back. But just as it had for my dad, the time had come for the Archbishop (funny I still think of him as he was, Monsignor Niederauer) and I found out he was gone as I read the intentions for the dead on Sunday.  He had already been dead six days.

I have prayed for his eternal rest. I will pray for it again, and for that of the friends and mentors who have died who contributed to my life, and for whom I am grateful.

Law School Djinn

Ah, the beginning of a class at St. John's Law School requiring, as they all did, the sustenance of a nice cup of coffee.  This photo, circa somewhere in the late 1970s, never made it into the Yearbook, but someone kindly (I think) gave me the proof.

Those were the days, when I was in my mid-twenties, that I could drink several cups a day and sleep wonderfully well at night. Those days are long gone some close to forty years later! And I can tell from my face just how much I am enjoying that sip before a tenured Professor of Law obscures the material to be presented that day.

The wisdom of the ages says, "Know Thyself". I have found that particularly difficult, especially in the area of why I ever became a lawyer. I decided on the profession when I was was too young in the first instance, age fourteen, if memory serves, and had not the faintest idea of what it really meant to be one, in the second instance.

Those of you who have read my ramblings before know that I was nearly side-tracked into radio and television writing. It is, I think, what I would have preferred, emotionally, but it wasn't what common sense dictated. And after a dabble in the creative arts, I took the road most traveled by (to vary Mr. Frost) and opted for further education and a more linear, and financially stable, career.  It's a paradox that as I sit here writing, I know that it was the best thing not to go "rogue". I am secure as a result, which was otherwise unlikely. But why a lawyer? You got me. I was a bit, no a lot, naive and ridiculously idealistic. I knew being a lawyer wasn't like "Perry Mason", the long running television show of the dramatic credits featuring a compendium I would come to know, the Corpus Juris Secundum.  But I had been schooled in objective truth and Natural Law, both of which I continue to hold dear, but not countered in my training by exposure to deceit, and manipulation.

When I got there, one of the white haired professors of stern look and liberal leanings did that army thing as we sat at those long tables at which lines of us would be seated. "Look to the left and to the right of you, because many of you will not be here at the end of the semester."  One woman, who did think it was all supposed to be "Perry Mason" was gone by the end of the first week. I was in a two and a half year program by virtue of my detour into radio and script writing, but I had done very well in college and saw no likely problem.

While I have great respect for the Socratic method, whereby the student reads the text and then is guided to brilliance by pointed questions of the learned teacher, my sense was that most of the professors, few of whom practiced in real life, had misread the instructions. I went through most of "Torts", the law of wrongs, or Negligence, or Intentional Harm, in a fog. I went out and bought the Bar Exam preparation books and used that to help me, and what had been made Greek became English again.

St. John's was one of the few schools that primarily used True-False Exams. I never did well on those types of exams as I would debate endlessly on the facts on both sides and find neither was correct, and be forced to choose uncomfortably, rather than to be provided an opportunity to explain the pros and cons of each side as one would expect, well, a lawyer to do.

I want to say that this picture was taken in Constitutional Law, and if memory serves, I almost failed the exam because I somehow made a mistake in which question I was circling, or filling in the space, or whatever, so I missed answers that I otherwise knew.

I got the measles during final exams my last year, yes, at age 25, and the powers that be said well, if you can't take it, you'll have to wait a year. My doctor said that if I took the exam in a room alone, that would be sufficient, and so I did. And happily they let me.

I found it hard to find work after I graduated, and passed the New York Bar, and as you know, blog readers, I was still entranced, if no longer by radio, by script writing, and warmer climes, so I moved to Los Angeles. I found a niche as an attorney, and wrote, in my way, in between verbal jousts over what was and was not ethical, as prosecutor for the State Bar's Office of Chief Trial Counsel until I finally got shipwrecked by the storms of human politics and hied myself to a safe distance from the practice of law.

I do wonder sometimes if that young woman blissfully sipping her before class coffee might have gone a different direction had she had an inkling of the denouement of her educational efforts? The answer, actually, and surprisingly, is probably a "no!"  I am a great believer in synchronicity and where I am today, and how I got there, seems to be a most exquisite combination of destiny and free will.

The only thing I might say to that kid in the picture is "lighten up!".  But I don't think she would have listened.

A Couple of Really Short Dad Writings: Larissa and The House on the Hill

I think of these two short short short ones as rather out of left field. I have no idea who "Larissa" might have been or when she told her story, or what was its context. But I just like it and evocative it is. The second one? Dad never liked Los Angeles so maybe that feeling generated the reverie. As usual, whatever religious content, and so much of his writing I see had it, is, cynical. I have this feeling I know what house he might have been describing. You can see it as you go north on Fairfax, a kind of cement circular object, plopped, not built. 


Larissa

It was only a crumb of bread in a world of starvation.  She told me how she picked it up and placed it on her tongue, and savored it for a brief moment of its precious existence--and then it was gone.  Only the memory clung and imbedded itself in her psyche--perhaps for all time.

She related the story simply, her head down as if she were in a solitary reflection aloud.  We listened in silent empathy to the words, halting in their transition from the Cyrillic to English.  When she looked up there was an expression of surprise at our reaction to the story, a tale out of the depths of despair and want, and a trace refection of an elusive apogee of pleasure, however transitory.

Her story has intrigued me for some time.  I am not unfamiliar with want and deprivation having lived through the great depression and witnessed the calumnies of war visited by one group of humans on another.  Still, it is not the negative aspects of this tale that motivates me to reflection.  In that fleeting moment when the precious crumb dissolved on the lady's tongue, she experienced the ultimate potential of pleasure, then the despair of reality--survival, need, hopelessness.  What can we compare the moment to?  Perhaps the fleeting occasional hugs of the mother for her child who has been without comforting since birth--an effusion of dammed up love that is released by the momentary affection, however desultory? Then, like a chastened dog it returns to its state of perpetual hunger.

Human wants are limitless, so said my professor of economics many years ago.  I am thinking of the egocentricity of physical and emotional necessities--the unrelenting grasping for comfort and gratification-relentlessly unforgiving at that which is withheld.

Without this primordial pursuit, without the impediments to realization in a cornucopia of satiated desires, there is an abundance of salt--a flatness in the ingestion--never that reaction of highly-honed taste buds on a preciously charged essence.


The House on the Hill

It sits upon a barren topped mountain apex, a square white quadrangle of unremarkable aspect.  When the perpetual haze of the area allows, one can see it placed like a mammoth paper weight on an immense mound, to no aesthetic purpose.

I have never been to its summit.  I can only imagine the view towards the south, where the corpuscular traffic starts and stops and exudes its corruption to the skies.


Of course, this is during the day. The views of Los Angeles are different at night. I have been in the hills, on many occasions in the past, when the panorama of kaleidoscopic lights seduces the imagination with the dissimulaton of illusion.

Nor is it different in the pointed spires of New York City.  I remember looking down from the observation tower of the Empire State Building.  Down below, the ant-like clusters of people vied with the clamorous automobile for the supremacy of the concrete streets until night fell and a magnificence lit up the city.

How to describe the play of neon, the perpetual motion of streams of light, red, sometimes white, in equal measure, depending on the direction of travel.

These scenes defy description.  Perhaps is is the promise of the Divine or a preview of things beyond fulfillment--for He is an enigmatic Creator--something, perhaps, like the view from the mountain that Moses was allowed of Canaan, before he was told he cannot go down and see for himself.

Dad's Conversation on A Crowded Bus

I had just mounted the crowded bus when a rotund lady motioned me toward a narrow interval between herself and another passenger.  I declined the offer, but she insisted, rising a little from her seat and reaching out to pull me to what seemed a severely limited space.  I sensed that further argument would be useless so I wedged myself within the constraints of the seat between my benefactor and another ample matron.  I felt surely that if I resisted further, she would lift me physically, shopping bags and all, and deposit me into the vacancy.

I say this lovingly.  I am familiar with the elderly Russian ladies who abound, either mounting or leaving the buses at Fairfax and Santa Monica. They evince much of the gregarious, the maternal, the helpful and clearly the conviction that men do not know what is really good for them.

There ensued a verbal interchange between my benefactor and a slim bespectacled woman standing in front of us.  The exchange was not clear to me.  It was in Russian.  I took it that the intercessor was disagreeing with the solicitude of the seated woman.  I decided to ask.

"Do you feel the lady should have allowed me to stand?" I asked.

"Oh, no," she replied.

"But you must agree that she had little regard for my reluctance to sit," I pressed.

"Perhaps," she said, "but I do feel that her actions were generous, caring and in your best interest."

"I agree," I concluded, "but as a corollary to that logic, would you say that women know better than men what is good for them?"

She hesitated to answer.  I saw her look searchingly at my seated companion, who was evincing complete indifference to our conversation, and was ingesting a donut. I hastened to assure her that her companion did not understand enough English to generate continued interest. I added, "If she did, she would have a decided opinion on the matter with a display of much gesticulation."

The standing lady smiled. "Surely you generalize?"  Genuine amusement overspread her face.  Her white, even teeth accentuated by laughing blue eyes dispelled my first impression of plainness.  Perhaps I had been misled by the heavy rimmed spectacles she wore.  I decided to provoke her further.

"Would you have done the same in her place?" I offered.

She laughed and quipped.  "Considering the size of the space and the size of the lady, I would have risen and offered you the seat.  Of course, if I were the seated one, I doubt there would have been an insufficiency of space.  Certainly, I would not have reached out for you.  I am less primitive."

"But you agree that men need the guidance and at least the gentle persuasion of women--for their own benefit of course.  This tendency may be genetic from the Beginning, in Eden. It was Eve who was adventurous, who saw that the forbidden fruit was good to eat, and later, induced the indolent Adam that  'surely he (thou) shall not die."

She laughed. "Surely women are entitled to a little pay back. Eve took all the blame. What was it the cowardly Adam said?  'She gave me of the tree and I did eat.'"

It was her stop.  She smiled as she left the bus.  She had had the last word.