The Subway Grinches

Subway Grinches

T’was the week before Christmas and all through the town
Every Who here in Whoville was wearing a frown
The shopping not finished, the brightness diminished
With mean Subway Grinches beating them down

There were two! Two foul Grinches, with hearts hard and cold
The Management Grinch was just rolling in gold
He was fat! He was false! And a terrible cook
Unless you enjoy an unwholesome stewed book!
And what can I say of his mean union brother?
That Grinch would steal Christmas from children and mothers
His workers were fed! His workers had money
His workers had pensions and health plans like honey!

They talked and they talked deep into the night
But neither would bend, they spoiled for a fight
And in the wee hours, ahead of the day,
Union Grinch called a strike, just to get his own way!

They locked up the subways, they hooted and hollered
They marched and they picketed, yelling for dollars
So the Whos down in Whoville sneakered their feet,
Rode cabs, skates and bicycles and took to the streets

Then at last, the Great Who of Whoville arose
Grabbed one Grinch by the ear, the other by nose
Led them inside to the bargaining table
And paddled their pants as the Great Who is able

“Look here, Boys!” said he, “best make up on the double
You’re both much too big to be causing such trouble!”
Now sad and ashamed, the two Grinches blushed
With tears in their eyes, to the table they rushed
They stood and they talked, with their feet getting tired
Shook hands and made up as the Great Who required

Now Whoville was humming again with bright cheer
The subways were running, and Christmas was near
Even Grinches were happy and grinned ear to ear

So if your mass transit’s been snitched by a Grinch
Remember the Great Who and don’t give an inch
If you can’t get to work in the usual way,
Just stick out your thumb and hail Santa’s sleigh!

Thoughts on Same-Sex Marriage

Remember the song in “South Pacific,” “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught?” I think that’s very true when it comes to this issue.

The first time marriage was explained to me, I was probably around four years old. Some adult, I don’t remember who, told me that marriage meant a man and a woman falling in love with each other and deciding to live together as man and wife. In my little-girl mind, the question already formed: Why couldn’t two men or two women fall in love with each other as well? Why did it always have to be a man and a woman?

The answer I received, of course, was that two men or two women couldn’t marry and have babies. Aha! There was the secret underlying purpose of marriage: not love, which could happen to anyone, but making babies.

Knowing nothing of adult love or sex, I easily accepted this more practical explanation of why same sex marriage “didn’t make sense.”

The next time the subject came up, I’d already been “carefully taught.” Not by anyone openly, but by what I observed in society. I was ten years old and my friend David was eleven. My apartment building had a superintendent, and the superintendent’s daughter was a lesbian. Those were the butch and femme days of the mid-1960’s, before the Stonewall riots, before gays and lesbians came out of the closet.

Not only was the superintendent’s daughter a lesbian, she was black, and her lover was white. The daughter was pretty and looked feminine, but her lover cut her blonde hair extremely short, bound her breasts so that she resembled a man with a muscular chest, and wore mannish shirts and pants. Unless you scrutinized her, you could barely tell she was a woman.

The couple never appeared together in public that I ever saw. Maybe they went out at night to the lesbian bars in Greenwich Village. I have no idea. David and I would sit in my bedroom and sometimes catch a glimpse of the lover passing by on the street. Then we would giggle together.

“Their parents will never approve!” I laughed, referring not just to their same-sex relationship but also to their status as an interracial couple. But in fact, at least one parent, the superintendent, either approved or tolerated their relationship and allowed them to live together in his apartment.

Back then I had another confused notion about homosexuality. I thought all lesbians wanted to be men, and gay men wanted to be women. So I thought, why couldn’t a gay man marry a lesbian, and he could be the woman while she was the man? That would take care of the baby problem, wouldn’t it? Though a pregnant man would be an unusual sight, to say the least! Back then, of course, I knew the word lesbian but there was no such word as “gay.” “Gay,” in those days, meant happy and cheerful, and at first when homosexuals began using the word, I resented their misappropriation of the term. Today, you couldn’t possibly write a book titled, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay,” unless you meant something specific.

Homosexual men were called homosexuals by the polite, homos, faggots and queer by the less polite, and cocksuckers by the bigots. Today, the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning) community has adopted the word “queer” into its lexicon and it is no longer an epithet, just as blacks have taken over the word “nigger,” and they can use it among themselves without insult. Can a straight person call a gay person “queer” today without insult? In some cases, apparently, yes, because I just finished writing a grant to a foundation that maintains a “Queer Youth Fund.”

In the past thirty years, society’s pendulum has swung again. In the years since the Stonewall riots of 1969, first gays and lesbians came out, then bisexuals, and now the LGBTQ acronym stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning. Same sex marriage has been legalized in some places and I hope it will be legal all over the United States soon, but that may have to wait until Bush and his pals are out of office.

I used to tell a gay friend, Lou, that I wanted to dance at his wedding. Today, I belong to the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, which supports same sex marriage. Its officiants perform commitment ceremonies as same sex marriage isn’t yet legal in New York City. Last February I arranged for BSEC to have a booth at the Same Sex Wedding Expo at the Javits Convention Center, hoping to attract more LGBTQ people to the Society as well as to advertise our rental space for commitment ceremonies.

And now I write grants for the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which provides direct services to at-risk LGBTQ youth in New York City. These kids come from impoverished backgrounds and have faced verbal and physical violence because of who they are.

I’ve learned that LGBTQ teenagers drop out of school at a much higher rate than other kids and are often afraid to even show their faces at school because of the taunting and beatings they face. Some of them have run away from home, some of them were kicked out when they outed themselves to their families. They attempt suicide three times as often as other teenagers, and on the streets, they are exposed to drugs, prostitution and HIV infection.

Right now HMI is helping them to get on their feet, get educated (it’s also the home of the Harvey Milk High School, the first public alternative school for LGBTQ students who have run into rough situations at their zoned schools because of their sexuality or gender identity), participate in after-school activities that boost their academic and job readiness skills as well as their creativity, get information about HIV prevention and taking care of their health, and get counseling and crisis intervention when needed.

When these kids grow up, will they grow up with scars? Or will they be strong and smart and happy? That’s not for me to decide: I just write the grants. It’s for everyone to decide, how these youngsters with dreams and aspirations should be guided into an adulthood of meaningful careers and stable loving relationships: for instance, marriage. I hope they’ll find society more and more ready to welcome them. I hope they’ll find the things every teenager hopes will be waiting out in the real world someday.

In spirit if not in body, I’ll dance at their weddings.

December 1st

Tuesday, December 1st, was the eighth anniversary of my breast cancer surgery. Pretty good, though it is scary that Nancy, who had ovarian and uterine cancer 9 years ago, got through almost 9 years of survivorship before it came back to kill her.

The concern that it may come back never completely leaves. I just have to believe that it won’t.

Eight years ago I felt and experienced the power of prayer. My friends from the internet support group were praying for me and they knew the expected time of my surgery. I remember being with Bruce and stopping off in Barnes and Noble first to try and get our minds off the operation. I remember looking through comedy books and laughing but underneath the laughs there was a constant dread.

Then we went to the hospital, I checked in, and I waited. I had a slight sore throat that evening. It was probably dryness due to fear. But I was afraid that if they found I was running a fever they would delay the surgery. I wanted that breast off. I wanted the cancer removed from my body, before it could go anywhere else.

Around 5 PM I felt a definite lessening of dread. My spirits lightened. There was no obvious reason for this, because in fact I was forced to wait an extra two and a half hours until an operating room was open for me.

But at the scheduled time of the surgery I definitely felt different, lighter, less afraid. I knew then that the prayers from afar were lifting me up and strengthening me.

Lois was returning from a trip that night, and she made a beeline from the airport straight to Beth Israel Medical Center. When I woke up in the recovery room, she was standing over me smiling and looking like a blonde angel. Lois told me that now, I could be an Amazon warrior.

I said I might list to the left unless I carried a shield in my right hand like the Amazons did, and Lois replied that I was more aware and alert than anyone she’d ever seen wake up from an operation.

No matter what happens on my survivorship anniversary, I am blessed. I was late to work because of a track fire, but so what? I’m here and I’m breathing, eight years after breast cancer. And I intend to keep on breathing. It was a sunny day and warm for December 1st. That was a gift too. “Just live in the sunshine,” as the song goes. “We’ll understand it all by and by.

December 1st is World AIDS day and Rosa Parks Day. Fifty years ago, she sparked off the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white man. So December 1st is a special day in a lot of ways. I don’t like winter and I dread its onset, but now, every year for the rest of my life, I’ll be reminded that I made it through that scary winter of 1997-98. I survived. And that’s something to be grateful for.

David's Back Yard

In second grade the teacher taught us how to slant our papers so that our handwriting would come out neater. If you were right handed you slanted the paper one way, and if you were a lefty you slanted it the other. Since there were only four of us lefties in the class, she separated us out into the “left-handed corner” and had us all slant our pages the same way so we would remember how it was supposed to go.

That’s how I met David. He sat in front of me in the left-handed corner. When we found out we lived a few houses apart on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, our friendship was sealed. Soon after we became friends I began playing in his back yard, the place where I spent many hours of my childhood.

David’s back yard was nothing special to look at. He lived in a private house and you walked down the tarred driveway into the yard. His yard actually served two freestanding houses, David’s house and the house belonging to the Kraybills next door. David and the three kids whose parents rented the upstairs part of the house shared the yard with the three, and later the four Kraybill kids. But to me, it was always David’s back yard.

Gravel crunched under your feet as you walked in David’s back yard. In the center was a corrugated metal shed, painted a brownish peach shade. I don’t remember ever seeing that shed open. I wondered often what was inside it. Once, it snowed so much that snow piled up between in the narrow space between the fence and the shed. We climbed up the snow hill, and found ourselves nearly level with the roof of the shed.

There was a garage under David’s bedroom window, but his parents parked their car in the back of the yard unless the weather was nasty. On either side of this yard were the back yard spaces of two adjoining apartment buildings. Those yards were stark and ugly. There was no space to play, just a narrow area where you could do nothing but walk and stand around. It was fenced in, and the ground was concrete, like the sidewalks out front. My own back yard behind our apartment house was the same, and I never went down there except to accompany my parents to the garbage room.

By contrast, David’s plain back yard was luxurious.

Honeysuckle grew by the fence. I forget which kid showed me how to pinch off the back of the flower, pull out the tiny stamens and get the sweet drop of “honeysuckle” to well up at the base of the blossom so we could lick it off. If you pulled too hard or too fast, the drop would be lost and a flower wasted.

At the back end of the yard David’s father had scratched out a small tomato garden where he tended tomato plants every summer. My parents got to know David’s mother and Dad and we got some of those tomatoes too. Beyond that, it got scary. The back fence was built at the edge of a cliff, a sheer drop down to private houses that were on a level with Broadway, which begins in lower Manhattan and runs all the way upstate. We could go to the fence and look down onto the rooftops of the houses below, and at their lush green lawns. Standing near that fence made me dizzy, and I was afraid to put my weight on it. What if it gave way?

Big kids from the apartment houses sometimes came down into their yards and taunted and threatened us little kids through the fence, but for the most part never did more than bluster. None of them had the nerve to come down the driveway and fight us on private property. Some of them were daring and climbed over their fence, to walk that narrow cliff edge while clinging to David’s back fence. We watched in horror, expecting one of the older boys to fall to his death. That never happened.

On the Kraybill side of the yard stood the house I thought of as Charlie’s house. Charlie was the eldest of the Kraybill children. His parents were Mennonites and his mother always dressed in black with a small cap and a white apron. Charlie’s house had a metal staircase that led up to the back porch, and I used to sit on it with the other kids, eating ice cream from the Bungalow Bar truck or pouring powdered sugar Lick’M’Aid down our throats from striped straws. David used to chant, “Bungalow Bar, tastes like tar, the more you eat the sicker you are!” but we bought their ice cream and enjoyed it.

Under Charlie’s porch there was a huge flat tire, probably from an eighteen-wheeler. I don’t know how it got down into Charlie’s side of the yard but it was always there that I could remember. It was big enough for three or four kids to sit in and hold a pow wow, planning our next carnival or figuring out which roles we would play in our next game of Superman, and how the story line would go. Charlie, two years younger than me, always sported a crew cut. Before his family caved in to modern culture and bought a TV set, Charlie lived to plan carnivals. He wanted all kinds of booths where people would pay money to play different kinds of games. He figured the money would support the next carnival, and that money would support the next one, and so on. We planned and plotted, sitting in that great big tire, but never actually put on any of those carnivals.

I always came back to David’s back yard and I always came back to play with David, even when we had a fight. It seems like it was always summer there, except for my memory of that big snowstorm that left a blanket of knee-deep snow. In summer we would play baseball, sometimes with a real ball and sometimes with the pebbles from the ground. Once I hit a pebble with the bat and it went sailing through the garage window. What a disaster!

In David’s back yard we played Superman, we played “baseball,” we played freeze tag. We played Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light, all the games kids played outside in the fresh air before this generation’s computers and Nintendo lured them all indoors.

Sometime in the late seventies, the neighborhood changed. David’s parents decided to move away to Queens. One last time I walked down the sloping driveway into David’s back yard. The Kraybills had moved away years ago, to a tiny Mennonite town in Pennsylvania, population 70. When I reached the back yard, I was amazed at how tiny it really was. Seen through an adult’s eyes, there was barely the space to turn around in. It was fall, and the last crop of tomatoes David’s father would ever plant there was wilting. Where I remembered a “baseball field” there was hardly the space to swing a bat. But I remember David’s back yard through a little girl’s eyes. Seen that way, it had all the space a child could want.

Nancy's Eulogy

Dear Monte, Morgan and Melissa,

I just want to say again that my heart goes out to you. You have incurred an incalculable and irreplaceable loss. Only time can mitigate the pain but it will never erase your memories of Nancy.

Cheryl gave such a touching eulogy at the funeral service. I appreciated her very specific memories of Nancy, and the way she highlighted Nancy’s high-spirited personality at college and beyond. I’m sure if I’d walked into that same classroom I would have picked out Nancy to be my friend as well.

Nancy always said she met me earlier at some synagogue meeting for mothers, but my first memory of her takes me back to an unusually warm day in January, 1992. We met on the playground at Bedford and Avenue V. Morgan, not quite two, and Jason, almost two and a half, were climbing the same wooden blocks. I asked Nancy how old Morgan was, and with her characteristic crusty humor, she answered, “She’ll be two in two weeks – if I let her live that long!”

Jason and Morgan took a liking to each other, and Nancy and I began arranging to meet at the playground, McDonald’s, and Burger King. Later, when the kids reached preschool age, we began arranging weekly playdates every Friday afternoon at the library, followed by an early dinner at a fast-food place with a playroom.

As soon as they caught sight of each other, Jason and Morgan would make a beeline for each other and start playing. Nancy often referred to them as a “corporation.” Once, when they were four, Jason and I visited Nancy at the Palms Shore Club and Jason spent the day in the day camp along with Morgan. A friend greeted Nancy as we arrived and she introduced me as her “mockitainista.” I got a huge laugh out of that when I found out it was the Yiddish word for the relationship between the parents of the bride and groom!

As I got to know Nancy better I learned that she did indeed have an infectious laugh and great sense of humor. She was also a strong woman who took no guff from anyone, and she would speak out in no uncertain terms, especially in defense of her family. She could be a strict mother, summarily taking Morgan home from the park when she disobeyed, but her love and caring for both her daughters was never to be doubted. She was passionately devoted to her husband and her children, always spoke to me admiringly of her sister Ellen and brother-in-law Michael, and was so grateful for her mother Jenny and the way Jenny supported her marriage and never interfered.

When Nancy’s cancer was first discovered she fought hard. She must have been shocked to wake up after surgery and find that there was much more of a problem than a simple burst cyst. How she explained her hair loss and sickness after chemotherapy that first year out, I don’t know, but I do know that she did not want to tell Morgan, who was only seven. She did not want to frighten Morgan or disrupt her childhood with the spectre of cancer. Instead, she fought back and she seemed to win. Her hair grew back. I asked her once if she worried the cancer might return, and she declared, “It’s NOT coming back.”

Her tone was final, dismissive. I believed her. No mere cancer cell would dare to mess with a determined Nancy! I thought of her as someone who beat cancer, and she was one of the role models I looked to for hope when I had my own bout with breast cancer the following winter.

When I had my mastectomy, Nancy visited me at the hospital and brought me a Harlequin romance and a book about Big Beautiful Women. This must have seemed to her an analogy to my missing breast: beauty of a type that society has been slow to recognize. The book discussed pride in one’s body, and I found it a reassuring and thoughtful gift.

After my recovery, we continued to meet at libraries every Friday afternoon until Jason and Morgan were in middle school. Sometimes we met at the Homecrest library; other times at Kings Bay or Gerritsen Beach. Afterwards we ate at Burger King on Coney Island Avenue or McDonalds on Nostrand.

Once, when Jason was nine or ten, we had a bad incident at McDonalds. I was there with Nancy and Elyse, and Jason, Steven and Morgan were in the playroom. Because kids had to remove their shoes before entering the playroom area, Jason was in his stocking feet, and the heavy playroom door swung back and caught his toe. He came out crying and bleeding, with part of his toenail ripped off. At that time I didn’t know whether his toe was broken (fortunately, it wasn’t).

The manager dropped a couple of Band Aids on the table and left us to our own devices. As I tended to Jason, a crowd of teenagers collected and began making pointed comments and nasty remarks. One told me not to let him bleed on the table because he might have AIDS. In exasperation I said, “Why don’t you get out of my face and let me take care of my kid?”

At this point they became threatening. I was still trying to get Jason’s bleeding to stop so I could take him to Dr. Ehrlich, and I couldn’t do anything to defend us, plus I had the nightmarish knowledge that if this gang attacked us we could not even run away. Jason’s toe was injured and he was already too big to carry.

Nancy and Elyse went to the manager, who pretended to be busy, and it was Nancy’s voice booming out over the workers’ feeble excuses, demanding the manager come out and help us. He was indifferent, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “What do you want me to do, call the police?”

Nancy answered him, loud and clear: “Yes! Call the police!”

If anyone could take the lead and protect her friends and family, it was Nancy.
The weekly meetings broke up around 2001, not long after 9/11. After that I didn’t see Nancy often. I know we visited when Monte’s father died, and Jason visited once during summer vacation a couple of years ago.

Back in March or April, we met Nancy at the H & R Block on Avenue U and E. 13th Street. She was happy to see us but busy with her job, and said we’d talk sometime soon.

We never did. I never even knew she was sick, so it came as a complete surprise and dreadful shock when I read Monte’s email Monday night.

Nothing can bring back a strong, vibrant and loving woman like Nancy. She lost her battle with cancer way too young, and missed out on the things we look forward to later in life. But we have our memories, and I hope I have given you a few more to cherish, that you may not have known about.

May you find comfort in loving each other, and in knowing that Nancy loved you all deeply. She is remembered with love in many hearts in addition to your own.

Meandering Through Artifacts

The beach glass is a scarred old cloud, frosted like a flat lump of rock candy, and embedded with crisscrossing wires. They were supposed to prevent the glass from breaking, but it broke anyway, and the waves on Brighton Beach pounded it soft and smooth. A little seawater seeped inside the glass, rusting the wires. I found it at the water’s edge after the tide ran out, and kept it in my jewelry box, a mile from the ocean.

I’ll put it in my pocket and visit the New York Aquarium in Coney Island. Maybe I’ll throw it into the sand before I go and see the walruses. Maybe I’ll return it to the ocean. Will it be sad to leave the safety of its home among my baubles, or will it splash and sink, snug and sound into the surrounding sea?

The walruses resemble the drawing on my refrigerator magnet but the walruses themselves are in-your-face real. The enormous male’s courtship habits, if you can call them that, are crude and to the point. He seems drawn to hunter green and follows the dark uniform shirts of the Aquarium docents.

Maybe I’ll go to the Botanic Garden next week, for the Chili Pepper Fiesta. I can just taste a hot chili pepper on my tongue. A chunk of solid fire, it ignites my taste buds, making the food seem to sizzle in my mouth. There will be African drumming, Cajun music and Cajun food. Sad, that New Orleans has been flooded twice, and no dove returned. Their traditions, expatriate now, visit Brooklyn for a little while at the Fiesta.

I leave the beach and ride the B68 bus north on Coney Island Avenue. Russian immigrants from Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay converse as we travel. Someone left a tattered orange voting card on the seat beside me. Against the blue seat, it looks like a patch on the seat of someone’s jeans. The card is printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I puzzle over it. Why no Russian? A woman shakes her head to emphasize her speech, earrings clacking. They are castanets, and her husband beside her dances to their beat.

I get off at Avenue T and pass the elementary school. It’s called the School of Music. Through the lunchroom windows, glass shot through with wire, like the bit of beach glass in my pocket, comes the wail of off-tune violins. A red object catches my eye, lost among the crunched brown leaves at the entrance to the schoolyard. Is it a handball? No. It’s a red rubber heart, to squeeze in your hand for exercise or to pop up a vein so the doctor can slide a gleaming silver needle in. I squeeze it, idly, wondering if this constitutes aerobic exercise, and slide it into my pocket alongside the Brighton beach glass.

My Neighborhood

My block is an urban hodgepodge of buildings and styles. Two apartment buildings, one with a crenellated roof and fire escapes, the other with balconies outside the center apartments, face each other. The rest of the block is built up with private houses, some brick and some wooden. Many are detached houses with their own small landscaped front lawns, but a few are semi-detached. Three new private homes, solid Indian-red brick and much larger than the rest, supposedly belong to one wealthy family, brothers and sisters who have bought up land on the same street and built color-coordinated semi-mansions.

My block is quiet. I hear the humming of air conditioners, still needed on this first day of autumn, and the occasional whoosh of a car passing by on the avenue. As I approach the corner a chartreuse monk parrot squawks at me. I spot him on the phone wire, adjusting a twig in the large nest he and his family have built beside the transformer, to keep them warm in winter. Parrots in neighboring trees answer his chattering.

I round the corner and pass the home of a “survivor of the shield.” Her policeman husband was killed in the line of duty, as her license plate advertises. This woman decorates her home elaborately at each holiday, but so far, her Halloween decorations are not out and the house seems curiously naked without its usual display.

An older Asian woman holding a little girl’s hand passes me on the street. The woman shields herself from the sun with an oversized navy and white plaid umbrella. The little girl carries a red backpack. She’s probably done with pre-kindergarten for the day.

As I reach the next corner the parrots’ raucous calls intensify. Here there is a larger nest, and the parrots flit in and out of the trees around the perimeter of a small city park. Sometimes they land on the ground, a splash of green beside the drab pigeons and sparrows.

I cut through the park. The leaves have not turned yet but the ground is littered with crushed brown leaves. We have not had much rain. On the handball court, a young man of Asian descent, clad all in black, is smashing his handball against the wall. I wonder if he is supposed to be in school. A park attendant circles the park house, carrying a broom and dustpan. On the basketball court, another lone man, also Asian, dribbles a basketball.

In the playground, toddlers climb the equipment while grandparents watch. One group speaks Russian, another speaks Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese. I can’t easily tell the difference. I rarely hear English in this playground, except from some of the teenagers.

As I approach the main commercial drag on Avenue U, I see store signs and awnings in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and other languages. Pakistani women in tunics and matching pants pass me, their heads scarved. Stricter Muslim women, clad in their burqas, wheel their babies in strollers. I hear every language but English on the next seven blocks as I head east.

I stop at an Asian supermarket and glance at the vegetables outside. The odor of fish wafts out from inside and I wrinkle my nose. Some of the vegetables are familiar: carrots, onions, green beans and scallions. But others are unrecognizable to the western eye. Some resemble elongated string beans, each one close to a yard long. There’s a long green vegetable that resembles a cross between a cucumber and a cactus. Fat green carrots and huge white radishes known as daikons are on sale beside the better-known bok choy and broccoli tops. The streets are thronged with Asian and East European shoppers, squeezing fruits, selecting the best string beans, and milling through the stores. This is a multilingual polyglot, Chinatown meets Little Tokyo meets Moscow on the Hudson. There’s even a Moscow on the Hudson Bakery.

Inside the supermarket, I find open bins full of beans, nuts and dried fruits. Glass jars hold mysterious roots selling for $60 a pound. I wonder what they are and what they are for; they must be something special at that price! I find twenty-five pound bags of rice and small packages of rice pasta. There are canned logans, lychees and water chestnuts, and pop top cans of coconut milk and grass jelly juice, whatever that is.

The variety of food around here is amazing. Besides the Asian supermarkets there are Russian groceries featuring Russian sausage and salami, Russian breads, bags of kasha and millet, both popular East European grains. There are abundant restaurants, too. I see Chinese restaurants and bakeries featuring sweet rolls and bubble tea, Vietnamese restaurants, and now a growing number of Japanese sushi and sashimi restaurants springing up. There are East European Caucasian restaurants, a Mexican restaurant and a new Malaysian one too. I’m expecting a Pakistani restaurant to open anytime now.

I leave the supermarket and head east. There is a fruit store on almost every block, sometimes one on each corner. Outside a discount clothing store, women pick through a table with a rainbow of cotton panties. When I read the sign I realize why they are so intent: the panties are on sale, three for a dollar. I join a blonde with an East European accent and we sort through the panties. Soon we discover the reason they are so cheap. The sizes are not correctly marked.

I eat lunch in Spiro’s Restaurant, a Greek coffee shop. A couple of booths away, I overhear a woman telling her lunch companion about her high blood pressure, her arthritis, and an operation on her elbow. At another booth, two middle-aged blondes are discussing hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At last, conversations I can understand and eavesdrop on! The restaurant is small, with one long row of booths and two shorter ones. The walls are painted pastel pink surrounded by wood paneling, and a mirror overlooks each booth. Slightly bedraggled silk flowers in vases adorn each formica tabletop, and on the walls are small prints by Monet. Piped in music plays the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”

On the way home I notice the streets are quieter until I reach Ocean Avenue. St. Edmunds High School has let out, and girls in white blouses and pleated gray miniskirts wait at the bus stop. Orthodox Jewish girls from the nearby Mesivta cross the street, their concealing black skirts brushing their ankles.

My block remains quiet when I return. A young man wearing a backpack rollerblades past and the sound of his skate wheels breaks the near-silence. Even the parrots don’t chatter as I past beneath their nest. It is two-thirty and at three, the public schools will let out. Then the streets will ring with children’s voices again.

The Synagogue

Last night the family attended the first Friday night synagogue service we have attended in years. We went to the temple we used to belong to years ago, and left when we could no longer afford both membership there and in the humanist church we joined around the same time.

About a week and a half ago, maybe on September 7th or 8th, I had lunch in Burger King. When I was on the line waiting for my order, I saw a man I vaguely recognized, and thought he looked very pale and unwell. It turned out he was Alan, a man we'd known from the synagogue. He and his wife Maddy were there having lunch with their grandchildren. Actually it must have been on Tuesday the 6th because now I remember, I said to Maddy that the kids would be back in school in two days. She was pleased because the boy was being a handful and acting spoiled and whiny.

I sat down with them and asked how the synagogue was going. They were both enthused about it and said it had merged with a third reform temple and was now meeting in Boro Park. They encouraged us to come to an open house on September 11th. We talked about the possibility of reforming a youth group, about the women's group, the brotherhood, all sorts of activities there. They did say they needed more membership, well, what religious organization doesn't?

Anyhow Maddy and Alan were so friendly that I thought about checking the place out again. I also felt that it was somehow a sign from God that I should try the synagogue, or at least, putting something else in my path as I have been thinking about us leaving the humanist church.

We have been so angry and so negative about what is going on at the church that I've felt for some time now that we need to start dissociating ourselves from it. It is not spiritually enriching us, in fact right now it is just the opposite. It is dragging us down into negative emotions.

So it seemed like an illustration of the saying, one door closes and another door opens. I talked to Rick and he agreed somewhat unenthusiastically to try it out.

When we went to the open house, everyone was very friendly. Most of the people there were from the old synagogue that we belonged to (and in fact, Rick used to belong to the third syagogue where the congregation is now meeting, years before he met me). Maddy was there for a few minutes but left to visit Alan, who was in the hospital. I wasn't surprised as I'd been shocked by how pale he looked. She said it wasn't anything serious, just some arhythmia.

Last night after dinner Rick, Rick Jr. and I headed over to the synagogue. It's in a Hasidic area and lots of Hasidic men were strolling about on their way to services, clad in their black frock coats and fur hats. I often wonder why they don't die of heat stroke in summer.

When we reached the synagogue I immediately went into the ladies room. As I emerged from the stall I heard two women talking in horrified and grief-stricken tones about a man's death. Immediately I knew they meant Alan though I didn't hear his name. I came out, and one woman was crying in the other's arms. They apologized to me, since neither of them recognized me.

I said, "I think I know who you are talking about." Sure enough, it was Alan. He'd come home from the hospital but then collapsed in the house and either died in the ambulance or on arriving at the hospital.

This gave me an eerie feeling. Why should I have run into him again after not seeing him for so many years, receive encouragement from him and his wife to visit the synagogue again, and then never see him alive again? It seems like a sign and it seems like the last thing he was meant to accomplish. Since I don't believe in accidents I feel it had to be a sign to me. Also I had a strong premonition that he wasn't well and in fact, when I saw him, I thought to myself that he looked like a ghost.

At the service, I felt comfortable although I couldn't quite read Hebrew fast enough to totally keep up. Maybe a refresher is a good idea. I give Rick Jr. credit, he tried to follow along at least in English.

The brief sermon was interesting, basically the rabbi was saying that we shouldn't neglect our bodies because we are made in God's image and it is an offense to God to desecrate what resembles God. (I notice that to be politically correct they keep saying God instead of Him). The rabbi went further and said that our bodies don't belong to us but to God and we are just holding them as tenants and stewards and are expected to give them back in good condition. He also blamed the overriding religious traditions in America, which downplay the body as bad and to be transcended, for the amount of bodily neglect and self harm that Americans demonstrate.

Maybe that's what I needed to hear because I have been pretty bad with my diet ever since the wedding. I wonder if that would work as a thought to keep in mind when I am trying to resist gobbling junk food? Maybe it would, I can try it.

In any case it was strange to hear about Alan's death and feel as if I met him again at exactly the right time for something important to be accomplished in my life. I don't think the universe revolves around me and certainly he meant much more to his wife and family and his closer friends, but somehow if a person's actions send out ripples in a pond, his ripples reached me at the last moment in his life and have made a difference. In a way it is similar to the effect Richard had on me in his own last months of life.

At the kiddush after the service, Rick got into a conversation with a man who was a childhood friend of his father. Lester was saying that he has his doubts about whether God exists and he pointed to the situation with Alan, dying at the relatively young age of 70. Why should such a good man be taken, he asked. I wonder, if Alan hadn't completed all that he came here to do. And was getting me to check out the synagogue one of the last things he'd come here to do? What a thought.

I don't expect to join the synagogue at least not right away. I'm not ready for a relationship on the rebound. But I'll certainly go back from time to time. I do acknowledge synchronicity and try to follow the path laid out for me, and it seems that revisiting this synagogue is definitely on that path.

Going last night, the week before Mom's Yahrzeit, also gave me the chance to say Kaddish for her, which I have not done in many years. It has always been a curious thing to me, that the prayer for the dead, spoken by those in mourning, says nothing about death and loss but only speaks of God's goodness and greatness.

Lunch With Oneg

She had to be loopy. No one comes and sits at your table, uninvited, in Burger King. Not unless it’s very crowded, but it wasn’t crowded at all.

I’d just opened a copy of Piers Anthony’s latest Xanth novel. But here she was, sliding her tray onto the table, asking me if I liked the book. I thought she was a flake, and I held the book out in front of me, trying to retrieve my place.

“Oh, you’re reading,” she said, and I couldn’t pretend. I put the book face down on the table. My teachers would have been appalled.

“Do you like Piers Anthony?” she asked. Startled, I answered, “Yes, he writes good fantasy.”

“I used to read a lot of Piers Anthony,” she told me. “I liked science fiction. But then my life became like science fiction.”

Yup, had to be loopy. But her eyes twinkled and she was too happy to be complaining.

“Are you interested in energy healing?” she asked me. At the same time she dug into her fried onion rings. Not a health food nut, then.

“What kind?”

She mentioned chakras; she mentioned meridians. I thought she was talking about longitude. In England in 1982, I traveled to Greenwich and stood on the Prime Meridian line that runs through the town, one foot in one time zone and the other in a different hour. Only standing on the International Date Line would have been more exciting. So what were these meridians?

She didn’t explain. Instead, she told me about going to the Learning Annex to hear some author who’d written a book on energy healing. Skeptical, I asked her what the classes would cost.

“Oh, they’re free,” she assured me. “She’sdoing it because she wants everyone to know about energy healing,” she insisted, smiling broadly. Those hazel eyes were sparkling again. Oddly, they matched the color of her curling hair.

“I used to go to the Learning Annex,” I said. “I saw a couple of mediums there. One was a phony but another one..no, she was at the Seminar Center – the other one was for real.”

“How did you know the first one was phony?”

“She was too interested in money. She came in with audio tapes and right away she was selling them. Then she had these vitamin supplements that were supposed to help you get in touch with the other side.”

“Vitamin supplements?”

“Right. And she asked people to come up and put photos of loved ones they wanted to contact out ona table, and then she parked her vitamin supplements right t here on the table, on top of the photos. So right away I knew she was a phony and only cared about the money, not about people or their loved ones on the other side.”

“But the other one,” I continued, “she was good. She gave everyone in the room a five minute reading and she was very accurate. She got my mother: she knew what my mother died of, when she died, and a lot of details about her that were absolutely true. And she didn’t know a thing about me. She didn’t even know my name.”

My companion agreed there was no other way the medium could have known anything about me.

“Sometimes they get your name ahead of time and they go on the internet and find out about you. But she knew nothing.”

She nodded and introduced herself as Oneg. I grinned as we shook hands. “I’m Celeste,” I said. I told her I liked her name. It’s the Hebrew word for a festive meal, like “Oneg Shabbat.” She said her original name was Noga, and in Hebrew it was spelled with the letter Hay at the end. Noga, she told me, means “bright light,” and she said the concept was important in the Kabbalah.

Oneg told me that when she got married the rabbi did not listen to her and spelled her name Nun Gimel Ayin instead of Nun Gimel Hay. This changed the meaning from “bright light” to “plague.”

“And my marriage was a plague,” she added, “until I was able to divorce him.” She spoke of it so cheerfully that it must have happened many years before.

Oneg told me she felt she must have been meant to come over and sit with me and hear me tell her something. We speculated it was the part about the afterlife.

“I had experiences, too,” she told me after I told her about my mother’s predictive dreams and some of my signs. “But my mother would have called me crazy if I’d told her any of them. We didn’t have much money but she would have spent it dragging me to psychiatrists to prove I was crazy!”

“One time,” Oneg began, “when I was seventeen, I went to visit a girl in Williamsburg. She was a friend from high school. I had never been to her house before. When I got off the train, I looked up and down the street where she lived over and over but I could not find the number of her house.”

“Finally I knocked on the door of a brownstone, to ask directions. The people were European immigrants and they didn’t speak English, but the man of the house indicated that he could take me to a man who did speak English. He led me up a dark staircase – it was so dark! They must have had a two watt lightbulb!”

“As we went up I could see into a room at the landing, which was lit up. There was an ark with a Torah in there so I knew they prayed in that room. As I stood on those stairs I saw a boy in the European style of dress, the long coat and so on, coming up the stairs. He didn’t seem to be floating but he seemed to be walking normally. But his whole face was lit up, as if he were a lightbulb.”

“He didn’t speak to me but he passed me, went onto the landing and rounded the corner to go up to the next landing. Then, the man who spoke English came out, and he told me he didn’t know the family I was looking for. I went back outside and crossed the street, and there, on a doorway below street level that I’d overlooked the first time, was the number of my friend’s house. So I knew I was meant to go inside that house and see that boy.”

“He was filled with a bright light and that matches your birth name,” I pointed out to her. She nodded but I couldn’t tell whether that thought had occurred to her before. She began talking about meridians again, and about her son who lived in Israel. She asked whether going to Israel was a good idea for her and of course, I had no clue. So she held out her arm and asked me to push down on it. I pushed down hard but could not budge her arm.

“That means it’s a good idea for me to go,” she said, pleased. She told me about her son’s life in Israel, that he was married to a Burmese Jewish girl and the prejudices she faced, being considered a domestic worker by the Westernized Jews who made up most of the Israeli population. Then she decided to test whether a food I was eating (my onion rings) was good for me. I could have told her the answer to that!

She had me hold out my arm and she pressed down lightly and I couldn’t resist. She said she was barely touching me and it meant I was “homolateral” instead of “heterolateral.” I should go home and do exercises, she told me, to become “heterolateral.” Oneg stood up and did her “exercises” right there in Burger King, marching up and down and swinging the opposite arm from the knee she was lifting. She looked peppy and delighted with herself, and also, I have to say it, loopy.

But even if she was loopy, she livened my afternoon. She’d come to my neighborhood by mistake that day, thinking it was a Wednesday instead of Tuesday. “So I was meant to come into Burger King and meet you,” she told me.

I’ll buy that. I don’t believe in accidents either. We traded emails, but we haven’t gotten in touch. I may never see Oneg again but she made an impression on me that lingers long after we said goodbye. I think she should have kept her name, Noga, because whatever else she is all about, she does indeed radiate a bright and cheery light.

A Perfect Writing Day

On a perfect writing day, I'd wake up around 9 AM, feeling fully rested and refreshed. I would remember all my dreams. They would be intricate, with plots and twists and turns of fate. Perhaps I would awaken from a dream of my blond guardian angel, who has been with me since I was fourteen. The beautiful colors and scenes in my dreams would inspire me.

I'd power up the computer, turn on word, and away I'd go. My fingers would fly over the keys. Maybe I'd write poetry or an essay. A short story would appear fullblown and pop onto the screen, almost without my fingers having to intervene.

After writing for hours I would shock myself by looking at the clock and seeing how much time had passed. I would stagger away from the computer, a little disoriented, and find myself a delicious lunch of cheese, crackers and fruit. I'd make myself feel like I was at a party. Then I'd bring a glass of diet soda back to the computer and jump back in.

When I stopped at dinnertime, I'd have a first draft of a story or article that I'd know was sure to be a hit.

Job Interview

You could call her passionate; you could call her a motormouth. I didn't know what to make of this woman, and after interviewing with her for an hour, I still didn't know what to make of her. She was interviewing me for a part time job but you'd never have known it.

Instead, she talked on and on about the organization; about all that needed to be done. She told me about the Board members and all her contacts. It seems she's friends with anyone who is anyone in the known universe (New York City being the known universe, that is).

Was she bragging or just telling me her story? I couldn't tell. Every so often I tried to wedge a word in with a shoehorn. I asked her, almost desperately, wasn't there something else she needed to know about me? "Oh, yes," she replied, as if pulling a question out of a ready-made jarful of Things to Ask at an Interview. "Why should I hire you? What's do you bring to the table that's better than the others?"

I countered with questions about the organization, the board, the future plans. In between, I studied her. She must be in her mid-fifties, with hair dyed a stark black, matching her little black dress. I thought little black dresses were evening wear but I see they have somehow made it into the boardroom. She's smart, she's sophisticated, she's out of my league. I don't think I'll fit in with her crowd, and that may very likely blow me out of the water.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she wants someone who is more down to earth. Maybe she is looking for someone who can tone down her personality a bit. She's strong, she's forceful, she knows how to be a catalyst for change. Those are good things, but talking to her was like coming up against a steamroller. I learned much more about her than she could possibly have learned about me. Was that good or bad? Only time will tell.

Savage Hope

I just finished reading "Savage Hope" by Cassie Edwards. Generally I enjoy her series. But there are some things that trouble me. First, the men depicted on the covers and even in the photograph on the inner cover, are not Native Americans. They are very clearly white men given copper skin and straight black hair, but their features are in no way Asiatic the way American Indians really look.

Given that Ms. Edwards has some Native American ancestry I'm surprised she lets this kind of thing go on. It's insulting really. The whole point of these books is overcoming prejudice and two races coming together in love and harmony. So why make them look like they are really the same race and there are really no characteristic differences?

The book itself kept me reading but it was a bit disappointing. The heroine was too sweet and the hero was too perfect also. They had one disagreement and that was all. The whole conflict was based on outsiders: a villain who wanted the girl for himself and was willing to do anything, even murder, to get her, and society's prejudice against interracial marriage.

So this one doesn't get four stars. But in general I enjoy her work and I certainly will go back for more. Just a little more conflict between the main characters, please. I like a Hollywood romance where they fight until they fall in love.

Maybe the next romance will be more like that.

Hospital

I thought I was all packed for the hospital but now I have learned there are more things I should have taken along. I brought the toothbrush but forgot the toothpaste. And in fact I never took the toothbrush out of the bag. I brought two books and finished one of them, never opened the second. Last time, with the same amount of time spent there, I got through two novels instead of one.

This time it was different. Harder. They made me wait all day for the surgery. We got there at 11 AM and I was supposed to be called at two. Instead they kept calling me "Mrs. Rosenzweig." I kept saying, "I am not Rosenzweig. I'm Leibowitz," but the next person would come over and call me Mrs. Rosenzweig again. I began to fear they would give me Mrs. Rosenzweig's surgery, whatever that was supposed to be.

When they finally called me it was still "hurry up and wait." The anesthesiologist had to talke to me, the nurse had to talk to me, the surgeon had to talk to me. They all asked me the same questions over and over. Why don't they just check each other's notes? Hospital files must be so stuffed with duplicative paper.

Finally they got me into this cold, blue operating room with electronic gadgets everywhere. They put me on the table and put those sleeves on my legs so I wouldn't get a blood clot. Why would I get a blood clot from lying down for a few hours, when we sleep every night and don't get blood clots? I have to wonder. I asked the anesthesiologist to say a prayer for me and to say positive things. He agreed and then he asked if he was the only one to get this honor. I said, no, everyone could do the same.

He told me soon I would feel sleepy but I went out so quickly I never felt it coming on. Too bad, I kind of like that feeling just before the wave of unconsciousness hits. It seemed very quick and I woke up in the recovery room. Bruce was there and the team of doctors came in and said everything went fine and the growth would have to be biopsied but it was benign.

I knew it had to be but I had worried. The surgeon told me that if they found cancer they would have to open me up the old fashioned way and intubate me. So I knew that if I woke up in the recovery room and found a tube still in me that I would know I had cancer. I dreaded waking up to find that. But I didn't. Bruce wanted to stay until I got a room but I told him to go home and be with Jason.

The night nurse was friendly and we talked about our sons. She had four kids: I don't even know how people do that and maintain a semblance of sanity. But the boys all seemed to have similar issues with reading and writing to my son, so we had a lot to talk about. Also I must have had plenty of morphine in my system so I was feeling fine. You feel best right after surgery. It's later that the pain kicks in.

They found me a room after two thirty in the morning and I got less than three hours sleep before nurses came in and started waking me up to take blood pressure, sticking me to get my sugar, etc. At first they used a huge cuff on my arm and got a low blood pressure reading twice in a row. Then they switched to a smaller cuff and got normal readings. But the damage was done and because of the two low readings the doctor team decided I had to have an upper GI series.

I didn't argue though perhaps I should have. It was so obvious that it was a "cover your ass" test but I went along with it. After 42 hours of not eating and drinking even the foul swill they make you drink when they do the GI series actually tasted good at first. However it lost its appeal by the time they gave me a second bottle. Of course there was no leak and I knew it and they knew it. I would love to see the bill that comes through now on account of that.

So this was Wednesday morning. The team of doctors came in, and I learned that the growth had been "ectopic pancreas," a little splitoff of pancreatic tissue that ended up in my stomach. It dated back to when I was a fetus. All along, except when the cancer paranoia clouded my brain, I knew deep down that this thing was harmless and it had been there all my life. This is the down side of all those great tests that look inside you. They find things that are harmless but can't be identified, and they generate worry and wind up causing unnecessary procedures.

I was told I was cleared to go home but I felt weak and tired and not ready for that. It was a good thing. Jason and Bruce visited and at dinner (soup and jello) I had terrible gas pains. Finally when they started coming through instead of just passing gas I developed a nasty case of diarrhea that got worse and worse. To my horror they would not give me medication for it nor would they give me even a disposable diaper so I would not keep soiling and messing the bed, the floor and everywhere else. It was repulsive. I don't know when I have felt so ugly.

Plus, the nurses said they wanted me to produce a stool sample so it could be checked for infection. I couldn't seem to go in the right place! Either it was on the bed or on the floor but never in the toilet into the correct container. I was so revolted by my own body by this time. It continued into Thursday morning. By then I was running 101 degrees of fever and a nurse told me they wouldn't clear me to go home if it did not come down. So I kept playing with the breath machine and walking around the halls (crapping everywhere) until it came down to around 100 degrees.

A nurse told me I was cleared for discharge, and I signed the paper and got ready to go home. Bruce went and got me immodium but I still had two more accidents on the way out of the place. Fortunately I had the sense to ask him to bring the grungiest, most ripped up pants he could find in my closet so I could simply throw them away after I had an accident in them. And that is exactly what I did. I had an accident in the lobby, and felt so humiliated thinking everyone saw liquid gushing out of my ass and all over my pants. But we just got in a taxi and as soon as I got home I chowed down some more immodium and threw away the revolting pants.

The diarrhea cleared up by the next day thanks to immodium and the brat diet (bananas, rice, applesauce and toast. Well, skip the toast, I was only allowed to have soft foods). Soon that hospital stay, like the others, will only be a miserable memory. That will happen when the bruises on my arms where they stuck the IV's fade, the stitches dissolve into my body, and the hair on my belly that they shaved grows back and stops itching like a case of poison ivy.

Writing Class

I signed up to take a writing class today and we are supposed to take a few minutes every single day to write. As if I don't. I used to do more but there are too many secrets and too much I don't want found. So now it has to be relegated to certain areas of my life.

We're supposed to put down thoughts and ideas we'd like to write about. So I can do that. I made a huge list of possible magazine articles. The trouble is that I have not followed through on any of it. At least, not much. I did get the book review published and now I will have to hunt down my money in order to get myself paid.

I haven't had an idea for a story much lately. I tend to write erotic stories and that's not so suitable for this class. Maybe I will just hold off on that. For the most part, fiction doesn't interest me anymore. Only the erotic romance novels and some fantasy hold an attraction. But straight literary novels? No. I find them dull.

Of course, how can I say that when I haven't read one in years?

Maybe tomorrow I will write about my surgery and the hospital stay. That's more interesting than trying to state what my writing ideas are.

Introducing Me

This is my very first blog ever so I'll introduce myself. I'm a 50 year old female, married with one teenage son. I've been a stay at home Mom since he was born but now, I am working part time as a fundraiser.

I've kept a journal for years and would like to go on doing so but I am concerned that they be found if anything ever were to happen to me. So I'd rather write in cyberspace and not worry about physical books being found. After all, this way, no one would know where to look. So maybe here I can indulge my need to keep a record of my life without worrying that a cross word will hurt someone's feelings in the distant future.

My passions are learning, reading, and writing. I like to research topics that interest me. I've been a student of dreams for many years and I have a keen interest in the afterlife and other psychic phenomena.

I'll say more later, but for now I am excited to have my very own blog!