Her torch aloft in an azure sky,
A lovely lady standing by
She lights the darkness for those who grope
An immortal symbol of freedom and hope.
The Great White Way
A lovely sight do we behold
when Times Square lights shine white and gold
New Yorkers and tourists out to have fun
For theaters and
Night clubs the day has begun.
--May 1955
Ninth grade
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Third Grade Poem: The Cave Shelter
The Cave Shelter
The early cave, home of the brave
They had less utensils, had not heard of pencils,
Early days and early ways,
Prove to us that life was a fuss.
They had a flint knife
Led a hunting and fishing life,
They were afraid of the Dinosaur
But hunted a wild boar
These animals dont exist anymore
And we are glad we don't hear them roar.
--Oct.6,1949
Third grade
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Ted Kraver Suggests an Organization for This
My friend Ted, who is, of course, an engineer, has organized his own rich life into decades, and by doing that has managed to get it into the 4900 character limit imposed by his alma mater, MIT. Since I was a liberal arts student at Cornell, Columbia, and Syracuse, always majoring in literature, it has never occurred to be to organize my life in...decades. It's linear, but it works. Let's see if I have the patience to do this; I usually burn out pretty quickly at left brain tasks.
1940'a - Washington Heights, opposite Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan. Lived upstairs from Carol and Barbara Lindeman, whose mother died of breast cancer and whose father had a frightening German accent. I used to play in the park after school, and I do remember taking my underpants off with Herbert Satzman and Robert Rudko in a cave in the park so we could compare accoutrements. We were probably in third grade, and although I doubt that this was traumatic, since we were all friends, I do still remember it, so it wasn't trivial.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and I shared a bedroom with my brother Brad, who was over three year younger, and whom I found to be a major annoyance. Among other things, his life was full of vaseline and Desitin (he must have had diaper rash), and when I used to try to diaper my stuffed rabbit like my mother diapered Brad, things got really ugly. I ended up throwing that rabbit into the Hudson River one Sunday in disgust. I think that might have marked the end of my childhood. Or of my desire to be a mother.
New York in the 40s was very safe in my memory. I walked around the corner to our elementary school, PS 152 with all the other kids in the neighborhood. Although my mom walked me the first day, after that I was on my own. I also was allowed to cross the street and play in the park at a very early age, even though the street was Broadway. The subway was at the end of the block, and at somewhere before the age of ten, when we moved to Riverdale, I got on the subway with my girlfriends Margo, Joann, Melissa and Joy and we went down to Wollman Memorial Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. We skated, bought french fries (they were awesome--real potatoes) and went home again on the subway.
Under our window, which looked out on Broadway, a man with a horse cart often called out "I cash clothes." I think you gave him your old clothes and traded for cash, but our family never did that.
Here's what it is like to grow up in New York City during and after World War II. Our world was our neighborhood. We had a hair salon, a bar, and a soda fountain on the first floor of our building, and we used those services. The gas station was on the corner. Jewish Memorial Hospital, where I was born, was on the other corner, and our apartment building was between them. Fort Tryon Park was across the street, In 1944 there was a big blizzard, and we hung out at home for days, playing in the mounds of snow outside.
Around the corner was the synagogue. It was Orthodox, and it's probably why I am not a Jew today. My father belonged to it and attended in a casual way, but my parents were upwardly mobile (my dad was an entertainment lawyer) and we weren't really attached to it. The neighborhood was full of German-Jewish immigrants who were profoundly touched by the War and the Holocaust, but we didn't make a big deal of them. Apparently Henry Kissinger also grew up in Washington Heights, my neighborhood, but I was slightly north in Inwood. Inwood struck me as a little less ethnic, although in my class the overwhelming majority of kids were Jewish. Here's what I remember: we had one black kid, Leigh Edwards, who travelled from Harlem to our school for our gifted classes. And we had one Puerto Rican kid, Camillo Marquez. I have warm memories of both of them.
Also around the corner was the butcher, the bakery with its wonderful charlotte russe, and the fruit store.
Although I don't remember my mother shopping (maybe she sent Dilcy) she must have bought everything separately and walked home with it.
I took tap dancing lessons, ballet (for a very short time), and art lessons. Miss Irwin, a piano teacher, came to our house once a week, but I hated the piano lessons. I was a tomboy, and I wanted to play in the park with Herbert, Robert, Richard Kintzler (I had a crush on him) and Peter Lubrecht, whom I still know. If I knew they were in the park, I'd slide past Miss Irwin, off the piano bench, before the end of my lesson to run and join them. I actually knocked her over one week, and my mother had to apologize for me.
I wasn't easy for my mother, but my dad was my ally. He knew I was different, he believed in being different, and he encouraged my outlier behavior. When my mother complained that she couldn't get me to learn how to do dishes, my father said "she will never have to do dishes." He let me read at the dinner table and, I now realize, undermined my mother's discipline.
My mother was hopeless. Although she wanted to have children, she nearly died having me (long labor) according to her, and I don't think she ever wanted me after she had me. I was a lot of work. Very early on I knew I was smarter than she was and could split my parents. She used to come after my brother and me brandishing a coat hanger, but she was chicken to use it on us and we always knew it.
However, I do remember the phrase "wait until your father comes home," and I remember my father chasing me around the twin beds in our rooms trying to pretend to spank me. He actually hit me pretty hard on my thigh, by mistake, and it turned red. I started to cry, and he was as horrified as I was.
But my mother wasn't the biggest figure in my life as a child: Dilcy was. Dilcy was our maid, who either lived with us or came in by the day (she had a child of her own) and took care of us when my mother and dad were gone, which was often. During this time, my dad managed Pearl Bailey, Billy Daniels, Red Norvo, and Lionel Hampton. He was an attorney who had an office on Fifth Avenue, although I don't remember him spending a great deal of time there when I was little. Mostly he would go out with my mother to the jazz joints on 52nd Street or the Village at night, they'd get in at 3 or 4 AM when the clubs closed, and Dilcy would get me and Brad off to school.
My dad never went to work in the morning like other fathers. Instead, he went to work in the early afternoon, and stayed out half the night. He and my mother drank Manhattans in Toot's Shors, hung out at Lindy's and Sardi's and the Village Vanguard, Copacabana and Blue Angel. My dad was a friend of Barbara Walters' father. We weren't a part of his life, and my mother told us they had decided to put each other first, as we would grow up and go away and they would then be left with each other. I felt very rejected by this intepretation of their marriage, and that must have been how I became such a high achiever -- just trying to get a little attention from my parents.
He also never came to school, and never played games. Later I learned that he couldn't play games because he had rheumatic fever as a young man, and it left him with a weak heart. He wasn't supposed to exercise. And he went to the cardiologist, who was the general practitioner, very often to have cardiograms. In retrospect, in those days when you paid out of pocket for care, my father was followed much more closely than any patient is followed now. I went to the doctor's office with him on Saturday.
The doctor, Dave Markman (inventor of the flexible sigmoidoscope) was in the Bronx, and near my dad's mother, whom we would also visit. She didn't speak English, her house was dark and smelly, and I couldn't relate to her at all. When my dad spoke to her on the phone, it was in Yiddish, and although I tried to understand, I really didn't very much. My parents depended on this; they spoke Yiddish when they didn't want us to know what they were saying. It pissed me off.
That's where I met Michael Markman, who was the son of my dad's doctor. Dr. Dave had his office in the same building his family lived in. That was quite common in the era before large health care systems; we went to a dentist whose office was in the lobby of the building we lived in. Dr. Dave's kids were often in the office on Saturdays when they were young. His wife, Betty, ran the office. I played with Michael and Judy until the Markmans moved to Westchester. Then I lost touch with Michael until Tony Perkins brought us back together at AlwaysOn during the dot com era. By that time, Michael had been a comedian, a national brand manager for Apple, a rabbinical student, a TV writer and a host of very interesting things I wish I had known about. My mother thought he was a nerd, so once he moved to Yonkers she didn't encourage a friendship, although we both later went to Bronx High School of Science. If anything typified why my mother and I had nothing in common, it was her pre-judgment of people like Michael. She tried to mainstream me, but I was a geek.
The forties were both glamorous and horrible for my parents. My father had to get up in the middle of the night and bail out Billy Daniels when he got in a knife fight in a Harlem after-hours club, and help his clients get the rights to their own music from the big music publishing companies that cheated them. He helped integrate Las Vegas during this time; he made it possible for the black entertainers to live in the places they entertained in. He became very well-known, and in retrospect I think he also developed organize crime connections. At that time, organized crime and entertainment weren't that far apart.
My parents also traveled a lot to Las Vegas and Hollywood. In those days, you went by train, and my parents were often gone for a month, leaving me with Dilcy and some aunts and uncles on my mother's side. They stayed in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, hung out in Ciro's, and met all the stars. How did I know this? They brought home the matchbooks and the glasses. I hated it so much when they went away that I developed insomnia. I couldn't sleep and had what I now know were anxiety attacks. No one cared, except maybe Dilcy. When my parents came home and I told them I couldn't fall asleep, my father used to make me walk back and forth in the living room. "If you can't sleep, walk!" he'd say. I soon went back to bed, if only to read in peace.
My mother's father lived in our living room for a few months before he died, as did my mother's Uncle Willie. Nobody spoke English, and my mother kept me away from them. But she did take care of them; there were no nursing homes. My mother's mother had died of a brain tumor when she was 16, and my grandfather remarried someone my mom never accepted or respected, so we were pretty estranged from our relatives. And my mother didn't like the relatives on my father's side either; she thought they were all ne'er do wells and resented the fact that my dad lent (gave) them money to go into businesses over the years that repeatedly failed. One of my father's brothers especially was a failed entrepreneur -- he owned a string of bars. It mystified my mother that anyone could make a bar fail.
There was a fair amount of tension in my home over responsibilities for less successful relatives. While my parents were climbing, climbing in New York society, their own immigrant parents were left behind. I am amazed now at the lack of relationship between the first generation and second generation Jewish immigrants of the time, although I guess it's the same as what's happening now with the Latinos. The barrier seemed to me to be language -- and that has given me a predilection for favoring programs that make immigrants learn English. If they don't, their own children sooner or later reject them.
1940'a - Washington Heights, opposite Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan. Lived upstairs from Carol and Barbara Lindeman, whose mother died of breast cancer and whose father had a frightening German accent. I used to play in the park after school, and I do remember taking my underpants off with Herbert Satzman and Robert Rudko in a cave in the park so we could compare accoutrements. We were probably in third grade, and although I doubt that this was traumatic, since we were all friends, I do still remember it, so it wasn't trivial.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and I shared a bedroom with my brother Brad, who was over three year younger, and whom I found to be a major annoyance. Among other things, his life was full of vaseline and Desitin (he must have had diaper rash), and when I used to try to diaper my stuffed rabbit like my mother diapered Brad, things got really ugly. I ended up throwing that rabbit into the Hudson River one Sunday in disgust. I think that might have marked the end of my childhood. Or of my desire to be a mother.
New York in the 40s was very safe in my memory. I walked around the corner to our elementary school, PS 152 with all the other kids in the neighborhood. Although my mom walked me the first day, after that I was on my own. I also was allowed to cross the street and play in the park at a very early age, even though the street was Broadway. The subway was at the end of the block, and at somewhere before the age of ten, when we moved to Riverdale, I got on the subway with my girlfriends Margo, Joann, Melissa and Joy and we went down to Wollman Memorial Ice Skating Rink in Central Park. We skated, bought french fries (they were awesome--real potatoes) and went home again on the subway.
Under our window, which looked out on Broadway, a man with a horse cart often called out "I cash clothes." I think you gave him your old clothes and traded for cash, but our family never did that.
Here's what it is like to grow up in New York City during and after World War II. Our world was our neighborhood. We had a hair salon, a bar, and a soda fountain on the first floor of our building, and we used those services. The gas station was on the corner. Jewish Memorial Hospital, where I was born, was on the other corner, and our apartment building was between them. Fort Tryon Park was across the street, In 1944 there was a big blizzard, and we hung out at home for days, playing in the mounds of snow outside.
Around the corner was the synagogue. It was Orthodox, and it's probably why I am not a Jew today. My father belonged to it and attended in a casual way, but my parents were upwardly mobile (my dad was an entertainment lawyer) and we weren't really attached to it. The neighborhood was full of German-Jewish immigrants who were profoundly touched by the War and the Holocaust, but we didn't make a big deal of them. Apparently Henry Kissinger also grew up in Washington Heights, my neighborhood, but I was slightly north in Inwood. Inwood struck me as a little less ethnic, although in my class the overwhelming majority of kids were Jewish. Here's what I remember: we had one black kid, Leigh Edwards, who travelled from Harlem to our school for our gifted classes. And we had one Puerto Rican kid, Camillo Marquez. I have warm memories of both of them.
Also around the corner was the butcher, the bakery with its wonderful charlotte russe, and the fruit store.
Although I don't remember my mother shopping (maybe she sent Dilcy) she must have bought everything separately and walked home with it.
I took tap dancing lessons, ballet (for a very short time), and art lessons. Miss Irwin, a piano teacher, came to our house once a week, but I hated the piano lessons. I was a tomboy, and I wanted to play in the park with Herbert, Robert, Richard Kintzler (I had a crush on him) and Peter Lubrecht, whom I still know. If I knew they were in the park, I'd slide past Miss Irwin, off the piano bench, before the end of my lesson to run and join them. I actually knocked her over one week, and my mother had to apologize for me.
I wasn't easy for my mother, but my dad was my ally. He knew I was different, he believed in being different, and he encouraged my outlier behavior. When my mother complained that she couldn't get me to learn how to do dishes, my father said "she will never have to do dishes." He let me read at the dinner table and, I now realize, undermined my mother's discipline.
My mother was hopeless. Although she wanted to have children, she nearly died having me (long labor) according to her, and I don't think she ever wanted me after she had me. I was a lot of work. Very early on I knew I was smarter than she was and could split my parents. She used to come after my brother and me brandishing a coat hanger, but she was chicken to use it on us and we always knew it.
However, I do remember the phrase "wait until your father comes home," and I remember my father chasing me around the twin beds in our rooms trying to pretend to spank me. He actually hit me pretty hard on my thigh, by mistake, and it turned red. I started to cry, and he was as horrified as I was.
But my mother wasn't the biggest figure in my life as a child: Dilcy was. Dilcy was our maid, who either lived with us or came in by the day (she had a child of her own) and took care of us when my mother and dad were gone, which was often. During this time, my dad managed Pearl Bailey, Billy Daniels, Red Norvo, and Lionel Hampton. He was an attorney who had an office on Fifth Avenue, although I don't remember him spending a great deal of time there when I was little. Mostly he would go out with my mother to the jazz joints on 52nd Street or the Village at night, they'd get in at 3 or 4 AM when the clubs closed, and Dilcy would get me and Brad off to school.
My dad never went to work in the morning like other fathers. Instead, he went to work in the early afternoon, and stayed out half the night. He and my mother drank Manhattans in Toot's Shors, hung out at Lindy's and Sardi's and the Village Vanguard, Copacabana and Blue Angel. My dad was a friend of Barbara Walters' father. We weren't a part of his life, and my mother told us they had decided to put each other first, as we would grow up and go away and they would then be left with each other. I felt very rejected by this intepretation of their marriage, and that must have been how I became such a high achiever -- just trying to get a little attention from my parents.
He also never came to school, and never played games. Later I learned that he couldn't play games because he had rheumatic fever as a young man, and it left him with a weak heart. He wasn't supposed to exercise. And he went to the cardiologist, who was the general practitioner, very often to have cardiograms. In retrospect, in those days when you paid out of pocket for care, my father was followed much more closely than any patient is followed now. I went to the doctor's office with him on Saturday.
The doctor, Dave Markman (inventor of the flexible sigmoidoscope) was in the Bronx, and near my dad's mother, whom we would also visit. She didn't speak English, her house was dark and smelly, and I couldn't relate to her at all. When my dad spoke to her on the phone, it was in Yiddish, and although I tried to understand, I really didn't very much. My parents depended on this; they spoke Yiddish when they didn't want us to know what they were saying. It pissed me off.
That's where I met Michael Markman, who was the son of my dad's doctor. Dr. Dave had his office in the same building his family lived in. That was quite common in the era before large health care systems; we went to a dentist whose office was in the lobby of the building we lived in. Dr. Dave's kids were often in the office on Saturdays when they were young. His wife, Betty, ran the office. I played with Michael and Judy until the Markmans moved to Westchester. Then I lost touch with Michael until Tony Perkins brought us back together at AlwaysOn during the dot com era. By that time, Michael had been a comedian, a national brand manager for Apple, a rabbinical student, a TV writer and a host of very interesting things I wish I had known about. My mother thought he was a nerd, so once he moved to Yonkers she didn't encourage a friendship, although we both later went to Bronx High School of Science. If anything typified why my mother and I had nothing in common, it was her pre-judgment of people like Michael. She tried to mainstream me, but I was a geek.
The forties were both glamorous and horrible for my parents. My father had to get up in the middle of the night and bail out Billy Daniels when he got in a knife fight in a Harlem after-hours club, and help his clients get the rights to their own music from the big music publishing companies that cheated them. He helped integrate Las Vegas during this time; he made it possible for the black entertainers to live in the places they entertained in. He became very well-known, and in retrospect I think he also developed organize crime connections. At that time, organized crime and entertainment weren't that far apart.
My parents also traveled a lot to Las Vegas and Hollywood. In those days, you went by train, and my parents were often gone for a month, leaving me with Dilcy and some aunts and uncles on my mother's side. They stayed in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, hung out in Ciro's, and met all the stars. How did I know this? They brought home the matchbooks and the glasses. I hated it so much when they went away that I developed insomnia. I couldn't sleep and had what I now know were anxiety attacks. No one cared, except maybe Dilcy. When my parents came home and I told them I couldn't fall asleep, my father used to make me walk back and forth in the living room. "If you can't sleep, walk!" he'd say. I soon went back to bed, if only to read in peace.
My mother's father lived in our living room for a few months before he died, as did my mother's Uncle Willie. Nobody spoke English, and my mother kept me away from them. But she did take care of them; there were no nursing homes. My mother's mother had died of a brain tumor when she was 16, and my grandfather remarried someone my mom never accepted or respected, so we were pretty estranged from our relatives. And my mother didn't like the relatives on my father's side either; she thought they were all ne'er do wells and resented the fact that my dad lent (gave) them money to go into businesses over the years that repeatedly failed. One of my father's brothers especially was a failed entrepreneur -- he owned a string of bars. It mystified my mother that anyone could make a bar fail.
There was a fair amount of tension in my home over responsibilities for less successful relatives. While my parents were climbing, climbing in New York society, their own immigrant parents were left behind. I am amazed now at the lack of relationship between the first generation and second generation Jewish immigrants of the time, although I guess it's the same as what's happening now with the Latinos. The barrier seemed to me to be language -- and that has given me a predilection for favoring programs that make immigrants learn English. If they don't, their own children sooner or later reject them.
Monday, September 21, 2009
My Personal Mad Men
Because I was a young adult in the work force in the 60's — in fact I was working at J. Walter Thompson in New York City in 1963, my first year out of grad school and the year in which this season of the show occurs, I am fascinated by Mad Men. My early career experience bears an almost preposterous relationship to this show, from me being the woman with two Ivy League degrees typing ad copy, to my watching the men's lunchtime drinking bouts, to being part of the disconnect between the generations, amd observing the blindness of powerful Americans to their own culture.
I knew something was happening when John F. Kennedy was elected president. I also knew the world nearly ended during the Cuban missile crisis. And I knew the Civil Rights movement was coming because one of my college classmates, Mickey Schwerner, had already been active in the movement. He would be killed the following year in Mississippi. Cornell and Columbia, the two schools I had already attended (the third would come after my flirtation with advertising, which I had always thought would be my career), were liberal activist hot beds. As always, I was more considered and tentative than most of my contemporaries, who jumped in with both feet while I had one foot in revolution and the other on Madison Avenue.
There I sat, at the black Remington typewriter, with the carbon paper and the onion skin for copies (JWT didn't have a Xerox yet when I was there), pounding out copies, consuming vats of White-Out to correct my errors on the original, and using an eraser on the copies. When I didn't have stuff to type, I had literally nothing to do, and was not really encouraged to leave my desk and walk around, so I polished my fingernails under the desk and read books.
After about six months of that, I had an "Are you kidding me?" moment and quit. Fortunately, I had taken the LSATS and the GMAT and scored well, and could walk right into a Ph.D program. Changing agencies, as Peggy is thinking about doing, from Sterling Cooper, the WASP agency to Grey, the Jewish agency, wouldn't have done it for me. And by the way, I quit about two months after Kennedy's assassination. A general revisiting of priorities found advertising pretty low on the list of important considerations. So I left it for academe.
Don's about ten years older than I would have been in 1963, and I would have worshipped him. In fact, I would have sought him out. And he would have ignored me because I wasn't quite conventionally pretty enough, but he would have understood that I had talent.
And done nothing about it. I made $80 a week at JWT. I think Peggy Olson already makes more than that.
I knew something was happening when John F. Kennedy was elected president. I also knew the world nearly ended during the Cuban missile crisis. And I knew the Civil Rights movement was coming because one of my college classmates, Mickey Schwerner, had already been active in the movement. He would be killed the following year in Mississippi. Cornell and Columbia, the two schools I had already attended (the third would come after my flirtation with advertising, which I had always thought would be my career), were liberal activist hot beds. As always, I was more considered and tentative than most of my contemporaries, who jumped in with both feet while I had one foot in revolution and the other on Madison Avenue.
There I sat, at the black Remington typewriter, with the carbon paper and the onion skin for copies (JWT didn't have a Xerox yet when I was there), pounding out copies, consuming vats of White-Out to correct my errors on the original, and using an eraser on the copies. When I didn't have stuff to type, I had literally nothing to do, and was not really encouraged to leave my desk and walk around, so I polished my fingernails under the desk and read books.
After about six months of that, I had an "Are you kidding me?" moment and quit. Fortunately, I had taken the LSATS and the GMAT and scored well, and could walk right into a Ph.D program. Changing agencies, as Peggy is thinking about doing, from Sterling Cooper, the WASP agency to Grey, the Jewish agency, wouldn't have done it for me. And by the way, I quit about two months after Kennedy's assassination. A general revisiting of priorities found advertising pretty low on the list of important considerations. So I left it for academe.
Don's about ten years older than I would have been in 1963, and I would have worshipped him. In fact, I would have sought him out. And he would have ignored me because I wasn't quite conventionally pretty enough, but he would have understood that I had talent.
And done nothing about it. I made $80 a week at JWT. I think Peggy Olson already makes more than that.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
There's No Such Thing as an Unwanted Child
I moved to Arizona in August 1968. Some time early in 1970, I found myself "expecting." Unfortunately, I hadn't planned to be a mother, so you might say I found myself "unexpecting." I confessed this to my husband and to the father of the child (two different people), and did the right thing. I offered to have an abortion.
The father of the child begged me not to do this. And my husband, a Catholic, agreed. It was nothing short of amazing. (Of course it was the aftermath of the 60s.) The husband agreed to divorce me and give me over to the lover. I still don't know how this happened, except that I have exceptional taste in men.
When the child's father insisted, I agreed to bear the child (the first he would have that was his own flesh and blood, because his two older children were adopted) under some stringent conditions for the time: he would have to assume half the responsibility for its upbringing, because I was going to continue my career path. After all, I wasn't even out of my 20s, I had a Ph.D., and I was destined for academic stardom:-)
Several months later, newly divorced ( I think I signed the papers in the hospital), I delivered by natural childbirth a beautiful little girl.
I couldn't believe I had accomplished this feat. I marveled at the little feet and fingers, and changed my entire point of view. I loved this child. She transformed my life. I knew it almost immediately, and I nursed her for 18 months, almost until her little sister was born. (Yes, I knew once I had one child that I should have the second).
Fast forward many years. She's a lawyer. I'm an entrepreneur. I have vicious risk tolerance, which is why I was able to reverse direction and have her. She has very little, because she's been trained as a lawyer. Her child was planned. And I mean planned. She has been a model daughter in every way, and now she is a wife with a model family, insofar as life makes that possible.
We are now in a horrible recession. A senior citizen, I have badly timed my down cycle. I've had several down cycles, but only one when I was over 65. This is it. I own a house in Half Moon Bay near her and near her sister. We all live within five or six miles of each other, but only one of us is "under water" in her house -- me. I tried to live in two places at once, and when the music stopped I found myself working in one state and living in another.
I couldn't re-finance my house this year, and I couldn't afford to keep it. Facing financial ruin (if the banks pull my credit they ruin my business), I consulted with my family.
And here comes my transformative child, otherwise known as my "unwanted" child. Somehow she finds the courage to persuade her husband to rent my house from me for the winter while I go back to Phoenix to work, thereby saving me from financial ruin. Not only that, but she packs up and moves into my house shortly after having her own child -- my 8-month-old blessed grandchild, so hard to come by and so really really wanted.
How do I deserve such a child? I will never get over my own good fortune. I made the right choice.I kept the baby. How lucky was that?
The father of the child begged me not to do this. And my husband, a Catholic, agreed. It was nothing short of amazing. (Of course it was the aftermath of the 60s.) The husband agreed to divorce me and give me over to the lover. I still don't know how this happened, except that I have exceptional taste in men.
When the child's father insisted, I agreed to bear the child (the first he would have that was his own flesh and blood, because his two older children were adopted) under some stringent conditions for the time: he would have to assume half the responsibility for its upbringing, because I was going to continue my career path. After all, I wasn't even out of my 20s, I had a Ph.D., and I was destined for academic stardom:-)
Several months later, newly divorced ( I think I signed the papers in the hospital), I delivered by natural childbirth a beautiful little girl.
I couldn't believe I had accomplished this feat. I marveled at the little feet and fingers, and changed my entire point of view. I loved this child. She transformed my life. I knew it almost immediately, and I nursed her for 18 months, almost until her little sister was born. (Yes, I knew once I had one child that I should have the second).
Fast forward many years. She's a lawyer. I'm an entrepreneur. I have vicious risk tolerance, which is why I was able to reverse direction and have her. She has very little, because she's been trained as a lawyer. Her child was planned. And I mean planned. She has been a model daughter in every way, and now she is a wife with a model family, insofar as life makes that possible.
We are now in a horrible recession. A senior citizen, I have badly timed my down cycle. I've had several down cycles, but only one when I was over 65. This is it. I own a house in Half Moon Bay near her and near her sister. We all live within five or six miles of each other, but only one of us is "under water" in her house -- me. I tried to live in two places at once, and when the music stopped I found myself working in one state and living in another.
I couldn't re-finance my house this year, and I couldn't afford to keep it. Facing financial ruin (if the banks pull my credit they ruin my business), I consulted with my family.
And here comes my transformative child, otherwise known as my "unwanted" child. Somehow she finds the courage to persuade her husband to rent my house from me for the winter while I go back to Phoenix to work, thereby saving me from financial ruin. Not only that, but she packs up and moves into my house shortly after having her own child -- my 8-month-old blessed grandchild, so hard to come by and so really really wanted.
How do I deserve such a child? I will never get over my own good fortune. I made the right choice.I kept the baby. How lucky was that?
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
One Affair
The past few years have brought a string of shame-faced confessions from political figures who were discovered cheating on their wives. One after the other, they trot up to the bank of microphones, with or without the poor woman, to say they are "sorry" and that they "take full responsibility." Liars and hypocrites all, they are usually political conservatives (with the exception of John Edwards) and devout Christians. Fortunately, their God is very forgiving. They'd be up sh*t creek if they had been born Jewish, the religion of the just, rather than the merciful God.
But I never feel a moment of moral superiority, because I can put myself in their shoes with incredible ease. In fact, I have been in their shoes.When I hear about a public figure having an affair, I always have the feeling that "there but for the grace of God go I." Back in the day, before cell phones and email, GPS and satellites, you could duck a way for a couple of hours and no one would know. Now, not so much. I feel sorry for them.
Indeed, in my early 30's, while working full time and raising two infants, I met a man I thought was the love of my life.
One problem: I was already living with the father of my children, who had just divorced his wife to make me an "honest woman." I had just borne his child, and then another. I had two step-children. And the "love of my life" guy had just gotten a divorce from his wife of twenty years and remarried a trophy wife. He wasn't going anywhere, either. Things were, shall we say, complicated.
But you know how it is over that second Martini at the end of a long day. Everybody starts to look pretty good. And I, at the age of 32, was already on my third marriage.
After the demise of marriage number one, the relationship I thought would be forever, I had a rather more modern outlook. It boiled down to, "follow your heart, but not into a joint bank account."
But I only say that in hindsight. At the time, it felt like falling in love...and falling in love...and falling in love. Each time, it was new and different.
This time my designated lover was the superintendent of the largest, fanciest, school district in town. He was a minor celebrity, later to be Commission of Education of another state. He was a wonderful man, smart and funny, generous and thoughtful. Of course he thought the same of me. We were drunk.
We had absolutely nothing in common except the man who introduced us, but that didn't matter. From the beginning, it was animal magnetism, on to which we grafted all the friendly concerns that make a relationship. "How's your daughter?" "Did you get to the day care before it closed?" His daughter was an irresponsible adult; my day care center closed at 6 PM. He was an older man. At that period of my life, I had a great line that I used for all the older men in my life who were beginning to doubt their youth: "I don't think a man is ever at his best until he's 45."
That line worked really well, until I myself reached that age, at which time it ceased to have relevance.
After declaring undying love to each other, we more pragmatically declared that we would never let ourselves to anything to hurt each other's families, and therefore we never would allow ourselves to be found out. That made wrestling in the back seat of a parked car outside a fern bar or stopping by the side of the road untenable, and we had to find another solution.
So, for two or three years, we shared an apartment in a part of town half way between his office and mine. We were nothing if not practical. We met for lunch, and for happy hour, and whenever we could get away. The relationship lasted a long time.
He only stood me up once. I got to the apartment, waited an hour, and he never appeared. Crushed, I went home. Several days later, I found out that his brother had died suddenly, and he had left town to go to the funeral. Naturally, he couldn't let me know. He would have had to call my home or my office, and risk interception at either place. And I couldn't call him; his secretary didn't even know he knew me.
How did it end? He changed jobs, and the stress of the new job made him much less interested in sex, and much less capable, too. We became friends, and gave up the unnecessary apartment. We stayed in touch for years.
He died a few years ago. Neither of our spouses ever found out.
But I never feel a moment of moral superiority, because I can put myself in their shoes with incredible ease. In fact, I have been in their shoes.When I hear about a public figure having an affair, I always have the feeling that "there but for the grace of God go I." Back in the day, before cell phones and email, GPS and satellites, you could duck a way for a couple of hours and no one would know. Now, not so much. I feel sorry for them.
Indeed, in my early 30's, while working full time and raising two infants, I met a man I thought was the love of my life.
One problem: I was already living with the father of my children, who had just divorced his wife to make me an "honest woman." I had just borne his child, and then another. I had two step-children. And the "love of my life" guy had just gotten a divorce from his wife of twenty years and remarried a trophy wife. He wasn't going anywhere, either. Things were, shall we say, complicated.
But you know how it is over that second Martini at the end of a long day. Everybody starts to look pretty good. And I, at the age of 32, was already on my third marriage.
After the demise of marriage number one, the relationship I thought would be forever, I had a rather more modern outlook. It boiled down to, "follow your heart, but not into a joint bank account."
But I only say that in hindsight. At the time, it felt like falling in love...and falling in love...and falling in love. Each time, it was new and different.
This time my designated lover was the superintendent of the largest, fanciest, school district in town. He was a minor celebrity, later to be Commission of Education of another state. He was a wonderful man, smart and funny, generous and thoughtful. Of course he thought the same of me. We were drunk.
We had absolutely nothing in common except the man who introduced us, but that didn't matter. From the beginning, it was animal magnetism, on to which we grafted all the friendly concerns that make a relationship. "How's your daughter?" "Did you get to the day care before it closed?" His daughter was an irresponsible adult; my day care center closed at 6 PM. He was an older man. At that period of my life, I had a great line that I used for all the older men in my life who were beginning to doubt their youth: "I don't think a man is ever at his best until he's 45."
That line worked really well, until I myself reached that age, at which time it ceased to have relevance.
After declaring undying love to each other, we more pragmatically declared that we would never let ourselves to anything to hurt each other's families, and therefore we never would allow ourselves to be found out. That made wrestling in the back seat of a parked car outside a fern bar or stopping by the side of the road untenable, and we had to find another solution.
So, for two or three years, we shared an apartment in a part of town half way between his office and mine. We were nothing if not practical. We met for lunch, and for happy hour, and whenever we could get away. The relationship lasted a long time.
He only stood me up once. I got to the apartment, waited an hour, and he never appeared. Crushed, I went home. Several days later, I found out that his brother had died suddenly, and he had left town to go to the funeral. Naturally, he couldn't let me know. He would have had to call my home or my office, and risk interception at either place. And I couldn't call him; his secretary didn't even know he knew me.
How did it end? He changed jobs, and the stress of the new job made him much less interested in sex, and much less capable, too. We became friends, and gave up the unnecessary apartment. We stayed in touch for years.
He died a few years ago. Neither of our spouses ever found out.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Twelve
When I was a young girl, my dad managed Pearl Bailey, the musical performer and movie actress. Although I said this with pride, I had no idea what it meant. He was her attorney, for sure, but he was also her personal manager, her mentor, her guide and her friend. He spent a great deal of time propelling her forward in her career, and even in telling her how to live. She later wrote a book in which she thanked him for his influence on her life. I remember her as a large part of my childhood, even after I left for college.
After she got really famous, Pearl married a white man, drummer Louis Bellson, in 1952. I remember that my father told them the marriage was fine with him (he was very socially liberal), but he told them not to have children, because he knew that mixed race children were ostracized even in the New York City of my childhood. Another client of his, Billy Daniels, a very light-skinned Afro-American who could "pass" for white, married a white woman. Billy and Martha Daniels had two children, both darker than either parent. My father used them as examples to Pearl and Louis, who put off childraising and opted for a large boxer dog, Mr. Rogers, instead.
The Daniels children, in the mean time, had to be sent off to school in Switzerland.
In 1954, Pearl Bailey starred in an ill-fated (154 performances) Broadway production called "House of Flowers," which was about two rival whorehouses in Trinidad. The music was by Harold Arlen, and the lyrics were by Truman Capote. It was produced by Arnold Saint Subber and directed by Peter Brook. Although I had no idea how important they were, I met them all.
I took dancing lessons on Saturday mornings at the Jules Stone studio in Washington Heights. After my dancing lesson, my dad often took me down to the Alvin Theatre where Pearl was rehearsing. I got to watch them put the production together, see them fight, and breathe in the weird scents of a Broadway theatre, and I had a chance to show off my mediocre tap dancing to the cast. I did it gladly, because it was one of the few times I was able to make my father proud.
No, let's go further with that. Tap dancing was one of the few ways I could even get my father's attention. He was an absentee father, as they all were, but he was worse, because he had such a strange occupation.
In the morning, he and my mother never got up to see my brother and me off to school. That's because my father's business required them to go out almost every night to a play or a night club to watch my father's clients. My mother, I'm sure, didn't have to go, but she chose to go. As she always told us -- and as he also told us -- when you grow up and go away, we will have each other. So I have to take care of him. That was their theory of parenting. Not only was I in a competition with my mother for my father's attention, but according to their rules, I had already lost simply by virtue of being the child.
In addition, my parents began going to Las Vegas and Hollywood for long periods of time as my dad's clients got more famous and decided to make movies. Going to either of those places (I still dislike them both) involved taking a train across the country for three days, which meant you didn't zip across the country for a weekend, or even a week. My parents were absent for a month at a time, leaving me with a housekeeper, Dilcy.
So you can imagine how much I looked forward to going with my dad to the rehearsals.
But it's amazing how much I didn't understand. During that year, my father talked a lot about pansies and fruits. He was very disdainful of them, and made fun of them and their fights. I got the feeling he didn't admire them. Only after I got to college and began to hang out with people who studied Broadway and were artists themselves did I realize that Truman Capote and Saint Subber were both gay, and perhaps were even lovers during the production of "House of Flowers." I'm sure they didn't "come out," and that even in the legitimate theatre they were looked down upon as "fairies." That was another one of my father's terms for them.
I was always attracted to gay men, because they were intelligent and sensitive. Only I never knew they were gay. Two high school classmates of mine, both friends and confidants, committed suicide after college, neither having the courage to admit their preferences. By that time, Truman Capote was "out," because it was the Sixties and anything was acceptable. All that came too late for Jerry and Stuart, two poetic, sensitive people in a harsh world.
But what did I know? I was twelve.
After she got really famous, Pearl married a white man, drummer Louis Bellson, in 1952. I remember that my father told them the marriage was fine with him (he was very socially liberal), but he told them not to have children, because he knew that mixed race children were ostracized even in the New York City of my childhood. Another client of his, Billy Daniels, a very light-skinned Afro-American who could "pass" for white, married a white woman. Billy and Martha Daniels had two children, both darker than either parent. My father used them as examples to Pearl and Louis, who put off childraising and opted for a large boxer dog, Mr. Rogers, instead.
The Daniels children, in the mean time, had to be sent off to school in Switzerland.
In 1954, Pearl Bailey starred in an ill-fated (154 performances) Broadway production called "House of Flowers," which was about two rival whorehouses in Trinidad. The music was by Harold Arlen, and the lyrics were by Truman Capote. It was produced by Arnold Saint Subber and directed by Peter Brook. Although I had no idea how important they were, I met them all.
I took dancing lessons on Saturday mornings at the Jules Stone studio in Washington Heights. After my dancing lesson, my dad often took me down to the Alvin Theatre where Pearl was rehearsing. I got to watch them put the production together, see them fight, and breathe in the weird scents of a Broadway theatre, and I had a chance to show off my mediocre tap dancing to the cast. I did it gladly, because it was one of the few times I was able to make my father proud.
No, let's go further with that. Tap dancing was one of the few ways I could even get my father's attention. He was an absentee father, as they all were, but he was worse, because he had such a strange occupation.
In the morning, he and my mother never got up to see my brother and me off to school. That's because my father's business required them to go out almost every night to a play or a night club to watch my father's clients. My mother, I'm sure, didn't have to go, but she chose to go. As she always told us -- and as he also told us -- when you grow up and go away, we will have each other. So I have to take care of him. That was their theory of parenting. Not only was I in a competition with my mother for my father's attention, but according to their rules, I had already lost simply by virtue of being the child.
In addition, my parents began going to Las Vegas and Hollywood for long periods of time as my dad's clients got more famous and decided to make movies. Going to either of those places (I still dislike them both) involved taking a train across the country for three days, which meant you didn't zip across the country for a weekend, or even a week. My parents were absent for a month at a time, leaving me with a housekeeper, Dilcy.
So you can imagine how much I looked forward to going with my dad to the rehearsals.
But it's amazing how much I didn't understand. During that year, my father talked a lot about pansies and fruits. He was very disdainful of them, and made fun of them and their fights. I got the feeling he didn't admire them. Only after I got to college and began to hang out with people who studied Broadway and were artists themselves did I realize that Truman Capote and Saint Subber were both gay, and perhaps were even lovers during the production of "House of Flowers." I'm sure they didn't "come out," and that even in the legitimate theatre they were looked down upon as "fairies." That was another one of my father's terms for them.
I was always attracted to gay men, because they were intelligent and sensitive. Only I never knew they were gay. Two high school classmates of mine, both friends and confidants, committed suicide after college, neither having the courage to admit their preferences. By that time, Truman Capote was "out," because it was the Sixties and anything was acceptable. All that came too late for Jerry and Stuart, two poetic, sensitive people in a harsh world.
But what did I know? I was twelve.
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