Who can stop a dream?

Happy New Year 2012 with the Mummers

2012-01-06T17:34:00.000-08:00

Welcomed the new year with the Mummers and my dear friend Sue. Check out the action on my web gallery by clicking on the above image. Boy do we love a parade!

In the season of my birth

2011-12-19T18:38:00.000-08:00

This is one of my all time favorite pictures, taken by Tony Wood on my 5oth birthday. Here is a piece I wrote for the day.
In the season of my birth, and as I turn fifty, I’m thinking about parents and children,mothers and daughters, my mother, my daughter and me, and how we teach by who we are. All parents wish for their children to be happy. It’s their greatest wish. Children learn how to be happy by watching their parents enjoy themselves.
I learned this from my mother, especially in winter, because she never tried to turn
winter into spring for me. She made the most of winter...
In the morning of a freshly fallen snow, we’d take a hike always with the same
destination in mind-’Dunkin Donuts’, she loved their coffee. In the afternoon, after all the forts and snowmen were built and destroyed, she’d pack us into her station wagon and take us to Burholme Park for sledding. We’d all pile on top of her and plow down that hill, making the most of a snowy day, before the sun went down. Winter road conditions never stopped her from driving downtown to the theater at night, then Chinatown for a late dinner. Winter cold never stopped her from celebrating New Year’s Eve on the patio, clattering pots and pans, popping noise makers and yelling “Happy New Year!” to the cars racing through her corner stop sign. (The one she fought City Hall for). New Year’s Day found us shivering on Broad Street while Mummers paraded to the music she loved. In winter, we ran to the Spectrum for the ‘Ice Capades’, her dream, then created our own at ‘Boulevard Ice Rink’. We did all of these things with visions of hot chocolate and ‘TastyKake Chocolate Cupcakes’, her favorites, awaiting our return to the blue and yellow chrome kitchen table.
I was nearly born between the heavy chrome legs of that table on a snowy Sunday
in December, just before brunch. My pregnant mother’s water broke in the kitchen and
three year old brother Lanse ran upstairs for a towel, and for Dad to take her to the hospital. I think she gave birth to me prematurely on purpose in mid-December rather than January, so I shouldn’t miss a party, and the holiday vacation.
Throughout her life, my mother’s older sisters “did for her”, allowing her to be their
princess. She never crocheted or sewed, she barely cooked or cleaned. They did it for
her. She strutted around in the fuzzy winter coats and hand knitted scarves and hats they passed down, and wore them to the opera. My mother had big feet in wide boots. She
trampled the snow for me, forging a path for happiness to come sledding through, leaving clear instructions on my heart.

Excerpt from my memoir, The Beginning of the End:The Long, Slow Death of an Optimist

2011-10-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

I attended the Push to Publish Conference and received some wonderful feedback for my book, The Beginning of the End: The Long, Slow Death of an Optimist. Either by self-publishing or perhaps a small press, this dream is going to print! Here's an excerpt from Chapter 4.

Assisted-Living

Assisted-living is assisted dying. My mother— lover of art, culture, good food and flowing conversation— is drying up before my eyes, in a space designed to make life easier through assistance with daily living skills. Regardless of all the pictures we hang on the closet and bathroom doors, the favorite books and mementos on the shelves, the wide selection of films and home movies on video, the small refrigerator stocked with Pepsi, the microwave with popcorn in the corner, and all the other ways my brothers and I turn her new room into our collective dream of a simplified, yet happy retirement existence— to Mom, it’s just a place to die.

She is clinically depressed, has anxiety attacks and psychotic episodes. She can’t be in her own home alone. But this room, just a shout from the nurses' station, holds nothing for her and she no longer has the resources to make something out of nothing. Her window faces west and her room is high enough above the city to enjoy the amber/orange sky at sunset. I like visiting her this time of day for the view.

“Mom, remember when the boys and I were kids? You’d drive us the 60 miles to the Atlantic City beach early on summer mornings. We wanted to go bike riding on the boardwalk before breakfast. We’d watch the sunrise on the way to the shore. I remember that pink sky and how you’d make us feel so lucky to catch the moment when the sun appeared—like it was ours alone, in the car with us— like it was worth it to get up that early, and it was just the beginning of the greatest day in the world, because we were there when it started. And they were great days—running in and out of the ocean, eating and sleeping on the warm sand. Remember how we’d bury you and then you’d have to go in that cold ocean to get rinsed off? The only reason I was willing to pack up and leave at the end of the day was because of the fuss you’d make over the sun setting in front of us on the drive home.”

““Look at that gorgeous, orange sky!” you’d say, ” We are so lucky! It’s always there waiting to welcome us home.” And then we’d stop for ice cream, and watch the sun go down.””

“I don’t remember,” Mom says.

Her lack of emotion stuns me, as much as the effusion of her earlier years was fuel. Now, Mom sees only darkness on the horizon. She, who taught me to stop and appreciate the light, seems blind to it.

I had begun the process of selling her house and relinquishing her responsibilities as a way to clear her mind of worry. But the things she worried about were also the things that had brought her the most joy. In this new environment, both worry and joy are diminished.

I am still determined to find in her some remnant of the person she was, and to keep that alive. Regardless of how lost she may feel I am not ready to let her disappear. I simply cannot let go of the spark that was Mom.

I have my own regime for assisting her living. After dropping off my five-year-old daughter at kindergarten each day, I drive for forty minutes arriving at my mother’s room bearing shopping bags of chicken soup, soft pretzels and Tastykakes. We do a quick one-on-one aerobics class, then exercise in the pool- and-fitness center. Mom sits erect on the stationary bike, peddling endlessly in a remembered pattern. She just won’t initiate or end the ride. I take her out to lunch, and then settle her in for a nap, then leave to collect my daughter from aftercare. While driving to and from, I use my cell phone to manage Mom’s healthcare and my photography business, and to call my brothers to argue about what else we should do. All this caretaking activity is causing me to lose weight and develop muscles. That’s the good part. The harder part is that my mind is divided: when I’m with my mother, I feel guilty for missing valuable moments of my daughter’s childhood; when I’m with my daughter, I feel guilty for leaving Mom alone.

I begin bringing Amity to swim with Bubbe at her pool. This is a great way to take a small child to a retirement home, making it fun. The vending machines are a fascinating new experience for Amity, coating our visits with sugar and salt. The comfort and joy to be found in potato chips, chocolate cupcakes and Pepsi is passed on to the next generation.

The pool water is a little too warm for me at eighty-eight degrees, especially when I glance around at the residents and consider the possible incontinence. But it’s perfect for Amity’s small body, accustoming to water. It gives her the confidence, without the shivers, to take her first swim strokes.

The familiar scenario of the swimming pool— the clear, blue water, the light streaming in through the windows, our laughter bouncing off the walls and spirits buoyant as we splash, even the thick smell of chlorine seems to lighten Mom up. It clears her head. But when I see Mom, across from Amity and me in the shallow end, submerge and not resurface, I lunge toward the other side of the four-foot line to rescue her. I leave Amity alone and clinging to the metal steps— halfway into the pool. I reach Mom, grab the back of her head and raise it above water. How could she forget to lift her head?

“You’ve saved my life, Tracela!” she gasps, but her eyes sparkle. “Let’s get dressed and go out for pizza.” I gather Amity and try to explain why I abandoned her on the steps. She is jealous and unforgiving.

Once in the car, Mom asks for her favorite radio station, pulls out a pack of gum, shares it and applies her lipstick.

“Nothing like a good-old-fashioned ‘New England Pizza’ to revive you,” she chirps. She loves the New England Pizza parlor that was walking distance from her home. She was one of their first customers when they opened in 1965. Going there tonight to celebrate life is a return to familiarity and fun. She orders milkshakes and pizza all around, insisting it’s her treat. For that evening, she seems unbound by her fate. But the next day her depression returns, her body droops, her head falls to her lap. She wants nothing to do with anyone. The isolation of her room again becomes her crypt.

On weekends, I photograph weddings for a living. As I document the most beautiful days of life, the poetic toasts and the outpouring of appreciation between parents and children, I remember what a joyful family mine had once been. As I make portraits of dreamy-eyed couples, I wonder, “Do they understand the fragility of happiness?” I travel in my mind back to the ebullient speeches my mother, the toastmistress, used to make at such occasions. “I’m so thrilled to be here celebrating our beautiful family….” I can’t go off in thought for very long before my cell phone rings.

Mom is still able to manage the phone, although she no longer says, "Sweetheart! How are you?" A hopeless, helpless, soulless voice calls out to me from a dark canyon. “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?”

“Gotta go. Call you back,” I whisper.

On a Saturday morning wedding photography gig, as I position myself in the center aisle of the church, ready and waiting to capture the entrances of the major players, Mom’s first ring on my cell phone usually arrives just when the bridesmaids do— a false cue before the first chord of the organ. I learn to shut the damn thing off, although I feel guilty and worried throughout the vows. If it’s a Catholic Mass, I can exit the church, take a picture of the program in natural light, and call Mom back, knowing I have an hour before my next shot.

“So what’s happening, Mom?”

“I want to die.”

“I’d like you to live, comfortably.”

“What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

“Get involved. Exercise.”

“I feel like I'm in jail.”

“Go outside. You like that.”

“With you, I’ll go. I’m not capable by myself.”

“Can’t anyone take you?”

“I’m all alone here. What am I going to do?”

“I’ll find someone to take you. Gotta go. Call back later.”

I return to the mass and find comfort sitting in the last pew. I quietly sing along: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” I close my eyes, fold my hands in my lap and escape into the rise and fall of the notes, "a A MEN, A a men, aA A a men." The familiar symmetry of the hymn lulls me, simplifying and settling my thoughts, even while the cell phone vibrates furiously against my right thigh. But when the music stops, my frazzled brain returns to its constant reiteration of all the possible ways I might rescue my mother from oblivion.

Taking her home to her house is out of the question. It brings us back to the original problem of round-the-clock care. Even if it works for a while, there will come a day sooner rather than later when there will have to be another move. Besides, the house is already under contract. This is the logical part of my mind speaking.

But then the optimist speaks: Why not call off the sale and move her back home? The house isn’t packed up yet. After all, it’s where she is most comfortable. It’s a relentless inner dialogue— a broken record of rumination.

Over lunch the following week, Mom says, “I want you to go to my house and get your china out of the basement. It’s in a box labeled ʻTracy.ʼ I don’t want it to get lost. I’ve been saving it for you all these years. I want you to have it.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get it when I pack up the house. We still have some time.”

“I want you to get it now. I’m worried about it,” she insists.

I drive with her to her house. I say, “Stay in the car. I’ll go inside and get the china. I’ll be out in a second.” I don’t think she wants to go in. There are steps to climb.

I come up from the basement through the kitchen into the dining room with cartons piled high in front of my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice her seated at the dining room table. It’s like an apparition— a visitation from a recently departed soul. She climbed the stairs.

“Look what I have to give up!” Mom gestures with her hand across the landscape that had been her life and the table where she had hosted so many celebrations. And there I am, carrying out the china. I stop and put the boxes down. We embrace and weep for our loss. In this moment, she is in her body, in her mind and in her house for the last time.

My brothers and I begin packing up her home. We do it separately, never seeing each other at the house where we lived together with our parents until adulthood. We each just arrive and pick up where the other leaves off. It seems easier this way.

I arrive for my last day of packing and park on the side of the house next to the patio and the front door. I stare at the entrance from my car.

When their house was under construction in 1950, Mom and Dad had insisted on having the main entrance of their corner row home on the side, unlike the rest of the houses on the block. It secluded the patio and front door on one side and allowed them their own little corner with a garden. They planted some trees, azalea bushes and even a grape vine. They surrounded it all with a black metal railing. This was their masterpiece and the first and only house either of them would ever own. I stare up at the house, pick up my phone and call my brother Myles.

“Does she really have to give up her house? Can’t we just bring her home? Won’t she be better off? Can we afford the help? Can we just stop the sale, regardless of what it costs or what problems it causes? How long will that give us until she needs more care? Ever? Maybe never! The azaleas are blooming, now!”

I’m feeling desperate and I know that this is my last futile attempt at stopping a runaway train. Myles sympathizes, starts calculating our losses and then stops. “We’ll move her to Paul’s Run where her friends are, we’ll get her a nice apartment and furnish it with stuff from the house. She’ll like it better there.” He talks me down and we close with a new plan.

I enter the house to vacuum and sweep every room from top to bottom: the three second-floor bedrooms including the small one that was mine, it’s purple/pink shag rug still intact, the hall bath where the six of us half-dressed, had crowded around two sinks at the last second before school and work for so many years. I sweep down the hallway and vacuum the carpeted steps to the living room. I remember tumbling down them as a toddler and hitting my head on the mirrored cabinet that Dad built at the bottom. I remember practically carrying my cancer-ridden father down these stairs on his final decent, ten years ago. I quickly vacuum the living room, dining room, sweep the kitchen, and the basement steps. I stop and stand above the room where we as children, teenagers and young adults carried on all the hidden and unsupervised activities that every basement remembers. I sweep and muse through the laundry room to the garage where indelible oil stains remember racing car engines built and re-built by my brother Lanse. These stains refuse to be swept away. I realize that this house will remember us no matter who sleeps in the master bedroom or what food is served for brunch in the dining room. We’ve left our mark. I sweep the last vestiges of our family out the garage door and leave this house sparkling clean, quiet, and empty— exactly as it hasn’t been for 52 years.

2011-04-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

Check out my story, Kitchen Veda, published by Womensmemoirs.com

http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-scrapbooking/memoir-contest-winner-kitchen-veda-by-tracy-kauffman-wood/

Memoir Book Review: Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There — Reviewed by Tracy Kauffman-Wood

2011-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

Memoir Book Review: Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There — Reviewed by Tracy Kauffman-Wood

Award Winning Story

2011-01-20T09:07:00.000-08:00

My essay, Easter Bonnet was just published by Womensmemoirs.com
Check this out. Just copy and paste one of these links into your browser. Thanks.

Here's the link to your award-winning story. Be sure to let friends and family know and invite them to leave you a note in the comment section at the bottom.

http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-scrapbooking/memoir-contest-winner-easter-bonnet-by-tracy-kauffman-wood/

http://bit.ly/ffHNNC

Happy Birthday

2011-01-13T17:44:00.000-08:00

We arrived safely in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam around 11:30 PM on Thursday, December 16th. I turned 55 (Philadelphia time) in the air above the Alaskan tundra on a flight from Chicago to Tokyo. I just finished watching a wonderful movie called 'I Am Sam.' You have to see this for the great writing, and Sean Penn's stellar performance. I was deeply moved and soaking in tears when all of a sudden the flight attendants surrounded me with Japanese accented birthday wishes and three big bowls of some kind of choppy, pale, water ice. It was citrusy sweet, refreshing and definitely good enough to eat! Too bad Amity was totally dead to the world at this point. So Tony had two bowls of the sugary stuff. (??!!) The flight attendants presented gifts of candy, playing cards and an inflatable airplane. It was all so unexpected. They made me feel great. I was high all the way to Saigon. By the time we landed, my birthday was just about over, (Saigon time.) I lost 12 hours of the day, but a fragrant bouquet of flowers waited for me at our hotel room. It was the shortest, sweetest birthday I've ever had. I think, flying through the sky, watching movies high above the heaviness of the world, is the best way to celebrate life.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

2011-01-13T17:41:00.001-08:00

We slept late on the 17th and eventually ventured out on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. We stayed right in the heart of things. Street life starts very early here and sleeps very little. Night and day our greatest challenge was racing from one curb to the next. Amity was cowering, crossing the street in a slouch with her hands over her ears until she discovered that the best way to manage this was to get right out there with your hand in the air and stop traffic. It works well. You become the rock around which the river of motorcycles flow. The motorbikes are everywhere, brazen and unafraid, but rarely is there an accident. You try to remember this as you dodge for your life. Ben Than Market is a trip. Stall after stall, row after narrow row of souvenir chachkes with the most persistent sales people in the world stepping on your toes to wrap you in their wares. Right now it's about 20,000 dong to the dollar. Try to calculate that conversion within the chaos of this airless, stinking, claustrophobic, makeshift, seething, heavy-breathing, self-contained city. One visit is enough but somehow you can't stay away from the market. There definitely are bargains here.

Chi Chu Tunnels

2011-01-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

On the 18th we went to the Chi Chu Tunnels but not before stopping for a bowl of Pho first thing in the morning. Pho is a bubbling broth into which tons of exotic and undeterminable vegetables and meat has been tossed. It really is a great way to start the day. There's no mid-morning lag after this. Especially if you chase it down with thick, strong Vietnamese coffee. The sweetened condensed milk turns it into almost a coffee pudding. I like mine over ice. The Chi Chu tunnels were where some people lived and found safety during the Vietnam War. They are narrow, dark, airless places where 200 babies where born and grew up. This includes the famous 'napalm girl' who now is living in comfort and fame in Canada. God bless her! The tunnels have been widened for the tourists who tromp through them day after day but I came up short of breath, feeling blanketed top to bottom and grateful to be able to emerge from the darkness. Imagine only knowing this as life. By the way, the tour guide on this trip told us that there are 9 million people in Ho Chi Minh City and 7 million motorbikes. In the afternoon, we met with Mr. Thanh (Amity's middle name but no relation that we know of. In fact it is a very common name. )Mr. Thanh accompanied us to the school and orphanages. (More on that later.) He speaks English, arranged our hotel reservations and permission to photograph at the school and orphanages. He's an affable, good-looking man of 35 who works with Paul's Kids-the foundation formed to help Vietnamese children. Mr Thanh has a wife and two sons. He lives in a modest, one-floor, three room house next door to his parents', where he grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.

Mekong Delta

2011-01-13T17:27:00.000-08:00

On Sunday and Monday the 19th and 20th, we went on a two day tour of the Mekong Delta. The best part of these tours are the people you meet on the bus. There's a lot of down time to gab and share war stories of being spoiled, American 'Ex-Pats' in this strange/familiar, rapidly developing, third world country. We toured a coconut candy "factory" along the river, really just some big bowls of bubbling sugar stirred by men with oars over open fires and a line of women cutting and wrapping the taffy by hand. We got to try everything and spent the rest of the day picking it out of our teeth. We also saw rice noodles and rice paper being made-everything labor intensive and definitely not automated. We learned that most people live on boats where they fish for a living or farm and bring their wares to the floating market early in the morning. Actually, the reason they bring them to the floating market is to sell to the tourists! That's the industry which sustains. The tourists are urged to come and see the floating market. People from all over the world float by on rickety old boats everyday to buy pineapples and a cup of coffee from the people of the Mekong. Otherwise they just get by farming or fishing to keep their lives afloat. No money, no technology, just the sunshine, the wind in your sails and your family surrounding you. Perhaps they've got the right idea. Perhaps they are less stressed out. Life is certainly simpler but most would choose to have more. And many do leave(or some of their many children do)for more education or to find opportunity on the crowded streets of Ho Chi MInh City.

Kien Phouc School

2011-01-13T17:18:00.000-08:00

Tuesday was the big day when we visited Kien Phouc School in Tien Giang Province. Public school costs money here and 15% of the children do not attend for lack of funds. It costs $50 per year, per child. This is the school that Paul's Kids supports. Amity raised money (with help from many of you) to send 8 children to school this year. We met the children, photographed them with their friends at school, went home with them to meet their parents and view their communities. What a wonderful day! We spent the morning with the children at school. Photographically speaking, the light was right, the background was great, the children were natural (no one said "cheese" like American children are constantly being urged to do), and we were actually given some time to take pictures. The kids adored Amity and circled her. She was the local celebrity and we were the paparazzi. Going home with the children, hiking through the rising dust of their rural communities, made us feel like we were National Geographic photographers and truly gave us a sense of how little people around the world exist on and how much we think we "need." These are great kids - smart, sensitive, wiser than their years and thrilled for the opportunity to relinquish the daily work of home life, carefully dress in their freshly washed and unwrinkled school uniforms and march off to school in the morning. We intend to make sure they're back in school next year! The head teacher treated us and the children to a sumptuous lunch at a roadside makeshift cafe in the province. Apparently, all localities have their own unique style of Vietnamese cuisine. One of this area's specialties is hard boiled eggs with an actual hard boiled chick inside. To be polite, I turned off my mind and ate one. It tasted like chopped liver! Our hosts were so happy to see me enjoying the local favorites that they kept feeding me more, which I of course ate. There was pho, shrimp and stir-fried beef. Always there were noodles and steamed white rice, which Amity lived on. She never complained about all the rounds of Pepsi forced upon us. We all know how Americans love their Pepsi. Even we, the no sugar/no junk food family, did our part to keep that image alive.

Go Vap and Tam Binh Orphanages

2011-01-13T17:12:00.000-08:00

I had high hopes for Wednesday and I was not disappointed. We visited two orphanages with Mr. Thanh. The first one, Go Vap is where Paul's Kids has donated a physical therapy room. We were allowed to photograph children receiving therapy for various challenges. I was impressed with the love and commitment - the relationship that the therapists have established with the children living there. Ultimate trust and joy resides in this clean and happy place providing these most unfortunate children with a home and a hopeful future. After lunch, (more pho, sweet coffee and actual french fries for Amity), we arrived at Tam Binh Orphanage. This is the place that you may have seen in our original "Vietnam Video" where Amity spent the first year of her life. We retraced our original steps and had fun quoting ourselves from the narrative, "Finally...Tam Binh Orphanage, once a name on paper..." We were greeted by the director who had been on staff 13 years ago when Amity lived there. I brought out our pictures of Amity from that time and she remembered her. She was thrilled to see this beautiful American girl, grown so confident and strong. I could taste her pride and my own. She accompanied us upstairs to where the babies hang out with their caregivers. We held and hugged lots of gorgeous little boys and girls starting their lives in this loving environment, waiting to become citizens of the world. In fact, there were three boys about to leave to be adopted by French families. "This guy may grow up to be a famous French chef," I said to Amity. "This one a doctor, and this kid who knows?" Amity said, "I love France!" as we fantasized about what was ahead for them. Then Amity's primary caregiver walked in. She remembered Amity well. When I saw the light of recognition in her eyes, I knew I was standing in a moment I would never forget. We hugged and held on to each other long and hard. She spent time just looking at Amity, beaming with pride like a grandmother at her grandchild's coming of age. We asked questions about what Amity ate, her health and how she was cared for. "Just like this," she said with a wave of her hand. We sat in the dappled light on that terrace surrounded by loving caregivers and their bouncing charges, laughing, 'kibitzing,' listening and understanding the universal language of women 'kvelling over' Amity in Vietnamese. The discussion revolved around her braces, her tanned skin, her dimples, her American sense of style and expression. Amity handled it with grace and aplomb as if it were her graduation party. We distributed cheerleading pictures, 6th grade school portrait (with Obama for President button pinned to her shirt), 8th grade school portrait from Haverford Middle School, and as they held and fed the babies, these loving women nodded in recognition and beamed with pride sharing the window on this blossoming young woman's life. They knew her when...
-A great day, and for me what this trip was all about.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2011-01-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

After this we needed some down time to plan the rest of our stay, and Amity needed to get that last homework assignment done before Christmas. We spent Thursday immersed in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and planned our trip to Halong Bay.

Halong Bay

2011-01-13T16:56:00.000-08:00

We departed for Halong Bay in the early morning of December 24th. We flew Vietnam Airlines to Hai Phong, just south of Hanoi in the north of Vietnam. Our excursion around Halong Bay was in a traditional boat called a "Junk." This junk was named, 'The Jewel of the Bay.' We spent two calm and carefree days slowly cruising the bay surrounded by a spectacular view of mountains and caves formed by thousands of years of interplay between limestone and salt water. Everywhere you looked astounding beauty, and other boats with tourists from all over the world with their cameras. Christmas Eve found us sharing stories with a smattering of international travelers. We befriended some musicians from California, born in New York of course. (Wherever in the world you go, it seems you're never far from home.) Turned out that our new friend Jared is the guitarist on Saturday Night Live. In fact, Amity had a song on her Ipod that Jared co-wrote with one of her favorite bands, Honor Society. This made all the trials and tribulations of a journey across the world well worthwhile for Amity. The steep climb to the top of a mountain to gaze across the hallowed expanse of Halong Bay energized us all and filled me with an optimism for the future and the conviction that mine would include more of such treks to beautiful and mysterious world venues. Jared's impromptu ditty, "Jewel of the Bay...." quickly became Amity's theme song for the rest of the trip.

Back in HCMC

2011-01-13T16:54:00.001-08:00

Back at our home base, The Bloom Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City by late Christmas night, we fell into bed still clinging to the sounds of the soft, gentle lapping of the bay's cool waters (yes, I swam!) and the vision of peace and majesty that our minds would not soon relinquish. It's a good vision to keep close to your heart and mind, when you are again the dodge ball on the teeming streets and sidewalks of Saigon.

The Grand Hotel

2011-01-13T16:51:00.000-08:00

We spent our last two nights at The Grand Hotel. This was our home base 12 years ago, where we first bonded with our tiny, new daughter Amity Bess Van Thanh Le Wood. It was fun recounting the initial challenges ("of eating, sleeping and staying dry") memorialized on our 1998 video and to luxuriate in this elegant, French-style, historic hotel in the nicer, (designer-shop-lined street) part of town. As before, it was from here that we took the time to shop for "nifty souvenirs for the folks back home.

Can Gio and Monkey Islands

2011-01-13T16:47:00.000-08:00

The day before we left, we headed out of town for a tour of Can Gio and Monkey Islands. This "Eco-Park" and island whose residents have been fishing and harvesting rice (Vietnam is the 3rd largest exporter of rice in the world), with the same labor intensive methods for hundreds of years, is home to bats, crocodiles, and the infamous wild monkeys. This is the actual 'Monkey Jungle' where unchecked monkeys run free across the landscape and your back. They'll steal your shirt and hat, if you don't watch out. Amity and our delightful tour guide, Phou, forged a universal bond as they clutched each other in fright when the monkeys came too close. Phou was born and raised in the Mekong Delta and moved to Ho Chi Minh City with her parents for more opportunity. She attended school in the city, learned flawless English and a wealth of information which made her by far our favorite guide to this incredible, resilient, mysterious, ancient, modern, elegant, primitive, scary, warm and welcoming country and its people. Phou became part of our family by the end of that day and we would liked to have brought her home with us. On our last night, Mr. Thanh, his wife and sons invited us to their home for dinner. We had yet another banquet provided by people who own little and share all. Even Amity nibbled at the sumptuous home made spring rolls, shrimp salad and glazed chicken wings filling our bowls. And just when we thought we'd done justice to the feast, out came the ever-present bubbling hot pot of broth and endless, nameless vegetables for simmering. We learned one culinary maxim if not many on this trip. The rice noodles go directly into your bowl with hot broth poured over them. Any other method leads to over cooked noodles, which would be unfortunate.

Coming Home

2011-01-13T16:44:00.000-08:00

We continued on our flight around the world as we flew home from Saigon via Frankfort, Germany to Philadelphia, with a wave to our cousins in Israel as we flew over the Middle East. Exhausted, crampy and cranky, we arrived home safely in Philadelphia late on the 29th. I'm still not sleeping through the night but the cramps have lessened. And as we all move into our old, familiar, comfort zones, it's becoming obvious that this was "the trip of a lifetime"-pivotal, revealing and renewing. Unforgettable. Thank you Amity for the inspiration.

Halong Bay Pearls

2011-01-13T16:40:00.000-08:00

Here's a video of the process of harvesting the pearls from Halong Bay-one of the world's most beautiful natural wonders. The limestone cliffs and caves formed from thousands of years of salt water erosion and tectonic plate shifting provide a background to the serene waters of Halong Bay (surrounded by the Gulf of Tonkin of Vietnam War fame) We floated overnight in a 'junk' boat after an afternoon of caving, kayaking, and swimming. PS I got a good deal on some pearls.

Resolve to Express Yourself in 2011

2011-01-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

Open Mike Tuesday January 4th, 7:30PM @ Milkboy Bryn Mawr 824 W. Lancaster Ave. Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 (That’s the one further west on Lancaster Ave. by the Bryn Mawr Film Institute.)
Open call for writers/readers and a receptive audience. All are welcome to share up to ten minutes of personal narrative/creative non-fiction/memoir writing work. Writers of all ages and levels of experience are encouraged to bring in your stories - prose or poetry. Stories bind us to a common humanity. Let’s open up our hearts with an open mike and an open mind. Tell your friends and relatives. Tell your story.
This is a first Tuesday monthly event happening soon on Tuesday January 4, 2011 at 7:30 PM at Milkboy in Bryn Mawr. Please join us.
Tracy

Book Review of Lucky -A memoir by Alice Sebold

2010-09-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

Here's the link to my review of Lucky, a memoir by Alice Sebold. She wrote this before penning the novel, The Lovely Bones.

http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-book-reviews/book-review-lucky-by-alice-sebold-reviewed-by-tracy-kauffman-wood/

Friday Night at Bubbe's; Open Mic at Milkboy

2010-07-09T10:23:00.001-07:00

Book Review of Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr

2010-05-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

Check out my book review of Lit:A Memoir by Mary Karr on womensmemoirs.com

Open Mic Videos

2010-05-06T14:49:00.000-07:00

View more of the first open mic night at Bryn Mawr, PA Milkboy.

http://www.youtube.com/user/whoCanStopaDream

Part 1 Reading of Chapter 3(Cockeyed Optimism) from Memoir of a Dutiful Daughter

2010-05-06T13:54:00.000-07:00

Part 2 Reading of Chapter 3(Cockeyed Optimism) from Memoir of a Dutiful Daughter

2010-05-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

Book Review of Replacement Child by Judy Mandel

2010-02-24T13:26:00.000-08:00

This is a quick and riveting read with a cup of tea by a roaring fire. Here's the link to my review:
http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-book-reviews/memoir-book-judy-mandels-replacement-child-reviewed-by-tracy-kauffman-wood/

More on The Liars' Club by Mary Karr

2010-02-03T13:41:00.000-08:00

Here's the link to my other book review of The Liars' Club featured on womensmemoirs.com

http://womensmemoirs.com/memoir-book-raves/memoir-book-review-the-liars-club-by-mary-karr/
Thanks for your read.

Book Review of The Liars' Club by Mary Karr

2010-02-01T09:53:00.000-08:00

I finished reading a book this week that was so good; I immediately turned it over and started again. With her gritty and honest voice, authentic dialogue and poet’s precision with words, Mary Karr has blown me away.
I guess I have some catching up to do. This book, The Liars’ Club, A Memoir, was originally published to much acclaim in 1995. Mary Karr followed it up with her second memoir Cherry, soon after. Susan Cheever recently assessed Mary Karr as a “great memoirist” in her New York Times Book Review of Lit, Karr’s latest memoir. I read this and thought, “Where has Mary Karr been all my life?” and began to read the trilogy.
Turns out, Mary Karr has been alive and well and (like most of us) living the fractured life as best she can for about as many years as I have. That could be one reason I felt such intimacy with her words. But there’s more. We share a “long memory.” This, her father pointed out to her when she was a child, is a virtue.
“Daddy had instructed me in the virtue of what he called equalizers, which meant not only sticks, boards and rocks, but having one hell of a long memory for mistreatment.”
This served her well in her rough and tumble East Texas childhood with alcoholic, volatile parents. Her mother had a huge and looming secret. Her father stayed away rather than be struck by its unpredictable repercussions.
But Mary Karr’s long memory recorded much more than mistreatment. Karr brings to life in sharp and picaresque detail, the stories her Dad told when she tagged along for gatherings of the Liars’ Club- a group of neighborhood drinking buddies.
“Of all the men in the Liars’ Club, Daddy told the best stories. When he started one, the guys invariably fell quiet, studying their laps or their cards or the inner rims of their beer mugs like men in prayer. No matter how many tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed. He mastered it the way he mastered bluffing in poker, which probably happened long before my appearance. His tough half-breed face would move between solemn blankness and sudden caricature. He kept stock expressions for stock characters. When his jaw jutted and stiffened and his eyes squinted, I expected to hear the faint brogue of his uncle Husky. A wide-eyed expression was the black man Ugh, who taught him cards and dice. His sister pursed her lips in steady disapproval. His mother wore an enormous bonnet like a big blue halo, so he’d always introduce her by fanning his hands behind his head, saying Here comes Mamma.”
In my family, it used to be said that somebody was “from the workers” if they worked hard. No doubt Mary Karr is “from the storytellers.”
Her mother is poetry in (com)motion as her recounted dialogue is pure gold for the writer of memoir. When Karr urges her to speak of her past, having discovered telling evidence, her mother responds, “I have two headaches, one behind each eye, each one the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.”
Karr comments and recounts her mother’s response when the truth is spilled and they are able to talk about it.
“As to why she hadn’t told us all this before…her exact sentence stays lodged in my head, for it’s one of the more pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering: “I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.”
Here is how Karr sums up this part of her life as she moves seamlessly from a moment in the past, to her perspective about it in the present, to a projection of it in a hopeful and deserved future.
“I didn’t think this particularly beautiful or noteworthy at the time, but only do so now. The sunset we drove into that day was luminous, glowing; we weren’t. …Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both, in a way. All the black crimes we believed ourselves guilty of were myths, stories we’d cobbled together out of fear. …It’s only looking back that I believe the clear light of truth should have filled us, like the legendary grace that carries a broken body past all manner of monsters. …to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes grow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.”
I can’t wait to be illuminated by Cherry and Lit.

PS I've also reviewed this book for womensmemoirs.com and if you are still interested in The Liars' Club you may want to check that out. (It's a different review.)It will be published on 2/3. I will post the link then.

Book Review of Cowboy

2009-12-30T12:11:00.001-08:00

Book Review of Cowboy & Wills by Monica Holloway

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December Birthday Post

2009-11-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

December is birthday time for so many of my dear friends, relations and for yours truly. December is a time when all of us tend to take stock, to make amends, to look ahead with hope and back in gratitude. Right now as I approach my middle fifties, I’m thinking about legacy. What have we received from those who have come before us and what will we leave behind in our wake? My mother left a trail of shoes. Here’s why…

My mother hated her feet. They were size ten, widened and flattened by four pregnancies, with toes curved around each other, enlarged at the joints. In the sixties, when everyone wore sandals, she searched for a style that hid her toes. At the beach or by the pool, she wore plastic bathing slippers.
“Bubbe bought secondhand shoes from a pushcart for my older sisters and me,” she’d remark during every frequent trip to the shoe store when I was a child. “By the time I got them, they were hand-me-down, hand-me-downs. Our shoes gave us bunions and ruined our toes. I swore if nothing else my kids would have new shoes and pretty toes, just like yours.”
In the beginning of her dementia, when we thought she was “just depressed,” I took her shopping at the wide shoe store. “Nothing’s right, nothing’s right...,” she muttered over and over, her head oscillating in despair. We squandered half a day until finally settling on a mauve, leather, flat-shoe with Velcro strap. Laces and buckles were no longer an option. They were too confusing. With these shoes we trudged through the mud of depression,
and tiptoed the quick sand at its demented foundation. Her shoes fell through the cracks when she did. They were always getting lost. But on the days when her mind returned, so did her shoes. She demanded the help she needed to put them on. Shoes were her dignity.
When she moved into an assisted-living facility, I packed up her beloved home of 52 years. I counted 37 pairs of shoes in her bedroom closet and assorted singles. There were shoes that looked cozy and comfortable, just like her house. I found the shoes she’d worn to my wedding and the muddied shoes she’d worn to visit her mother’s grave, her running shoes and her swimming shoes, and her Sunday morning slippers. Right up front, sat the black patent pumps she’d worn the previous fall at grandson Joey’s wedding. Those shoes looked ready and waiting for their next dance. For a few minutes I basked in her presence, captured in shoes.
Toward the back of her closet, I discovered shoes that smelled new. Purchased on a whim, with rigid straps and narrow toes, they were unrealistic for the shape of her feet, but classy and adored anyway. I’m sure she couldn’t bear to wear, or discard them. These shoes were life’s disappointments, with gaping holes between what was desired, and what was delivered. Like a disintegrating brain in the middle of an exuberant and well-deserved retirement, they betrayed a painful discontent. I threw these shoes out.
So when it was time to give the funeral director some clothes for her service, I found the blue dress with white trim around the ‘Nehru’ collar; the dress she’d bought for her third son, my brother Myles’s Bar Mitzvah thirty years previous. The neckline would look nice in a half-body open casket, and Myles would be pleased. Since the top half of her body was all that would show, I figured that was all she would need. I was wrong.
A few weeks after her death, she visited my dreams as she had been in her prime: energetic, high-spirited, bursting with love and gratitude. She came back to thank me for taking care of her when she could no longer take care of herself. I was grateful for this gift from her spirit.
A few months after her funeral, she visited again. This time she came back steeped in demented hysteria. She came back demanding her shoes. In the dream, I searched the house for her shoes, every string in my body’s fiber tight with the familiar angst, trying to make things right by her. She waited in the car, fraught with anxiety that never let up. I knew it well. For two sick years, I took up the slack when it seemed as if she’d explode. In the dream, I never found the shoes. I woke up and realized that I had buried her without them. I knew the ones she wanted. The black patent pumps she had danced in at Joey’s wedding. Just before she got sick, she danced with her second son, my brother Lanse at his son Joey’s wedding.
What a glorious day that had been for her. She was already concerned about the state of her mind. She confided to me weeks before the wedding, “I wish it was here already.” She knew she was just holding on. She knew what was coming. She held on long enough to make a speech, dance with her son in her new black patent shoes and be the elegant grandmother she wanted to be.
Those shoes, boxed in the attic, complete with shoe stretchers to keep them wide, still wait for their next affair. But this never occurred to me on the day before her funeral, and there are some things you can’t do over again. So, she went out barefoot the way she came in, but worn from living. A pebble of guilt remains in my shoe, although it diminishes as the years pass and the stain of her dementia wears off. My mother’s black patent shoes remain in my attic, a testament to a life in full. And, “if nothing else,” my daughter will have new shoes and pretty toes, just like mine.

Memoir Book Review: A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

2009-11-25T11:54:00.001-08:00

Memoir Book Review: A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

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Memoir Book Review: Someday My Prince Will Come by Jerramy Fine

2009-11-01T11:19:00.001-08:00

Memoir Book Review: Someday My Prince Will Come by Jerramy Fine

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Memoir Book Review of The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman

2009-11-01T11:05:00.001-08:00

Memoir Book Review of The Possibility of Everything by Hope Edelman

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Cockeyed Optimism

2009-10-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

I'm writing a book about my journey as caregiver for my mom when she developed dementia. It is a memoir which takes place from the years 2001-2004. Here is a chapter: Cockeyed Optimism by Tracy Kauffman Wood

In the early stages of Mom’s illness, I would attempt to resuscitate the cockeyed optimism that had pervaded my family’s life as long as I could remember. This was a phrase from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, South Pacific. The sound track blasted from our hi-fi record player throughout my childhood. I remember the album cover smattered with white specks, rough and peeling from a botched paint job in the living room. The LP hadn’t suffered. The song lyrics began:
When the skies are brighter canary yellow,
I forget ev’ry cloud I’ve ever seen.
So they called me a cockeyed optimist,
Immature and incurably green.
I remember Mom expressing her own brand of cockeyed optimism, checking in with us every day. “Everything’s great, great, great! Right?” She belted this like a song in a musical – bright, cheery and with a grand smile. How could life not be great?
As it happened, Mom was great, great, great throughout her life and through ten great years of retirement until she fell apart at the age of 82. A series of small strokes chipped away at her brain creating a dark and insidious depression. Then multi-infarct dementia set in. This illness carried with it all the anger and pain that she had so successfully avoided for most of her life. Now, Mom moaned with her head in her hands, “Nothing’s right, nothing’s right. I’ll suffer for a few years and then I’ll die.”
I clung to the comfort food sentiments of my childhood, where a chocolate cupcake and a glass of milk soothed all wounds. “Don’t worry, Mom. Everything will get better. I’ll make it all better, just wait and see.”
“Trace,” she said, “You’re so naïve. Don’t you see what’s coming?”
She looked at me with eyes suddenly clear and wide-open in surprise and concern. It was a rare moment of clarity for her. I could read her thoughts. “I know what’s going to happen to me, but what will happen to her? She can’t face this.”
And she was right. I could not believe that there wasn’t a cure for this - that I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t believe that she was so changed. I was angry with her for being depressed, for not coping the way she always had, for losing her optimism. I couldn’t accept it. I was angry with myself for listening to her, for trying so hard to please her. I was angry that she wanted to die, that she would leave us so helpless and confused. I was angry that she couldn’t be the grandmother she used to be – the grandmother she was to my niece and nephew. Now it was my daughter’s turn, and where the hell was Mom?? I was missing my mother and wanted this miserable old woman to disappear. And I was disappointed in the resources we all assumed would be there for us. I was disappointed in the doctors, even as I took copious notes at appointments and followed every medication protocol to the ‘T’. I was disappointed with the therapy and day programs, and with my large extended family, suddenly scarce. Nothing and no one was working as expected.
But I confronted her gloom and doom with my own brand of cockeyed optimism, applying band-aids to every new trauma. (“Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll figure this out.”) It just released her anger and robbed her of discretion.
“You’re so full of shit, Tracy!” My once literate, cultured, happy-go-lucky mother reproached me.
Mom was losing her mind and she knew it, even though the rest of us were hanging on to her moments of clarity as the rule rather than the exception. I had a vision of myself and my brothers as children, each hanging on to Mom’s ample, competent arms as she juggled work and family. Now we were grown, scattered and clinging to a memory. I considered the options and suggested assisted-living. At least, she wouldn’t be home alone.
Mom moved willingly to The Protestant Home. It was nearby, and had a pool for the lap swimming she and I loved. Even though she was Jewish, we didn’t think the name or the mostly Christian population would be a problem for her. She had lived and worked with people from diverse backgrounds. Mom always fit in. Also, this assisted-living facility was just blocks away from the government compound where she had been employed for 25 years. Perhaps she’d run into some of the old gang from work. She seemed to make a good adjustment, and within a month or two, she said, “Sell my house. I don’t want to worry about it anymore.”
Her home of 52 years had been her pride and joy. She and Dad savored every stage of its construction back in 1950. It was filled with the remains of everything that meant anything to her. Now it seemed to be just another burden to leave behind – a remnant from a fading life. I did as I was told and contracted with the realtor she’d suggested.
The Protestant Home turned out to be the wrong choice. She hated the food, stopped eating, had nothing to do and no one she wanted to see.
She complained, “I feel like I’m in jail.”
Of course, she was isolating herself most of the time, embarrassed about the state of her mind. To help her feel less closed in, I suggested a trip to the art museum. I’d pick her up and we’d spend the day together. Just like we used to. I put it off for a few days, favoring her doctoring schedule and my other responsibilities.
She said, “You promise me all these great things, and then you don’t follow through.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can,” I said.
Her comments tortured me because I was spending most of my time trying to make things great for her. Before her illness, disappointment in me was not something she would ever express, even if I deserved it. She didn’t want to hurt me, so she didn’t mention it. It wasn’t in her make up to reproach me. She used her own inner resources to get over disappointments and move on. She could make herself happy by chewing gum and turning on the radio.
Now it seemed, her emotional resources had totally dried up. She wanted to die. But her whole life had been shaped by a never-say-die attitude. She was a child of immigrants who picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and were productive and upbeat for every long, hard day that God gave them. So what was this thing that first gnawed at her, and then whacked her over the head “turning my brains to molasses,” as she repeated to doctors, friends and family.
Worry lined her face. Anxiety stripped her of pleasure. Desperate to save herself, she stayed up all night doing Jumbles to exercise her mind and avoid the nightmares she couldn’t separate from upon awakening. She made lists on the backs of envelopes: cancel credit card, cell phone, get Tracy’s name on bank accounts. She wanted to cancel everything, get rid of things, so she wouldn’t worry about them. She thought the less she had, the less she’d lose. She began hiding from friends and family, not answering her phone. When she could pull herself together to go out, she’d ask her confidants at the senior center, “Do you ever get depressed? Do you ever cry first thing in the morning, and have a hard time leaving your bedroom?”
She’d never had. Never, ever one day of her life where she didn’t just ‘hop to it!’ So what the hell was happening now?
Now, her body was bent over. Her head oscillated back and forth. When she stood, her quivering fists were balled in anger and her face wore a permanent scowl. Her walk became as crooked as her expression.
When I did take her to the art museum, she complained the whole way there. “How will I get around? It’s too much trouble. You take on too much. I can’t understand anything anymore anyway. Your driving makes me crazy. There’s nowhere to park. How will I walk the steps?”
She’d never been a complainer. Now every activity provoked deep anxiety. Despite her discomfort, I knew she still wanted to try.
She climbed the steps and we borrowed a wheelchair. We saw the Degas exhibit. She listened to the lecture, although she said she could hardly hear it through the earphones. But after the lecture, we went to the museum cafeteria for coffee and chocolate chip cookies. When finished, she stood erect, bussed our table, wiped it clean with her napkin, and insisted on pushing the wheelchair.
“I don’t think I really need this.” She waved at the air in front of her, as if to push away the curtain of the last six months.
We perused the rest of the Impressionists paintings. Mom began to reminisce.
“Such beauty and grace. I miss the ballet and the orchestra. Remember the exceptional films we saw here, and those great dinners afterwards? Y’know, this is where Daddy and I shared our first kiss – right here on the steps of the art museum back in 1946…”
“I remember the story, Mom. And the Exceptional Film Society, and those great meals we had after the movies. Y’know, we can still go to the orchestra. I’ll get tickets. And let’s go out for dinner tonight.” I needed this reprieve.
For dinner, we stopped at a Chinese restaurant. As she dunked fried noodles in duck sauce, she chatted on about what a great time we’d had, and how lucky we were as Philadelphians to have such a great treasure “in our own backyard” as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She ate her shrimp in lobster sauce like she hadn’t eaten in weeks, because she hadn’t.
Finally, I took her back to her room at The Protestant Home. Not to my house because I had somewhere to go that night and the bed was too high and she might roll off and I didn’t have a sitter and so many other reasons. So she went to her new home where she slumped in her chair and forgot about every great thing that had happened that day.
On the following afternoon, I stopped by her apartment and found her still in bed.
“Get the hell out of here! Let me die!!” was her greeting.
I found her hand under the covers and held it.
“Ouch! Goddamn it, Mom!! You bit me! I began to cry.
“Just put me somewhere,” she said.
“Yeah, Mom. If only I knew where.” Now my head was in my own trembling hands.
I began living in a world of ‘If onlys’. Night and day, my mind never stopped thinking up grand solutions to a problem that just didn’t have one. If only, I’d taken her home with me that evening after the museum. If only I could take her home - to her house, where now, the azaleas were in bloom and the roses were budding. (“Perfect to attract a buyer,” said the realtor.) If only, I could leave her at the art museum in assisted living - admiring ballerinas and lingering by Monet’s garden pond. She would be constantly inspired and happy, and we could go back to life as usual. If only I could look ahead with cockeyed optimism, but I was growing less green.

The Mosaic

2009-08-31T17:05:00.000-07:00

Oh, the sacrifices we make for love and money, family and career, not to mention art. Can we have it all? Here’s an early lesson on art, family and sacrifice.

“IT’S CALLED A MOSAIC, BUB. YOU HANG IT ON THE WALL!”
I raise my voice to say this because Bubbe, my grandmother, is not wearing her hearing aid. My mother, rushing around as usual, forgot about inserting it when she helped her to dress this morning. Bubbe didn’t remind her. She’d rather not be bothered with it. It rings when she forgets to turn it down for a phone call. She finds it clunky and uncomfortable in her ear. She wears it to please us. Today, I am not pleased.
I am ten years old and my mother has left me to Bubbe-sit. Bubbe-sitting is what we do to keep Bubbe busy. One of us, me or another grandchild stays at her house for a few hours to give her a younger child to focus on, in an effort to keep her from worrying about the mixed up lives of her grown children. Bubbe had her first heart attack when she was, I’m told, a fat and energetic 75 year old. Now she is 85, shrunken and slow moving. Flabby skin hangs from her arms which used to be thick with muscle. My cousins and I call them chicken arms. I hope there’s a cure for them before I’m old. My mother says that Bubbe needs us around to monitor her weak heart. I think her heart is weak from worrying so much. My mother is helping my father handle the lunch trade at his South Philadelphia luncheonette, Abie’s Hot Dogs. She took my youngest brother, Myles, with her. He is five and trails her every movement as she works behind the counter.
“Take milk Momele,” Bubbe insists. My name is Tracy, but Bubbe calls me Momele or Tracele. It means love, my mother says.
Bubbe’s quivering hands place a tall glass of cold milk to the right of my mosaic. Her eyes follow my fingers as I outline the vase, flowers and butterfly with string. I fill pasted spaces with tiny pink, purple and white stones, each to it’s own color-coded section.
“No Bub, I gotta finish before my mother gets back.”
A fluorescent bulb lights from above the kitchen table where I work. The constant hum of the bulb competes for my attention with each measured tick...tick...tick... of the wall clock. It is all so loud, vibrating in my ears as I work. I feel like I’m at the center of a beating heart, like the one you can walk through at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. Every second in her small apartment is counted out to me. I notice every movement. My hands travel back and forth from stones to paste to the beat. Bubbe seems oblivious to everything but me.
“Finish, Tracele,” she hovers and pushes the milk closer. “You work so hard.”
The air is close in Bubbe’s dining room. I’m breathing in the smell of puffed wheat and milk from her breakfast. Fresh air makes her feel chilly, so no windows are open. I’d rather be here at night, especially on Friday nights when Bubbe makes dinner for our whole family. All my cousins come with my aunts and uncles, their voices drown out the clock, constant arrivals freshen the air and the apartment smells sweet like cookies. My Aunt Minnie usually brings a ‘Beatles cake’, with long strands of chocolate frosting hair running down the sides and thick chocolate bangs made from jimmies. I have five aunts - my mother’s older sisters. Between them, they take care of Bubbe’s needs. Aunt Jean lives with Bubbe, but works during the day. Aunt Lena lives down the street but comes over to help her bathe and dress in the morning. Aunt Bess stops to visit during the day on her way to and from work. My mother runs the errands and takes her to the doctor. The other two live nearby and call frequently. Although my mother’s four brothers live nearby, they don’t come as often.
The phone rings and I jump at the intrusion, so piercing even Bubbe can hear it. I am rescued from her warm breath on my neck as she clomps her black oxfords across the linoleum floor to answer the phone. She holds the receiver with two hands, trapping the twisted chord between her right elbow and breast. Her breast runs the length of her forearm and she squeezes it to her chest as she speaks. She struggles to hear the caller. “Nu?” she sighs. Her head rotates side to side. “Tt, tt, tt, tt, tt,” Her tongue clicks the roof of her mouth to show how sorry she is. Bubbe has started worrying. “Come Yussele, I give you what I have.” Her voice becomes softer. She grips the receiver like a vise to her rocking head. She still calls her children by their Jewish, childhood names.
That was her eldest son, my Uncle Joe on the phone. He roams the Philadelphia streets drunk and singing, “Smile, ‘though your heart is breaking....” He lives in a boarding house somewhere but often sleeps in a cot in the basement of my father’s store. I’ve seen the rats in that basement, and I’ve heard the story of his decline.
Forty years ago, Joe had a job, a wife and a tiny daughter. When his wife died of the common cold, before the days of penicillin, he brought his three-year-old daughter home to Bubbe and Zayde Max, my grandfather. When Joe remarried, he didn’t take his child with him. He left her with Bubbe and Zayde. This was fortunate because he was later struck in the head by the ‘50’ trolley while crossing Fourth Street.
“He got up and walked away but he was never the same,” is how my aunts tell the story. Bubbe embraced his daughter Lillian as her own although they had no extra money.
Zayde Max said, “We have ten children, we can have eleven.”
Bubbe said, “We’re rich in family.”
Zayde Max died when I was two, but I know him from our home movies. He had a wide, toothless smile. He didn’t like to wear his teeth. He liked to wiggle his ears and ham it up for the camera. He didn’t need to speak English well to make people laugh. Zayde was an orthodox Jewish miller in Czarist Russia who traveled to America by boat in 1909. Bubbe and their five small children followed him months later when he sent the fare. They settled in Philadelphia, having five more babies.
“He kept us laughing to keep from crying,” my aunts said. “He could never stay with any job or money making venture without drinking up the profits. He had a hard time adjusting to America. Once he got a job in a gun factory.” My aunts would start giggling at the thought of it. Then one of them would blurt. “He almost shot his pecker off! That was the end of that job.”
When the children were small, he drove a horse and buggy selling rags, or the discarded coal and fruit that could be found by the train tracks.
“We were so poor,” my Aunt Bessie told me, “that Lena used to hoist me up into the sitting railroad cars on Oregon Avenue, when no one was looking, and I’d fill a pillowcase with coal for the furnace, otherwise we’d have no heat in winter!”
When I asked Aunt Lena about this, her face turned red and she said, “We would never do such a thing. We were good children.”
As soon as the older kids could watch the younger ones, Bubbe began a hot dog business, parking a pushcart on the busy, market corner of Fourth and South Streets. She made her own pepper hash - a colorful mixed relish concoction from her Russian peasant background. She sold hot dogs with ‘the works’ (mustard, onions, pepper hash and sauerkraut) with an orange drink for five cents. Her business was a success and in time my mother, the ninth of Bubbe’s ten children would take over her station at the pushcart after school. Bubbe would go home and make dinner for the family.
My mother tells me, “Once when I was in high school my girlfriends walked by and saw me on South Street all hunched over, carrying buckets of hot water to drain the steam ovens into the sewer. I almost died from embarrassment. I looked like an old lady. But that never stopped me from helping my mother. I knew how hard she worked. And boy, was she proud of her business! She’d line up her coins in stacks on the kitchen table at night, nickels on nickels, dimes on dimes. On a good day, she could take in five dollars! At dusk, Zayde would clean up and push the cart to a garage. Then I would go home to do my homework. I was so bored standing at that pushcart all afternoon that I memorized the alphabet backwards! ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA, so there!”
She points her finger at me and smiles when she recites that, which makes me feel like I should be able to do it too. But, I’ve never been that bored. “That pushcart kept our family from starving through the Great Depression and World War Two,” Mom always boasts. I can’t imagine anyone starving with Bubbe around pushing food on them.
Mom was the top student in English at South Philadelphia High School for Girls. She was awarded a copy of ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare’ at graduation. It’s on the top shelf in our dining room. She always loved to write. Now she writes letters to the editor of Philadelphia’s, ‘Evening Bulletin’ when she’s upset about current events. Or if she sees a play that she likes, she writes to congratulate the producer. She never went to college. She decided to work as a bookkeeper after high school, in order to support her aging parents. Now she keeps the books for my father’s store, and assists behind the counter.
Fifteen years ago in 1950, Bubbe and Zayde as well as many of their children and extended family were able to purchase new homes, all of them first time homeowners, in a newly settled section of Northeast Philadelphia. Their home on 6727 Horrocks St. is where Zayde Max died, where Bubbe began to decline and devote her days to worrying about her children. She makes dinner every Friday night for her entire extended family. We eat in shifts around her dining room table. My family lives two blocks away. That’s why I’m always here Bubbe-sitting.
“Vays mere,” Bubbe returns the phone to its cradle. “Claina kinda, claina tzuris. Groysa kinda, groysa tzuris,” she rolls her ‘r’s and her eyes, and baby steps back to me. I don’t know much Yiddish but I can tell from the sound of her sighs that it means something like - small children, small problems, big children, big problems. Her head never stops its rotation back and forth.
“Nu, Momele, drink your milk.” We are back to this. I accept her doting as one of my Bubbe-sitting duties. She can focus on me for a few hours. I know this makes her happy. But I am worried about missing my art class this afternoon.
“If my mother doesn’t show up soon...” I grumble. Now, my head is rotating like Bubbe.
My mother arrives. She is beaming at me as she catches her breath.
“Well done!” She crows. “We’ll hang that up on the kitchen wall!” She puts her packages on the sofa including Myles, who has been asleep slung across her shoulder. She sits down on my chair at Bubbe’s table and drinks my milk, dunking a stray animal cracker from her pocket. She doesn’t stop to take off her heavy, winter coat. The pockets are deep and fat, full of used Kleenex; half sticks of chewing gum and snacks for Myles. I think about how warm that milk must be by now.
Bubbe tells Mom about Uncle Joe’s phone call. She reports other news from within the family. Although we try to keep bad news from Bubbe, to give her less to worry about, she always hears this. She’s like a sponge, absorbing her children’s problems. It’s like she’s trying to protect them from getting sick, losing their jobs, or fighting with each other by suffering for them.
“It’s pretty good, huh?” I say to my mother and Bubbe. I point to my artwork, trying to lighten them up. I’m finally seeing the mosaic as a whole image on a wooden board now that I’m done focusing on each section. It’s kind of like our family- Bubbe and Zayde, their ten children and all of their children - all sections to fill in and worry about. But when Bubbe makes dinner, they come together and everybody’s happy, even though they’re really not.
I’m thrilled that I have a finished creation to hang on the kitchen wall next to my older brother Lanse’s woodcuts. Mom says maybe I’ll be an artist when I grow up. She prompts me to pack up my paste, string and leftover stones as it’s time for my art class. She gathers her keys and a prescription to be dropped off, and places them in the pocketbook hanging from her left arm. There is a jar of Bubbe’s homemade soup and a baggie filled with the boiled, tasteless chicken whose flavor was sacrificed for the soup. She puts this in a shopping bag hanging from her right arm. She picks up Myles, slings him across her shoulder, and then takes my mosaic in her hands. We leave Bubbe alone again in her apartment, and begin our descent to the street. Somewhere between the third and fourth step down, either Myles or the chicken shifts. The delicate balance between her burden and my art is thrown off as she grabs for the railing on her right. Wood and iron collide. Purple, pink and white stones cascade the steps filling the spaces of our path below.
“Oh No!!” My mother and I shriek in chorus. Myles, aroused by the panic in our voices, begins sobbing and tries to break free. She clutches him tighter.
“Tt, tt, tt, tt, tt,” Bubbe’s head, rotating out of control, emerges from behind the screen door. “You worked so hard, tt, tt, tt, tt.”
“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry...” My mother’s repetition isn’t helping.
“It’s OK! I know you didn’t mean to drop it.” I start kicking at the stones to show her it’s okay.
“Here Trace, take the chicken. Take the damn chicken!” She’s angry; not at me but at herself for carrying so much that she ended up dropping the artwork. Mom hands a part of her burden down to me, as the stones of my mosaic settle into the cracks in the sidewalk on Horrocks Street.

Back-To-School Fashion Romp

2009-08-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

What a way to ruin a perfect summer vacation. It happens every year. The return of the dreaded ‘Back to School’ signage casts a gloomy pall over the month of August, announcing the death of summer. The only redeeming quality, I always felt, about going back to school was the license it gave to shop. Please join me on this fashion romp through the 1960’s and ‘70’s.

Standing in line at the Marianne Shoppe, Northeast Philadelphia, I am passed the baton.

My best friend Sueann’s older sister Arlene speaks. We listen.

No more miniature golf, bowling or Barbie - start shopping!

Sixth, seventh, eighth grade girls,
we learn to covet conservative colors,
maroon, pink, cranberry but not red,
and white socks are for fairies - get it
straight or you’ll be jive, which is not good.

Initiated into a John Romaine jungle of Ladybugs,
Injuns, Weejuns, Pandora, Velveteen,
initial pins, opal earrings, pierce your heart, pierce your brain.

These things cost money.
More money than our absent fathers collect in their stores and trucks.
Our mothers call themselves twos and threes,
earning pin money from the neighborhood government employer.
Shopping for widgets, they defend our nation.

We try on stretchy bras.

Underpaid, under-lived salesgirls whine,
“You? A bra? Whatya gonna stuff it with cherries? Hmmm?”

Giggling at wayward straps in history,
we search for more things to hide them under.

Underwear,
bikinis for every day of the week,
knee socks not anklets then stockings,
garters, make way for pantyhose, not tights.

We learn to accessorize, glamorize galore,
velour, Nehru, turtlenecks, medallions,
cigarette holders, cigarettes of all kinds.

Standing in line at the Marianne Shoppe, Northeast Philadelphia, we are passed the baton.

Ninth, tenth, eleventh grade girls,
to burn it all in the cool eternal freedom flame,
in the name of hippiedom,
groovy, seldom seen visions of
forests, trees and babbling brooks.

We shag
hair, rugs, dogs.

Bless the beasts
and children
and women
and our older brothers
and cousins fighting
some war somewhere.

Iron your hair.
Unleash the chains of your belt.
Add peace signs.
No more purses of mahogany with
matching case for keys. No more bugs
on sweaters, pins on skirts, try suede
fringies with beads, granny glasses and gowns.

Not a brassiere in sight,
same salesgirl sighs,
“You’re gonna droop and sag and be soorrrrreeee”.

We open our eyes,
pull the fringed purse strings,
tune in, turn on,
drop out of the shopping circuit,
save an occasional trip to the thrift
for flannel shirts from the fifties and
World War Two accessories to
camouflage ourselves from ourselves.

These are the clothes that travel
with us through vines, webs and ivy covered walls,
accessorizing here or there
to pass in hallowed halls of
corporate America, Micro Centers,
organic supermarkets, and the
cinema verite multiplex.

Standing in line at the Marianne Shoppe, Northeast Philadelphia, twenty-five years later, sagging and sorry,
caught without a suit for my father’s funeral,
I am passed the baton.

Bastille Day

2009-07-14T17:56:00.000-07:00

You don't have to be French to celebrate Bastille Day. Here is a memory of a Bastille Day past.

“At least, he died with his boots on!” my mother said. Leave it to Mom to find something upbeat to say about a schnook like Frank Rizzo. Mom admired that in a man -the ability to die and be done with it.
We were in line for the loo at Reading Terminal Market with my aunts Jean, Lena and Bessie, when we heard the news that Frank Rizzo had just suffered a massive heart attack and passed away. He was preparing to run for mayor again (this time against newcomer Ed Rendell), and collapsed at his campaign headquarters. Ed Rendell went on to become a two-term mayor of Philadelphia, then Governor of Pennsylvania.
This was after lunch on July 16, 1991, and before our visit to the Museum of American Jewish History. My older aunts were back from Florida. I thought an outing to this museum would speak to them, acknowledging their role in American history as the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Aunt Jean had been a toddler, Aunt Lena an infant in 1909, when they crossed the ocean in their mother’s arms, and settled in Philadelphia. Here was an exhibit about their experience, to make them feel acknowledged. My mom and dad, lifelong Philadelphians, always relished a trip downtown, especially when a meal at one of their old haunts was on the agenda.
Mom wore her white-patent go-go boots that day. She and I had matching pairs back in 1967, when I was eleven. Mom’s still fit. I suppose she plucked them from the depths of her closet in a spirit of rugged individualism; despite the hand-knitted sweater and hand-me-down pantsuit she wore to please her older sisters. And despite the fact that go-go boots became passé in 1968. Anyway, it was midsummer, the time for white shoes.
A celebration of Bastille Day was occurring at Reading Terminal Market, delaying our visit to the museum. Mom, Dad, I and my aunts always ready for a party, joined the revilers, as if we knew what we were celebrating. Mom practiced her high school French with actors, sporting berets and ruffled aprons. Having never been to Gay Paris, she was content to make do with a faux French field day in Philly. Aunt Bess kept serenading us with, “Que sera sera...” until I mentioned that she was singing in Spanish, not French. So, she hummed it for the rest of the day. I carried our croissants and cafe au lait to a table across from a woman and man in business attire, rapt in discussion. Aunt Jean sat down and immediately launched into a celebrity sighting. “Gladys Knight! Gladys Knight!” She wouldn’t stop pointing until the woman at the table across from us looked up, and acknowledged her, first with a worried look, and then a smile. I sunk in my chair.
“Thanks for the compliment, although I’m sorry to disappoint you,” the woman responded. “I’m not Gladys Knight.” She returned to her discussion, and we to our croissants. But Aunt Jean kept following people with her eyes as they walked by, half expecting The Pips to show up after a short break.
As we were leaving I heard Gladys confide to her associate, “Y’ know, my family thinks I look like Gladys Knight. She’s not just some crazy, old, white lady saying we all look alike.” I shared this with my family in the car. Aunt Jean beamed.
“See, I’m not just some crazy, old, white lady,” Aunt Jean kept repeating. She felt acknowledged. We hardly needed to visit the museum after that.
At the museum, we procured a wheel chair for Aunt Bess. She tired easily, which we would later find out was due to a growing stomach cancer. But for today, “hmm hmm hmm, hmm hmm...” Aunt Lena forged ahead, accustomed to leading and protecting her clan. Dad, despite his recent knee replacements and cancer surgery, insisted on pushing the wheel chair. He had been a professional boxer in his youth. This formative experience now proved invaluable for fighting his ultimate opponent, prostate cancer. In his zeal to prove his worth, pound for pound in the arena of aging, he sometimes over compensated. Like on this day for instance, when he pushed Bessie’s wheel chair in fits and starts, licking at Lena’s heels, until Lena screeched, “Ouch! Abie, how many times do I have to tell you..”
Lena and my dad harbored a lifetime of resentment toward each other. He resented Lena’s overprotective control of her family. Lena resented that he was never the provider she’d expected for her baby sister. Today they were duking it out in subtle nudgings with a wheelchair.
As usual, none of this dented my mother’s enthusiasm. She approached each display with the exuberance and curiosity of the baby sister and lifelong learner. This was her role in the family. Of ten children, she was the only one to graduate high school and further her education. The older children had to leave school in the eighth grade, to keep the family afloat during the Great Depression. Mom never stopped showing them her gratitude and joie d’ vie.
Returning home to Philadelphia, after ten years away, gave me the opportunity to appreciate days like this with my parents and aunts, before illness and death separated us. Bessie and my dad died the following year in 1992. Aunt Jean died in 1995. Lena and my mother lived on until 2004. Lena forged through the indignities of aging in stoic denial. The only reason she died at the age of 95 was because her favorite doctor was out of town, and she refused to take antibiotics prescribed by a visiting physician.
But Mom did not die with her boots on. Her off-the-cuff response to Rizzo’s death back in 1991 was prescient of her own impending barefoot demise. After ten exuberant years of retirement, she kicked off her go-go boots in 2001 and sunk into the deep depression that camouflaged her demented brain. Nothing she could wear could hide the fact that she wanted to die. Jealous of her friends dropping like flies, “They’re the lucky ones,” she’d say, while her life lingered on in a liminal, living hell.
But, if Mom, like Frank Rizzo, had died on Bastille Day in 1991, in her white-patent go-go boots running around Reading Terminal Market, speaking French and eating pastry, I know that my shock at her swift and untimely loss would have been just as difficult as her slow, painful decline. As her caregiver I learned that we cannot choose how or when we die. However, if given the choice, I’d prefer not to die with my boots on, or to suffer the barefoot descent to oblivion. I’d like to be given time for a clear-headed assessment, time to appreciate what is and what was, and time to hum what will be, will be.

Aunt Jean

2009-06-30T18:13:00.000-07:00

On July 4th, smother your hot dog with "the works" - mustard, onions, sauerkraut & pepper hash. Here is a recipe mixed in with some history which I hope you'll relish!

Aunt Jean read philosophy on the #50 trolley as it bounded down Fourth Street in fits and starts toward Passyunk Avenue. Rocking back and forth in her seat as if she were praying, she read and swayed until the brakes squealed and wheels ground to a screeching halt for the fifth time. Then she closed her book, grabbed the pole beside her and stood erect, climbed down the steps and walked the block to Lenny's Hot Dog Stand, where she sold sandwiches.
On Saturdays when I was ten, I rode the trolley and walked to Lenny’s along with her. She fed me, before I walked on to my art class at Seventh and Catherine Streets in South Philadelphia.
Aunt Jean stuffed hot dogs, fish cakes, mustard, chopped onions, sauerkraut and homemade pepper hash into warm buns, and handed them over the counter to customers she addressed as "Baby" and "Doll."
"Hey Baby, what can I get you?"
"Something to drink doll?"
She must've said this at least 50 times a day, never wearing out her smile.
“Eydie Gorme! Sugar, no cream, right?” Aunt Jean complimented her customers, citing a slight resemblance to the popular celebrities of the day, to make them smile.
Aunt Jean wore pink, frosted lipstick to match her painted fingernails. Her hair was set and heavily sprayed to a ‘J’ I thought, with a flip at the bottom. Her uniform was white, embroidered with "Jean" in red above the chest pocket. Her freshly polished white shoes were flat, wide, and made for comfort and support as she stood all day in a ten by twelve foot trailer, at an open window above a slight counter. Inside were steam ovens with stainless steel doors and black knobs on top, which she flung open with a large pronged fork to pluck moist doggies and plump patties of potatoes and fish.
Babobop! The doors bounced and settled backwards, as steam enveloped her, and the acrid smell of hot fermented cabbage and freshly chopped onions permeated the air, inside and out. She must've smelled that in her dreams. Sauerkraut was kept in a bowl in the oven. Its overflow doused the steaming hot dogs with a signature tang. But pepper hash was what scored Lenny's Hot Dogs its local fame. Bubbe Ida's recipe from the old country - a few carrots, a whole green pepper, a head of cabbage, white sugar and distilled white vinegar, all chopped together.
“How much sugar and vinegar?” New employees would ask.
"Sh'terein! Just throw it in!" Aunt Jean said with a slight wave of the right hand, repeating her mother's Yiddish words and recipe.
She arrived early each morning to light the urns and chop vegetables. This was her job, performed as if it were a chosen profession.

On Tuesdays before I started kindergarten, Aunt Jean emerged from her cubicle of sweet and sour steam, to spend her day off with me. We had a standing date for breakfast at Linton's on Castor Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia where we lived.
On Tuesdays, Aunt Jean wore black. Her blouse was off-the- shoulder and her skirt was flared out by the stiff, layered crinoline beneath. It sounded crinkly, as if I were forming snowballs, when I pressed against her skirt. Her black heels clopped on the street in short, quick steps. We took my stroller in case I got tired, but I usually walked beside her, holding on to the handle. We would need the stroller later to hold our purchases. We didn’t bother with sidewalks as we made our way toward Castor Avenue. The up-and-down of sidewalks was hard to negotiate with heels and a stroller. We walked in the street, alongside the curb. Aunt Jean trusted that drivers would see us. Indeed, they often slowed down just to look at her.
Aunt Jean liked her coffee black, her toast dry and her cigarettes unfiltered.
“Short stack, side of toast, hold the butter,” Bea, our steady waitress, announced over the microphone to the cooks, as we entered Linton’s.
Heaping dishes of sunny side up eggs, bacon, fried potatoes and thick pancakes with a scoop of butter on top that looked like melting ice cream, rolled out of the kitchen on a long conveyor belt. We always sat where I could follow the route of my perfectly plate-sized stack. I couldn’t smell much of anything except for cigarette smoke. Aunt Jean took long, languorous drags on her cigarette, held the smoke in her chest, then exhaled with a deep sigh. She relaxed back into her chair. The cigarette sat perched on the elegant pedestal of her consciously positioned fingers and tapered, painted nails. I knew that she had taught piano with those fingers, and I’d seen her play duets with her daughter. What I didn’t know at that time, was that she had been offered a career as a classical pianist in New York, when she was a young woman, but her mother was afraid to let her go. Instead, she was paid to improvise on the keyboard in silent movie houses in Philadelphia during the nineteen twenties.
“Can you teach me to play piano?” I’d ask.
“I don’t have the patience to teach or play any more,” she said from behind her smoky curtain at Linton’s.
“But, how about you?” She’d lean forward, holding her cigarette like a pointer toward my face. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“An artist,” I ‘d say, while doodling on the paper placemat.
“What do you like to draw?”
“Stars,” I’d say, showing off the blue, intersecting lines on my paper canvas.
“They sparkle, just like you! You’ll be anything you want because you’ve got personality,” she’d insist.
Then we’d walk out of Linton’s and down the avenue singing, “’cause you got personality, walk with personality, talk with personality, smile with personality, charm…”*
We’d end up at Woolworth’s five and dime store, where she bought my crayons. For herself she chose a new lipstick, perhaps a bottle of nail polish or a stiff, sandy emery board.

Aunt Jean and I remained close for 35 years, until she died of emphysema. In her later years, I became her confidant. She told me about her husband Leon.
“He said he was sickly, and didn’t want to have children. So I had three back-alley abortions, and almost bled to death the third time. When I became pregnant again, the doctor said, ‘You better have this baby.’”
“When you’re young, you do dumb things,” Aunt Jean said. “I could've had four children, like your mother.”
The fourth pregnancy resulted in a daughter whom she adored, fretted over, and raised alone. Her daughter was born with a hip deformity and had to wear a bar separating her legs for the first five years of her life. She needed to be carried, and her sickly husband wouldn’t carry her.
“Divorce him. What good is he?” Jean’s sister Lena advised.
“I liked him well enough, but Lena kept nagging,” Jean said. “And perhaps she was right. He wasn’t much help.”
So she divorced him. Aunt Jean and her daughter moved in with her parents, never asking for child support from Leon. Meanwhile, sister Lena remained unhappily married for 55 years.
“When I turned 50, I got a nose job and started going to dances,” Aunt Jean said. “I met a man and we dated for awhile, then he told me he was married with children. And yet he went to singles dances! We continued until I said, ‘Enough. Enough, already!’ I never dated again. All my life, I lacked confidence. I joined the library, thinking books would help.”

Aunt Jean sold sandwiches most of her life for her brother Lenny. She read self-help and philosophy books while shuttling to and from work. She took care of her nieces and nephews on her days off. She gave her money to her daughter and grandchildren.
When she retired, she kept busy and remained social by making weekly dinners for her family. Osteoporosis robbed her bones of minerals and stature. Her hands shook wildly while salting the soup she prepared for her family. At eighty, she cut a familiar figure in the neighborhood, bent over her shopping cart for support, pushing slowly and carefully toward Castor Avenue. She’d return home with it full of groceries for her weekly soiree.
Aunt Jean pushed ahead toward each new day, filling her life with simple pleasures, deflecting her larger dreams. When I consider the forces that helped shape her life, I can understand why. Aunt Jean grew up in an immigrant family. Her parents arrived in Philadelphia from Russia in 1909. Jean was four. They lived in tenement slums, until they got a foothold. She and her nine sisters and brothers depended on each other for emotional support, while their parents struggled to feed and clothe them.
“F’moch dinah pisk! Shut your mouth! Open your eyes. Watch. Listen. Learn. Don’t make trouble.” This is what Jean heard.
This impacted Jean’s life decisions. She didn’t want to disrupt anything or make trouble. She just wanted to please. Her attitude towards her dreams was inherited from her struggling parents. Who are we to dream such dreams? Just be good-natured and fit in. That’s all she could hope for. She knew it wasn’t enough. Still, she couldn’t oppose the people she loved. Simpler became easier for her.
I fight this tendency in myself to fall back on what is easier, diluting my spirit. But I feel we all have guardian angels, and Aunt Jean guards my dreams. At times in my adult life, when I have felt deeply overwhelmed by a task and ready to succumb to the prevailing winds, she has visited me. She arrives early in the morning, lights my urn and sings the song in my heart. I awaken and walk into the day with confidence and personality.

* Lloyd Price topped the rhythm & blues and popular music charts in 1959 with his song, ‘Personality.’

Recipe for Pepper Hash

My grandmother Ida Kravitz, was one of the early hot dog vendors. During the Great Depression, she was known as Mom, selling hot dogs with the works - mustard, onions, sauerkraut and her own recipe of pepper hash (she couldn’t afford the pickle relish) from a pushcart on the corner of Fourth and South Streets in South Philadelphia. She charged five cents and included a complimentary orange soda. She supported a family of thirteen from her efforts. In the late forties, she sold the business to her son Lenny, who created a chain of hot dog stands lasting through the seventies in Philadelphia and Margate.
The economy has changed again. It’s rare now for Mom and Pop to succeed in the free market. Hot dogs have changed for better or worse depending on whom you talk to. One thing remains the same. The recipe for life that Mom carried across an ocean from Mother Russia is still contained in a forkful of pepper hash. Life can be sweet and sour. If you respect, honor and make something beautiful of it, while it may bite, it will never lose its appeal.

Mom’s Pepper Hash

One head of cabbage, minced
Two large green peppers, minced
Two large carrots, minced
One cup sugar
One cup distilled white vinegar
One half cup water -or more if vinegar taste is strong
Salt to taste

Prepare vegetables. Add dry and liquid ingredients. “Sh’terein!” Mix and taste as you go. Smother your hot dogs with “the works” -mustard, onions, sauerkraut and pepper hash.

South Philly Southpaw

2009-06-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

Father’s Day will come and go. Some will spend time with their fathers; others will remember or try to forget. Fathers give the gift of life and, if you are lucky, they give more. If you are really lucky, when they are gone you have something memorable to say or display. Sometimes as children, we don’t appreciate what we have. Often as teenagers, we keep our hearts sealed from our parents. But memory saves us from ourselves. We grow older and our memories become the stories we savor and share.
I’m thinking about a story my dad shared with me not long before he died. He was a professional boxer in the 1930s and ‘40s, long before I knew him. My dad was “Irish Abe,” the South Philly southpaw who boxed his way through larger cities and smaller towns. As the youngest son of Jewish immigrants from Russia who settled into the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Fifth and Wolf Streets in South Philadelphia, Dad spent Saturdays in synagogue with his father and Sundays in church with his baseball buddies. When he was 12, his father died. Dad’s life became consumed with sports, and trying to make a buck to help his widowed mother. At 15 years old, he established himself as an amateur fighter, won 50 fights and many titles. The local parish priest attended the fights and recognized him. Dad recalled, “The priest jumped into my corner and remained there throughout the three rounds, cheering and yelling for the boy from his parish.”
The following week the promoter of the show presented Dad with a pair of boxing trunks - blue on one side with a white stripe and Star of David. The other side was kelly green with a gold stripe and harp. The Jewish kid, Abie Kauffman became Irish Abe of 5th and Wolf. Then, in his senior year at Central High as a lettered athlete, Dad turned down a baseball scholarship to Penn State and chose instead to go pro as a boxer when he was offered what in Dad’s view was the once-in-a- lifetime opportunity.
Professionally ranked as a lightweight contender, he fought anybody and everybody for twelve years. The promoters matched him in all categories, regardless of weight because he could dance around his opponents, give the audience a show and go the distance. One time though he went too far. Somewhere down south in the 1930’s, two locals grabbed him before the fight and taunted, “I hear you’re a Jew-boy. I ain’t never seen a Jew-boy before. Show us your horns! Come on, Jew-boy show us your horns.” He was matched up with the local favorite and asked for his show, but was told to “throw the fight, fix it for the homeboy and don’t tell or you’ll never get outa here alive, ya stinkin Jew.”
Dad rebuffed, “My name is Abraham. I come to fight!” And that’s how they read it in the morning papers the day after he beat the hell out of the homeboy. He got out of there fast, and never went back.
Irish Abe went north to New York and west to Chicago fighting the likes of Ike Williams and Willie Pep. He believed that Ike Williams might have been the best fighter of all time, since Ike fought and beat Joe Louis and Ray Robinson. Dad didn’t always win or even get the decision, but the promoters liked him because at the last bell, he was usually still standing.
From his chair in the living room 50 years later, Dad welled up with tears when he spoke of the “squared circle.” He said, “There is no question in my mind that a one-on-one situation like boxing can bring out the best in all of us.”
Although Dad was a stoic through the painful challenges of old age – knee and hip replacements, wrist cartilage removal, dependence on a pacemaker and hearing aid, Dad sobbed when he told me this story from his youth. In the end he braved his ultimate opponent, prostate cancer, and lost the fight.
What did I get from my father? I inherited his muscular frame but not his drive. I can approximate his dimpled smile, but I can’t shine it back at him; as I wish I had done more often in my teens. I can display his photos, tell his story and let my heart go the distance.

The Wishing Well

2009-05-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when my thoughts return to camp. As a child, Camp Council was my second home. My experiences there were formative. You can imagine how I felt a few years ago when I came upon the wishing well.

On a sprawling suburban lawn in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, sits a wishing well. To passersby, it looks as if it was built to compliment the sunny, stone colonial home beyond it. It’s a pleasant accent to the well-manicured lawn. But a closer look will reveal names carved into the top ledge of the well. These names are unrelated to this home or any of the other homes in the neighborhood. Trace the timeworn cement embossed letters with your fingers and travel back to a time when this same wishing well, in this same spot, sat in the center of Camp Council. Camp Council existed from 1925 until 1986 as a summer place for urban, Jewish youth from Philadelphia.
When I attended camp from 1963 until 1974, it was all girls. For me, it was a refuge from the taunts of my three brothers and the other boys on the block who only let me play sports with them when their older brothers were not around. Apparently, playing stickball with girls was an embarrassment. At camp, I became an athlete, a swimmer, gymnast, singer, and a writer of spirited songs and poems - about camp. This was my home away from home where I developed self-confidence, experienced acceptance and even popularity. Where I had the nerve to sing in a talent show and the nurturance to learn with alacrity any new skill presented. This was where I actually enjoyed being a girl among girls and witnessed girls who were strong and tough, who could hammer nails and hit a softball really far. Also, I saw girls with beautiful long hair and incredible singing voices who could play guitar, piano and sight read music; and girls who could make a Friday night service meaningful to a ten year old, with stories and songs about friendship, nature and the nature of friendship. I came away understanding that I could be any one of those girls, and I would be valued.
Camp seemed worlds away from home, although the actual distance between them was thirty miles. Things happened so differently there. Camp was my Oz, Northeast Philadelphia - my Kansas. This realization began during my first summer at camp when I was seven-and-a-half. It was July Fourth. We had an evening activity of skits and songs. All day there were rumors about fireworks, but none so far. At the conclusion of our final song, we had milk and cookies and headed back to our bunks to be tucked in with a goodnight kiss. Still no sign of fireworks. The lights went out, the counselors left, the complaints began.
“No fireworks!! If I were home... I’m never coming back here again...” I couldn’t
believe this was how this day would end. I said a silent prayer for fireworks. The voices trailed off as sleep overcame us. All of a sudden, we were awakened by, “Attention all campers and counselors, attention all campers and counselors:
Put on your bathrobes and slippers, and hurry down to the softball field for
fireworks!” I couldn’t believe it. This would never happen at home, where bedtime meant bedtime! In seconds, we were racing to the field in the dark. I remember the older girls with their hair wrapped around orange juice cans, wearing fuzzy slippers, and bounding down from the hill. I remember marveling at that big sky filled with light, as I sat on the bench at the third baseline. I remember the rush of night air through my pajamas and the excitement of the unexpected at the eleventh hour. I got the sense that anything can happen if you want it badly enough. I returned each year until I was eighteen with fireworks in my heart for camp.
In 1972, during my summer as a junior counselor, we built a wishing well - the junior counselors’ gift to the camp. Uncle John guided us through every layer of stone but we did much of the grunt work. We lifted heavy rocks out of the stream by the campfire site, loaded them into a wheelbarrow and hauled them to the office circle where we built the wishing well. I was sixteen. I felt so strong and healthy, mixing cement in the midday sun, and watching the stone wall grow higher and higher, as did our appreciation of each other and ourselves. When the well was finished, and we carved our names into the top layer of cement, we felt - accomplished.
So let passersby think that the wishing well is just a lawn ornament on somebody else’s property. Council Campers know that it leads to a bottomless source of laughter, song, friendship and an enduring spirit that you can access simply by thinking about camp.

Back to Camp Weekend:May 23-25, 2009
Attention all campers, families, friends, and anyone who has ever wanted to go to camp, or go back to camp:
Please join the ‘girls’ of Camp Council for a back to camp weekend of fun, frolic and forever-young feelings. Come away with us to Camp Golden Slipper in the Pocono Mountains from May 23-25th, 2009. From the pajama breakfast until the campfire embers die away, you will feel transported back to the magical summers of youth. Your inner child will thank you and so will your children and grandchildren. So bring the gang for swimming, boating, singing, sports, crafts and general silliness. All meals and lodging in bunks included. And of course, all the bug juice you can drink.
Call Fern @ 610-494-2848 for more details. See you soon!!!

Too Happy Mother

2009-04-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote this a couple of years ago when Amity was ten. It only gets worse!

I am an embarrassment to my ten year old daughter, Amity.
She says, “Here Mom, take the cat’s cradle.”
She extends her complex world of string to me. She’s critical of my clumsy interception. I can’t hand off without losing the design. I love trying. She’s critical of that, too. “Just do it Mom, don’t be so happy about it.”
My enthusiasm, which once bolstered her attempts to walk and spurred her efforts to read, now makes her cringe. The age of double digits arrives with an attitudinal shift.
I wish Amity could’ve known my mother in her heyday. She was the most enthusiastic person I’ve ever known.
“I’m going to the opera tonight, root-toot-toot!” my mother crowed to my best girlfriend’s mom.
“Root-toot-too-oot,” we mimicked her, scowling at her joy.
She was way too happy for two ten-year-olds to handle. It was embarrassing, having such a happy mother. Mom cherished her nights at the opera. It was her escape from the mundane life she’d come to expect; her ticket to ride to the rapturous places in her heart and dangle her toes in the creative spring. She came home warbling.
Children are naturally effusive, but as they grow, learn to suppress strong emotion to appear mature. They equate maturity with seriousness, and expect their adults well done, never rare. Sudden eruptions of happiness rattle them.
Last weekend, Amity and I enjoyed the show Wicked for the third time. This is something we can still share. But now, she warns me as the curtain rises, “Don’t get too hyper, Mom.”
She knows the moments when I’m likely to rise from my seat in an attempt to defy gravity. She’s already preparing to hold me down.
She whispers things to me like, “Check out the set changes,” and “That didn’t happen last time.”
She retains contact in an attempt to curb my enthusiasm. I refuse to acquiesce. Wicked is my current root-toot-toot.
I suspect that Amity’s embarrassment will separate us throughout her teenage years. But later when life extends its complicated designs, I hope that together we’ll embrace the root-toot-toot moments.
Happy Mothers' Day everyone.

Easter Bonnet by Tracy Kauffman Wood c. 2008

2009-03-31T11:54:00.000-07:00

Hope you enjoy reminiscing with me about the trials of the season. Happy Spring!

At Northeast Philadelphia’s Solis-Cohen Elementary School in the 1960’s, the annual Easter Parade was a rite of spring. From September through March, we students yearned for the day when the new season’s light found us marching around the school auditorium in our Easter bonnets. There were tall Uncle Sam hats and deep bowls of artificial fruit, tables set for ten and tiny jeweled boxes, tool benches and beauty parlor scenarios all balanced on the heads of a collective student body that was 95% Jewish. The coveted prize for our creative efforts was that the chosen people, the kids with the best Easter bonnets, would be photographed by Mrs. Bell for The Chronicle, our school newspaper.
School was an otherwise restrictive place. The creative spirit was subdued in favor of filling our minds with facts. In the classroom, we were required to sit with our hands folded. In the hallways we were admonished to, “Keep your hands to yourselves!” But here was a day when we were encouraged to use our hands to create a bonnet, displaying our creative selves. We revered this day and kept it holy.
For most of the children in our school, Easter and the related festivities, was not about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. We didn’t know from this. Sure, we dyed eggs with food coloring and vinegar, made Easter baskets out of construction paper and fake grass, and greedily inhaled the delightful aromas of jellybeans and chocolate, canceling out every other classroom smell. Who wouldn’t adore these rituals that culminated in a parade?
The problem was it all happened to coincide with Passover, the Jewish celebration of freedom and renewal, observed at home. One ritual of the season was to rid the house of chametz - any leavened bread or food not specifically made for Passover, including the contents of Easter baskets. This heightened my fascination with the world of Easter candy turning it into a guilty pleasure. For me, Jewish suffering meant having to eat the cheap, chocolate-covered jellies that passed for candy at Passover. Why bother when there was a world of pastel, candy coatings to explore?
The Easter basket was not hard to relinquish. The paper was flimsy, the grass messy and hard to contain. The hard-boiled eggs needed to be eaten or they’d rot. So I dipped them into the salt-water tears of our Passover seder. I sang Let My People Go, opened the door for the prophet Elijah and invited all who were hungry to come and eat. But all of the rituals of the Passover meal could not satisfy the saccharine urges of my springtime flirtation.
In this season, my spirit could only be set free by the miraculous arrival of the marshmallow peeps - a local, seasonal product on the shelves of Famous Delicatessen. The soft, sugary pink and yellow peeps chirped a heavenly message to me on Easter Sunday when I was sent on an errand for smoked fish. Squishy and deeply sensual, their birthday cake fragrance was in direct opposition to the briny, deli smell that usually overcame me as I entered the store. You could press on them through the cellophane and they would respond. Once you had a bird in hand, you could bite off the head, (with or without front teeth) clench the sandy sugar between your back molars, and allow a moistened glob to slide down your throat. What an escape from the confusion of the season. I was tasting paradise, while fleeing Egyptians. But this flight was fraught with guilt. They were definitely not ‘Kosher for Passover’. To absolve myself, I decided to create a homeland for the marshmallow chicks and all of their sugar-coated descendants in my Easter bonnet. What a great, sanctioned excuse to experience the forbidden sweets.
I chose a straw hat with a deep, scooped out rim - perfect for a pastoral scene. Feathering my nest with multicolored Easter grasses, I buried the leftover hard boiled eggs from Passover in layers of tangled grass. I pretended that the eggs hatched into hollow, chocolate bunnies - the children of Israel with pink noses. They romped through my hat dodging jelly beans and foiled, football eggs. I taped chocolate marshmallow rabbits with long ears around the circumference of the rim as soldiers to protect their homeland. The peeps, pink and yellow between mounds of chocolate, were set free and in their element. So was I.
A heavenly aroma descended upon me as my mother and brother lowered my Easter bonnet onto my head, come the morning of the parade. They spotted my trial stroll around our living room to make sure I could manage such a large hat. They attached strings
with clothespins on each side for me to hold, so I could keep the bonnet centered. There was a palpable air of excitement in my classroom that morning. My classmates and teacher knew that my Easter bonnet would be a contender.
With our heads covered, we ascended to the auditorium. It was a sunny day and the dappled light from the windows seemed to be singling out, not the brightest nor the most beautiful people, but the art kids - the most creative children in the school. I, and my fragrant, bounteous, and heavy hat was chosen, as were nineteen others. Mrs. Bell placed me in the front-row, center of her photographic composition. Even the chosen kids were admiring the scenario on my head and smacking their lips as we held our positions on stage. Mrs. Bell, looking through her camera and not quite satisfied, asked me to move slightly to my left. I was sitting on my sleeping calves dreaming of fame next year in Jerusalem. She became impatient with my slow progress, put down her camera, placed her hands on my shoulders and in one jerking motion, moved me to the left. Except only the top half of my body moved. My legs stayed where they were, my neck twisted and my hands were not gripping the clothespins of my bonnet. My peeps and all their descendants were cast about in a sudden and violent diaspora spreading across the stage and down the slippery, sloping aisles of the auditorium.
A collective “Oh my G-d!” swept the room. Children lunged for chocolate and chased jelly beans. Teachers were forced back into control mode on a day they assumed would be restful. My sugar-coated promised land went fallow. The more benevolent souls began gathering and returning my candy. Mrs. Bell moved me to the second row, left corner of the picture. I made it into the pages of the Chronicle looking startled. I’d been cast out of the land of milk chocolate and Bit o’ Honey to a border settlement. I ate the scant remains of my hat in the girls bathroom at recess.
The following year I wore a white lampshade on my head with a single strand of black jelly beans dangling from its middle. Simple yet elegant, and very popular with the Agnostics.

This just in!

2009-03-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

Good news! My poem 'She who carries' received second place in the Ardmore Poetry Festival. You saw it first here. To read it again, please scroll down. Yeay!

One More Day

2009-03-02T14:34:00.001-08:00

It was Monday, my day to write. I began by journaling in my car, parked in the lot of a busy shopping center. I tried to freely associate the surrounding sounds and smells of the parking lot with whatever impressions came up for me. Nothing came. Determined to find meaning from memories, I struggled and mined for depth in my imperceptible scrawl. I yearned for the seamless flow from impression to insight to expression. What I really needed was a bathroom break. I left the car and walked over to the bagel shop.
"Perhaps a cup of coffee will get me started," I thought upon entering.
“Sweetheart!” she called out to me from in front of the candy counter. “Let’s indulge!”
Zapped from my silent musings, my body trembled and my eyes confirmed what my heart never doubted.
“Ma?” It came out more like a quack than a human sound. “Ma, you’re dead! How are you here?” No one else seemed to hear me. My sounds lacked breath.
"C'mon Trace. Let’s indulge. How about those chocolate pretzels with the nonpareils? They really have nice stuff here.”
She winked at me, licking her lips. She appeared childlike and energetic, hellbent on having fun. This was my mother, before depression, dementia and death came between us. What do you say when your dead mother shows up demanding chocolate?
“Mom, maybe we ought to have lunch first,” I suggested. “Chinese food?” I asked, raising my eyebrows in co-conspiracy. She liked that.
"Trace, you always know the right way to do things.”
I allowed her compliment to sink in. My mother and her older sisters used to praise me for simple things. I always brushed it off, wondering what the big deal was. Now, that all of them had passed away, there was no where I could go for such easy ‘A’s in life. I missed them.
Mom and I left Delancey Street Bagels holding hands and skipping across the parking lot toward The China House. She opened the door for me and plopped herself into a booth.
“I’ll have won ton soup, shrimp in lobster sauce and an egg roll please,” she announced to me and the waiter, not wasting any time.
“I’ll have the same.” I was following her lead, suspending all logic,reason and doubt to savor the moment.
“Trace, you never order that!” She seemed flattered. “But it’s a shame, we could’ve shared one dish.”
“Do you want me to call the waiter back?” I asked.
“Oh no, no...” She waived the thought away. “So, what’s new sweetheart?”
What’s new? Where should I start? What could I say to her? A million things and nothing that seemed as important as the fact that she sat across from me in a booth at a Chinese restaurant.
“Maybe I should ask you 'What's new?' Mom.”
With a fried noodle, she scooped up the remains on her plate, and then worked on mine.
“Aren’t you going to finish your shrimp, Trace?” She feigned concern as she popped another of my shrimps in her mouth.
Her clothes were familiar; unstained as from before her illness. She wreaked of Secret of Venus, the perfume she favored when I was a child. I basked in her fragrance, reminiscent of dinners out and nights on the town. Between that, the chirping of her voice and the sense of adventure that enveloped us, I was willing to believe that time, space and mortal affliction could be transcended. I wondered what I should tell her about family, friends, her grandchildren and her beloved house. How much did she already know?
“Do you have today’s paper, and dessert?" she asked the waiter.
I was surprised that current events would be important to her.
“See what’s at the theater, Trace. We could probably just make a 2 o’clock matinee. Seen any good shows lately?”
I confessed that I’d been too busy to keep up her legacy of loyal theater patronage.
“Besides work and family, I have my writing now, Mom.”
“Good for you! I’m proud of you. Writing is in our family. But you need inspiration. I always feel great when I’m watching a show. Let’s grab that chocolate and head downtown.”
We arrived at the Academy of Music in time for the matinee. The show was Wicked. I’d seen it before but I had longed to share it with Mom. Ever since her death, whenever I sat in the audience of a theater, it seemed like she was embracing me at the high points. When I saw Peter Pan with Cathy Rigby, my eyes brimmed with her happy tears. When I yelled, "Beautiful, beautiful!" to the orchestra, I knew she was inhabiting me.
I started wondering if this day wasn't all in my head. Perhaps I was alone at the theater feeling her presence as before, and imagining the rest of this crazy scenario?
Mom broke off a piece of the chocolate pretzel and placed it into my mouth. She finished the rest and dropped the bag as the curtain rose. There was no denying Mom. She was there defying gravity and every other natural law. At intermission, I sped to the bathroom and returned with M&Ms.
“Wow! They make them with almonds, now.” Mom was ecstatic.
We held hands through the denouement, and clapped for the orchestra until their final note. We exited the empty theater singing, "I'm flying high, defying gravity..." and floated toward the parking lot.
“Should I drive you home now, Mom?”
I was feeling brave and giddy from the day. If she could materialize healthy and strong, why couldn’t her beloved house? She had left it one day, in a demented moment, never to return from what I called, assisted dying. Certainly today had felt more real and right, than her last sick years.
"I’m home Sweetheart, and it’s good. But it’s not life. There is nothing like life. Nothing. It’s too short. It happens in a day like today. Short and sweet. Enjoy it. Fill it with chocolate, Chinese food and days on the town. You didn’t need me to tell you this, but as usual I couldn’t resist the temptation. Thanks Trace, for giving me one more day.”

This month's post was inspired by the memory of my mother who passed away five years ago next Monday on March 9th.

Hi Faithful Readers,
How about becoming interactive this month? Try suspending your disbelief, reason and judgement. Ask yourself, "What if...?" and write about it. I've shown you mine. Now show me yours.

She, who carries

2009-02-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

Saigon, 1998

She, who carries the heat and the sea,
is handed to me in a heart beat proud
and strong.Where tiny lungs labor through
time’s phlegmy chest. Rattled breath sacrificing
ying, ying of the ancients,for the comfort
that ah, da da brings. She sings,past the
clutter and our ancestral emphysema.She brings
the heat and the sea, and the promise of continuance.

“Sit up child! Soon you will be a Barbie.”
They prop her up, wipe her nose.

“She, Vietnam?” they ask us.
“Yes,” we submit.
“She’s lucky!”
“We’re lucky!” It’s plain to see.
In our first unbridled cyclo ride,
grappling iron fingers grappling with new life.

Ardmore 2008

She, who carries the heat and the sea,
slender tween sings and sways to a beat proud
and strong. No trace of labor or sense of lack,
as she casts a line toward adolescence.
Deep within her form, like so many flecks of rice,
polished by the ages, her first unbridled cycle
speaks the promise of continuance.

She, who carries the heat and the sea,
seasons her language with salty shards of youth,
melts chocolate hearts in her palm.
Her blood remembers
the heat and the sea,
where generations of fish spawned
generations of family under thatched roofs,
saluting the heat of dawn,
swaying with the tide at dusk.
She carries their blood,
but her memory is free.

She, who carries the heat and the sea,
beholden to no one, breathes
confidence, speaks her mind,
grapples with new emotions.
She will be, what she will be.
But the blood that flows from her
heart to the sea, carries me.
Lucky. Lucky.

White Noise (for Tony)

2009-02-01T11:55:00.001-08:00

Oh,
sleeping son
of faded stars, blue
blood rhythms seething.
Ensconced in layers of dusty
sheets, blankets of camphor and
must. Generations of gentiles carefully
coiffed screech to a muted
halt in this black room
with white noise.
When
you shrug, I am
Atlas, robust and red.
When dreams are accessed,
dust must fall. Daily our rhythms
meter, teetering on the brink.
Oh,
who will release
the shudder, the ancient
worry, exposing our pastures
for green. Future is written in
sepia-toned captures of dreams.

Merrie's Threads

2009-01-08T17:32:00.000-08:00

Merrie’s Threads

I know a gal named Merrie
with a spirit like... Christmas.
Well, a secular christmas,
big, bawdy, unbound.

She is merry,
living on a thread of hope.
Give her an inch,
she’ll take a yard
and wrap it ‘round those she loves,
tight, and hang on for dear life.

She bargains...
“Dear Life,
I love you, I want you
I have a simple dream for more life-
A house in the country for me and my kids,
to watch them grow and flower.
I love to work, making pictures and money,
so I shouldn’t have to ask any more.
That’s all I ask.”

She tugs for more thread,
and rushes toward the cure.
“You got it, I’ll take it. I’m there!”
She wraps the thread around all that is left of
her four-foot-ten-inch body,
becoming invincible, living on hope,
devouring doubt.

She grows big, bawdy, unbound.
“I’m still here!” she shouts. “I am life itself!
How can this stop me? Can we party now?
I’ll take some more of that!”
She takes till she’s full of hope and nothing less.
Unstoppable!

She’s a girl on a thread so long,
it must be extended from heaven-

Ancestors hard at work,
trimming hours, days, weeks, months,
years off of lives already lived.
They don’t need them any more.
They want her to have them.

She gathers up her hand-me-downs from heaven.

“Schmates,” her grandmothers whisper.
“Zie Gezunt. Wear them in good health!”

Proudly she wears their hugs and kisses,
till they’re worn out.
Then, yanks for more thread
and gets it!

Only heaven knows how long the thread is,
but when there is no more,
there will still be hope-
the worn, warm, comfortable clothing of the soul.

January Post to Remember Merrie

2009-01-08T17:26:00.000-08:00

I am dedicating my January post to my cousin Merrie Renee Choder Johnson, who passed away in January of 2007. Merrie left behind her three beautiful children, her devoted parents, family and friends. Our lives are forever changed for having known her.
Her courageous battle to stay alive gave me an appreciation for the gift of life, and for the heroic person she became because of her illness. I have posted my poem, ‘Merrie’s Threads’, written when it occurred to me early in her illness, despite a world of love and prayers, that Merrie would not triumph over breast cancer. I thought ahead to her funeral, and what comfort I might bring. I’m grateful I was able to share this with Merrie on her thirty-sixth birthday, and was able to perform this, receiving a direct infusion from the ancestors, later that year at her funeral.
I am posting her obituary, as well as a brief visual biography. Merrie was a visual person, a photographer by trade, and this would be her favorite part. Photo credits go to the family collection, Tracy Kauffman Wood, Merrie Renee Johnson, and Anthony B. Wood.
Thank you for allowing me to share this with you. I ask if you are able and so inclined, to please make a contribution toward curing breast cancer, whether it be through the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, 125 S. 9th St., Suite 202, Phila. PA 19107, or by
learning about the work of the Center for Advancement in Cancer Education 300 E. Lancaster Avenue - Suite 100 Wynnewood, Pennsylvania 19096 , or any other way you’d wish. Let’s re-enliven, and fulfill the hope that fueled Merrie.

Merrie Renee Choder Johnson 4/7/70 - 1/4/07

2009-01-08T17:15:00.000-08:00

Merrie Renee Choder Johnson
4/07/70-1/4/07

Merrie Renee Johnson (Choder), 36, died of breast cancer on Thursday January 4, 2007. She is survived by her three children, Megan, 15, Zachery, 14 and Casey, 9. Also, she is survived by her three devoted parents, Sybil Weinstein, Alan Choder and Dennis Weinstein. She leaves her brothers, Greg (Rae) Choder and Daniel (Alyson) Weinstein and her nephew Joshua.
Merrie fought a courageous and unforgettably determined battle against cancer. She was diagnosed in September 2001, with Stage Three breast cancer. The seriousness of this diagnosis never diminished her positive, hopeful attitude. She was determined to be a survivor. And she did survive with gusto and a boisterous spirit for almost six years. She never gave up hope as the disease ravaged her body. She simply adapted to the changes in her body resulting from constant treatments. She wore her bald head and flat chest proudly to tell the world, “If I can get through this, so can you!” She focused on what could never be taken from her-her love for her family and love for life itself. She became well known to the clients and staff at the Oncology Unit at Abington Hospital because when she wasn’t being treated, she was there to chat, joke and bring treats to the other patients. She was proactive in her treatment and her doctors and nurses appreciated the strength, energy and optimism she brought to their collective fight. In December, the hospital awarded Merrie a grant, so that she could be home with her family for Christmas with the necessary help she needed.
Merrie was an artist and comedian. She and her brother Daniel, would turn family dinners into slapstick farce. Everyone remembers Merrie smearing her young daughter Casey’s face into a plate of food before the toddler could start eating and do it herself. With her tremendous regard for family and art, and her whimsical spirit, it made so much sense that she became a wedding photographer. Her clients and colleagues will remember Merrie Renee as a high spirited, hard working perfectionist who obviously loved her job. She began her career working for Lindelle Studios, and grew her own business for ten years well into her battle with breast cancer. She only stopped working recently when it became physically impossible for her. She was supportive to her colleagues and competitors always giving them referrals when she was not available. Her wedding clients usually ended up as friends. Merrie gathered a community of friends and family around her like water droplets gathering strength and merging on a window pane. She leaves us all with her tremendous spirit full of joy, hope and love.

On Turning Fifty 12/16/05

2008-12-16T07:26:00.000-08:00

In the season of my birth, and as I turn fifty, I’m thinking about parents and children, mothers and daughters, my mother, my daughter and me, and how we teach by who we are. All parents wish for their children to be happy. It’s their greatest wish. Children learn how to be happy by watching their parents enjoy themselves.
I learned this from my mother, especially in winter, because she never tried to turn winter into spring for me. She made the most of winter.
In the morning of a freshly fallen snow, we’d take a hike always with the same destination in mind- 'Dunkin Donuts', she loved their coffee. In the afternoon, after all the forts and snowmen were built and destroyed, she’d pack us into her station wagon and take us to Burholme Park for sledding. We’d all pile on top of her and plow down that hill, making the most of a snowy day, before the sun went down. Winter road conditions never stopped her from driving downtown to the theater at night, then Chinatown for a late dinner. Winter cold never stopped her from celebrating New Year’s Eve on the patio, clattering pots and pans, popping noise makers and yelling “Happy New Year!” to the cars racing through her corner stop sign. (The one for which she fought City Hall). New Year’s Day found us shivering on Broad Street while Mummers paraded to the music she loved. In winter, we ran to the Spectrum for the ‘Ice Capades’, her dream, then created our own at ‘Boulevard Ice Rink’. We did all of these things with visions of hot chocolate and ‘TastyKake Chocolate Cupcakes’, her favorites, awaiting our return to her blue and yellow chrome kitchen table.
I was nearly born between the heavy chrome legs of that table on a snowy Sunday in December, just before brunch. My pregnant mother’s water broke in the kitchen and three year old brother Lanse ran upstairs for a towel, and to awaken Dad for a trip to the hospital. I think she gave birth to me prematurely on purpose, in mid-December rather than January, so I shouldn’t miss a party and the holiday vacation.
Throughout her life, my mother’s older sisters “did for her”, allowing her to be their princess. She never crocheted or sewed, she barely cooked or cleaned. They did it for her. She strutted around in the fuzzy winter coats and hand knitted scarves and hats they passed down, and wore them to the opera. My mother had big feet in wide boots. She trampled the snow for me, forging a path for happiness to come sledding through, leaving clear instructions on my heart.

One Beat Home

2008-12-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

One Beat Home
c. 2005

I was back in our house last night, in a dream.

I thought I was done with that.

You asked, “What shade should we use in the front?”

We will make things fresh with paint.

Yes, we, the three of us need this house now.

I can see the steps from down the block,

and the rail which we will paint white.

What would my mom and dad think of this

new shade we pull on their dream?

Their dream house where the kids played in the shade

of the tree whose fruit would be plucked by birds in June.

And Dad would watch and scream at those birds

through the glass, from his chair, with his tea.

From a glass he drank tea, with a bowl of fruit

he left out for me, fruits of blue and green and red.

Which squish when you bite and turn your tongue dark in June.

And Mom on the porch in her suit for the sun

with a snack, and a book and her smile.

I thought I was all done with this,

but who can stop a dream?

A Trip to the Avenooo

2008-11-19T17:58:00.000-08:00

A Trip to the Avenooo
Tracy Kauffman Wood Copyright 1997

The trek to Bustleton Avenue is the earliest excursion I can remember. There was the bank where voices called out from above: “Can I help you?” The marble counters were so high I could never track their source. There were slips of paper within my reach and pens on chains dangling from the sky. I scribbled my heart’s desire and waited. It worked. My mother and I left the bank padding our wallets and ready to shop.
Ben’s Fish Market was next door. It smelled like the ocean. Most of the time we just went there to gawk. Fat men in white aprons armed with nets and clubs patrolled the aisles like policemen between tanks of live carp. “I want that one.” The bony finger of a serious housewife crossed in front of my eyes as I leaned over the sides of the tank. This verbal cue set off the deft motions of the fat man. His arcing net would drop, catch and throw a three footer onto the counter and with two quick conks of the club, knock the life out of it. I’d watch for the final shudder of a dying fish. It reminded me of falling asleep, how my legs would jerk before dreaming.
They would clean the corpses in front of us, and worse in front of the live ones. My eyes would wander back to them. Did they know what I knew? I’d be shaking pretty hard too if I were to be laid out on fancy china, an ugly, colorless, spongy mound garnished with an overcooked carrot slice and a dab of garish horse radish. It all seemed too great a sacrifice. But I’d make it up to them. I’d never eat gefilte fish. I’d rush outside, nose struck by a hardball. A man, stomach tied together with apron strings shoved a block of what looked like wood into the top of a grinder. Out came horse radish, the source of my aching nose. I wasn’t fooled by its neutral color. Later it would be dyed blood red with beet juice.
We escaped the carnage, ducking into Martin’s Wholesale City. This place could cure all ills of the mind and spirit. A blond woman with a raspy voice sat perched on a high stool behind the counter and a thick cloud of smoke. She knew the exact location of every item in the store. “Rubber bands, right side, aisle four, half-way down,” she’d bark from her throne. I wondered if she had legs. I never saw them. She never moved except to light up another cigarette. If you came back to her exasperated, she’d become more specific. “Red, white and blue box, next to the paper clips, underneath the reinforcements, above the scotch tape...” Her eyes kicked into place like lemons in a slot machine as she keyed out an office supply. “Bingo!” she’d say when you arrived at her counter with your rubber bands. I couldn’t wait to shop there for my school supplies. Black-and-white bound hardback books with lined paper called out to me. Only when I owned these would I know what it was like to be a schoolgirl in the world. When that day came, I wouldn’t have to ask where to find them.
We went to Lou’s Deli next because in front of the display cases, they had pickle barrels. Prongs were tied to the barrels for snagging pickles in the brine. There were plastic bags on either side to plop your pickle in, as if it were a goldfish. I never remembered to roll up my sleeve before I leaned in to pluck a fat one. The others would slither up beside my arm. For the rest of the morning, I’d have to endure the acrid smell on my wet sleeve and dripping arm. If I’d wet my pants, I couldn’t have been more uncomfortable. But they sold penny candy next to the cashier to absorb my mother’s change. She preferred Hershey Almonds, I liked Tootsie Rolls. She taught me at a young age, the power of chocolate to chase down sour pickles.
We’d window shop our way home. Images from an adult world filled my mind.
“Will I have bosoms like ice cream cones? The nude mannequins at the ‘Jean Kleven Shoppe’ do.” My mother and aunts didn’t.
“Can I have one of those crystal balls?” Silver balls threw light around the window displays. I wanted to hold one between my hands and look inside for Auntie Em and the wicked witch. But my mother was already in front of Spirt’s Shoe Store.
“What will you choose for your first day of school?” my mother quizzed me. “My sisters and I all got bunions from hand-me-down shoes. Bubbe bought them off a pushcart. They ruined our toes. I always swore, if nothing else, my kids would have new shoes!”
This story was already familiar to me, lingering over the purple velvet MaryJanes. The black suede with sensible strap might be better. What about tap shoes? With each pair, a new image of running, skipping, dancing down winding streets in far off lands enveloped me. Pressed against Spirt’s window, Mom and I dreamed of the day when my perfect toes in brand new shoes would step into line in the world beyond the avenooo.

2008-11-18T19:35:00.000-08:00

Friday Night at Bubbe’s
“See you Friday night at Bubbe’s,” my aunts would call as they rushed off to work or make dinner. My grandmother, Ida Kravitz was called ‘Bubbe’ by her ten children, twenty-four grandchildren and ever increasing number of great grandchildren. Every Friday night, Bubbe’s dining room table became her canvas, stretching centuries, laden with chicken soup, matzah balls, boiled chicken, kugel, challah, bowties and kasha and of course, her own kamish bread. Her family, as well as any other neighbors or friends who picked up on the aroma, crowded into her modest four room row house apartment at 6727 Horrocks Street, to eat in shifts. Those coming directly from work, along with the children would eat first. The second shift poked around the living room looking at the same old photographs, munching on salted peanuts and chocolate kisses, smoking or just squeezing together on the sofa, gulping down the rich, luscious air of Bubbe’s house.
Aunt Jean, just home from work, still wearing her Lenny’s Hot Dogs uniform, would dutifully sit in the same chair each week while Bubbe brought her soup. Aunt Jean served fast food at a hot dog stand at Fifth and Passyunk Avenue all day to people she called “baby” and “doll.” She willingly surrendered her public persona as Bubba’s steamy soup seeped through her. She ended her meal with a Raleigh cigarette. She let me count the coupons. She chewed Dentyne and carried four packs in her handbag, always one there for me.
Aunt Min and Aunt Bess hovered around the table, broad jumping to the refrigerator, should any man or child ask for ketchup or butter. Bubbe couldn’t understand why anyone would need ketchup so you couldn’t find any on the table, and butter was “tref” with chicken. It wasn’t allowed. But, no one knew from want at Bubbe’s house so it was with impish delight that Aunt Minnie and Aunt Bessie saw that the contraband got into the right hands quickly. No one waited very long for anything, in fact the second shift usually ended up at the table with the slow eaters of the first shift, who were unwilling and often unable to give up their thrones. The table talk usually centered around the hot dog business, almost everybody worked for Uncle Lenny except for my parents who had their own luncheonette, Abie’s Hot Dogs at Fourth and Monroe. Aunt Bess worked at Lenny’s on Castor Avenue. Aunt Minnie did not, although her husband Uncle Joe went to work for Lenny after he lost his job in the late nineteen sixties.
Aunt Min and Aunt Bess resembled each other sharing the same face and sense of humor. Aunt Bess was a brunette. Aunt Minnie dyed her hair fire engine red. People would see Aunt Bess working the counter at Lenny’s on Castor and remark, “Oh, you’ve darkened your hair!” “No, you’re thinking of my sister,” she would reply. The word “sister” dripped from her mouth sweet as pie-a-la-mode, famishing any sister-less soul, like me.
Cousin Lily was one of the oldest grandchildren. She was only a few years younger than my mother and was raised together with my mother and her younger brother Lenny, the three youngest children. Lily didn’t work for Lenny and was proud of it. She wore bright, tight clothes over her ample frame and every inch of her said “notice me!!” I imagine this was to be expected from the eleventh child. She complained that the cigarette smoke on Friday night at Bubbe’s irritated her asthma and that there was too much food. She didn’t stay long but like all of Bubbe’s children, she always finished her plate. My Auntie Mame, Cousin Lily drove a convertible and took me away on weekends to Long Beach Island, New Hope, movies and theater. Early on she whet my appetite for the freedom and excitement of the road, as well as the comfortable embrace of returning home.
This was the table where I spent every Friday night for the first twelve years of my life. I was one of the kids who Bubbe Ida fed first. I remember the quiver of Bubbe’s wrinkled, vein striped hands as she carried my bowl of hot soup between them. She didn’t flinch when that steamy broth leaked down her sagging arms towards her elbows. Bubbe crossed an ocean to bring me that soup. Feeding me was her goal. Mortal affliction would not come between us. The soup contained all of her hopes for a better life for herself, her family, her world. It made the struggles of her past as well as the creeping injustices of old age recede into the background, at least on Friday night. When Bubbe lit the candles, she was kindling the fire of the future. I was just thinking about my matzah ball. She infused us, my cousins, my brothers and me, with her fire. She tried to fortify us with her antidote to physical or spiritual suffering. Through her open house and heart, she opened up our hearts and minds toward honoring the good, accepting what comes and creating and recreating something fresh, vital and life affirming to share with the world.
An eternal light shines from Friday night at Bubbe’s.