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.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Back-To-School Fashion Romp
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.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Bastille Day
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.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Aunt Jean
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.
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