By estory
The rooms of our apartment in Brooklyn seemed enormous; great painted caverns with carpeted floors to crawl around in. The tables and chairs around the rooms were like forests and tunnels. Outside, the towering windows overlooked the street where cars flashed past from somewhere out in that vast world on out of sight. Strangers walked by bundled in their coats, clutching their bags. The buildings across the street were full of their own windows, portals onto other, mysterious, inner worlds. People and colorful cartoon characters appeared on the talking television set. My father's aquarium soared above me like the sea of tranquility, full of vivid little creatures swimming in the water between Chinese temple gates and treasure chests blowing bubbles. The Lionel train set my father set up for me in the back room roared around in its own world on silver tracks laid out between plastic houses, barns, train stations and artificial trees.
Always though in this big world was the warm embrace of my mother, and the warm voice of my father. Somehow I learned that my mother made breakfast, lunch and dinner in the kitchen out of metal cabinets, the refrigerator, the gas stove, the electric toaster and the coffee maker. The radio on the refrigerator played my mother's favorite songs: 'Do you know the way to San Jose?' 'California Dreamin' and 'What the world needs now is love, sweet love'. During the day while my father was out my mother would read to me of the Cat in the Hat, and the Big World of Little Adam. In the evening my father would come home from the shop and we would eat dinner and watch that television.
In the winter the snow too was something to discover, cold and white and seeming to come from another world. I remember seeing the white moon in the sky and wondering if the snow came from the moon. The snow transformed apartment buildings into mountains, the elevated train into a covered bridge, telephone poles into snow men and the trees into angels.
A short drive away was St. Paul's Lutheran church where we prayed every Sunday in the sparkling light of the stained glass windows within sight of the altar and its solemn candles. A short walk from there brought us to the park, where an Italian man with a moustache and an accent sold us real Italian ices in the summer time. Down the block was bustling Myrtle Avenue and its strange stores, its crowds of strangers, its traffic and traffic lights, and the elevated train that roared off over our heads into the wider world.
One day my mother took us on our first great journey into that world, to visit my grandmother in Cypress Hills. The stairs up to the El on the street full of hurrying strangers seemed to climb from the street into dizzying heights. The roar of the train stopped me in my tracks. But my mother took hold of my hand and her gentle voice kept repeating: "Take another giant step. Take another giant step. Don't look down now. Take another giant step." The platform was like something suspended in mid air, somewhere in the tops of the buildings. I could see far off over the stores to the sweeping skyline of Manhattan and its skyscrapers. A train came roaring around the bend on its tracks like a great beast, a metal caterpillar. But again my mother took my hand, telling me gently, bending over me, "It's just like your train set at home. Come. Watch your step. The train will take us to Nanny." I looked down as we stepped over the gap between the platform and the train car and saw the street far below, too far down to survive falling. But my mother stepped over it, holding me tight, lifting me into the safety of the car, where at last we could sit down.
The train began running, just like the train in my train set, taking us over the streets of the city and the stores and apartment buildings, beyond any connection back home that I could make out. But we were on our way to my grandmother's, where she would be waiting with her cookies, Hawaiian punch and old, wooden toys.
And then my mother would bring us home again to our own apartment, navigating the streets and station platforms and train lines back to Brooklyn and the familiar windows of Myrtle Avenue. And I discovered that the world was full of adventures, journeys there and back again.
| Author Notes | A few notes here on Memories of this World, which will be unfolding in the ensuing chapters. I envision this as something between Washington Irving's Sketch Book and William Heyer's Noises in the Trees; little sketches of experiences of life, sensations of life, memories that build a soul. These will be much shorter pieces than the short stories I have posted here so far. This first piece is from my earliest memories of the town house where we lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York City in the early sixties, and the impressions that this world made on me there. It is about finding oneself in this world and finding out how to navigate it, through the soft guidance of your parents. It is a world of trains, cars, television sets and radio stations, model train sets and aquariums, old churches and parks and great avenues full of strangers and store windows. They sparked my imagination as much as any landscape would, I guess. To me many of these images became elements of spiritual transformation; the stained glass windows in the church became a vision of heaven, the snow too could create heaven on Earth. Television and radio were magic carpets that could transcend reality. But always at the center of this wild world and its vast expanses was that sense of home, of my mother and father, safely cradling us in this world. The style of the writing hearkens back somewhat to Joyce in Dubliners, a more free flowing stream of consciousness writing that I think suits this format. estory |
By estory
On a rainy, Monday morning the incandescent light brightened our kitchen. The black and white checkered table sat in the middle of room, and we gathered around it. Monday morning always marked the beginning of the week; school and homework for us, the work week for my dad. We didn't have to leave for school until 8:30 but if we had breakfast at seven, we could catch a glimpse of my father sitting at one of the table, before he had to leave. He would have to load his scaffold into the Ford Econoline van, fold the curtains and load them as well, and thread the bundles of curtain tracks and boxes of casters in there too. He and my uncle hung movie screens and curtains in movie theatres and restaurants in the tri state area. Sometimes I would look up the towns and cities he travelled to on an atlas, wondering about his day while he was far away from us.
My dad stood up, finished his coffee, and kissed my mother goodbye. I asked: "Where are you going today, dad?"
"Danbury, Connecticut," he told me.
Then he put on his jacket and went out the door. He wouldn't be back until dark, after supper.
Still, the radio that had travelled with us from our apartment in Brooklyn to our house in the suburbs was in its place on top of the refrigerator, filling the kitchen with music. Every morning during the week my mother listened to 'Rambling with Gambling' and the soft pop music John Gambling played. Dionne Warwick. Jim Crocce. Simon and Garfunkel. Johnny Matthis. Glen Campbell. Burt Bacharach. The Momas and the Papas. The Carpenters. Today, because it was Monday and raining, he was playing their latest hit: "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.'
My mother, dressed in her blue robe and sitting at one end of the table, looked up from her newspaper and plate of buttered toast. "Do you want toast or cereal?" she asked me.
While I waited for the Wonder Bread to toast, I watched my sisters across the table, eating their Lucky Charms cereal and examining a little plastic toy they had found down in the box when they poured their cereal into their bowls. But the toast that popped up from our old, electric toaster was a warm, golden brown and crunchy, and the jelly was homemade. Every September my mother would spend hours in that kitchen, picking the little, delicate, purple Concord grapes we grew in our backyard off of their stems and heaping them in one of her crock pots. Then she would slowly boil them, stirring and stirring them smooth, mashing them and setting the resulting liquid with pectin to set. She would dole it ladle by ladle into dozens of Ball glass jars, to be stored in a cabinet in the basement where it would supply us for the year ahead. Each one was like a summer of sweet, purple grapes, the most delicious jelly I have ever tasted.
As we finished up our breakfast, one of my sisters asked my mother, "Can we go to the Five and Dime today, after school?"
My mother looked up from her newspaper. You could see in her eyes she was thinking of doing something else. But she smiled in spite of herself. "All right," she said, "I'll drive you up to the store after you do your homework."
Our hearts rose, knowing we had something to look forward to while waiting for our father to come home. Then I could look over the map with him while he told me of his trip, and after, we could watch TV together.
This was how the Mondays went by, one by one, while the calendar crept from January to April, and our school years passed.
| Author Notes | This sketch is another childhood memory, of those Mondays in the late sixties when we began to navigate the world of school, and work. Somehow our parents were always there to ground everything, to keep the foundation under our feet, to light the dark, make music in the silence, give us something to look forward to, someplace to come back to. It seems to me now in many ways a golden age that shaped my sense of the world with those snippets of songs like 'Rainy Days and Mondays' or 'California Dreamin,' toys in cereal boxes and those ridiculous cartoons. Through it all, I want to convey the sense of how important the role of our parents was in shaping that world. We were lucky enough to have parents that made the world seem like paradise. estory |
By estory
We were the first generation to grow up with TV. Our first glimpse of the world beyond our house and home came through this marvel of engineered tubes and wiring and that antenna snatching those programs out of waves and signals in the open air. Script writers, cartoonists, actors and actresses, directors from Hollywood would concoct all sorts of entertainment for us to enjoy while sitting on our couches, holding us spellbound for hours. There were mysteries and dramas, vaudeville slapstick, silly cartoons and that evolution of the comic skit, the TV sitcom. And there was news. For the first time in history, a weatherman would stand in front of a map explaining cold fronts and the nuances of high and low pressure, predicting the weather for the week ahead. Walter Cronkite, sitting at his desk in the clicking newsroom, would tell us of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, hippies and the space program. Eric Severeid would read an editorial. Charles Kouralt, in his down home 'On the road' segment, would take you to small towns and nooks and crannies of neighborhoods all across America.
After school, we would watch the wise cracking antics of Bugs Bunny, the Flintstones and the Jetsons. We would follow the madcap adventures of the castaways on Gilligan's Island and Lost in Space. There was the wonderfully creepy Adams Family and the homely Munsters. After supper we'd gather around the coffee table, sitting in bean bag chairs and on sofas, eschewing books and board games for nightly episodes on the continuing sagas of Archie Bunker, Oscar and Felix, Mary Tyler Moore, Trapper John and Hawkeye Pierce, The Flying Nun, Maxwell Smart and the Sweathogs from Brooklyn. We would become part of the extended families of the Partridge's and the Brady's. Over the years we watched Laura Ingalls and John Boy Walton grow up as if they were our distant cousins.
Of course there were those maddening commercials that became such an iconic part of American life. The Italian lady leaning out of the window yelling "Anthony! Anthony!" in all those Prince Spaghetti spots, the warm refrain of "Mmm Mmm good, Mmm Mmm good, that's what Campbell soups are, Mmm Mmm good!" the soothing tones of the suave Jamaican proclaiming "Seven up, the uncola!" and Tony the Tiger yelling "They're great!" about his frosted flakes or the crazy bird going "Coco for coco puffs, coco for coco puffs."
The old baseball broadcasts on WPIX brought me closer to my grandmother, and her lifetime of long support for the New York Yankees. Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Mercer would continue on the traditions of Mel Allen and the radio broadcasts she listened to in the glory days of Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Joe Dimaggio, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, those legendary figures that seemed to stand like monuments in the world of our day. A corner of her living room, behind the old oak table with the clawed feet, next to the window overlooking the fire escape in her apartment, became our Yankee Stadium seats. We would sit next to each other, sipping Tahitian Treat sodas and eating Cracker Jacks, cheering on Thurmon Munson, Bobby Murcer, Roy White and Fritz Petersen, whether they won or lost.
Night after night, year after year, the television would bring us news of Martin Luther King's assassination, the fall of Saigon, Woodstock, and Watergate. We saw Mark Spitz swim off with all those gold medals at the Munich Olympics, Nadia Comaneci perform her perfect 10 at Montreal, the US hockey team beat the Soviets in the Miracle on ice. We watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon, and the summer of love unfolding in San Francisco. We saw the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show, Colombo and Rockford solve all those mysteries, Sonny and Cher sing 'I got you babe' with baby Chastity, and Karen Carpenter perform 'Merry Christmas darling' on that Christmas special before the eating disorder claimed her life.
The old black and white movies and the old movie stars from the world my mother grew up in, came back to life. Every year, it seemed, we watched Shirley Temple in the Little Princess, Clark Gable and Olivia DeHavilland in Gone With the Wind, Erol Flynn flash his saber as Robin Hood, Judy Garland walk the yellow brick road, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tap dancing through The Barklays of Broadway, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds reprising Singin In the Rain, Humphrey Bogart sitting in the smoky cafe of Casablanca. Like old friends, they visited us every year.
In the dim, flickering, black and white light, we were transported around the world, back in time, into fantasy and a perfection of experience that we thought must be almost like heaven.
| Author Notes | Television, for good and bad, has become such a fabric of our lives and I wanted to articulate that sense of it as a background, an undercurrent, and a powerful connection in our society. I hope that these little memories will not only serve to conjure nostalgic feelings, but also make you think of how much these episodes shaped our growing up. In many ways, television became a shaper of morality, a vehicle of emotion, a replacement for family relationships. Instead of interacting with each other, we became part of the interactions of the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family and the Waltons. Another part of this chapter is the illustration of how we all shared many common events together, as a society, through TV. We experienced the Vietnam War and the protests over it, the civil rights movement, and Watergate together. We watched together as the men landed on the moon, as the US hockey team won that improbable gold medal, in all these little rooms all over the country, all over the world, in some cases, in all kinds of different situations. It is our shared experience as a society, as a country. Then there is this aspect of connecting to the past, through TV. Sharing in the experiences of our parents and even grandparents. By using TV as the common denominator, I hope to connect us all to these memories and experiences. I await your comments, which should be quite interesting, and I look forward to hearing you share your own perspectives on some of those commonly shared moments. estory |
By estory
It is an Easter Sunday. We've already found the Easter baskets of chocolate bunnies, wrapped chocolate eggs and jelly beans, that my mother always packed carefully with shredded, green, plastic grass, hidden behind the couches and chairs of the living room. The thrill of discovery, coupled with the warm sense of her desire to make us happy and pass along a tradition from our grandmother, livens up our breakfast. The special breakfast of scrambled eggs completes the uplifted mood. After breakfast, we dress in our new Easter outfits; my sisters in their new dresses and hats, me in my new suit, and head for church.
The morning sunshine of spring brightens the stained glass windows of Our Savior Lutheran Church as the congregation sings: "I know that my Redeemer lives; what comfort this sweet sentence gives!" In the window nearest our pew I see Christ robed in white, standing outside the tomb. The altar is draped in white cloth, the sanctuary is filled with Easter lilies, tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. They seem to have sprung up for just this reason; to suggest that no grave can hold this life we have been given. Nothing is greater than our God.
I think of my grandfather in his garden, planting those flowers in his garden. I think of my grandmother and the ham dinner she is making. I can't imagine the world without them.
After the service we walk out into the fresh air and brilliant sunshine. Everyone is admiring each other's new suits and dresses, telling of the Easter baskets we've gotten. The dogwoods lining the block are a blaze of white above our heads. Ahead of us lie the drive to my aunt's house, a baseball game with my cousins in the empty lot next to their house, an Abbott and Costello movie, the smells of coffee and pound cake in the dining room.
At that moment, it seems as if the world will go on forever.
| Author Notes | In this chapter I wanted to capture this sense of Easter and spring from my childhood through a retelling of our Easter traditions. To me, Easter seemed like a bright, sunny day, full of the smell of those lilies and hyacinths, the uplifting story of the resurrection and the promise of life overcoming death through love. The Easter service in that old church, with its altar covered in those flowers, the uplifting tone of the triumphant hymns, the girls and guys in their crisp, new clothes, the magic of the Easter baskets with their treasures of chocolate and jelly beans, all seemed to speak of the wonder of being alive. The hope of my grandparents living forever somehow. The hopeful mood of that time and the ever widening prospects of the future before us. And that moment of family dinners, Abbott and Costello movies and crude baseball games in empty lots that we seem to carry with us for the rest of our lives. It is a moment of innocence, but also a moment of hope and power. I hope it conjures up your own Easter memories as we approach spring this year. estory |
By estory
After dark the inexplicable blue sky faded, revealing the faint, star studded outlines of ancient hieroglyphs; those mysterious, almost sacred constellations. My father would point them out to me and tell me their names: Orion, the warrior, Taurus the bull, Gemini the twins. Hercules the hero. Pegasus the magical, flying horse. They seemed like the archeological remnants of lost civilizations to me, evidence of tales from the dawn of time. And then of course there was that equally mysterious moon, circling overhead from east to west and waxing and waning through its strange crescents, with that faint feature like spilled ink across its surface, tracing the outlines of a face. Planets too, moved through the zodiac night by night. Venus was just visible right after sunset, the blazing evening star. Then there was Mars glimmering like a ruby. Jupiter and Saturn, so bright they outshone all the other stars around them.
On such nights my father would set up his telescope. In the years before I was born he had made it himself, following the instructions in a book. Slowly and patiently he had ground the mirror that would catch and focus the light of those distant objects in the sky. He had mounted it, along with the magnifying eye piece, in the long, metal tube of its body. The tube fitted into a wooden tray bolted to a heavy, steel pivot that had to be screwed onto an old car axle to steady it. The pivot had to be aligned to the north star. This would allow the telescope to follow an object as the Earth turned on its axis, by means of turning a crank. I always marveled at how my father had been able to copy the accumulated knowledge of generations of astronomers who had invented and perfected the telescope, creating this instrument for exploring what seemed like the unreachable, unknowable mysteries of the night sky. To me, it was like a divining rod of space.
Through that eye piece, the moon became a world of great distant plains, craters and mountain ranges that I could look down on as if flying over them in an airplane. I could make out its curved horizon, illuminated peaks of mountains and shadowed recesses of craters, its vast emptiness and dead stillness. I could come close enough to Mars to see the tiny, white specs of its polar caps, expanses of rusty deserts with faint greenish markings; another, more distant world. Jupiter turned out to be a giant gas ball, something like a striped balloon with a great, red spot, surrounded by tiny, circling moons of its own. Saturn was the most compelling surprise; another gas giant even further away in the outer solar system, suspended in the middle of this shining, spectacular ring. One could only wonder at what forces at formed that.
And if we looked deeper into space, still greater and greater discoveries were revealed; great, misshapen clouds of colored gas, stars that had blown rings of their own, clusters of stars, and entire, separate galaxies drifting further and further away from us. So far away that the light we saw now began its journey to us hundreds of millions of years ago.
| Author Notes | In this little sketch, a memory of those nights when my father introduced me to the mysteries of astronomy with his home made telescope when I was a boy, I wanted to illustrate how science and technology doesn't so much explain away the mysteries of the universe as reveal greater and greater mysteries the closer you inspect it. We can look through a telescope and discover that Saturn is not just a dot travelling through the zodiac, but a whole other world suspended in its ring. But that leads to still more questions about how it became like that, what forces formed it. We can discover the moon is not a lamp up there, but a whole world unto itself, but in discovering that, we have to wonder how those craters were created, those vast lunar plains, those otherworldly mountains. And those faint splotches turn out to be distant galaxies with million of stars and planets of their own. The world is like an onion and the more we peel back its layers, the more we find ourselves lost in its amazing mysteries. And that is exciting, in and of itself. estory |
By estory
The anticipation of getting our Christmas tree would build through the first couple of weeks of Advent until it seemed to flicker in the house hopefully as the candles on the wreath. The cold, darkness of each night was coming upon us earlier and earlier in the afternoon, and we had to turn our attention from our outside games to something else. We found it in the magic of our Christmas tree. Here was a way of rekindling the green and gold of summer right in our own living room. That Christmas tree of every December seemed like an old family friend on one hand; on another, something of a magician.
On a Saturday morning in mid December when the kitchen smelled of tea and oatmeal, my father would finally announce that he would take us to get our tree. We practically leapt up out of our chairs and into our coats and mittens. His knowledge of Christmas trees stretched back for decades into the past of family tradition, and we trusted his judgement. We knew he had to have a fresh tree, one with a straight top for the star, and that perfect, cone shape.
Sometimes we would drive up to the estates on the north shore of Long Island to pick out a tree from a farm, sometimes he would take us to a lot on a street corner in town; but once under the strings of colored lights, in the crisp, December air that spoke of the turning of another year, it was always the same. We would scramble after my father between the bristling firs and spruce, whose woodland aroma would excite us even more. We would run to one tree after another, calling for our father to examine it. He would disqualify this one for an odd branch, this one for having loose needles, that one for a crooked top. The tree had to be perfect. At last he would stand for a time looking decidedly at one and we would gather around it and agree; this would be our Christmas tree.
After the man on the lot gave it a fresh cut, it would be tied to the roof of our Ford Falcon station wagon and we would bring it home in triumph. My mother would have hot chocolate ready, with fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. We'd carry the tree into its place of honor in front of the living room window, and my mother would admire it as my father set it into its stand. We'd let its branches spread and fill the room with its fragrance of pine woods up in the mountains.
Then we would sit on the couch sipping our hot chocolate, watching my father wrap the sets of colored lights around and around the tree from its lowest branches to its highest boughs. After he had crowned it with the star of Bethlehem, we would take turns hanging the ornaments. Most of them were delicate, colored glass balls from a time before we were born and we would unwrap each one carefully from its gauze of tissue paper as if it were a jeweled treasure from a lock box. Out would come the peacocks, the toy soldiers, the teapot, the old churchbell, the icicles, snowglobes and angels. They conjured memories of Christmases past. At last my father would lay a strand of glittering tinsel on each bough until the tree seemed to be wearing a ball gown of breathtaking beauty.
We knew then that Christmas Eve with its magical, mysteriously wrapped boxes of toys, its cookies and candy, carols and candlelight, was not far off and that the dead of winter would surely pass.
| Author Notes | There are few moments that seem to capture the essence of life as much as these Christmas moments. I hope I was able to capture the excitement of bringing that live tree from the mountains into those living rooms, where it held court in a dazzling display of colored electric lights and glistening glass balls and tinsel, helping us pass through the grim dark and cold of the dead of winter. Christmas is that moment when the grace of God rescues us from that darkness, and this celebration that our parents carried on from their parents connects us together and connects us with our ancestors, to the joy and power of life itself. The sense that life will make it through the darkness to the spring on the other side. Christmas became that moment of celebration when we realized life was bigger than death, that hope was greater than despair. A lesson we keep with us for the rest of our lives. estory |
By estory
My dad had his own business and worked long hours most of the year, sometimes six days a week and 60 hours. He would leave us before 7 in the morning and rarely come home before 7 in the evening. Then he would be too tired to do much else than watch a couple of sitcoms with us, and on Saturdays he would spend time on his hobbies: building a catamaran, and making cabinets for my mother. The only day we really had to share time was Sunday and after church we would play a couple of games of chess and listen to some classical music; my dad would play records of Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Beethoven and Strauss, and he gave me through that my love of music.
There were many summer vacations when my mother would drive out to our summer house out on Long Island without my father. When you have your own business, you take time off when the business is slow, and many times he would take the train out to Coram on Friday evening, spend a couple of days with us, and then we would take him back to the train on Sunday evening so he could go back to work Monday. On these weekends my dad would try to relax by sailing his boat, the catamaran he built, out of Mount Sinai Harbor. My dad seemed to possess all these magical skills of woodworking and sailing, and I longed to learn them from his hand.
One year as summer was coming to an end and my chance to go sailing with him would end with it, I talked him into making a day trip with me from Mount Sinai to Port Jefferson. We would leave early in the morning, sail out to Mount Misery at the mouth of Port Jefferson, have lunch there, and then sail back in the afternoon. We would have to navigate the sand bars and rocks, and the tides and islands. We would have to take my father's little twelve foot boat out of the calm waters in Mount Sinai inlet and into the rolling swells of the wide open Long Island Sound. It was some distance across the open water and to me, it seemed like a real adventure, a chance to learn tacking and steering from my father; a real accomplishment. We would have to sail past the eerie wreck of a ferry that had run aground under Mount Misery in a storm in the early 1900's. I longed to explore that wreck, to stand amid its remains and feel the ghosts of those who had experienced that harrowing night so long before I was born.
We got a good forecast and the day of our trip broke into one of those beautiful, August days on Long Island; a clear, blue sky and air from Canada that brought a tinge of approaching September. My mother packed sandwiches for us: salami on pumpernickel for my dad and peanut butter and jelly on wonder bread for me, carefully wrapped in wax paper. Also in our plastic, zippered bag she put tupperware containers of homemade potato salad and cottage cheese, crackers, and a ziplock bag of chocolate chip cookies. There was also a thermos of her delicious, lemon and mint ice tea, all kept cold with an ice pak. These were the comforts of home we would bring on our journey.
We loaded up our lunch, our map, a couple of towels and our brimmed hats into my father's station wagon, hitched up the boat on its trailer and were waved off by my mother and my sisters. Our adventure had begun. We were on our way, together.
As we drove in the car up Mt. Sinai - Coram road, my dad's sharply chiseled profile was turned to look out the windshield as I road beside him. He seemed to be contemplating the weather and the wind in some mysterious calculation and I wished I could know what he was thinking.
"It's a beautiful day," I said, hopefully. "We should have a good sail."
"It's pretty calm," he answered soberly. "I hope we have enough wind out there. We'll need some good wind to get all the way out to Port Jefferson by the afternoon."
The though of not making the trip all the way out shook me. "You think we might not be able to sail out to the Port?" I asked him anxiously.
"We'll have to see when we get to Mt. Sinai. Usually there's some kind of breeze on the water."
"Can I sail for a little bit today?" I asked my dad.
He turned to look at me. "I don't see why not. You have to start some time."
"I'd like to see the old wreck," I stated. "Do you think we could land at the wreck?"
"I don't know. There might be rocks. It might be tricky." my dad answered dubiously.
"I'd really like to see it, close up."
"We'll have to see." my dad said flatly.
His ability to think of all these dangers I could hardly guess at was something I longed to possess.
At the water my dad backed the trailer down the boat ramp and then we lifted the catamaran together off of the trailer and into the water, where it could float freely. The water shimmered like glass in the harbor but the flag at the marina dock was blowing straight out in a light breeze. My dad watched it for a moment and seemed satisfied. My spirits rose until I was jingling with excitement. The grassy islands that littered the harbor out to the cliffs of Mt. Sinai at the mouth of the harbor seemed to beckon us. My dad entrusted me with holding the boat by its line while he parked the car; the responsibility swelled me. That boat he had designed and built himself in our basement was his pride and joy.
I helped him lift the eight foot aluminum mast into its fitting on the deck, and together, pulling hand over fist, we hoisted the white canvas sail out of the boom until it caught the wind and pulled the line tight. My father let out the boom and held its line with one hand, while with the other he gripped the rudder. Somehow, he seemed to know just the right angle to steer the boat to catch the wind and drive us across the water, magically on the wind alone. We zigzagged in short tacks against the wind to make for the harbor mouth, and he always seemed to know at just the right moment to turn the rudder and swing the boom over our heads to turn into each tack. Each tack got longer and longer as the harbor widened and on one of the last, long reaches before we left the safety of the harbor for the open Sound, my father finally asked me: "Here, do you want to take the line?"
My turn had come. With a beating heart I took the line from him, and then the rudder, connecting me to the wild powers of wind and water. The boat lurched in the waves and the sail began to ripple.
"Keep the boat steady," my father advised, "Don't steer too close to the wind or it won't fill the sail. Keep the rudder straight. Try to steer on a straight line. Steer for that rock on the other side."
Sure enough, the sail smoothed out and billowed, the boat skimmed forward, towards that rock. My heart leapt. The boat was making for our target, at my command, in the middle of this water, this wind, this light. I was exultant. I was sailing, just like my father.
"Yes, that's it," he approved.
We were leaving the other sailfishes and sunfishes sailing with us behind. I wondered with immense pride at what we must look like, slicing through the water at speed, across the harbor mouth, together, side by side, my dad and me.
When we got closer to the other side I handed him the line and rudder to work the tack and we were on our way again. At last we were in the open Sound and we would have to ride and crest each rolling swell, but I quickly found it was not too much for us and we soon left Mt. Sinai behind. We were traversing this great space one could measure on maps by wind and mind alone. Behind us the towering cliff of Mt. Sinai with the houses on top of its bluff shrank while the low, rounded bulk of Mt. Misery rose steadily ahead of us. The sky was one great, blue expanse; the light, like one endless photo flash.
As we drew closer to Mt. Misery and its rounded top grew more distinct, I made out the broken black ribs of the wrecked ferry at the base of it. There it was; the old wreck I had always only just heard of, in all its eerie glory. I wanted to land there and explore it, to say I was there.
"That must be the wreck," I said to my dad, pointing.
"Yes," my dad said, solemnly. He seemed to be watching it respectfully, as if looking at a graveyard. The serious look on his face silenced me and I watched the wreck go by as we sailed past without saying another word. Somehow I was beginning to feel what he felt; that it was no longer a part of our world.
Just ahead of us an empty beach of undisturbed sand and pebbles stretched under a row of cedar trees. It looked like nobody had ever even seen it before. The waves were breaking on it in gentle, murmuring curls, sparkling in that August sunshine. My dad made for it and it seemed to me that we were discovering some unknown place, we were sailing into some unopened moment. The hull of the catamaran scraped into the sand and my father let the wind out of the sail. "Now," he said to me, "Jump off."
I jumped off of the deck of our boat and into knee deep water, grabbed the boat and held it as my father brought down the sail. Together then, we pulled the boat up half way out of the water. We brought down our picnic bag and thermos and spread our towels out on the sand under the cedar trees to eat our lunch. It was like being on a deserted island. Together we looked back at what we had done; the great expanse from the distant cliff of Mt. Sinai, some miles away.
"We did it," I said triumphantly, do my dad.
"Yes," he said. "It was a good sail. We had some good wind and an easy swell."
"Is this the furthest you have ever sailed?" I asked him.
He looked out across the Sound, so wide there you could not see across it. Somewhere out there lay the neighboring state of Connecticut. "No," he said, "I've sailed over to Connecticut."
It seemed like an impossible, dangerous trip to me, out of sight of land. "How long did it take you?" I asked him.
"There and back? A whole day."
"Was it rough out there in the middle, where you couldn't see land?"
"No, not too bad. It's not like an open ocean, you know."
I looked out at that distant shore I could only imagine, dreaming of crossing the Sound to Bridgeport with my dad someday. Someday we would do it, I told myself.
Then we unwrapped the sandwiches my mother had made for us, sipping her tea and enjoying her potato salad, thinking of her back there in Coram, the place we had left so far behind. I wondered if she was thinking of us too, out on that distant beach.
The waves rolled down that beach gently, one after the other, sparkling in the crisp sunshine of that hour on that August afternoon there with my dad. White clouds began to gather out of nothing out to the west, over the Sound, in that wide sky. The tide was beginning to creep in, rocking our boat and lifting it from the sand. The day, and the summer, were coming to an end but no matter where we went from there, in the future, we would always have that afternoon to ourselves.
My dad stood up and shaded his eyes, looking back over the expanse of water we would have to cross in order to get home, back to my mother and my sisters in our little cottage in Coram.
"Well, we'd better be getting back," my father said.
| Author Notes | This day that I spent sailing to Port Jefferson from Mt. Sinai with my dad was one of my happiest memories shared with him. It seems to me that that moment symbolized the relationship every boy has with his dad; the hope of learning his skills in navigating the world and life, of picking up some of what he loves about life and carrying it on, through your own life. It is all together a real moment, and a surreal one, a memory and a dream, and I wanted to write about like that. At once tangible, and also impressionistic, spiritual. I hope my little story was able to do that and that you enjoy it. estory |
By estory
The world we were born into in the 1960's was a world on wheels. For the first time, just about every family owned a car and the means to move on the interstate highway system that the government had just constructed. Those Fords, Chevys, Chryslers, Pontiacs and Plymouths, those Volkswagen Beetles and Vans, sedans and station wagons and touring coups made it possible to live in the suburbs and work in the city, listening to WINS news, WABC pop radio with Dan Ingram, and WLIR along the way. For the first time in history, you didn't have to go to a concert hall to listen to music; not only could you listen at home on a home stereo system, but you listen to music on the road on your car radio. For breakfast there was the classic bacon, egg and cheese biscuit at McDonald's. On the way home you'd grab a Whopper in a drive thru window at Burger King. Fast food was born. Gulf, Mobile, Texaco and Shell stations kept the tank full, cheap. It was the era of the rush hour. The mobile economy.
And the economy boomed. The interstates made my father and uncle's small business possible. They installed curtains and movie screens in countless twin theatres and multiplexes in the tri state area, from Perth Amboy to Wilkes Barre, Danbury to Utica, Springfield to Nashua. And the eighteen wheelers travelling along those highways brought us fresh oranges from Florida, milk and butter from the Great Lakes, lettuce, carrots and broccoli from California, potatoes from far off Idaho. Whirlpool refrigerators, Carrier air conditioners, Toro lawn mowers and Zenith tv's would come from the factories of Gary, Indiana, St. Louis Missouri, Cleveland Ohio and Minneapolis Minnesota. Clothes milled and sewn across the South. It would all be hauled up to the stores we shopped in in New York on those long, endless roads of double yellow lines, guard rails and exit signs. Things made and transported by people you never met, in places you would never see. You could only guess at them from the names on the old Texaco maps: Detroit, Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Richmond.
The interstates also enabled something else that was new: the family vacation. No longer were you confined to the city where you grew up and lived. You'd throw your suitcases into the back of the Falcon wagon, grab your comic books and puzzles, and buckle up in the back seat. Mom would sit up front with the maps. Dad would take the wheel. You'd leave before sunrise when it was too dark to look out of the window, listening to the radio. When the sun came up you'd be going over those bridges, through those toll booths, watching the Palisades, the Delaware river and the Catskills go by. There were the necessary stops at the auto plazas; trips to the restrooms, a quick fill up at the gas pumps, and then a burger and fries at McDonald's before continuing the journey further and further across the map, along those interstates. 95. 84. 80. 40. 10. Route 66. You'd measure your progress by reading exit signs: Albany, Troy, Syracuse, Rochester.
At the end of the journey, off of one of those exits was the experience of the motor inn that also enabled those vacations. You could park and spend the night in the comfort of something very like your living room at home. There were twin vanities and a clean shower in the bathroom, double beds and cot if you needed it. There would be a television set so you wouldn't even miss your favorite shows. If you drew back the curtains in the window, you could look across the parking lot at mountains, maybe a lake. If you were in Howard Johnson's or Holiday Inn, there would be a swimming pool out back. If you were lucky enough to be on the second or third floor, there was the thrill of riding the elevator up and down to the lobby. There would be the complimentary ice machine and a Coke vending machine in the hall.
Most of them had a restaurant where you could sit down and have the waitress bring you meatloaf with brown gravy, mashed potatoes and beans, or fried chicken with corn on the cob, macaroni and cheese or shepherd's pie. For dessert there would be apple pie a la mode or peach cobbler. In the morning there would be waffles with butter and maple syrup, or scrambled eggs with bacon and english muffins. Then you could go into the lobby and look through the t-shirts and baseball caps, the shot glasses and the coffee mugs, the souvenir plates and the racks of postcards.
You'd pick out a postcard and there you would be, in Niagra Falls, the White Mountains, the Poconos or the Jersey shore, the Skyline Drive or the Finger Lakes. A point on a map, somewhere in a distant city whose name was printed next to a dot along that double, yellow line.
| Author Notes | So many things about the world we live in we take for granted, and one of them is the mobility of our world, the cars and highway systems that changed the economy and led to so many conveniences and experiences that people never had before. It's hard to believe that all this didn't exist, even a hundred years ago. Less than that. Seventy years ago. The suburbs, the rush hour, the family vacation; ours was truly the first culture on wheels, on the move, like never before. Travel was not only for the rich and famous; the average person could drive to the mountains from the shore or to the shore from the mountains. Looking back on it now, it is also very nostalgic. Those old Howard Johnson motor inns, those Holiday Inns, with their kitchy lobbies and the fast food we grabbed along the way; they are all a part of our fondest memories now. I remember taking a trip once a year, during summer vacation from school, in July or August. The Catskill Game Farm was our first trip, in 1966. Then Niagra Falls, Howe Caverns, Mystic, Valley Forge, New Bedford, and the White Mountains. I got to see Washington DC on a graduating school trip. I still remember staying up late one night playing poker with the boys in that Holiday Inn. And of course there were the old cars we rode around in; my dad had a Ford Falcon and then, in 1970, he bought a Volvo wagon. One of my uncles had a Galaxy, another, a Ford Torino. Another uncle out east had one of those old Volkswagen Karmans. Wonder what it would be worth now. estory |
By estory
During my teenage years, I would sometimes help my father changing movie screens in old theatres. The old screens had to be unlaced from their frames and then the new screens had to be laced in their place. To reach the top of the screen frames required a scaffold and I would help my father carry the pieces from his van into the theatre and assemble them on the stage. Then he would climb up and work on the lacings while I pushed him across the stage from below.
The theatres were always empty, of course. From the stage I would look out over the rows and rows of empty seats stretching back up towards the lobby. Each one of them seemed to hold faded memories of boys on their first dates kissing their girlfriends; mothers sitting with kids holding their bags of popcorn; friends looking up at the flickering action taking place on the screen; lonely people sitting by themselves in corners.
The projectionist appeared from a door in the back of the theatre with a roll of film under his arm and made his way up to the projection booth. I wondered to myself how many movies he had brought up there: Fantasia, Bullet, The Outlaw Josie Wales, The Sound of Music, The Planet of the Apes, The Man with the Golden Gun. How many audiences had come and gone out into the night, leaving those rows of chairs behind. Like ghosts that could not speak of what they had seen or felt, they stared back at me.
I could imagine all those people sitting in those chairs, watching me on that stage. What could I do to impress them? Recite one of my poems? Sing a song? What would they think of that?
The answer was silence.
In the end, before any audience could witness the feat, the new screen had been installed and I had made my performance, my contribution to the stage, somewhere in an upstate or south Jersey town, on an unannounced date.
| Author Notes | The idea for this piece came from those memories of working in those old twin movie theatres with my dad and my cousin in my younger days. Changing screens, hanging drapes in those empty theatres was an eerie experience. Out there in the theatre were all these empty chairs that had held the people who had come to the theatre for entertainment or escape, for romance or excitement or diversion; people who came from all kinds of places and then went back just as mysteriously as they had come. Of course when up on those empty stages one can't help but to dream of finding one's own fame there, of burning oneself into the memories of someone out there. But in the end, for most of us, its not singing or dancing or making a spectacle of ourselves in some way through some talent that makes us precious to the world. It's these simple, behind the scenes things that people often take for granted, that enable us to make our contributions. estory |
By estory
On a September night I lay in darkness, listening to the radio. The reporter is telling of the hurricane churning slowly towards us in the ocean south of our island. It is a CAT 3, with sustained winds of over a 110 miles an hour. The experts expect the warm waters of the gulf stream to sustain it. Be prepared for flooding, blocked roads and prolonged power outages, he says. It will make landfall in the morning. We will take a direct hit. I'm going to go through my first hurricane.
My mother told me that I was born in a hurricane but of course I don't remember it, and we have been through two tropical storms in my childhood; Donna and Bonnie, but they were nowhere as severe as this. Our house was built in 1918 and my parents say it has survived many storms, including the great hurricane of 1938. But I take a deep breath, thinking of the warnings of the man on the radio, wondering if the roof over my head will hold this time.
In the morning I wake to hear the house creaking in the gusts. A heavy, windswept rain is splattering on the windows. Looking out, I see the big sycamore trees around the corner bending and waving in the rising wind. They look like they will topple over at any moment, and I begin to worry about driving or walking under them. How will I get to work and back?
Downstairs, the kitchen seems like a storm shelter. My mother has coffee and toast ready for me.
"Do you think we'll lose power?" I ask my parents, as I sit down. I think of losing refrigeration, losing the tv news.
"We might," my mother says inconclusively, shrugging as she looks out of the window at the rain.
"The storm is still a few hours away," my father says. "This isn't the worst of it yet."
I'm getting more anxious. "I have to work today," I say. "How bad do you think the roads will get?"
"They say they'll be a lot of rain," my mother says, "And some of the roads might get blocked by falling trees."
"Maybe I won't be able to drive back," I say, "Even if I get there. I don't want to get stuck somewhere. Maybe I should walk up to the store." The store is about a mile and a half away.
"Be careful," my mother says. "There might be downed power lines too."
I leave the house after breakfast draped in a raincoat. The streets are already ankle deep in water. I watch the wind bending the trees over my head. Already there is a branch down in the road. I have to walk around huge puddles. Somehow I will have to get through this monster of a storm, I tell myself. I will have to do my job, and get back home.
At the supermarket there is an early flurry of nervous shoppers picking up cans of vegetables, bottled water, bread, peanut butter and batteries. There is an air of panic and losing control. Through the front windows of the store we can see great sheets of rain laying down a carpet of water in the parking lot. It is like a lake. I've never seen anything like it. When the truck comes later that morning, we see that the water in the bay is almost up to the loading dock. We ask the driver how the roads are and he shakes his head. "Don't think I'll be able to get back over the bridge. They say they're going to close it down. Too much wind. Probably have to try and get a room somewhere or just stay in the truck."
I look at Frankie, the produce manager, and he shakes his head. "It's a bad one," he says grimly, "The worst I've ever seen. And my mother is in a house a couple of miles from the ocean."
After we get the pallets in the ice box, the lights of the store flicker and the store manager announces he's going to close the store. All this technology, all this infrastructure and brick and mortar seems on the verge of being swept away by something coming from the book of Genesis. It's a news story, it's an event, and I am in the middle of it.
I ask Frankie if he can give me a ride home and reluctantly he agrees. He's worried about getting to his mother's house on the south shore. We're soaked to the skin by the time we get to his car, and there is a tree down, lying in the road just outside the parking lot. The main road is a river as we cross it; the water is up to the hubcaps. Again and again we go through lakes of water worrying if the car will flood, if a tree will fall and block the road. At the corner of my block Frankie lets me out. He can't get any closer to my house in the flooded street and I have to wade through foot high water under the bending trees to get to the steps of my porch. I take my shoes and socks off, the wind shaking me with its ever increasing blasts. There are leaves flying everywhere.
Inside, I find that the power is out. My parents are listening to a battery powered radio.
"The worst of the storm is coming now," my mother says.
This is the moment of truth, I tell myself, whether the roof will hold. I am drawn to the living room window to watch the fury of the storm sweeping over us, this force of nature coming from the depths of the wild sea from thousands of miles away across the globe. Dark, boiling clouds are racing by overhead faster than I have ever seen or thought possible. The trees are pushed to the breaking point. The house is shaking. The street is completely under water; the water is almost up to the steps of the porch, and my father is worrying that it will get into the basement. Still the rain keeps coming.
I wonder what it must be like, to feel that wind. I want to feel it, to see what it is like, this hurricane, this monster from the deep. This is my chance, I think to myself.
"I'm going out on the porch for a minute," I tell my parents, putting on my raincoat.
"I don't think you should go out there now," my mother says. But I ignore her.
I open the front door and the wind rips the storm door from my hand, hurling it against the siding. Another huge gust almost pushes me over against the railing of the porch, as I step out. I have to lean into the wind, bracing against its shoves, to stand up and keep my footing. 'This is a hurricane wind,' I tell myself. 'I'm standing in a hurricane.'
With a crash that shakes the house, a huge tree limb falls from one of the old sycamore trees around the corner. I pull open the storm door in a lull in the wind and duck back into the house.
"That was stupid," my mother says. "You could have gotten hurt."
"You could have broken the storm door," my father admonishes.
But to me in that moment these things sound trivial compared to standing in the wind, of being in that storm, testing its power.
There is a tremendous squall of wind that blows the rain like pebbles against the siding of the house. I look out of the window and am surprised to see an edge to the clouds, and a patch of blue sky widening, beyond it. The clouds are racing around like pieces of paper along this rim.
"It's the eye!" I shout out. "It's going to pass right over us!" How many times does this happen in a lifetime? I can't miss this chance, I tell myself. I put on my jacket over my parents' objections as the rain suddenly lightens into showers, the wind backs off, and the light brightens.
As I step outside, the sun comes out. The water in the street is glittering in the sunlight. The wind goes completely dead, there is a dead calm. Over my head a great patch of clear blue sky, a great donut hole in the storm, is sweeping over me. Around its edge great black clouds are racing like newspapers picked up by a dust devil.
I think to myself: 'I am in the eye of this storm, this huge storm that can be seen by satellites. I am in the middle of this thing that came from the Atlantic, these clouds and rain that came from the coast of Africa. Here I am, standing in the middle of it.'
Another edge is appearing in the sky, a great edge of boiling, black clouds and rain. The other half of the storm is coming. The eye of the storm sweeps over me, going north. The wind hits with another great gust and it starts raining as I go back inside.
But I have stood in the eye of a hurricane.
| Author Notes | In 1985, hurricane Gloria swept over Long Island as a Cat 2. I was 23, and working in a local supermarket at the time. It was an experience, going through the ominous warnings of the news media, the panic of the shoppers, and trying to get up to the store and back in the middle of that storm. But what I remember most was the life changing experience of the eye of the hurricane passing right over me. Anyone who has been through that can attest to how it overwhelms you with the force of nature, with the feeling the power of God can reduce mankind to splinters in the wind. It is a moment of life you never forget, an experience of this world that leaves a mark and raises your consciousness. After that, my cousin and I became weather buffs who were fascinated by every tropical storm and blizzard that came to the Island. We tracked them on the Weather Channel, watched them on radar, talked on my cousin's cb radio to other people going through the storms. It's an event that gives you respect for nature, and God. estory |
By estory
Our tent is pitched on the edge of a campground under the dark, green boughs of maple trees, just above an embankment that drops down to the Delaware River. In the settling darkness of twilight, as the shapes of trees and boulders grows more indistinct, the murmur of the river in its ceaseless flow to the sea from the mountains is reassuring, refreshing. It is like a voice from nature itself, evidence that beyond the world of automobiles, television sets, refrigerators and air conditioners, this raw, natural force still exists. Somehow we find that exciting.
We are a couple of hundred miles northwest of New York City. It felt good to drive up to this place from the civilization of the suburbs, with the windows of the car open to let in the fresh air. Only the car and its license plates seem a tenuous, stretched connection to those suburbs. That too is a cause for exhilaration. The fact that there is no television up here to entertain us means that we have had to rely on a pack of old playing cards. No stove means that we had to cook our burgers and corn on the cob over an open fire. No beds means sleeping bags, rolled out over air mattresses in our tent. All these things are for us, also a cause for celebration.
The fire is dying down, crackling the dried up sticks and logs we have tossed into it, flickering in the darkness so that our hunched shadows loom and shrink against the dappled, wild leaves of the trees; a ghostly pantomime. We laugh at them nervously. We listen to an unseen chorus of crickets and katy-dids calling to each other from their mysterious places in the woods. It is good to be close to this, we think.
In the light of an old oil lamp we play cards, and the simple figures of spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, the braces of kings and queens, jacks and aces, seem to be yet another connection to the past, something handed down to us from generation to generation like chess, or English itself. For one night at least, we're almost like the characters in the Outlaw Josie Wales. Vagabonds with thin ties to civilization, in the middle of nowhere.
| Author Notes | Camping is one of those things everyone should experience, at one time or another in their life, especially in these technology framed times. It's good to cut the cords to these machines and that way of life, and once we're free of them, the excitement of being out close to nature has a kind of rejuvenating effect. We seem to rediscover ourselves and our abilities, in these moments. And we reconnect to the old ways that have been left behind, for the most part, in our civilized suburban world. One great thing about growing up on Long Island was that you could drive for two hours north of the city and you were out in that world again, in the mountains or on the Delaware. It was like stepping across a border into another world. estory |
By estory
I watched Patricia walking slowly through my mother's backyard garden in her lace blouse and blue jeans. It was an early summer's evening and the daylight seemed to settle around us in that soft, tenderness of light that only the embers of an early summer's day can make. The rhododendron, the bluebells and the roses were all blooming. As it grew slowly darker Patricia moved closer to me and her delicate perfume was like the fragrance of the roses blooming white, pink and red in the garden. She seemed to be waiting for a sign from me; her body a challenge and a promise at the same time.
I felt that I should say something, do something. I walked up beside her, as she smelled first the pink rose, and then the red one.
"Which of the roses is your favorite?" I asked her.
"The red one," she said warmly, turning to face me. "Red is for romance."
"Do you want me to cut one for you?" I asked her.
She smiled shyly, and nodded.
I went into my father's shed and got his clippers and snipped off a perfect red rose for her, tightly wound with its velvet petals, on an elegant, long stem. I handed it to her with a flourish of my hand.
She put her arms around my shoulders and held her face up to me. With a beating heart that flushed my lips I put my arms around the curves of her waist and leaned in and kissed her. She stood still as I ran my hands over the curves of her hips, her back, and her shoulders.
All the years of waiting and searching had come to an end, for one moment at least, and the whole world we were in seemed contained in that garden of red and white roses. Even the stars overhead were standing still.
| Author Notes | I wanted to capture something of the relationship between men and women in this little piece, along with this sense of focus that love brings, this sense that the world melts around you and nothing else matters but this one person in your arms. So I chose the images carefully, and tried to describe the moment carefully, using these flowers from my mother's garden and the bold outline of Patricia standing in it, the symbol of the one red rose on its long stem, the stars standing still overhead. All the challenge of the moment and the promise of the moment all in one instant. estory |
By estory
Horse racing has its own rhythm, it has its own way of catching us up into an experience of life, a perspective of society and humanity. You enter the grandstand along with the excited crowd, in the midst of the mingled, hopeful voices of the betting public. There are the ladies in their hats, the old men in their suits clutching their copies of the Daily Racing Form, smoking their cigars, sipping their beers and mint juleps. The view of the historic ellipse of the track, circling the neatly clipped azaleas in the infield, brings to mind memories of past stakes races and jockeys and trainers standing with their mounts in the winner's circle. You feel lucky.
The time before the race is a moment of reflection and you take your seat and bury your head in the Racing Form along with the other optimistic players studying the past performances of the horses, the pedigrees, the workouts, the recent results of the jockeys who will ride them and the records of the trainers. In a nervous murmur, each to his own and through his own secret methods, people begin figuring their bets. Like the azaleas blooming bright in the early afternoon sun, and the sky blue and bright above the grandstand, their hopeful chatter seems to color the whole racetrack.
As the horses come out onto the track, one by one, wearing the colored silks of their stables, the sense of anticipation begins to build. All eyes watch them as they make their measured way to the starting gate on the far side of the infield. The bettors, flashing hopeful smiles, head up to the parlor windows and you follow them up there, folding your bills in your hand. In a closely guarded voice, you relay your bets to the lady on the other side of the window: $5 win, place and show on the 2 horse, and a $5 2-6 exacta, a $20 commitment in all. You turn and head back to your seat, clutching the tickets that hold your fortune or failure. You check the odds on the scoreboard. The 2 horse is at 4-1. The 6 is at 5-1. Like the ones you are standing shoulder to shoulder with, you wonder how much you could win if your bets come through, and what you might spend it on. There is a feeling of gathering hopefulness, of energy, like the coil of a spring being compressed.
The crowd is buzzing now, the lifting pitch of the restless voices rises and rises, carrying you up with it. As the horses reach the starting gate, the crowd gets to its feet. One by one the horses are locked into the gate. The jockeys hunch over their mounts. All the energy of the horses, the thoughts of the jockeys, the plans of the trainers and the hopes and dreams of the bettors clutching their tickets seems to hang in the air like that coiled spring. Everyone is holding their breath.
And they're off, in that burst of sudden action; the horses break out of the gate and leap across the track in the wave of the gallop, the jockeys rocking on their backs in the steady rhythm of the stride. One horse shoots to the lead. Another keeps on his tail. Another moves from the back around the horses on the outside, while one falls back along the rail. The horse on the outside is gaining, gaining. He moves into fourth. Into third. The crowd bursts into shouts of despair and hope.
They round the clubhouse turn and bolt into the home stretch. Here they come, four horses abreast, charging passed the grandstand. The crowd, still on its feet, seems to leap into the air as the horses pass and flash under the wire.
And then there's the exultation of triumph, the sigh of disappointment, as the crowd settles back into their chairs.
| Author Notes | Horse racing in some ways seems to embody something of the time honored experience of anticipation and disappointment, that aura of hope springing eternal, that is such an integral part of our lives. That's why I wanted to include my memories of Belmont Park in this little collection of Memories of this World; it is an experience of life, a parable of this struggle between hope and despair in our lives. And it has its own rhythm, through this slow, steady gathering of tension and anticipation like a coiled spring, the sudden release of all that energy, and the moment of triumph and tragedy that follows. Like countless other millions, I've leapt into the air and sank back into my chair when those horses crossed the finish line. estory |
By estory
From the observation deck on the Top of the Rock in Rockefeller Center the city of New York with its splendid skyscrapers, its maze of myriad streets and neighborhoods, its miracles of bridges, spreads out all around you. Up in the air at the tops of the buildings comes the sounds of carhorns, the flash of blinking arcades, the millions of mingled noises and movements that make up this tapestry of life. As the light of day fades, the electric lights in the countless apartments and offices snap on. You look down and and in one window you see a man in a suit embracing a woman in a red dress; in another, a cleaning lady emptying a waste basket; in still another, someone sitting at a desk drinking coffee, reading a newspaper. Down the street an old lady climbs the worn steps of St. Patrick's. A young couple sit on a bench in a park, throwing bread crumbs to the pigeons. A man in a jacket walks out of a corner deli with a loaf of Italian bread under his arm.
On the bridges, the frustrated commuters sit in bumper to bumper traffic, listening to their car radios. Across the river, the floodlights of Yankee Stadium come on. Out in the harbor, a cruise ship heads out to sea. A tourist standing next to you asks you to take her picture in front of the railing overlooking Central Park. A balloon from a penthouse birthday party drifts by.
Here, it seems that the entire human race can be seen in its greatest endeavors and its smallest moments, its triumphs and its tragedies. Everything from the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral to the cemeteries of Brooklyn.
And everything in between.
| Author Notes | Growing up in New York, I guess I have always been fascinated with these shared moments of time, people in all walks of life in all sorts of various endeavors sharing a single moment of time, and a single space on the globe. New York is the perfect metaphor for the world, in many ways, and this little piece is a celebration of that world, and all the people who make the world go around, in all sorts of little but significant ways. Who's to say which is more important? The home run in Yankee Stadium or the kiss in the office, the ball player or the cleaning lady, the old lady clinging to her faith or the young lovers on the park bench? Or are they all in some way little sparks of a whole spirit, living in this world? estory |
By estory
On a late summer's evening the soft fading glow of the day settles through the skylights of the shopping mall. The store windows are a blaze of the colors and patterns of all manner of the goods of our consumer economy. The polished chrome columns, the glittering marble floors, the arching atriums with their escalators ever in movement, are like a temple of that economy, in our world of today. In the air are the tangled aromas of coffee, cinnamon, grilled meats, pizza and salted pretzels. Beautiful women in beautiful clothes hurry past carrying their bags of blouses, jewelry and shoes. Men dressed to the nines in slacks and loafers escort them along or follow after.
Here is a stand selling gold earrings, bracelets and necklaces. A stall selling watches. Another is dolling out ice cream in little paper cups or waffle cones. Boxes of candy wrapped in ribbons. Remote control toys. Cellphones. Blue jeans and greeting cards. You can find it all here.
The hum of the voices from the boys and girls laughing in the arcades, the manicured ladies discussing their lives in the cafes, or the men in their suits answering their cell phones rises and fills the echoing, interconnected halls like the chanting in the alleys of an ancient bazaar. Here you can witness countless little moments in the lives of those who have made their way here today, in this the market of our time. A young man in a polo shirt and slacks asking a girl in designer jeans for her phone number. A sales clerk on a break, sitting in a corner of the food court, staring at the crowds and sighing. A woman dragging two crying kids from the window of a toy store. A man counting out twenty dollar bills on the counter of a jewelry kiosk. School girls laughing at an old man staring at them from a coffee bar.
Yes, this place is a place of our time; but also as old as the world itself.
| Author Notes | The phenomenon of the shopping mall seems like a modern experience, and an experience that is very much a part of our lives in this world we live in today. But in this piece I not only wanted to capture something of that cosmopolitan experience, but also the timelessness of it, the way it connects us to the history of human culture, something that is very much ingrained in us as a society. And also what it says about us and how we navigate this experience, and all the little myriad threads of lives and experiences that somehow weave together to form this tapestry of life. estory |
By estory
The colorful brochures of Tahiti, Shangri-La, The Grand Canyon, the Matterhorn, Mount Kilimanjaro and the Pyramids of Egypt, Machu Pichu and Maui are unfolded across our coffee table. Along side them are the brochures of resort hotels we could once only dream about: The Waldorf Astoria, The Chateau Frontenac, The Fountainbleu and the Peninsula. Our airline tickets are a phone call away. Our boarding passes are at our fingertips, right on our computers. We can pack our suitcases and be ready to go to the far flung corners of this incomprehensible world at a moments' notice, all due to the invention of the jet plane that has transformed our world. Remote landscapes and natural wonders, exotic cities and isolated islands that have been nothing more than rumor have come to be within the grasp of our possibilities. These planes can take us through this miracle of physics across oceans and over mountain ranges, beyond deserts and through time zones.
For a week or more, you can leave behind this apartment with that all too familiar bathroom and kitchen, the daily commute, the newspaper and the television set. In the hours before dawn you make your way to the airport and its terminals and hangars, carrying your suitcase like a pilgrim, an explorer, a hobo. As you arrive at this vast, gleaming cathedral of travel your blood begins to tingle. You are a transient, between somewhere and somewhere else, along with all the other mysterious, inscrutable faces you pass on the check in and security lines. You don't know from what kind of home they've come from or what kind of place they are going to, or why. And they have no idea about you either. Such is the mysterious air of travel in an airport.
The destinations printed on the departure boards, along with the departure times and arrival times and the gate numbers, the restless murmur of the crowds of passengers about to disembark, the impatient jostling in the lines, sometimes the pounding footsteps of someone running late, all contribute to the uncertain, untethered atmosphere of the place. You are neither here nor there. Obligations and allegiances have disappeared. As a last call announcement echoes through the gates and lounges, you feel excited and actually lucky to be there.
Soon you will rise above all this on those silver wings. You will recline in your seat, look out of the window, and watch the sparkling water and the gossamer threads of clouds drift by. A stewardess will bring you a sandwich, some chips, a drink and a pillow. The city you have left behind will fade into the distance. The place you are going to will rise before you. Time and space seem to evaporate into thin air.
This is the miracle you have been dreaming about in these past few weeks and months.
| Author Notes | I've always loved to travel, and this chapter is a celebration of it; from the anticipation of dreaming of far flung destinations you have never seen before, to the excitement of leaving the familiar and well worn paths of home for the untethered moment of the journey, the mysterious air of the airports and the strangers we fly with. A hundred years ago, international travel was almost unheard of, except for the rich and famous. Our generation has been the first to experience this explosion of possibilities that has come about because of the invention of the jet airplane. Now it is an integral part of our modern experience, as integral as commuting. It really is hard to believe it has not always been so. I am also dedicating this to Ulla, whose time spent as a flight attendant might make this especially relevant. Lets all remember the people in the travel industry who make these moments possible for all of us. estory |
By estory
It's the end of another summer and on a lazy afternoon I'm home from a day's work, laying on the sofa in the living room with the windows of the apartment open. The evening train from the east end of Long Island is roaring through town, carrying cars full of all kinds of people coming back to the city from their vacations. There are people looking out of the windows; fathers and mothers with their children, friends, lovers. Behind them are memories of sunset walks on lonely beaches, sandcastles and fishing trips, picnics in quiet little coves out at the end of our world. Ahead of them are office buildings and school, autumn mornings in the apartments of Manhattan.
But for me, listening in my apartment as their train went by, only the mournful note of the train horn fading away; that moment of their passing lost to the vastness of that sky and skyline. A mysterious intersection of time and place and strangers.
| Author Notes | Shared moments and places between strangers in this world has always been a fascinating topic to me; this idea that people living disparate lives with very different experiences of life in this same space and time. I wanted to capture something of that intriguing idea in this little piece. The sound of the fading train horn has always been something romantic to me, a moment when you realize that people you will never know are sharing this same space and time with you, somehow. On their way from moments you will never know to other moments you will never know; and they will never know you, sitting there in your own little apartment, contemplating them. A sad facet maybe, of life. estory |
By estory
As the year bends down into its end among the shortened days and lengthening evenings of autumn, there comes a day of crisp air from the north; a harbinger of winter that seems to carry with it the last of the bright light of a fading summer. The cold nights and warm afternoons have worked their magic and on such a day, the green of the leaves has faded and the burnished golds, ambers, oranges and scarlets, the burgundies and purples that are the true colors of the trees around us paint the leaves like ornaments. The blessings of that fading summer are being brought in by farmhands on countless country farms: pumpkins and puppet squash, apples in all their splendid varieties, grapes for the wine press and blackberries for the jampot.
On such a day, on such a frosty morning, we set out with a good cup of coffee for the country roads that will take us to the mountains and the waterfalls, roadside farm stands and remote wineries. This is a day we have waited all year for. The sky is bright blue, the light is brilliant, the colors warm and cheerful as we wind up into the foothills. The air tastes like biting into an apple. We pass lonely farmhouses with their lonely barns, and we can only imagine the lives of the families who have lived their for generations. Forgotten scarecrows still stand in their cornfields, county stores are decked out with chrysanthemums, white steepled churches stand next to their churchyards.
We park the car and take a path through the woods up to a mountain top. Burnished leaves flutter down in the shadows, one by one, glinting in the autumn light. We hear a brook murmuring somewhere off in those woods. At the top of the climb the sky opens up and in the stillness a couple of thousand feet above the world and its problems, we sit and contemplate the magnificent landscape and its timeless steadfastness; the rocky summits, the wrinkled valleys, the ridges of mountains dusted with the rainbow colors of fall, and we think of the maker of that landscape. We seem closer to God, somehow, up on those heights. And somewhere along that trail is a hidden waterfall, and in the cool shadows under the blazing trees, we listen to its peaceful music of grace. We watch its refreshing flow wearing the edges off the sharp stones and think we have felt something of an experience of life. Something of compassion. Forgiveness. Renewal.
Somewhere along that country road we come across a farmhouse whose porch is studded with jack o'lanterns. Up on a slope, just before a line of Maples that have lost half of their leaves, there is an old barn with its silo. What leaves are left in the trees seem ready to float to the ground. The farm stand is piled with pumpkins great and small, some fat and squat, others stretched and twisted. Grotesque gourds grin at you from wooden boxes. Winesap apples, Honeycrisp apples, Jonagolds and Cortlands fill the air with their tart, sweet scent. There is a wooden shelf lined with jugs of fresh apple cider, wildflower honey, and blackberry jam. Our thoughts drift to the joys of Thanksgivings and Halloweens past, those years in childhood when we went door to door dressed up as skeletons or hoboes or pirates, and those delicious bags of peppermint patties, Reese's pieces, Mr. Goodbars and candy corn that were the anticipation of that holiday. Not far off is that roasted turkey, gravy and cranberry sauce, the bean cassarole and butternut squash, the raisin stuffing and sweet potatoes, the cider and the wine, the pumpkin pie and the apple pie laid out along that long table. Sisters and brothers, uncles and aunts, cousins on the way for games and dinner, music and laughter that brightened those darkening nights of late fall.
The trunk of our car fills with the treasures of fall, and for one last moment, we try to hold on to that old house on the slope, the trees, the light, the air and the last of those glittering leaves that we know we will not see again until next year.
Such is the tart, crisp beauty and joy of autumn. What would our world be like without it?
| Author Notes | Autumn, as you probably have guessed by now, is my favorite season, and this little piece is a celebration of that season that I wait all year for. The bright crisp days and the thoughts of pumpkin pie and apple pie, the holiday shopping that makes the world seem, for a day at least, to be a better place. Something maybe of what heaven is like. estory |
By estory
Thanksgiving Day dawns an inevitable brisk, cold morning; a day clinging to the last of autumn, on the threshold of winter. There are still a few, last, golden leaves hanging onto the bony fingers of the trees, glimmering in the waning light. But most of them, like fading postcards of the year, lie scattered on the lawns or raked into crinkled piles along the curbs of the streets. The wind rattling the frost etched windowpanes speaks of the coming winter and its long, dark nights and snow. The poignant passing of time seems to hang in the air.
The aroma of a roasting turkey fills the house. My mother has been working on this dinner since breakfast, in her apron, as she done on all the Thanksgivings from my childhood through my life, as far back as I can remember. Hers is the legacy of those countless golden birds on their platters; the light and the dark meat carved up alongside the drumsticks and wings, the gravy, the raisin and bread crumb stuffing, the bowls of creamed white onions, bean cassarole and mashed potatoes that we gathered around year after year. Those pumpkin pies, those apple pies and their rich, flaky crusts, the spicy sweetness of Cortland and Macintosh apples that went into them. It was something we waited all year for. Oh how we took those marvelous delicious dinners for granted. Days of work spent shopping in those crowded stores, waiting on those check out lines. The peeling and slicing of all those hundreds of apples over all those years, the rolling out of the dough across flour sprinkled boards, the hours of mixing and pounding and slicing and stirring in that old kitchen. All for a dinner that disappeared in fifteen minutes.
Yet after all these years we know there was something about those big, old dinners. The table crowded with chairs, the happy harmony of excited voices, the hands reaching for the butter dish and the salt and pepper shakers and the cider jug. In the background would be the parade; the Broadway scenes played out in front of Macy's on Herald Square: the Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Les Miserable and Annie. The magnifiscent floats, the singers, and of course those giant balloons swaying in the breeze between the skyscrapers. Snoopy and Charlie Brown trying to kick that old football. Ronald McDonald and Spiderman, Rocky the flying squirrel, Virginia with her letter and the Elf on the shelf. And at last, Santa Claus, in his magical sleigh, proclaiming to everyone that the Holidays had finally arrived.
Afterward would be the game of Monopoly, the smell of coffee. Outside the pale window, the daylight would fade quickly and down the block one would see the warm, scarlet glow of a sunset between the empty branches of the trees that lined the street. Purple clouds racing in that brisk wind.
In the contented air of our cozy dining room, my mother and my aunt would talk of long ago Thanksgivings with my grandmother and my uncles in their little flat in Ridgewood, Queens. My cousin would tell us of his ever expanding model railroad, the new coal mine he was putting in its hills. We would tell each other of the toys we hoped to get for Christmas; the Major Matt Mason spaceship and mooncrawler, the Hot Wheels racing kits, the Barbie doll houses. My father and my uncle would be arguing over jazz and classical music.
It seems now, in a time and a place far away from there, that this was the moment we were really thankful for.
| Author Notes | Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and I wanted to capture something of the sacred nature of this special family moment in this piece. The hours of work our mothers put into those dinners, out of love for their families, the joys of sharing all that delicious food, anticipating Christmas, and remembering the past that always seems closer to us during the holidays. It is a moment that connects us to the generations that came before and set the stage for us, and a moment that we will carry with us into our lives as they unfold. It is something precious that we cannot quite describe easily. Something under the surface. Something glowing with those clouds on those sunsets of long ago. estory |
By estory
In the aftermath of shoveling out my car and a path along the sidewalk from a January snowstorm, I stand on the porch of our old house looking over a world that has been magically transformed. The last of the tattered clouds overhead is racing away, and the blue sky sinking down around me seems to ring with clarity. The air is cold, crisp and pure, as if it had come from the unspoiled regions of the North Pole. The roofs of the houses around me, the cars parked along the street, the uplifted branches of the trees, the grass, all are covered in a coat of snow. In the brilliant sunlight, the snow glitters and sparkles, white, clean, almost holy. As if it came from heaven itself.
For these first few moments after the storm it is as if the whole world has gone through its death and resurrection, its transfiguration. The dead leaves and the dirt are gone, the imperfections of the scene are blanketed with the perfection of absolution.
It is as if we have been forgiven somehow.
It is as if the whole world were starting over.
| Author Notes | This chapter marks the conclusion of Memories of this World. I wanted to finish on this note of transfiguration, this moment when the imperfections of our world are transformed back into the innocent and pristine, and I thought the perfect symbol for that would be a snowstorm. I have always cherished those moments after snow storms, when the shoveling is done and the car is extracted and you can enjoy those first brilliant moments when the world sparkles and the air is crisp and pure and the world seems brightened to the lustre of heaven. It is a spiritual moment experienced within a physical one. estory |
|
You've read it - now go back to FanStory.com to comment on each chapter and show your thanks to the author! |
| © Copyright 2015 estory All rights reserved. estory has granted FanStory.com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work. |
© 2015 FanStory.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Privacy Statement