Joe

9.26.08 Joe

I awake on a Friday morning in September to the sound of a tumultuous rainstorm pelting spitballs against my bedroom window. I hurry into the daycare center where I work without giving a thought to breakfast, lunch or snack. Looking like a bedraggled rodent, I am greeted by the kitchen staff proffering a vegetarian sausage on a biscuit. Intrigued, I take one bite. Disgusted, I throw the rest away.

For a few minutes I am alone in the office, realizing that with the storm, and our staff’s rather spotty attendance and, to be generous, flexible work ethic, it’s going to be a challenging day. I visit the classrooms to say good morning before I begin my work. I peek in at the babies, schmooze with the toddlers, and eventually make my way into the preschool classroom in the basement. I brainstorm with the teacher to find a place to post photos so that they’re accessible to parents and children. We settle on the wall by the staircase, so that everyone can see the photos coming in in the morning and leaving at the end of the day.

After checking the office email, I go to my library in the attic; the one no one uses. The library has had a long and mostly unhappy history; originally donated and stocked by a women’s professional organization, it had been my task to enter the 2000+ books into a database. Unfortunately, that project had become a low priority and other tasks came first. The library had been in the attic in 2002; a year ago I was granted the privilege of re-creating the library on the first floor. Alas, that didn’t last long; the executive director decided to rip the library shelves out to create a tiny classroom for 5 three-year-olds and one teacher. The library books went back to the attic, and oblivion. However, today I am fortunate to have the services of an energetic young woman, and together we begin to organize the books according to subject. Any pretense of an orderly system was gone, but I do manage to find some of the most important categories: My Family, School, Colors, Shapes, Sounds, Food, Birthdays and Feelings. The Halloween books (there must be 50 of them, and at least 30 of them will be going home as Halloween presents) are on display for any teacher who wants them. Or has the energy or ambition to climb the stairs to the attic.

The Business Manager asks me to make some changes to the school’s website. I have been administering the website for over a year, and at this point I know more about it than anyone in the office. I suppose it doesn’t matter; the only person who looks at it is me. But I keep adding to the content, creating new pages and uploading photos. The pictures, however, cannot simply be uploaded. I have to create thumbnails through yet another program. It’s a tiresome process but I can do it in my sleep. I make his adjustments.

Phones ring; I answer them, and take messages. I organize the pictures stored in my computer to make it easier to find a picture by date. It probably looks like busy-work to others, because most of the teachers and all of the parents have no idea of how much work I do, or how important my work is to our development, fundraising and marketing operations.
I offer the parents the option to give me their email addresses, so that I can email them the pictures of their children directly, saving the office the price of printing out copies to send home.

I have lunch. It’s either tuna salad or chicken salad; I can’t tell, but it’s good.

Quietly, so as not to wake the toddlers who are sleeping in the classroom beneath the library, I find books that can be sent home with the children. The library books are worthless if no one reads them. I am slowing giving books away, with the approval of the director. I believe she will be happy when there are no books left. I also bring down as many picture books as I can carry. The shelf over my computer, seemingly the only space that I have been granted as my own, will house the colorful, amazingly beautiful and diverse picture books. Saving the teachers the walk upstairs, they will be able to choose books for their classes, until, eventually, that shelf will be taken from me too.

A few kitchen workers, mothers who have fallen on hard times, come into the office and begin discussing their situations with other staff members and me. I show one woman (my morning library partner) different types of resumes that would show off her career goals and special skills. She seems to have neither, but I give her some questions to take home to help her hone her resume, which I promise I will work on with her the next week. I make a bet with myself that she will not return. Everything in our school, from the books to the classrooms to the students to the staff, is so transient. Don’t get too attached to anything, or anyone, because you will probably never see them again. (In the future, I am correct. She does not return.)

While in my library/storage/pantry room, I discover a stash of potato chips. I feel noshy. At snack time I watch the children deconstruct their Oreos as I used to do, 50 years ago. I think I love this place, because it can transport me in an instant to a time when tiny things – a cookie, a coloring book – were large, and huge things – the state of the world, the energy crisis – were non-existent.

It is a hot, muggy, rainy day, and I am moving throughout the building, one room air-conditioned, one not, from floor to floor to floor. Passing through the toddler room as I run up and down the staircases, I see a little boy named Joe standing up, crying. Crying, and nobody paying attention. I suppose the teachers’ theory is that he will calm himself, and so they are not coddling him, but I don’t think they really have a theory governing such situations – I think they are ignoring him.

I don’t like picking up toddlers. Especially crying ones. There are too many fluids exiting too many orifices. I’m squeamish about bodily functions. I have another idea.

I go to the bulletin board, and find a picture of Joe that I had taken the week before.

I give him the picture.

He stops crying.

Pandas Strike Back

Me and my brothers were just playing in our yard when these American ladies came up and started talking to us. One was very pretty and one was very smart.

One of them, the pretty one, I guess, kept trying to feed us eucalyptus leaves. Don’t they know, that’s what you feel koalas, not pandas! They [koalas] are very annoying. We don’t even allow them on our continent! We kicked them to the curb 12,000 years ago and haven’t heard from them since. I think they ended up in that prison camp island, Australia.

We eat bamboo. It’s much more refined than eucalyptus leaves – and it has more fiber which we think helps to make us happy regular kids.

We play in our yard and people think that we’re so cute. Not all of us are cute. Some of our big brothers went to Hollywood in America and got themselves into a movie. They were practicing martial arts and they starred in a movie called, “Ju-Jitsu Pandas” which they thought was so cool because it had that lady Ms. Jolie. We actually like our own actress Gong Li, who makes mostly art-house movies, better. She doesn’t adopt lots of kids, either. I think she has them one at a time.

(We got a little nervous when that Jolie lady was here scouting for new kids for her family but then she skipped right over China and picked up one from Vietnam. She gave him a new name, Pax, which means Peace in her language. I’m sure he is very happy but it’s kind of funny how she changed his name. I think when you are three years old you have the right to decide what your own name is. Whatevs….)

People seem to think that we are very fat, cuddly animals. Don’t they know that we have to dress really warm to play in the snow? We are really very skinny, but we wear extra padded snowsuits when we go outside. They make us look really chubby. But underneath we are not. (All that fiber from the bamboo helps.)

We got a little freaked out by the visiting ladies because we thought they might really be from the Russia. They kept talking about their “fellow travelers.” Maybe we were very paranoid because they were looking in that book called “Red Channels.” They said it was just a guide for their hotel room TV. OK.

They said that they wanted to take one of us back to America with them for a friend. We didn’t want to go. Just give us plenty of bamboo and our furry snowsuits and we’re good to go. Maybe if there were some girl pandas here me and my brothers would be really, really happy.

East Meadow

She stepped outside the ABC studios in New York after the last show, looking for her boyfriend Rootie, the baseball player, the star of their TV show. They had arranged to meet after the finale, but as she looked north, south, east and west, there was no sign of him.

Their late-afternoon daily children’s show had been a phenomenon. The early days of television broadcasting had been a matter of much experimentation, though why some shows caught on, and others sunk into oblivion, there were no definitive answers. She was happy that the show had had its four-year run, and she and Rootie had planned to move to the Bronx, where Rootie was already hired by the Yankees to play ball.

As she stood shivering in the cold, it occurred to her that she had been stood up. Without Rootie to plan her life, she was adrift, abandoned, and very much alone. The other cast members had their own career paths; Big Todd Russell was headed out to Hollywood to see if he could make the Big Time.

She adjusted her outfit: white blouse with a pink, polka-dot skirt, shoes and socks and a bag that matched her skirt. With no coat, she realized that she had better find someplace to warm up. She started walking, soon finding herself at Pennsylvania Station. Not having any other plans, she bought a ticket for the next train that was leaving for Long Island.

Long Island was a land of opportunity, or so it seemed to be at that time. Families were moving into cozy little homes there, each family with its 2.3 children. She headed for Garden City, because she liked the name. She boarded the train, having no clue how her life was going to change.

But when she got there, she was just as confused and alone as she had been in New York. She stopped into a candy store at the station and ordered a Coke. A handsome young truck driver came and sat down beside her. He drove a parcel post truck. He was headed to East Meadow, where he was dropping off a few birthday presents for a little girl who was turning four years old that day.

The little girl was living in the Golden Zone of happiness in the early 1950s. A loving family, plenty of friends and neighbors, she only wanted one thing for her birthday. She had wanted that present since August of the previous year, when her family had bought its first television set, and she fell in love with a hand puppet on one of her favorite television shows.

She hadn’t lacked for toys; she already had several dolls. But this doll was special; her flirty eyes looking off to one side seemed to have an extra sparkle; her deep dimples punctuating her chubby cheeks; and her perpetually smiling mouth that gave her face a look that was at once both sweet and knowing.

The Parcel Post man drove up to the little house on Gerald Avenue. Polka Dotty got off the truck, and walked into the little girl’s heart.

She became the child’s most beloved companion. Manufactured by the Effanbee Doll Company, Polka Dotty’s head was molded vinyl, her body was stuffed and encased in a vinyl cloth. The little girl spent hours tracing the swirls and patterns in Polky’s molded hair, dressing and undressing the doll, until all her original clothes were lost. No matter; Polky was just as enthralled with her little fan.

The “Rootie Kazootie TV Show” went off the air in 1953. Nothing was heard of Big Todd Russell or any of the other actors on the show. Rootie eventually made his way to California, where he tried out as a Dodger in the late 1950’s. But like many other TV toys from the Golden Age, he ended up on Ebay.

Polka Dotty still lives with the little girl. She has a place of honor in a little wicker carriage with her best friend, Robin, a vinyl doll with a little rosebud mouth, and red hair that you could actually comb, who came to live with the little girl and her doll in 1956. Best friends for more than fifty years, they are both rather fragile now. But they are happy to be beloved friends of the little girl, who is not so little anymore.

The Last Out

It was the final game at Shea Stadium. I don't usually follow baseball -- and I missed the Yankee Stadium ceremony -- but for some reason I remembered that yesterday would probably be the Mets' last game at Shea. I've never gone to a baseball game, but New Yorkers have always had a strange (unnatural?) attachment to its teams and their stadia, so I decided to watch the final game. First I had to local it on my cable station, then had to find the HiDef cable station. So I only popped in at the 8th inning.

The game ended disappointingly, but soon afterwards the ceremonies began. The announcer mentioned the many players who could not be present that day. But then they began calling out the old Mets. And I do mean old. I was shocked to see how much our boys of summer had aged. When a very elderly man came out I thought, oh, no, that can't be Ed Kranepool, and it was, I wondered how he got to be so old! Willie Mays was escorted onto the field with an aide at his side.

But then -- the kid they called "The Franchise," because he was the Mets' biggest asset in his heyday -- Tom Seaver came out to thunderous applause. And, oh, my, Mike Piazza, looking amazing (how did he get out of New York? he belongs here!) came out to even louder applause. And part of the reason had to be, his METS' SHIRT WAS TAILORED!!! Not for nothing do I watch makeover shows. His shirt was tailored for his body.

Finally, heartbreakingly, Tom took to the pitcher's mound, and Mike took the catcher's place, and Seaver pitched one last ball to Piazza. They embraced, and slowly left the field together. They came to the fence, and each took one side, and then, closing the gates for the last time, Tom Seaver and Mike Piazza were....

the last out.

What I Really Know About Civic Duty

What I really know about civic duty I learned from my parents. As young adults, they were Democrats who had worshipped Franklin Roosevelt and in 1948, I’m told, cried when hearing an impassioned civil-rights speech on the radio by an up- and-coming statesman named Hubert Humphrey. I wasn’t around for that speech, but seven-year-old me stuffed mailboxes for Adlai Stevenson. 11-year-old me snuck into the voting booth to pull the lever for John F. Kennedy. (Oops, did I just invalidate his election?) And 21-year-old me registered to vote on that birthday.

There are other forms of civic duty that I practice with some regularity: volunteering; recycling, supporting non-profits (sometimes volunteering to recycle for non-profits). But I think that probably the least effective thing I do is to work in political campaigns. Living in New York State, probably the “Bluest State” there is, much of what I do doesn’t have any impact at all. Al Gore didn’t even campaign on Long Island in 2000 – though I’m sure if he had, somehow my phone calls and stuffed envelopes would have turned the tide on Election Day. I campaigned twice for Hillary for Senator, but just half-heartedly, and darned if she didn’t win both times! So I don’t know if I’m a jinx and a jonah. I just know, it’s my civic duty to pester the citizens of my town to vote, which they promise they will, if only I would hang up the phone.

Sometimes I give my insurance company the willies when I volunteer to drive voters to the polls. Out here in suburbia, if you don’t have a car, you can’t vote. It’s not like it’s a law; more that it’s a huge inconvenience. So I’ll stuff as many folks as I can into my car, and drive around from pillar to poll, hoping that my passengers will do their civic duty and vote for my candidate.

The worst part about participating in political campaigns? Working in cold, unheated, rented storefronts GOTV (getting out the vote) on dreary, rainy First-Tuesdays-after-the-First-Mondays in November. The best part about participating in political campaigns? The impromptu First-Monday-night-before-First-Tuesday-in-November pizza and pot luck parties in those cold, unheated, rented storefronts, bracing for the 24-hour marathon ahead.

I can’t wait till November 3. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Submitted to AARP Bulletin.

Letter to a Baby Boy

Letter to a Baby Boy (Another in as Series of Letters That Will Never Be Mailed). May 26, 2008

Dear Baby,

Congratulations on being born! I’m not so sure I see the wisdom of being born at this point in time, when you may never be able to drive a car that is powered by gasoline, but I hope that you learn from the example of your family and grow to love mass transit.

Your grandmother and I met each other in a strange, 21st Century mode on an Internet Message Board, in 2001. When we found out how much we had in common, we began to correspond directly through email. In a wonderful coincidence, we learned that not only had we grown up within a few miles of each other, I in Bethpage and she in Levittown, but that we had been standing on the very same street on the very same day in November 1960. We both waited in the rain for a glimpse of Senator John F. Kennedy making a last-weekend campaign swing through Long Island.

My family was standing on the corner of Hempstead Turnpike and Wantagh Avenue, and she was standing on Wantagh Avenue about a mile to the south. As adults, we both moved to the north shore of Long lsland. We have met in person several times, and we share a warm email relationship.

I take some small credit in the circumstances of your conception. If not for my efforts 20 years ago, your life might have begun quite differently.
In the early 1900’s a man named George McKesson Brown, heir to a giant pharmaceutical company, bought several acres of land in Huntington bordering on Huntington Harbor and the Long Island Sound, and built himself a great estate. It was known as West Neck Farm. He had a grand home built, based on a Norman chateau, with a garage and stables and a boathouse on the beach. When he lost everything, as heirs invariably do, he sold off parts of the farm, and then finally the chateau, which he sold to the Brothers of the Sacred Heart to become a Catholic boys’ boarding school, named Coindre Hall, after the founder of that order.

When the school closed down, a combination of bad management and pilfered plumbing led the building to a state of near-ruin. While Suffolk County debated what to do with the property, all sorts of developers came up with plans to develop the land, raising the possibility of destroying one of the last remaining Gold Coast Estates. I fell in with a band of protestors called, “The Alliance for the Preservation of Coindre Hall,” or something noble like that, and together we painted posters and picketed Parliament (aka the Suffolk County Legislature) while we tried to stave off any possible development. At one particular meeting, held in the evening in one of the large drawing rooms, a group of suits from a medical-rehab institute tried to persuade us that having such a facility in that neighborhood, given that there is limited access, no trains or buses, and no nearby support businesses, would be a swell idea, started off strong, but by the end of the evening the 5 men making the presentation had backed themselves, literally, into a corner of the room. Seeing them cower from the assault of the mildest-mannered best-behaved group of concerned citizens was the highlight of my career as a protestor.

Eventually, the County took over the grounds, and Coindre Hall is preserved today as parkland, and the building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, is used as a wedding venue.

Getting the picture? Good, because just a few more details and then you can go burp. The garage and stables became the home of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington. The boathouse is the headquarters for the Sagamore Rowing Club. The grounds of the estate has picnic tables and even a dog run, which won’t do you much good if you do have a dog someday because there will be no gas to power the car for you to drive there.

And Coindre Hall itself? By yet another coincidence, your Mommy and Daddy chose the beautiful chateau as the site of their wedding two years ago.

Dear baby, do you want to know a secret? I did it all for you.

**********************************************************************

Roslyn May 19, 2008

When I was six years old my family lived in a small town named Roslyn Heights for 6 months, from the summer of 1955 to the winter of 1956, while we waited for our house in Bethpage to be ready. Often a town named “Heights” signifies an elegant address, but in this case we literally lived on the other side of the tracks from the well-to-do, just-plain Roslyn. (Not to be confused with Roslyn Kaufman, one of my first friends in Bethpage, who was thereafter forevermore known to me simply as Rozzie).

We lived at #33 Edwards Street in a garden apartment complex, on the second floor. The flat was cramped; it had a walk-in, but not an eat-in kitchen; two bedrooms (my brother and I shared one) and a little dining area and living room. All of our furniture from our house in East Meadow was somehow shoved into that tiny apartment.

We moved in during a brutally hot summer. One day my mother attempted to take my brother, some friends, and me to a nearby beach in our 1952 Chevy. We ran over a metal rod in the street which punctured a tire, and we all had to wait on the side of the road for help. Not having Triple A or a cell phone, I can’t imagine who or what we were waiting for, but a passing truck driver stopped and changed the tire for us. From then on, I always thought of truck drivers as friendly, chivalrous, and gallant.

I had gone to kindergarten in the Meadowlawn School in East Meadow, but I started first grade in the Roslyn Heights Elementary School, where my brother was in fourth grade. The school was an ancient, imposing brick building, probably built 50 years before, which could not accommodate the overwhelming number of students enrolled there. As a result, my first grade class was held in a left-over World War II-issued Quonset hut next door to the big school. (In an ironic burst of symmetry, some of my classes in my freshman year of college were held in old World War II Army barracks on the campus of Adelphi University, and the school theatre was in a Quonset hut.)

Kindergarten in East Meadow had been only a half-day, but first grade was a full day, and so it was the first time I had to eat lunch in school. I think we went next door to the old building for lunch. The looming, cavernous building terrified me, and I was unable to eat there. I would bring my lunch back to the apartment and eat it after school. Eventually I learned to swallow my fear, though others came in to replace it. My 9-year-old brother and I had to cross a fairly large street to get to school and back. There was one particular autumn day when my brother and I had to lug our book bags, lunch boxes (mine was a tartan plaid) and a pumpkin each across the Avenue and up the hill to our apartment. My doll Robin joined me at school occasionally; of course she was another burden, but not a weighty one.

My deepest shame, in all of my 17 years of education, happened in that Quonset hut. We had a substitute teacher one day, who asked us to write our numbers, as high as we could count. I got stuck on 12. I remember remembering that it was either 1-2 or 2-1; but couldn’t figure out which one was correct. Maybe if I had skipped past it, I still tell myself, I would have gotten back on track with 13. But no, I had to stop just when I had barely made it into the double digits.

My brother and I quickly made friends on Edwards Street. I know my friend’s name was Susan, but I don’t remember anything else about her. My brother’s friend was named Gilbert, and he was the perfect buddy to go on boyish adventures. In those days, children were safe to wander far from mother’s eye (although not really; it was only a year later that the case of the kidnapped Weinberg baby in Plainview became headline news) and the boys were able to get into mischief that only little boys can. I remember seeing them walking along a high brick ledge and jumping off onto the pavement. (My mother only learned about this from me 40 years later, saving her from a possible heart attack in 1955.)

I think the apartment complex was filled with other families on their way to permanent housing elsewhere; I know Gilbert also moved away, and he and my brother lost contact. For all I know, Susan, the barely-remembered best friend, is still living there. Interestingly, I went back to Edwards Street several years after we moved out; our apartment number, #33, which was on the left side of the street when we lived there, was inexplicably on the right side of the street when I went there as an adult.)

Despite the heat and the cramped little apartment, we had memorable times in Roslyn Heights. There was a dinky little town on our side of the railroad tracks, but Roslyn High School, and the little town of just plain Roslyn, was on the other, north, side of the tracks. When we drove into Roslyn proper, we had to drive up a hill and wait for the traffic light to change. I developed yet another fear, this one of the car rolling backwards down the hill. Although cars today are more reliable, I’m still not comfortable with that maneuver.

Sometimes on Sundays we would get into the old gray Chevy and drive through Roslyn Estates and Manhasset, looking at the fine homes there and dreaming. We would never have been able to buy one of those houses, but it was thrilling just to dream about. It’s still an if-only….dream of mine.
There was, and still is, a lovely duck pond in Roslyn; we went there to feed the ducks, which is probably frowned on today. We went to the movies in the theatre next to the Roslyn Clock Tower to see “Lady and the Tramp,” still one of my favorite movies, with the beautiful spaniel Lady still one of my favorite movie heroines.

My brother and I also were enchanted by an innovative children’s television show, that had also sprung from the mind, or the studio, of Walt Disney, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” Later I realized that the show was actually a marketing gimmick for Disney to lead families to his new amusement park in California, but we didn’t care. We watched that show and made friends with the Mousekeeters. There was even a Mouseketeer named Cheryl, although she pronounced the name incorrectly; the proper pronunciation is the plosive, fricative CHeryl.

We stayed in Roslyn until January 1956. From the heat of summer, to the bitter cold winter, we experienced four seasons in six months.

We finally moved into our permanent, forever house in Bethpage on January 19, 1956; it was to be our family’s home for the next 33 years. Roslyn Heights had been my home for only a half year of my nearly 60 years; still, it was a memorable slice of time, and the place where I learned to read, write, and feed ducks; to eat lunch away from home; to make and lose friends.

I conquered some fears, and acquired new ones.

I learned I could depend on the kindness of strangers.

I saw my brother as a daredevil for the first time. I shared a room with him for the last time.

I watched a romantic movie about two dogs in heat in the heat of a Long Island summer.

I cried from the pain of my red, chapped hands in the frigid cold of a Long Island winter.

It was only six months, but seemed so much more.

A Sentimental Journey -- October 8, 2007