On A Street In 1957

The leaves were matted near the curb. The recent downpour left other traces of debris, dog poop being the most nearly disintegrated of them, happily. Generally, the landscape was freshened and a sense of renewal was in the air. This was my neighborhood: no longer semi-rural perhaps, as a 1938 brochure extolling the virtues of the surrounding environment of the then new Boulevard Gardens apartment complex in North Woodside described it. No, this was Woodside, just past mid-century: visually and in fact, more industrial than ever before, stable, conservative (though we didn't know it), with its residents descendants of Scots-Irish, Irish, German-Americans, a sprinkling of W.A.S.P.S., Ashkenazi Jews, and other assimilated folks or those aspiring mightily to be so, from many other European lands as well, especially Italians, Poles and Greeks, blue collar folks, artisans and laborers, few "eggheads", all proud Americans, nearly all Caucasian, moral, God-fearing (and the very few atheists, homosexuals, beatniks and generic troublemakers knew to keep their traps shut) and most especially, hopeful.

This particular day was like many another. Frying onions, i.e. their odor wafting through hallways of walk-up apartment buildings was familiar and comforting. Children playing on stoops or venturing near the curbs, some shorn of their locks, silently told of the presence of ringworm in some residences and families. The appearance of a 1952 Topps baseball card, like the slightly torn one of journeyman "Chisox" hurler Lou Kretlow that I found in an empty lot near the Northern boulevard Independent Subway station, was not an uncommon or unpleasant occurrence for a rabid collector of these little works of art mounted on neat cardboard rectangles and fragrant, if new, with the sweet dusty residue of pink chewing gum.

The growing urban landscape included small factories and a burgeoning volume in traffic that was the fruit of the full re-tooling for a peacetime economy that the auto industry and other titans of industry and government strove for and welcomed. Peacetime prosperity was a reality despite a bitterly cold Cold War. The afore mentioned empty lot along with others, though they were a kind of endangered species, coexisted with the factories, auto repair shops, food processing plants, tool and dye establishments, etc., much the same way that horse drawn wagons, while dwindling numerically, made their peace with the horseless buggies that became increasingly speedier, larger and more numerous by the close of World War I.

But what of life on this street on this newly sunny late morning, a cold spring one that made my flannel Roy Rogers shirt feel oh so, welcome against my skinny ribbed torso? As I walked past parked cars with their split windshields, some with the new wraparound style and triangular little vent windows, I didn't notice of course, the empty spaces between many of them, the non-existent curbing along some sections of the street or the lack of signs informing drivers of alternate side parking regulations; these were all things yet to be. And there was no sense of how fleeting time could and would someday become. A grade schooler like me only pondered the moment's concern and wondered what Mom had packed in his brightly painted lunchbox with Davey Crockett's image on it. Was the chocolate milk in the thermos remembered? The evening meal may as well have been decades into the future as far as my catalogue of thoughts could tell, though in really just an instant (as an aged one's perceptions of the clock's all powerful ticking could reckon), my next door neighbor's mother would project her cry half way down the street: "Supper's on the table!" Like the latter day characters in Our Town, my observations of the ghosts of my youth are inevitably filled with uber-emotional wistfulness and the indescribable sense of fragility and awareness of the exceedingly transitory nature of persons and events that were then unquestioningly believed to be as solid as Gibraltar and as unchanging as the Kingdom of God.

This day I saw "Big" Mike for the first time. They had told me about him. The frightened whisperings of juvenile tongues pre-disposed toward the thrill of seeing bogeymen had colored utterly my understanding of him. Someone screamed "run!" and I sprinted away toward the safety of other adults whose faces I knew and who did not drag their legs or stare ahead with bulging eyes embedded in a face crimson and twisted with wisps of white down above jug ears. Still, it was his street too. And life on it was no doubt quite different for him than it was for us little ones, ambulating with abandon and quite oblivious to the fact that Mike once ran as we did. When most of us could only crawl or were fetuses in our mothers' bellies, or like the youngest of us, just zygotes, "Big"Mike first became a monster and not as "Big" as those who loved him and remembered he was. A cerebro vascular accident, as the old-time doctors in Woodside termed it, had left him with his speech badly slurred and that big left foot scraping one of his once shiny black shoes across the pavement. They were shoes that he used to proudly wear along with his double rowed brass buttoned policeman's dark blue tunic and sharply pressed trousers. At the dawn of mid-century he also did not hold one of those withered arms uselessly against his chest and his flashes of Irish temper were not horrific wailings, but lightning strikes of anger happily married to a wink and a flash of wit of a seemingly undying mind. Then too, until the stroke he could twirl a nightstick with the dexterity of a teen bound for glory as a juggler or a crackerjack Las Vegas card dealer. When most of our parents were also just beginning their journeys, Mike had, on a Chelsea corner dimly lit by a solitary gas lamp, taken a bullet in the line of duty that penetrated a bicep, but that youth and grit shook off and that made a wiser and stronger cop in mind and body. He was a good man. Many of us did not learn this until years after the cessation of those inadvertent hauntings.

Yes, the only bad man on our street was really just a sick man.  Juvenile delinquency though was the new obsession of newspapermen, the purveyors of pop culture and Hollywood moguls. There was money in depicting youthful rebellion or worse. Yet gum chewing in school was still the no.1 concern of educators with the lull between the fright over "Reefer Madness" in the '40s and the spread of "weed" in the mid-'60s just that: a hiatus before the emerging tumor of the drug culture. This interlude was real, however short-lived it proved to be. Teenage gangs were in reality, pubescent folks just hammering out social rules of engagement as they naturally sought their "place in the sun" distinct from children as well as adults. We had such a gang. They never harmed anyone and their desire to "rev" a jalopy's engine, preen before members of the opposite sex and display varsity jackets (uniforms of identity and belonging), carry or have carried school books by one's "steady", were as revolutionary as they got. No need to pretend: as in all human communities, there were real problems. Some girls did "get into trouble" and the less than mature judgment of the teen male, especially behind the wheel of an internal combustion engine vehicle, resulted in many a tragedy, no different than today. But these incidents were fewer, more remarkable and deeply regretted than today's brutal atmosphere of unabating violence, promiscuity and moral ignorance, if not bankruptcy. Creativity and tenderness….art in short, grew on this street as well. It took the form of music: yes, rock and roll, especially the doo wop stylings of acapella all-male groups harmonizing in the alleyways separating our apartment buildings and semi-detached houses. Complex rules of playtime were other manifestations of fertile young minds, the ones not yet made dizzy by pubescence. There was hopscotch, scully, boxball, punch ball, ringalerio and other diversions in our little busy world of socializing, budding grown-ups.

The most significant fact about existence then and there is one that contrasts sharply with reality on the same block today, nearly six decades, eleven presidents and nine or so wars later. Your neighbor and yourself were not only known to each other, but each other's offspring knew that they were answerable to each other's parents, i.e. all adults. Oh, of course there were exceptions. The eccentric old bachelor or the chronic inebriate down near the corner was not in "the loop" about group parenting. But by and large, ours was a block of families, with sizable numbers of small fry clogging the pavement or shouting and carrying on in backyards, the empty lots and the nearby schoolyard, their controlled chaos kept on this razor's edge of civilization by watchful loving eyes of mature men and women who knew the kind of world they had and the kind that they wanted to keep and it was a world permeated by love and structure, meaningful and committed to a future of upholding traditions and mores of beloved ancestors, but one determined to expand peace, prosperity, knowledge and especially to spread the distilled wisdom of liberty, education, good old American innovation and good humor. It is a street that is no more.

The Tortured Tree

I knew a lady who painted portraits of her children and grandchildren, as well as landscapes, seascapes and occasionally impressionist and still life paintings. She clearly had talent, but it had been thwarted initially, by a backward and myopic father who died only weeks too late to not deny her the acceptance of a scholarship and attendance at a prestigious and excellent art institute of learning while still in her teens. This particular injury to her opportunity and future was irrevocable when added to circumstances such as economic demands, marriage, children and all the other usual responsibilities of these realities together with running a household and helping with the family business. But like a healthy and vigorous plant not permitted the proper sunshine and nutrients to its surrounding soil, she grew in spite of these shackles that, rather than dragging her down, made for a more interesting and remarkable living thing, i.e. her art, its twisted form triumphing through the fruits born of its own special trial and tribulations. Yes, she neither became another O'Keefe nor a Cassatt, but the purity of her art and wounded but undefeated purpose allowed her to abide. Over the years, with no bitterness detected by me or anyone who ever knew her, the results of her labor were somehow more beautiful objects of beauty precisely because of strictures and oppressions.

We have all seen the indomitability of nature. The mimosa trees growing wildly up against chain link fences in my father's backyard for many years, uncomplainingly produced what was their collective destiny with the intimate aid of photosynthesis and blessed rain. That is, hardy wooden trunks grew through and around the iron links and anything akin to a description of the sight as those of somehow crippled vegetation or a perversity of nature, compared to a freely growing tree, misses the mark and fails to see the drama of constraints and how human nature as well as that of simpler forms of life courageously strive and overcome.

Sewage Supreme or The Dirty Half Dozen

John Edwards, Bob Filner, Mario Lopez, Mark Sanford, Elliott Spitzer and Anthony Weiner are all men who did or do hold public office and either did or do continue to remain in or aspire to elective office in state, local or national politics in the United States of America in this, the thirteenth year of the twenty first century. What do they have in common?  They all have been accused of and revealed to have been involved in immoral and unfaithful behavior related to their unchecked libidos.  Except for Edwards and possibly Lopez, a.k.a. "Grope-ez" (he of the perhaps slowly dawning self-awareness due to his age and  sudden unemployment) these men are adjudged by this blogger to be ethically challenged narcissists in continued denial who therefore are unwilling or unable to remove themselves from the public square and whose fragile inhibitions are neither nourished nor encouraged by a growing portion of the electorate that has increasingly demonstrated itself to be morally obtuse and similarly disinclined to consider self-control about its own promiscuity.

The time has long since passed that one needs to preface any condemnation of sexual indiscretions with the defensive assurance to the reader that one is not a puritan.  The ethos of the 1960's ("free love", the championing of non-judgmental ways and the constant urgings to "do it if it feels good') has held sway for far too long in America.  Allying itself with the "New Morality" of that era of counter-culturalism is really now, what one may safely identify as the "Old Immorality." In Weiner's case he has repeatedly lied about his "sexting." When his dissembling was revealed, and only then, did he come clean about these activities. Resignation from national office did not come easily for the former congressman. Two years after he did agree to step down, he began very recently, a renewed campaign for the mayoralty of what was perhaps the greatest city in the world, New York. We were assured that his rehabilitation was complete and that he was ready, in the dreary parlance and empty sloganeering of Democratic Liberalism to "move forward." Speedily it was announced that other "sexting" incidents occurred AFTER he had resigned his office. With equal alacrity Weiner called a press conference and rationalized all of his behavior with a wife by his side who chimed in with her own little apologia for why, in effect, Anthony was not deeply disturbed and did not deserve to be denied a chance to become the next mayor of the very wormy "Big Apple." Neither was convincing, but their ambitions and again, the weakness of the objections to his deeply flawed character keeps the unpleasantness of his continued presence in the public consciousness alive, like a hopefully dying rat that is for the present, too strong for the particularly weak dose of vermicide, i.e. opprobium that it has ingested.

When Bill Clinton avoided removal from the most powerful office in the world in 1999 for his perjurious acts growing out of his illicit sex life, it marked a milestone in the nation's cultural climate. While our traditions about privacy and the almost religiously held view about the inviolable bifurcation between public service and one's personal life were then and are now as strong as they ever were, the Clinton scandal inoculated, for the first time, other and future politicians from the fear of "infection" caused by repulsive behavior. In short, the negative consequences of indulging one's appetites receded to the point that there increasingly became no consequences. Routinely, more and more offenders paid lip service to traditional sensibilities by remarking that they had taken "full responsibility" for their actions and that they had, at the very least (and it was all too often demonstrated to be the very least of their peccadilloes), "exercised poor judgment", as if their transgression was no more than that of a mediocre outfielder who didn't account for the sun's rays while unsuccessfully trying to settle under a pop fly.

But conjoined with this behavior that many dismiss as just "naughty" comes a more systemic nastiness that one is inclined to view as not just coincidental. In the case of Spitzer, there is no great debate about his penchant for arrogance. He in fact, evinces a certain pride in his past behavior that he no doubt views as heroic, i.e. that of a "kick ass" reformer whose self-description early in his aborted gubernatorial term of office was that of a "f--king steamroller." More than a few other incidents point to  the gracelessness of this man, including the "Troopergate" issue and his vindictiveness in other areas.

The vileness and mental cruelty of Edwards towards his dying wife is well documented and Weiner's combativeness along with his self-destructive sexting nonsense reinforces what former Mayoy Giuliani once said of him not long after the former congressman first appeared on the national scene: "there was always something wrong with Anthony."

Well, the ancient saw is true. As our politicians are democratically elected "we get the leadership that we deserve." Do we really want to be deserving of morally feculent and bankrupt leaders? As software operators and others in the early days of computers warned those seeking excellence and accuracy from dubious facts and data: "garbage in….garbage out." The flotsam and jetsam on the seascape of our political world cannot endlessly be cleaned up and removed. The hubris that asserts that these "oceans" cannot become irretrievably polluted is a risky mindset akin to the conduct of these pathetic yet dangerous men.

Where Is The Little Tricycle?

Where is the little tricycle, the one that I would ride on, making laps unceasingly as my grandfather encouraged what I imagined was my fierce grownup athleticism while my newly minted self-esteem ballooned? My vigor knew no bounds and no conception of weariness troubled my supposedly endless days of play.  And what of the soft corduroy cap upon my dirty-blonde head, a black and white one with ear flaps and perceived as one worn by a motorcycle policeman?  How about the wooden milkbox, the one our family kept just outside and beside the screen door of the front door of our house?  My little tricycle would skirt it as I furiously pedaled on the vehicle in the circular route designed by Grandpa's theatrically inclined mind. No doubt he fancied himself the master choreographer of this tiny one "man" palio that his beloved grandchild could not fail to triumph in, immune to the effects of its dizzying demands for relentless rotations because of youth's insuperable vivacity. The then fairly fresh concrete of five sumer's past that covered the space between our modest attached brick house and the public sidewalk and upon which my tiny rubber tires tread: where is it? It's still there, but darkened and eroded, silently telling of so many winters, springs, summers and falls that have pounded it with impunity. Well, these objects, even if magically stored away in an attic or carelessly stashed somewhere, dry and dark, are really no more, if the spark of life given to them by their now profoundly changed human owners or borrowers are gone. Grandpa's voice, whether the happy, hortatory one on that long ago July afternoon or the one gurgling its last utterances in a mishmash of memories, is long stilled. My joyous shrieks of affirmation while immersed in the very serious business of fun are gone too, of course. What is not gone are later, other tricycles, other cries of the juvenile gaiety of their owners, other grizzled throats of encouraging shouts of other summers owned or borrowed by other lovers of life. They're not gone, because they never were.

Ultimate Elf

She was not yet fifteen….less than half my years then. Quite more than a moppet, but clearly not near her coming of age, she was accompanied by her mother, a chaperone who seemed to know that no short leash was possible though she radiated something indomitable in her glance at her vivacious child.  The woman's face was a somehow familiar one: dark, lines and wrinkles with a slim regality to her tall figure, Sephardic features, yet perhaps Gallic and with intense, intelligent eyes, the bags under them more than hinting of pain and loneliness.  As our first day of drama classes were about to commence, I was focused only on my goals: to acquire rudimentary skills and hopefully more in the "art that conceals itself" as our acting coach would repeat often and with avuncular earnestness. I also wanted to have fun.  Determination to do all this was arguably of a kind similar to the "Dutch courage" many of us employ when timidity immobilizes pursuit of a dream.  But friendship and the mutually supportive system that naturally grows from such a bond was the liberating "alcohol" in this case that freed up one's inhibition.  My friend Peter had aspired to perform before an audience for many years, and like me he had never made "the move." Now we both had and it was exciting to even have gotten to just this point of trying something new.

The little one's chattering and fidgeting allowed my shyness to recede and my very fledgling self-confidence to survey the landscape with the default position of an imagined dignified silence and supposed maturity that was re-enforced by as it easily contrasted with this teen's molten energy and impish impulses.  But I could see, perhaps not yet consciously, that her time was fast approaching. Her passing childishness would be but a stepping stone to so many more kaleidoscopic changes that her precocious and bold ways presaged. She would leave us behind in the dust of the road that we, well most of us, had already chosen or that fate had assigned to us: safe, minimally creative and never quite mastering our fears. She, instead, would "make it."

I preferred the comfort of a quite transitory dominance that dismissively and superficially mused "she's just a kid." My manners, though perhaps mannered, suited me fine until one day she revealed who was the mistress and who was the servant.  Whether she was attracted to me or whether she was chiefly irritated about being ignored, this particular evening's class' conclusion featured a swift kick to my leg as I passed her enroute to the exit door.  Though I didn't know it immediately, I was now hopelessly smitten by this Lolita-like charmer with the short dark bob and twinkling almond shaped peepers who had all the hopefulness within her being of a tiny bird of paradise chirping to quit its nest, the azure sky beckoning to her throbbing little heart.

The course was of eighteen months duration and before one year had elapsed she was on to other things and the only and occasional pupil of her family was now the mother. We heard reports that she was pursuing other projects including her singing in a band somewhere in the punk rock scene of that era. I had been invited to a fifteenth birthday party for her at her apartment before her departure and my crush on this pixie took the form of moodily staring at the child's headshot while more age appropriate friends wondered who this strange fellow was. Poems and a love letter were soon after written and happily (or not) never delivered.  A vacation to Canada during the occasion of her sixteenth birthday found me still lovesick. In Toronto, at the typical tourist stop at the top level of the Canadian National Exhibition's famed tower, I lingered to have a merchant at the concession for "permanent" metallic messages (many enshrined on the tower's inner walls) inscribe one thusly: "Rus Without Ultimate Elf." A bouquet of flowers to her on another occasion from a "Secret Admirer" was the culmination of this hopeless and pointless state of affairs.

The years rolled on. My predicted success for her came to pass and a latter day encounter in cyberspace confirmed two hopes: that the "sugar 'n spice and everything nice" child-woman would grow up to be as sweet and sassy a good hearted woman and that "someday some boy would write in her (daughter's) autograph album/book too: 'Roses Are Red My Love, Violets Are Blue, Sugar Is Sweet my Love, Good Luck, May God Bless You.'"