Research supports what people often claim: that we recall bad experiences better than good ones. Maybe you have found this to be true for yourself. Maybe not.
In any event, I am grateful that I can share this decades-old memory of my dearly departed Dad, and in vivid color! You will find it published in The Good Men Project here: Live From Atlantic City!
HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!
Read my mother’s Depression-era childhood recollection of a beloved family border below:
In memory of Bruno Walter Kohler, and to all who bring delight to the hearts of children, any time of year.
This is the story mom tells every Christmas. Her father told it before her. She tells it in a formal tone, weighty and reverent, which is different from the way she ordinarily speaks. It’s as if she understands that when she is gone, there will be no one left to tell this story. She tells it to me, her daughter, and her grandson William, as we set up the Christmas crèche with its painted, plaster figurines– this manger, which has been in our family for about as long as this story has been told.
My father Ted, she begins, who was raised in abject poverty during the Great Depression, he never had a Christmas tree as a child. But when I was born, he always saw to it that I had a Christmas tree, and a large one at that.
William unwinds cocoons of tissue paper, worn with age, and soft as flannel. Small sheep emerge, curled on grass green bases.
But my father was also thrifty, mom continues, and waited until the very last minute to buy a tree, on Christmas Eve, when the prices came down. Of course in those days, the practice in New York was not to put the tree up, or even to trim it, until Christmas Eve. And then people would celebrate for the twelve days that followed. Which is very different from what it is today, when people throw their trees out the day after Christmas.
William unwraps a shepherd, and another sheep, this one with neck twisted backwards, looking over its shoulder. I place this lamb, as I always do, backwards, with its hind quarters facing the crèche, and its muzzle craning to witness the miracle of our savior’s birth.
One year, my mother continues, when I could not have been more than six or seven, my father waited, as usual, until Christmas Eve to buy a tree. But when he went out looking, he found that trees were scarce, and actually, there were no trees at all for sale. He did not know what to do. He went home, and I imagine he told my Mother and Walter, who was sitting at the kitchen table, that there would be no Christmas tree that year. So Walter left for Judges Bar on Zerega Avenue, his favorite watering hole. Lo and behold, a couple of hours later, Walter returned with a cheap bottle of Muscatel, a gift for my teetotaling father, along with two large balsam branches that he had bought from a barfly. My father lashed the boughs together for a tree, and decorated it. And it was beautiful. And I never knew it wasn’t a real tree until I was older and heard the story. So that was the year that Walter saved our Christmas.
Walter, a boarder in my mother’s home, not only saved Christmas that year, but he started a family tradition that endures. Walter bought my mother this manger from a five and dime store. We still erect it every December, no matter how busy we are, and sometimes very late in the season, even adding figures after Christmas Day.
As is the case this December, when we build out our nativity scene on December 26th, which we insist on calling Boxing Day, a British holiday, though we are American. We enjoy this little affectation; a nod to imagined Old World Christmases we have never known. William continues to unwind tissue and I to arrange: Mary and Joseph, the Magi and camels, all crowding the holy crib, and Archangel Gabriel perched atop. But there are also unlikely worshipers, swans and turkeys, dogs and cats–out of proportion china keepsakes, added over the years, collected from boxes of Red Rose Tea and God knows where else.
Walter loved Christmas and would shake the snow globe of childhood memories to mesmerize my mother with sparkling flakes of yuletides past, the Christmas markets, the handcrafted dollhouses, the Christstollen with candied fruit.
William unwraps the last bundle to reveal the central character in this nativity drama. In years when we are not so late in setting up the crèche, we hide the babe behind the manger until Christmas Eve, when we pop the little light of the world into his straw bed. But now, with Christmas past, I place Jesus right at the plaster knees of his mother, bent and adoring, arms outstretched, hands cupped, as if cradling love itself.
Bruno Walter Kohler’s own little light kindled into the world in a small town in Saxony, in the late 19th Century. Not much is known about his early years, besides what he shared of those idyllic Christmases. Walter endured the Great War and the severe inflation that followed. He became a merchant seaman out of Hamburg, and in the early 1930s he sailed into New York Harbor and jumped ship, rather than return home, where he might well have been conscripted into the Third Reich.
Walter went looking for lodging and found my great-grandmother, Carmela, who rented him a room in her tenement apartment in East Harlem. It was not uncommon in those days for a divorcee, like Carmela, to rent spare bedrooms. Her daughter Mary lived upstairs on the top floor in the same building, with her husband Ted and my mother, Constance.
An undocumented immigrant, Walter worked seven nights a week tossing back-breaking bundles of The Daily News from a truck onto newsstands throughout the city. He worked all night and slept all day, for years. The Great Depression was still hanging on when my mother was born in 1938. Mary was nineteen and Ted was twenty, and unemployed. It was Walter who bought the milk for little Connie, week after week.
In 1943, the whole family, including Walter, moved from Manhattan to the top floor of a two-family house in the Bronx. One year later, at forty-eight, Carmela got sick and died from something mysterious that doctors at the time didn’t understand. Walter stayed on with Ted and Mary and Connie. While World War II raged in Europe, Ted got Walter off The Daily News paper truck and found him a job as a dishwasher at Schreiber’s, a Kosher restaurant in Manhattan. This was an improvement, or was it? Now Walter worked forty hours a week and had two days off, which he spent, increasingly, at Judges Bar up the street.
Up until then, no one realized Walter was an alcoholic because he worked every day and never had much time to sit on a barstool. Gradually though, his behavior changed and he became unbearable. He fell down the stairs drunk more than once, and Ted and Mary asked him to leave more than once. But when Walter begged to come back home, they relented, every time, until the last time, when they didn’t take him back.
Now Walter was on the outs, living in a furnished room nearby. He would often walk by the Tratman Avenue house and talk to Connie, playing out front. In the early 1950s, some of the Bronx was still undeveloped. There was open space and marshland for children to explore. Swamps would freeze over, and kids like my mother would lace on their skates and disappear until dinnertime. One such frozen winter day, Ted and Mary got a call from the police that Walter had been found dead in one of these swamps, about two blocks from the house. According to the coroner’s report, the immediate cause of death was heart attack from “chronic ethanolism.” Alcoholism. Walter had no insurance and no savings. My grandfather paid all expenses to bury him.
William and I add the finishing touch: the snowy forest. None of us has ever questioned the topographic accuracy of these snow-flocked, bottle brush pine trees that we plant behind the stable in Bethlehem. I step back to take in the scene. One shepherd’s staff is missing, another’s sandaled foot is chipped. The porcelain turkey squats beside the rhino.
My mother is pleased with how the manger has turned out, though it looks pretty much the same as it does every year. She is thinking of Walter:
There was a great deal of accumulated sentiment for Walter, who had lived with us for more than two decades. There was nobody else in his life, just our family. He was with us when I was born in 1938 until he died, when I was sixteen. I remember one time I passed Walter’s room, I must have been seven or eight. The door was open. On his dresser I noticed a tiny, leather glove. Now we knew that Walter had lost his wife and child in a fire in Germany many years earlier, but that’s all we knew. He never talked about it. There was just that one glove that he kept on top of his bedroom dresser. I remember it to this day.
I count sheep and make sure there are the same number on either side of the stable, because this is how it’s always been done. It’s as if someone, at some point, perhaps Walter himself, figured out that prioritizing visual balance fostered the harmonious effect that scenes like these call for. Everything is as it should be, as the manger figures from the five-and-ten-cent store settle into their roles for yet another season, to reenact the same story, with the same message. An inexpensive set of statues and a pair of pathetic pine branches, bought by a beloved drunk, tell the tale of agony and abiding love at Christmas.
Photo by Author
Not long ago I heard an interview on NPR on the “consciousness” of plants, which got me worrying that maybe I was hurting my pot of basil every time I pinched off her leaves for marinara sauce. So I’ve been digging my fingers below the surface of my understanding to unearth what it is exactly about my new hobby, so often frustrating and full of fails, that keeps me at it! Read the story below:
After the “smoke event” of June, 2023, when Eastern Canada caught on fire and belched particulates down the Eastern seaboard, reaching as far as Flatbush, Brooklyn, and turning the sky outside my window Creamsicle orange, I did two things to improve the air quality in my one-bedroom micro-environment: I bought a Korean air purifier on Amazon and a small forest of houseplants from my local florist.
Until that point, I had just one imposing snake plant, worthy of any dentist’s waiting room, which thrived under the canopy of my neglect. Now I had a leafy grove with hard-to-pronounce names and confusing care labels poking up from pots.
Like cooking, there is a knack to growing houseplants. A little education in the beginning helps — plant care podcasts and conversations with neighbors are a good start, but as I discovered, you are on your own to save that broccoli sheet pan supper from shriveling into the petrified forest, or that African Violet, when, for no apparent reason, she loses all turgidity in her stems and collapses like a beached octopus.
What I have learned from cooking and caring for plants is that you have to be willing to have your heart broken and to try again. You have to be willing to turn up the heat and sear salmon again, and you have to be willing to compost that Tiger Aloe that you overwatered and then go buy another succulent, just like it.
I have also learned that both the art of cooking and the art of plant care require good timing and just the right amount of attention. Shrimp can go from raw to rubbery in thirty seconds, and a tempermental Rosemary can catch a chill and drop her needless overnight. And if you get too fussy flipping that flounder filet, it flakes into a million pieces in the pan. You have to face failure, accept what isn’t working, and change course.
But most situations in the kitchen and on the sunny windowsill are salvageable. And this is heartening for someone like me, who likes to eat well and surround herself with foliage that continuously pants oxygen into the air.
I recently heard a story on NPR about the consciousness of plants, not a new concept, but revived and expanded in cool ways. Like most stories that I listen to on NPR, I can’t remember the name of the person interviewed, nor the name of their book. So I looked it up: The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger, a staff writer at the Atlantic. The takeaway was this: when plants are challenged by unfriendly forces in their environment they don’t just surrender their fate from their fixed and rooted position, they get creative. Or as Ms. Schlanger puts it, plants have “agency.” “They take an active stake in the outcome of their life,” and have this “lively ability to make choices for themselves.” She goes on to describe this weird way tomato plants can secrete substances into their leaves that are so distasteful to caterpillars, that the fuzzy parasites turn away from feeding on tomato leaves, and turn to munching on each other instead. Obviously, plants can’t always save themselves like this, but they can usually buy themselves some time.
And it is in this grace period, when all plants, including my Peace Lily, when the tips of her leaves turn brown in distress, that they are able to tolerate some pain, and stave off death. And it’s also during this time, when plants are kicking into survival mode, that I can step in and try to save my Anthurium, who is turning pale and folding her heart- shaped leaves inward. I can move her from direct sunlight to bright, diffuse light. She might like that. But lighting is tricky with houseplants and I’m still figuring it out.
If I am alert and adaptable, like the plants in my care, I can see trouble coming and demonstrate agency myself. I can be more attuned to the heroics of my house plants as they bend, discolor and curl in order to live. I can watch and intuit their needs. I can notice when my Kalanchoe fails to thrive and pinch her back hard, then mist her well.
My Heart of Jesus keeled over today. He had been ailing for weeks and I had tried everything. I will take him back to the florist tomorrow, and I’ll let the florist scold me for what I did wrong, and I will buy another Caladium, just like him. And I will try again. I will take him home and care for him and not over water him. And if his leaves start to drop anyway, my new Heart of Jesus and I will both demonstrate agency to try to turn things around. And maybe this time it will work out all right.
Photo by Maria Newsom
In this complicated tribute to my late great Uncle Harry, a machinist who wrote short stories on the side, I speculate on what the act of writing may have meant to him, and explore what it means to me as well.
The Box in the Basement
The Forgotten Stories of Great Uncle Harry
As executor of my late great Uncle Harry’s estate, my mother inherited a box of short stories. Miraculously, this collection of hand-typed, double-spaced sheets of medium-weight paper survived four cellar floods in my parents’ Brooklyn home. Each time the waters abated, mom was relieved to find the box dry. Still, it never came upstairs. Eventually, my parents moved upstate, and the box moved to a new basement. It still hadn’t come above ground when I visited them last summer and found it downstairs, wedged between rolls of Santa Claus paper and a dust-shrouded set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
I don’t much recall Uncle Harry’s stories coming up in conversation at family gatherings. If they did, they were dismissed. They were “Harry’s hobby,” or “Harry’s little stories,” at best. Mom once quipped: “It was pretty much the same story, over and over again.” Grand Uncle Aurelio—my own blood, and a fellow writer—written off by one comment from his favorite niece. I imagined how it was—Harry read his drafts aloud in a writers’ group that met in the basement of the Presbyterian church of Hackensack, then ran home to revise, invigorated by the encouragement of his peers. I saw him hunched over the typewriter at dawn, a cigarette bobbing under his unapologetic Calabrese schnoz. I pictured Harry dabbing typos with toxic white fluid, wheeling pages out of the carriage, gathering sheets together, and finishing them with a staple. I even envisioned him sliding those manuscripts into clasp envelopes and sending them off. To where? My imagination defaulted to the stereotype—to Fifth Avenue publishing houses and cigar-chomping editors behind big desks, snowed under by submissions, sending up smoke flares from beneath an avalanche of words.
This is how I saw my uncle: a disciplined writer who submitted often, grounded out most times, but also, occasionally, knocked one out of the ballpark and into a publication. But could mom be right instead? Was Uncle Harry just a one-note storyteller? The cardboard box showed water damage, but inside, wrapped in a contractor’s bag, was an intact stack of stories—dozens of them, separated by paper clips. How bad can they be? I thought, taking the one on top. The cover page was promising in its professional formatting: name, address and phone in the upper left corner, word count in the upper right— title, lower down, and centered:
“Way Out in Left Field”
I opened to a random page:
“Lacey gasped at the sudden constriction and found herself largely immobilized. She tried to knee him, wickedly, but he had anticipated this and guarded against it. She began to struggle, wildly, but Albert was very strong and stubborn and he wouldn’t let her go so she could hit him again. And finally, she looked up, uneasy, into his face and panted, ‘Let me go, you miserable son of a bitch!’ And then it was, he kissed her. He opened his mouth over her panting one, drew her breath into him, and made a prisoner of her mouth in his…
Wow. I set “Left Field” aside and picked up “Samurai.”
“She bowed her head slightly and said, in a low voice, ‘Have you been happy, my lord? ‘I prayed that you would be.’ Her voice was low and musical. He closed his eyes and listened and the tones were the same as they had been, many, many years before. ‘I am happy now, little shikibu,’ he said ‘as I have not been, for, lo, these long, long years.” And he remembered then, that long ago springtime and the fullness and softness of her breasts, the warm goblet of her navel set in the ivory roundness of her belly, and the inexhaustible sweetness of her mouth and lips. He felt moisture gather in his eyes and he took the frail figure before him and pressed her against his chest. He said, again, ‘I am happy now, Shikibu.’”
Clearly my uncle lifted the plotline from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. I put down Samurai and picked up Magic.
“...And from then on, each time I caught a glimpse of her, whether I saw the trim set of her shoulders, or the way her lashes swept her cheek, or how the globes of her buttocks drooped in their insolent, maddening opulence, I was only more lost and more beyond recall, each further glimpse only reinforcing the effect of the last. As if when I was created, all my circuits, switches and relays were programmed, inflexibly, to respond to this woman alone, out of all the women in the world, like magic, the blackest magic, each time my eyes fell on her.”
My eyes burned in the cellar air. Where to begin? I’d spent eight semesters elbow to elbow with colleagues in the creative writing program at City College. I’d gotten a sense of what made a story work. I’d learned to dish it out to my peers, in a nice way, and to accept criticism in return. I went at manuscripts like over-ripe pears, honing in on bad spots, picking at mushy thinking, and carving out wordiness. Anything phony, or excessive—I pared away to help reveal the firm flesh of what was really being said. But sneezing uncontrollably now, I was at a loss. This was erotica. Bad erotica, in my opinion. And let’s face it: offensive. “His maleness made him bold.” Yuck. In fairness, I didn’t have much basis for comparison; the only book of erotica I’d read was Anais Nin’s Little Flowers. This felt seedy in comparison. How could I honor my ancestor with anything that resembled a tribute? I could not. Better to just return the stories to the box and put a lid on it—for good.
But as I started to slip the manuscripts back into their three-ply plastic shroud, I thought: Here is an author whose writing will remain unknown, even to his descendents. I thought about the person attached to these stories—my maternal grandmother’s brother, a toolmaker who listened to Verdi, played chess, and wrote salacious stories in his free time.
…
Born in 1912, the boy Harry would burn through books by flashlight, reading under the covers until 3:00am. Then, in 1913, the stock market crashed. He was seventeen. Both my Grandfather and Harry went to work in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, FDR’s answer to the question of what to do with America’s unemployed youth during the Great Depression. Each camp had its own newsletter; Harry was editor-in-chief for his. Eventually, the teens returned home to East Harlem from the CCC camps and learned a trade. Harry became a machinist. It was the end of his editorial career.
Harry Aita was hard-headed—testa dura—the hallmark of all Calabrese. One Christmas he flat-out refused to concede any downside to the colorization of the black and white holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life. All the Aitas have been stubborn, right down to me. And short. Though only 5’6”, when Harry walked through the door, people stood up and took notice. He “brightened a room,” is how mom described her favorite uncle. “That’s how I would put it,” she told me, “if I were writing this.”
I came up from the basement. The box was still downstairs, but the lid was off, and I hadn’t yet wedged it back into obscurity. My grandfather used to joke that his brother-in-law was “smart as four colleges,” but my uncle didn’t even get his high school diploma. I thought of the day Harry took his first step onto campus at seventy-three, to visit me. I watched his eyes tear up behind thick lenses which, from my kid's perspective, made him look like a brilliant bottle fly. He gawked at the gothic bell tower, like a Roman tourist facing the Empire State Building for the first time.
...
After dinner, I went back down to the basement and carried the box up to bed. I saw what mom meant when she said it was pretty much the same story over and over. How Do I Love Thee?, Magic, A State of War, all swollen love stories. The setting would shift—from a rooming house to a rickshaw, from the beach to the forest floor, but the plots centered around only two types of heroines: the lonelyheart—a middle-aged marm waiting for some handsome sailor to say: “I beg your pardon mam, but are you in any trouble?”—or the harlot, who ate hearts like potato chips. In the first scenario, the frigid protagonist blossoms under a stranger’s hot kiss. In the second storyline, some sap succumbs to a wanton woman, or in one instance, to a slinky, lantern-bearing vampire who haunts a New England shoreline at night. Harry’s heroines made me wonder about his true feelings towards Aunt Aurelia, his wife of more than three decades. I pictured their courtship, him dropping to the hem of her apron and proposing as she stirred a pot of red sauce. I could imagine him feeling heroic, saving his homely, thirty-eight-year-old cousin from near certain spinsterhood.
Yellowing pages, freed from their steel clips, lay fanned across my bedspread. I inhaled deeply, hoping oxygen might help me see the larger picture. All of Harry’s stories did have one thing in common, I reflected, none made any reference to a recognizable world. Wallflowers or maneaters, all females were caricatures in collision with equally cartoonish males. There were no secondary characters, no platonic friendships, no political undercurrents, and no true geographical coordinates to pinpoint the reader in time and space. There were only, ever, two strained humans in love—and usually trying hard not to be. I imagined cave diving to be like this: claustrophobic beyond belief.
It was disappointing. How cool would it have been to have opened that box and found real talent in the family? a Cheever, a Baldwin, an Italo Calvino in coke bottle glasses and Tartan leisure pants? Very cool. Instead, the box would go back to the basement and my family would remain unremarkable; I settled into that reality. But then a flood of unsympathetic, anxious feelings washed over me, a wave of superiority and doubt: my writing was better than this mediocre adult lit blanketing my bed—wasn't it? Harry considered himself a good writer. How could he have been so delusional? I wondered.
These unexpected feelings were not welcome. This was my kin, who greeted me with a warm hug and a cold cream soda from the back of his fridge. One hot day I even begged my uncle to build a rock dam across the brook in his backyard so I could have a wading pool. He did, and the next morning he suffered a mild heart attack, a fact mom likes to mention whenever Harry comes up in conversation. Here was a man who had thrown himself into cardiac arrest so his great niece could cool her ankles. Stones of guilt sank into place beneath my solar plexus, damming me up for my uncharitable reaction to the contents of one cardboard box.
But this reaction wasn’t really about Harry. This was about me, about how opening that box now brought everything into question. Foregoing sleep, I dove even deeper, hoping to change my perspective, hoping to find something to admire in my uncle’s writing, and in so doing, hoping to reassure myself that my own pursuits were worthwhile. But unfortunately, I just came up with example after example of how not to write.
“All right Miss Phillips,” he tried to control his labored breathing, ‘starting now, you will no longer put any flowers on my desk, ever. Is that perfectly clear?’ She was erect in her seat, looking at him, her face composed and unruffled but for the merest whisper of tightening around her mouth. He kept his stare on her face hard and inimical. Something of dauntlessness came into her eyes and she took a deep breath and stiffened further erect and the inexorable, female, swell and thrust of her not inconsiderable breasts stretched the fabric of her knit pullover excruciatingly. He all but yelled, wrenched off stride this time, ‘Is that perfectly clear Miss Phillips?’”
That sort of flowery hyperbole works for Poe, I thought, not for Harry—nor for me, for that matter. But again, why did this bother me? Unless, wait—was my writing pretentious too?
Weird syntax, wooden dialogue, excessive adverbs, it was all rot. Inedible fruit. Paring knife in hand, I sliced to the stone of each story, but found no flesh to salvage. No chance to vindicate Great Uncle Harry. Not even one firm section of a story to read aloud over pumpkin pie next Thanksgiving. I pushed the pages to the end of the bed and fell asleep.
…
Something shifted in the night and I woke up with a softer outlook. Even if his stories were shipwrecks, it dawned on me, Harry loved writing them. And that came through—his own pleasure, in his own writing. I put down my knife. There was no point in critique—Harry wouldn’t be doing any more revisions. I read with fresh eyes, eager to get at the heart of what really mattered to my uncle, to feel for that slippery stone of meaning with my bare fingers, and in so doing, maybe I would discover what my own work meant to me.
Harry was thirty-five when he married his first cousin Aurelia, three years his senior. It wasn’t the most inspired merger, but by all accounts, Harry built a good life with big-boned Aurelia. “She wasn’t a high beauty,” mom said, “but she was a good woman who made a meat sauce with hot sausages and tasty pieces of pork.” I winced at this quasi-incestuous union. “People did this back then Maria,” mom explained. I was skeptical. To her, it wasn’t disturbing to marry your first cousin especially since offspring were off the table—Aurelia had had a total hysterectomy in her twenties. “They weren’t sexually compatible,” mom whispered, “but you can’t put that in Maria.” Why not? I thought. A young woman has her entire sex apparatus removed at a time when post-surgical hormone replacement therapy wasn’t yet a thing. That’s a big deal. That may have explained the mismatched libidos. Given the unbridled wantonness that galloped through the stories I had just read, it was hard for me to grasp how a successful marriage had been forged between placid Aunt Aurelia and hot-blooded Harry. Unless… maybe Harry spent more nights with his purring IBM Selectric than his wife? Was this just another case of an artist rerouting sexual energy into creative expression? Wait a minute, didn’t this feel familiar? Didn’t I often choose to stay home to revise, instead of stepping out with friends? Did writing mask my own avoidant tendencies? More uncomfortable feelings.
…
When I left my parents’ home, I decided not to return the box to the basement, not to slide it along the metal shelving, backwards into oblivion. Instead I toted it back to my apartment in Flatbush. The stories now squatted under my bed like trolls, haunting my nights, and shadowing my waking hours. Harry and I were connected by blood and vocation. No one in my family better understood the joy of a well-turned phrase than Harry, or conversely, what it felt like to find yourself still at it, at 3:00AM, reworking that son-of-a-bitch section just one more time.
No, I couldn’t abandon these stories, or by extension, my Uncle Harry, or by further extension, I couldn’t abandon myself. But I also couldn’t pretend they were good stories, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that Harry was delusional in thinking that they were good. But was that really so bad? I thought? And maybe Harry did know his limitations, but he wrote anyway. Maybe he just needed to work some things out through his contrived plots of human ambivalence and sexual conquest. This seemed plausible too. There was always an earnest voice behind the narrative, a struggle; Harry had something to prove. Over and over, this voice seemed determined to answer that unanswerable question, “What is love?”
Love was both a curse and a cure-all to Harry. The energy in Harry’s writing reminded me of Johnny Depp’s glowing portrayal of 1950’s B-movie filmmaker Ed Wood in Tim Burton’s film of the same name. Uncle Harry, I realized, was the Ed Wood of erotica. There was a boldness to both artists’ style, an over-the-top ebullience that unintentionally entertained. You admired their audacity; you also laughed at it. I pictured a passionate Harry at his desk, an espresso pot at his elbow, Turandot on the turntable, an ashtray overflowing, and a wastepaper basket brimming with balled up words, like snowballs a child had piled high, in anticipation of a big fight. I saw him feeding sheet after sheet into his IBM Selectric, the carriage humming, whiteness rolling into black, the sound of keys striking a ribbon, and the sight of words rising up, row after row, page after page. I treasured this romantic, if not wholly accurate, portrait of my uncle. There was plain JOY in this vision of writing.
…
But what about me? The answer hit me softly. It traveled like one of the tidy bundles of garbage that I drop down the chute at the end of my hall; like a knotted ball that falls six floors and lands in the compactor room with a faint thud. Then I had another thought: another bundle followed the first and landed with a soft thud: I needed this romantic portrait of a writer for myself too. In the end, I could only speculate about Harry’s motives, but I was getting closer to understanding what writing meant to me.
For starters— and this one’s hard to admit—writing meant added value to my personhood; writing meant status. I liked to call myself a writer, I realized, because day-to-day living without this job title seemed a little shabby. Here I was, a late middle-aged single mother working as a teacher’s aide in a New York City public high school. I needed something to dress it up a bit. Writing was the velvet ribbon which ran through my ordinary life. Sure, it nourished my artistic appetite, yes, and I enjoyed the fellowship of other writers from time to time, but writing fed my ego too. That was the smelly truth. Perhaps I was just as delusional as I condemned my great uncle to be.
I didn’t get around to calling myself a writer until the half century mark. It began with a writing contest I’d won sponsored by the public library, for which I was pinned with an orchid and handed a savings bond. I had a few followers to my blog, mostly PTA moms and friends of my mother, some stories in the local paper, and a memoir piece in a legit literary journal. Small potatoes maybe, but I cherished each publication and felt encouraged up to this point. But then, with the storm surge of grim developments flooding the world in spring, 2020, I started to question my own relevance as a writer. It was starting to feel more important to devote what disposable time I did have, to making stews from scratch for my teenage sons.
I wondered if Harry ever fed his ego by introducing himself as a writer to the cashier selling him a can of Medaglia D’Oro espresso coffee? Certainly no one in the family called him one. So now I started thinking, Am I a writer, or is writing just my hobby too? Who gets to decide this anyway? I wanted to think it was Harry, and me, and any of you who linger at the keyboard, or jot notes on a napkin. But I was no longer sure. Harry was dedicated, prolific, and open to input from other writers. Was that enough? Or was it the reading public and the book critics who got to decide? Was a writer a writer if she had no readers? Did that falling tree in the forest make a noise if everyone had their AirPod Pros in their eardrums? These were the questions that swirled the dank air when I lifted that lid off Pandora’s box.
Well, Harry was dead, and few people had ever read his work. Until now. Now, thirty-five years later, Uncle Harry had the attention of a great niece he’d last seen crossing campus in Frye boots and feather earrings. Timber! The tree had landed, and I had heard it.“Maybe Harry was a writer, after all.” I said it outloud. “And maybe I am too.”
Addendum
As it turned out, Harry was published—once. At the bottom of the box, under all the hand-typed stories, was a magazine dated January, 1980. The cover featured three-quarters of a zaftig nude, starting at her crotch, and cutting off at her nose. I scanned the table of contents: The Price of Love by Harry Aita, with the tagline: “It’s real heavy to be crazy about a beautiful but cruel bitch.” Here was my uncle’s one published story, printed on inferior stock, in a stag magazine of the lowest order. No matter. Harry must have felt proud to see himself in print. I got that.
“She could feel his eyes drinking her in, as they always did when he was near her. ‘Don’t stare,’ she said flatly, ‘don’t you know what I look like yet?’ ‘I can’t help my eyes,’ he whispered, ‘if they love you.’”
Later I asked mom about the spank magazine at the bottom of the box. “I never told you the story?” she said. “No, I don’t think so.” “Well, there was great excitement in the land,” Mom started, as if I was five, and she was telling me the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. “Aurelia was so excited, everybody was so excited, because Harry was published in a magazine called BUF. Now nobody could figure out what this meant. It was called B-U-F, not B-U-F-F. But still, we thought that maybe it was a nudist magazine or something. It turns out BUF stood for Big Up Front. It was a magazine featuring women who were… um..” mom was fishing for a euphemism but didn’t find one: “women who were, let’s say, overly endowed, to the point of deformity.” I objected. “That’s a matter of personal taste, Mom.” “Can I tell the story Maria?” “Go ahead mom.” “As soon as Aurelia learned this new slang word BUF, she stopped talking about Harry getting published and she never talked about his writing again.” My heart sank.
…
Well today I’m talking about Harry’s writing and his box that lives under my bed—never to return to any basement anywhere, so long as I’m alive. I pull it out every couple of months and run a damp cloth over the lid. Some of my writing lives there too, under my bed, beside my uncle’s. And this spring I’m getting through the entire Harry Aita oeuvre, one paper-clipped tale at a time, all originals, and none backed up on harddrive. I’m savoring each story, from start to finish, until I reach those two short words that hover in the white space at the end of every story, the two most satisfying words for any writer:
The End
Photo by Maria Newsom
School crossing guards are the unsung heroes of the morning commute. When my own local crossing guard retired, I wanted to acknowledge her twenty-two years of service on the same congested corner, and to thank her for safely shepherding countless children—including mine—across the same scary intersection, day after day, year after year. Read beloved Ms. Joanne’s story below in You Gotta Move It!, my first piece published in West Midwood News
Photo by Unsplash
Mom didn’t mean to get involved; she only wanted to help. She just felt somebody should call the wife of the man who was getting arrested, to let her know that her husband wouldn’t be home for dinner. As it turns out, mom didn’t make it home for dinner either. It was uptown New Orleans, February 9th, 1973. We all remember the date—it was also dad’s birthday.
“It was the first snowfall in New Orleans in fifty years,” Mom told me recently, as we watched whiteness blanket the patio picnic table from the comfort of matching Lazy Boy recliners in her home in Ulster county, New York. That’s not quite true, I discovered later. According to The National Weather Service, whose records date back to 1849 for the Crescent City, there have been seventeen “snow events” with sticking power. Still, it was an oddity, and my mother understood the significance. I was seven, and my brother Robey was ten. This was our first snowfall. It was just starting to come down as we walked to the Winn Dixie market after school. Mom wanted to elevate a weeknight meal to a celebration. Stuffed artichokes, that would do it. When we reached Palmer Park, it was clear that these flakes were going to stand up to the semi-tropical climate. “I only have to pick up a couple of items,” Mom said. “You stay in the park and play.” Then she walked across the street and out of sight.
… A tower display of canned yams rose high in the center of the produce aisle. Mom was weighing artichokes when a police officer, who’d been moonlighting for the pharmacy next door, rounded the corner and chased two girls straight into the pyramid, sending sweet potatoes in all directions. The cop was white, the girls black. Everyone was screaming, including a young bystander from Tulane Law School. “It was an altercation,” Mom told me. Altercation? I thought. Sounds like an understatement. Altercation felt too civilized a word to describe the scene. Mom seemed uncomfortable talking about this. As the cop arrested the girls for allegedly stealing Kodak film, the law student intervened. “I want to give you my business card because I have observed this,” he told them. The cop saw this exchange and arrested the law student next. “Then, “Mom said, “the young man started ranting that his father was a prominent judge, somewhere in the Midwest. You should be allowed to rant and rave though,” Mom added, “that should not be grounds for arrest, unless you’re threatening someone you see.” I did see. Then Mom made a big mistake. She said to the would-be attorney: “Give me your card so I can call your wife,” At which point, the policeman also arrested Mom. “Now that was clearly above his line of duty,” mom said. “He should not have done that. That policeman should have let me take this law student’s business card so I could call his wife. It was an unjust arrest, both for the young lawyer and for me.” “And what about the girls?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Mom replied. That was a different case. They may have been guilty, that’s possible, but that wasn’t the point. Even if someone is guilty, they need to be treated with respect when they’re arrested.”
…
It was getting dark. I watched flakes fall through halos of light crowning the street lamps as I lay in the grass making angels in the snow. I can’t remember what my brother was up to, but I imagine that he was hurling snowballs in the direction of the streetcar on St. Charles Avenue. My gloves were soaked through, and my thin coat was not made for true winters. Snow continued to sift down from blackness now, like powdered sugar falling generously on a plate of hot square donuts at The Café du Monde in the French Quarter.
…
This is where the story goes from troubling to outright disturbing. As Mom was escorted out of the Winn Dixie and into a squad car, she told the cops that her children were waiting for her across the street. “Officer, my children are alone in the park. I have to get my kids.” The cop ignored her and opened the back door of the sedan, “Get in.” Mom hesitated, then slid into the back seat of the cop car alongside the apprehended. They headed downtown to the precinct.
A graduate of all-female Hunter College, little Connie from Zerega Avenue in the Bronx has never had a problem finding her voice. Her father was an FDR democrat, a union man and an atheist. Her Suffragist grandmother marched up 5th Avenue in 1915. Maybe all this played a part in making Mom the independent thinker that she is. Throw some astrology in the mix, if you like. Whatever it is, stubborn Taurus Mom has always had the courage to speak up. But Mom was also raised in the 1950s, before questioning authority was the norm, especially questioning law enforcement. I’m sure it didn’t feel right to just go along with the police that February evening. Mom didn’t make a scene. She got in the car. “You can imagine how I was feeling Maria.” I thought about when I was separated from my own six-year-old, when he had wandered off a path at the zoo. Oh those ten minutes of terror—as the security guard sped me around in his golf cart, through flocks of peacocks, pointing out every white male under four feet tall. “The police wouldn’t let me do anything Maria.” She spoke softly. This was hard for her. “They didn’t care that I had left my kids in the park. They were not compassionate.” Not compassionate? I thought. Again, her choice of words didn’t match the grim scene. Mom seemed detached, as if she was talking to a reporter and not her daughter. It was good we were seated side by side, not face on. We watched the snow fall through the French doors—about three inches thick on the picnic table already. Summer seemed far off. “That cop was a bastard mom. He should have lost his badge that night.” I watched my mother’s pain, in profile. It was not explosive, like those cans of yams that had crashed down and skidded in every direction. Her anger was not directed towards the cop so much, as towards herself. In that moment I saw that Mom has never forgiven herself for getting into the squad car that day.
…
“Take off your sweater,” a rookie cop told mom, in front of a roomful of male officers. Did they think she was concealing a steak knife between her breasts? Mom was thirty-four and a dead ringer for Italian movie star Anna Magnani. Not so many people know who that is today. Magnani wasn’t classically beautiful like Sophia Loren, but La Lupa had something. And so did mom. “Well I didn’t have anything on underneath,” Mom explained. I could feel her humiliation, forty-eight years later. “I was not wearing a bra because, well, that was the time when women were throwing away their bras.” Mom the bra-burner. Cool. “So the officer understood that and didn’t force me to take off my top. Instead he asked me ‘Where are you from?’ I told him ‘New York.’ He said ‘New York? I thought so…’ And you know Maria, the way he said ‘New York,’ well, he said it like it was a dirty word.”
They fingerprinted and photographed Mom, then put her in the cell with the two younger women. For some unknown reason, my Mother had the business card of a civil rights attorney in her purse, and after she called Dad, she used her second nickel to call Beau Switch. Beau came down and got her out.
…
No one remembers how Robey and I happened to be rescued and taken to a grand townhouse across the street from Palmer Park—how we climbed a tall stoop and met a nice lady—how we were fed, given hot baths in a deep tub, and dressed in pajamas, rolled up at the cuffs. Looking back, I had good reason to feel afraid, but I don’t recall really being scared by any of it —not by being left in a park for hours after dark, nor by being naked in a stranger’s bathtub. I do remember feeling numb to my core from the cold, and happy to finally thaw out, but that’s it. Eventually, Dad found us at this townhouse and took us home. No one remembers how that happened either. Then Beau dropped Mom off. It was far too late to celebrate Dad’s birthday, but we were home safe under the same roof, which, quite possibly, was more than could be said for the three others arrested that afternoon.
...
Mom did have her day in court, such as it was. “There’s always some humor in a good story, am I right?” “You’re right mom.” “It turned out Beau Switch was an alcoholic,” Mom laughed. I failed to see the humor. “That’s not funny mom.” “Can you let me tell the story Maria?” “Go on,” I said. “So before the hearing, Beau had like three martinis at lunch—and no lunch. And we were late getting to court. And here’s where the racism comes in. When we finally got there the judge said ‘Oh had I known it would be someone like you, (translation: white) I never would have heard this case.’ So my case was dismissed on the spot. Beau was drunk and I didn’t have to do anything.”
...
Mom had never been willing to talk about this—until now. Over the decades, I’ve tried. “Mom, tell me about the time you abandoned me in an empty park after dark.” Finally she did, and now I felt her shame. More than forty Februarys have passed since Mom ignored her conscience and went downtown without a fight, leaving two small humans in the dark. Two little people were waiting for one big person to come into focus through a flurry of white, to scurry towards them, clutching a bag of artichokes to her breast, spilling apologies and artichokes, pulling them into her tight. I was a witness to my mother’s remorse. Of course she did know her first duty was to her children, not to the New Orleans Police Department.
I tried to make it better, because that is what I’ve always done. “Don’t worry mom, I don’t remember feeling abandoned. Really. I didn’t even notice you were gone. Except towards the very end. When it was getting cold.” For once my mother didn’t respond. It felt right for me to say this, and it felt mostly accurate. But I think I would have said these same words, even if they weren’t true. I wanted to add “I’m proud of you mom,” but I didn’t. That would have been pushing it. She would have accused me of being phony. But that’s actually the most truthful thing I can say about the whole incident. I was proud that mom did as much as she did. She saw something wrong and chose to get in the middle of a messy situation, in the produce aisle of a 1970s Louisiana supermarket. This was not small, given who she was, and under those circumstances. “I want to watch the forecast now Maria. Are we done?” “Yes Mom, we’re done.”
Photo by Author
Has anything ever happened to you, so expertly timed, that it made you doubt it was mere coincidence? This past summer I had such an experience. I found a postcard written by my twenty-five-year-old self, that I had thought I had sent to my friend in Paris, but instead, it was sandwiched within a box of blank notecards. This unsent postcard had no postage, and was never mailed. Reading it now, 29 years later, I felt inspired to articulate the emotions sparked by that 4”x 6” card. I am honored to now share below: Return to Sender: What an Unsent Postcard Taught Me about Addiction, published in 2020 in THE FIX, that excellent online recovery journal, now sadly defunct.
ByMaria N.12/21/20
A timely message from my much younger, unsober self.
It was freeing to see that my pain — sharp and ugly — couldn’t stand up to the beauty of light and dark scattering the water’s surface.
The Unsent Postcard
I have a stack of unwritten postcards, collected from my travels, purchased with the intent of sending them to those back home. In recent months, I have taken to writing out these postcards to friends and family, both to cheer them with sunny images as they shelter in, and to support the United States Postal System.
Not long ago, I came across a card featuring a hand-colored photograph of a windmill in East Hampton, New York. To my surprise, it was not blank. Tightly scrawled sentences, in rudimentary French, it was meant for a friend in Paris.
No postage, never mailed.
17 Septembre, 1991
Chère Delphine,
Salut! I am at the beach with my mother. My God! My poor back! I am ready for a big change in my life. We must talk. I’m going to write you a real letter soon.
Ton Amie, Maria.
Here I was, standing at the edge of big change, poised to plunge into some grand announcement, too large for the 4 x 6 space given. These words never crossed the Atlantic. Instead, I held them now, between my fingertips, twenty-nine years later.
What are the chances of this? I thought. Of all these blank cards, only one has writing, and not just any writing, but words that speak to my alcoholic “bottom— the physical, mental and spiritual low-point of my young life.
My back hasn’t bothered me for years, thank heaven. I take it for granted. I walk with ease everywhere today. Until this moment, I’d forgotten just how bad things were with my lower lumbar at age twenty-four, that hell year when I couldn’t stand up straight without sciatica shackling my ankles, seizing my spine, and clamping down hard at the cervical vertebrae. This physical agony — an exclamation point to my mental and spiritual state — had literally brought me to my knees.
I spent weeks in bed self-medicating on whiskey sours and muscle relaxants. Somehow I’d convinced the corner pharmacist to dispense refills beyond the legal limit.
I‘m skeptical when people make meaning from random events. It feels self-indulgent to interpret every rainbow as a reference to my personal recovery. Yet finding this card, all these years later, didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt intentionally planted to remind me of why I’d sobered up.
It also felt like something I had to share with others.
Watching waves
In those mellow days following Labor Day, when the water is warmer than the salt air, I was with my mother in a rented bungalow at the tip of Long Island, now emptied of humans. I was twenty-five, unemployed, and reeling from a bad break-up.
I remember the lunch mom served on or about the day I’d written that postcard: linguine with shrimp and mussels, and flutes of rosé wine. Mom was a faithful clipper of the Wednesday food section of The New York Times. Maybe she’d sourced this seafood pasta recipe there, or maybe she’d been inspired by one of the influencers of Hamptons entertaining at the time: Martha Stewart or The Barefoot Contessa.
However it came to be, it was a memorable meal presented with panache, from a bare-bones rental kitchen. And it was a meal where my mother enjoyed alcohol as she always did, in moderation. More often than not in my childhood home, there was an appropriate wine, served in stemware, to compliment every dish.
My mother drank the way Jacques Pépin did on public television, and the way I always wanted to, but never could — with class. At the end of an episode of making something like, say, classic Beef Bourguignon, he would raise his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon in a toast: “Aah-pee Coo-keeeng! and tilt it lightly to his lips.
But that’s not the way I drank this glass of blush wine. I downed it.
Plagued by sciatica, a still larger pain loomed; it had been moving in slowly for years, like a cold front, now dipping as an arctic depression over this lovely lunch.
I remember craving more flutes of Zinfandel than that one bottle held, but I was checked at two because mom was watching. Two drinks were the limit if you were female, and raised right — and you cared about appearances — which we did. But I couldn’t comply.
I found myself watching the waves from that deck all afternoon. I watched them crest and crash, one after the other, in rhythmic indifference to my pain. Then it hit me. It felt big. Big like the feeling I get reading an inspirational poem from an anthology with a daffodil or seagull on the cover. Though the feeling was big I, myself, suddenly felt small. And weirdly enough, I was okay with that.
It was a relief. The waves kept rolling in, oblivious to my situation. It was freeing to see that my pain — sharp and ugly — couldn’t stand up to the beauty of light and dark scattering the water’s surface.
Scared, self-involved me was no match for the folding waves. For hours I watched them flatten at the shore and return to the sea, gradually eroding the moat I’d dug around myself. Yes, my experience of this landscape could be captured in a bad sonnet in a book with a hokey cover — the kind you’d find in a hospital gift shop.
It was neither subtle nor original, my “white light” oceanfront awakening, but it was genuine.
The next day, a masseuse with strong hands and a soft voice got me to open up about my drinking on a massage table in Amagansett. A recovering alcoholic himself, Sean R. is much of the reason I made it to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when I returned to Brooklyn that next week.
A Bridge Back to a Good Life, Then Some Slippery Turns
As the postcard predicted, big change followed. “A.A. is a bridge back to life.” That’s true. I did cross over to a full life with marriage, kids, and a semi-detached house. But it was a life further into Brooklyn, and further from my home group, the A.A. group where I had first gotten sober and stayed that way.
Yes, I was still not drinking, but I can’t claim I was emotionally sober. Somewhere along the way I stopped going to meetings. Lost touch with my sponsor. Quit working with other recovering alcoholics. You know where this is going. Eventually, I drank.
It started small: communion wine on Sundays, the occasional “non-alcoholic” beer, and the argument with my dentist. He wanted to give me local anesthesia for minor dental work, but I pushed for hit after hit of nitrous oxide on top of that. I wanted to numb my brain, not just my molar.
“The idea that somehow, someday he(she/they) will control and enjoy his (her/their) drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.— from Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 3, ‘More About Alcoholism’
I went along like this for years, skating on the edge of my sobriety, doing figure-eights on April ice, until seven years ago I found myself sitting in the sun porch of my friend Samantha’s historic, center hall colonial home.
Our kids were playing together somewhere on the periphery. I always found my way here, to this snug room off the parlor, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a loveseat. I’d marked it as my space, where I could step away, sink into the cushions and watch the cardinal at the feeder.
On this day I was thinking about my marriage. It had been a good run, but after fourteen years, two sons and a poodle, it was over. During the past months, this reality had settled over me like snowfall hitting pavement at the freezing mark, melting first, before catching hold, white landing on grey, gradually building, til nothing remained of the sidewalk below. I was scared as hell now.
Samantha stood over me with finger sandwiches and two flutes filled with golden bubbles on a silver tray. It had been so long since I’d been to a meeting, so long since I’d said out loud to a roomful of people: “I’m an alcoholic.” So long that I had a new circle of friends that never knew I had a problem and older friends who had forgotten that I didn’t drink.
In that moment, I forgot I didn’t drink.
Alcohol, catching sunlight, was presented to me on a slender stem, the way it had been twenty-two years earlier at the beach.
Why not? If ever I deserved a mimosa, it’s now.
I took a sip.
Holy shit, what the hell am I doing?
I ran to the powder room and poured the rest down a sink with a swan head faucet.
“The alcoholic, at certain times, has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he (she/they) nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His (her/their) defense must come from a Higher Power. — from Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 3, “More About Alcoholism
It had happened —I had drunk again. I never thought I would. It had been more than two decades since my last real drunk, and I had good reason never to drink again — actually two very good reasons, their names were Leo and Liam. Sure I could rationalize the Sunday morning communion wine and the occasional hit of laughing gas — after all, I was accountable to no one for my behavior now— but when I let that bubbly pass my teeth and slide down my throat, I recognized that for what it was —a slip.
I remember the taste of it clearly — that citrus effervescence in my mouth — and I remember my conscious decision to swallow. Like countless alcoholics before me, I had now proven what the Big Book drives home in the conclusion of Chapter 3.
I had had “no effective mental defense against the first drink.
The Room Above the Fish Store
Thankfully, at the same moment, I realized my problem when I took that sip of spiked o.j. , I also remembered the solution.
Alcoholics Anonymous had worked for me, for as long as I had shown up for myself and others. What became obvious to me with this slip was that I’d do well to return to a community of recovering alcoholics if I wanted to get sober again, and stay that way. I needed to plug back into a sober support network.
So on the heels of my slip in late September, 2013, I climbed a staircase to a room above a fish store filled with retired seniors and flies circling overhead. I’d stepped into an A.A. Big Book meeting, already in progress. They were reading one of the personal stories from the back of the book, round-robin style. Right away I could see myself in ‘The Housewife Who Drank at Home.’ When she described herself as a ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde’ PTA mom, I lost it. That was me. Someone passed me a box of Kleenex. I will never forget that kindness.
Today
Willpower and the passage of time are no guarantees against the first drink. I was humbled by this realization when I slipped.
I like my life today; some days I love it. I don’t live in unreasonable fear, but I accept this fact: on any ordinary day, my alcoholic mind could observe the oven clock turn five and think: A snifter of eighteen-year-old single malt whiskey, served neat, alongside a bowl of salted cashews, would be a fine idea!
And today I understand, right down to the jelly marrow of my bones, that this is typical alcoholic wishful thinking.
I also recognize — and appreciate — other approaches to solving problem drinking, or at least to blunting the devastating effects of alcohol and other addictive substances and habits. Some of these solutions have developed in my lifetime, and some have been there all along.
I have a friend who threw herself back into her childhood faith in earnest, and another who found help in Buddhist-inspired Refuge Recovery. I am happy for these friends, and for everyone who finds lasting recovery, however and whenever. And for those who have chosen the A.A. path, I am especially gratified to welcome back those like me — humbled humans who have returned to the fellowship later in life.
On the last day of this month, I’ll have seven years back in the rooms. Once again, Alcoholics Anonymous has been a bridge back to a good life. I’ve got a sunny apartment, two sturdy teens, and an Australian lizard. The ex and I have each other’s back in the co-parenting game. I’ve got a day job where I feel purposeful, and my writing at night, which lights a votive in my soul.
I was lucky to find my way back to A.A. at forty-seven, and lucky to turn up this picture-postcard now — this four-by-six inch card stock talisman, a reminder of who I was at twenty-five, and who I am now, twenty-nine years later — sandwiched between sunbathers on the Jersey shore and Niagara Falls at night. To me this is no coincidence: this postcard, lost then miraculously recovered, does parallel my own recovery, lost for twenty-two years, then found again in a new group, above an Italian fishmonger.
And so, my dear friend Delphine, here is the full story, the real letter I promised you, delivered now, almost thirty years later. You are not an alcoholic, but maybe some of this makes sense. I hope so. We must talk soon.
Honestly, I had no plan to take a stab at short form humor—this one just wrote itself overnight! Please note: hyperbole (EXAGGERATION) is a defining feature of satire, and so the character below bears only small resemblance to the author:)
Hey there long-suffering single sister, this tip is for you! And you can thank me with a picture from your scaled-down second wedding on a public beach.
If you’re like me, you’ve been dating waaay too long post-divorce.
It’s a BIG problem. We’ve no time to lose! I am so much less cute and so much more crazy than I was even a year ago! I don’t look anything like my sun-kissed snapshots from last summer. And men complain about that. Right? They say that I should update my pictures. Are they insane??
Over the years I’ve had several shots at bagging big game—doctors, lawyers, union plumbers—but I’ve missed my Mark every time. That capital M is intentional. You’ll see why. Hang on.
I’ve finally figured out why I’m still spending Saturday night in bed with Chunky Monkey instead of on a second date with Mr. Hunky! I’m a serial first-dater, but it’s not my fault! And it’s not yours either. And I’ve got our solution. But before you go there, it’s not that I’m batshit crazy and that I show up for date #1 late and covered in cat hair. It’s not that the letter from the IRS spills out of my purse, or that my breath smells like a Brooklyn dumpster in August. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I do all the talking, order three appetizers, entree and dessert (plus a slice of blackout cake to go) then text the poor rube three times before he gets home.
No it’s not about me. Or you! The problem is him. Or rather his name. What’s in a name you say? EVERYTHING. You see, in these two decades of liberation, since I cut my wedding dress into rags to clean toilets, the eligible bachelors I’ve met have had the inconsiderate habit of stealing the names of the most significant men in my life, namely, my father, my son and my ex-husband. (Also the pet monikers of my first puppy love, plus the-one-that-got-away.)
I thought I could overlook this, all the Jims and Johns, Bills and Bobs who've populated my storied past, and persist into the present—but I was wrong. Harriet will always and only be Harriet Tubman, Ruth always and only Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Edward—ahh Edward—he can only ever be Ready Teddy. Yes, all those common names generally assigned to biological males, have been retired to a hall of fame housed somewhere between head, heart and honey pot. It’s just ICKY to think about all these same-name men bubbling together in one fucked-up Freudian soup inside me.
So the problem was ME, not them. I finally understood: somewhere in the first ten minutes of those 666 first meetups, my unconscious mind cried: “Gross!” There can’t possibly be any other explanation for why I never got second dates. C’mon, they all salivate at the sight of me! And I really wanted to want them back! I just couldn’t see beyond their birth certificates to their six figure incomes. Of course I sure saw the midnight blue Maserati of Agamemnon, and I did let Heathcliff drag me across the moors of Ft. Tryon Park. I did swoon over those too. But now I realize that’s just because my clan has zero imagination in naming babies— no Greek kings or romantic antiheroes dangle from our family tree. No psychological associations with past or present men there. Those two men were clean, and I was ready to get dirty with them. Why did they both block me instead?
Anyway, I don’t strain my subconscious with the prospect of entertaining any more Bills and Bobs in my boudoir. No longer does the vision of pillow talk with a prospective Pete compete with the image of my freckle-faced kid spilling a glass of milk on the linoleum. When I fantasize necking with some new John now, it’s not crowded out by my first awkward kiss on an ugly plaid sofa. And finally, I don’t have to moan “Bob” between satin sheets and see dear old Dad’s beaming face in the rear-view mirror as I pass my road test on the fifteenth try. Freedom!
I don’t know why it took me so long to get myself, but no judgement—I’m all about self-acceptance and self-awareness today. I’m hopeful. Last week yet another Jim messaged me and I cut him off at the pass. He was so hot for me that he didn’t seem to mind giving up James, the only male name in his family going back six generations. Date two tonight. So far so good, I’m still into him. But I can’t lose my resolve and let him slip back into Jimbo! There’s no time to waste, the Botox wears off in a month and I absolutely must throw the IRS a few thousand dollars towards back taxes, before I can freeze the fuck out of my forehead.
Because I’m finally on the verge of a second date here, and therefore almost at the altar, I feel confident when I urge you to be proactive too—rename the next one before that first coffee date in a well-lit public place. In fact, just take care of it when he first messages you with “Hello beautiful. 🌹”. Tell that Michael on Match that while you dig his name that means “Who is like God?, you unfortunately have an uncle, a nephew and a third cousin who also ask the same question in Hebrew. Tell him it’s Micah from now on if he ever wants to zoom past ZOOM with you.
If, for some crazy reason, he still balks at Micah, give him three alternatives you can imagine yourself saying upside-down and all out of breath. Here are my top picks, categorized for your convenience. They bear absolutely no resemblance to any male I’ve ever boffed or birthed. (I did have to axe Fabio last minute, when I found out it meant ‘bean farmer.’ Rats.)
Hunky names: Harley, Hank, Ivor, Sven, Travis, Tor or Willulf (wolf).
Names for cinema studies types who take you to see The Tin Drum on a second date: Alaric, Dimitri, Grayson, Griffin or Rémy
Or just go for broke: make him a Greek god (He wants that anyway.): Adonis, Ajax, Apollo, Hercules, or Zeus.
So go ahead, start playing the rename game. And let me know how that fourth date with Conan goes. No wait—scratch Conan. I threw up on Conan O’Brien at a keg party freshman year.
Okay, bye girlfriend. Sigmund’s waiting. Oh hell, let him wait. I’m having fun. Besides, men think that’s cute, when we make them stand on street corners. What do you think of Huxley or Inigo?
