Essay #4: Grandparents, part 3

Grandpa Sam Leibowitz came to the United States at 16, in 1907, the year of the greatest immigration to the U.S. in the 20th century. His older sister, Rose, had come a year earlier, and his next younger sister, Lena, came the following year. And in 1910, his widowed mother, with three of her four youngest children arrived, just in time to be counted in the 1910 census. (I questioned a genealogy librarian about what might have been the reason Max, then 14, might

Sam's mother and one of his sisters

not have come with his mother and siblings, she thought it was just a mistake. Since the mother, my great-grandmother, most likely didn’t know English, a neighbor must have answered the census taker’s questions, and since the family were new arrivals, the neighbor might not have known how many children were actually in the family. But in the 1920 census, it’s confirmed; Max came to the States two years later, in 1912. So what was that about? Was there some apprentice-type program he was in until the age of 16? Was he going to a yeshiva? All the relatives who might have known are long dead.)

           Sam’s mother was illiterate and very superstitious, according to my mother. When she clipped her fingernails, she burned the clippings, to prevent their being used against her. And she never learned English. Her youngest daughter died at 13, according to one story one board the ship bringing the family to the U.S., but her death date doesn’t accord with census records.

            Sam was from the same town as my grandmother, Liz, but they met in New York. My impression is that they met at the landsman restaurant her parents ran, but Jack remembers hearing some story that they met at a union rally outside the Winter Garden Theater. However, they met, they married in 1917, and my mother was born a year later.

Sam's draft card during WWI

            I don’t know how Sam came to work in the fur industry, but in his work he also became a union organizer. He remembered students coming to the estate, where his father had been an overseer, from the big cities after the 1905 revolution in Russia to talk about the revolution. He had a draft card that noted he was working for the Fur and Leather Workers Union in 1917 and 1918. I don’t know how soon after the Bolshevik Revolution he joined the American Communist Party, but he was definitely in the Party because after the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, there were many conversations at the dining table about what he was going to do about its anti-Communist affidavit. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

           Through much of the 1920s, Sam worked and organized, and his family moved, sometimes every year. There was an oversupply of apartments, so landlords offered a month’s free rent, which was an incentive for working people to change apartments. Sometime in the late 1920s, however, he was blacklisted and couldn’t get work at all. So he moved the family, first to Washington, D.C., where he or Liz, my grandmother, must have known people, then to Richmond, Virginia. At first he tried to do fur repair work, but Richmond was not a place where furs were much worn—it just didn’t get that cold. So he and Liz ran a grocery store in a poor neighborhood, near the street-car depot. But he kept in touch with his comrades back in New York, and when WWII started and now Soviet Russia was an ally, he was called back to New York to work at the union office. Where he worked until that question of the anti-Communist daffidavit came up. (I wrote about this in my red-diaper baby memoir.) His friend,

My grandpa, in the index

Ben Gold, was president of the union and wanted to fight the affidavit, but Sam said he’d had enough fighting, he was ready to retire. Which he did, spending the rest of his life reading and painting, and when they moved to Florida in their 70s, he worked at the University of Miami bookstore. Meanwhile, Granny Liz went to work at Macy’s, in the lingerie department, until they moved to Florida. She once gave me a leopard-skin-patterned bra. But, she said, I should wear something with a little padding—not what I wanted to do in 1962.

            They took me to see my first movie, “Little Women,” at Radio City Music Hall, at Christmas. Granny was my little sister’s protector in any dispute among us children. Grandpa talked to us like we were grownups; when he asked what we were doing, it sounded like he really wanted to know. He was very mild-mannered, not dogmatic in his ideas.

            Granny was a classic worrywart. After a visit with them in Brooklyn, we had to call her collect once we got home so she would know we were home safe. She worked at Macy’s in the lingerie department. When they visited us when we were still children, she gave us backrubs before we went to sleep, and each of us wanted her to stay with us the longest. And she cooked. She made knishes unlike any knish I’ve seen since, with a pastry she stretched so thin it hung over the edge of the table and was translucent. It was more like a potato and onion strudel.

 

Sam & Liz, maybe 1950

           They were not at all religious. In retrospect, I think our spring visits to them in Brooklyn must have been around Passover, and the dinner she served was a seder. But it was never called that. There was a little booklet on the coffee-table, from Manischevitz, in English and Hebrew, about Passover, but we never did the ceremony, never asked the questions, never talked about bitter herbs. Now, in my 70s, when I hear my friends talk about the seders they've been to or hosted through their lives, I’m sorry I missed all that. But it just didn't exist in my family as a tradition.

            I never really talked to Grandpa Sam about politics. But I remember late in his life, he went back to the Soviet Union with his second wife (Liz had died of an abdominal cancer in her early 70s), Gussie, even more political than he was. He told us about flying to Riga from Moscow, where Gussie had relatives, and mentioned that they didn’t get any meal on a three-hour flight. Gussie got very defensive at what she took to be a slam against the Communist Motherland, and Sam said, mildly, “Gussie, I’m not criticizing the Soviet Union. I just think it would have been nice to have a bite to eat.”

            My mother had lots of cousins from Sam’s family, but while my mother may have kept in touch with some of them, they were never part of the family I grew up in. I’ve met a few since, but it’s hard to maintain contact with family who are otherwise strangers. 

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Essay #3: Grandparents, part 2

I know much more about my mother’s family, and her mother’s family. Here is a formal photo, from about 1928. My mother, Leah, sitting demurely in front, looks to be about 10, and her sister, Anita, standing next to her, would have been about four. Their parents stand behind them on the right, their mother, Elizabeth,  gazing appraisingly toward the camera, their father, Sam, looking anywhere but at the camera. Had he lost his job by this point? He was a fur worker, a union organizer, and a member of the Communist Party, and the “reds” were being hounded out of fur shops in the 1920s by company goons, according to Philip Foner’s history of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, published in the late 1940s—which includes Grandpa Sam in the index and in the photo insert. He and his union colleagues sometimes sat in front of fur and leather shops, where many Jews worked, and ostentatiously ate ham sandwiches; they were trying to break the religious hold on workers by showing they wouldn’t be struck down for eating traife.

           I don’t know what occasioned this photo. Everyone is very dressed up, especially my great-grandmother, sitting on the left. My grandmother, the oldest of three children, is the plainest dressed in this photo. Did this bother her? My mother told me her mother was a good wife: her husband was a leftist, so she was, but if she had married a rabbi, she would have been a good rebbetzin.

            My mother’s Aunt Esther is on the left, with her husband, Morris Rappaport. Morris was a CPA, and prosperous. When I was young and visiting the relatives in Brooklyn, Esther showed off her mink coat. Her sister didn’t have a mink coat or a fur of any kind. My mother tells me that when she was young and her father was still working in the fur shops, he would bring home scraps of fur and put them together into little fur coats for her and her sister. Morris remained lean throughout his life, while Esther became more corpulent, like her mother. In 1930, they had one daughter, Honey Lee, who had rheumatic fever as a child. That damaged her heart, and she died in her thirties. Honey was born 12 years after my mother, I was born 12 years after Honey, and Honey’s first daughter, Randy, was born 12 years after me. I broke the pattern when Christie wasn’t born until Randy was 18—and I was out of touch with the part of the family

            Honey’s husband worked at NBC as some sort of technician, and when I was six or seven, he got me onto The Howdy Doody Show as one of the Peanut Gallery. I really didn’t want to be part of the show, I just wanted to watch it, so being in it felt excruciatingly awkward. I sat in the back, so as to be as invisible as possible.

            My mother’s Uncle Louie, in the center, is not married yet in this photo. He and his wife, Millie, had no children, so my mother had only one cousin on her mother’s side. Louie was a liquor salesman, and he also was on the corpulent side. My grandmother was the only one who remained slim. My mother told me that there was constant feuding in the family, Liz and Esther against Louie, Louie and Liz against Esther, Esther and Louie against Liz. My mother found this very upsetting, but I was totally unaware of this emotional upheaval. Was it just my self-absorption?

            My grandmother was the only one born back in Russia, in the town of Khotin (or Hotin, or Chotin, depending on whether you were writing it in Russian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish), near the border with the Ottoman Empire. The region was called Bessarabia, and when I asked my grandparents where they were from, they would say Bessarabia, not Russia. Nathan Mucinic, my great-grandfather, sitting on the right, was the only son in a family of seven children. His family owned a cigarette factory, and when Nathan’s father died, his mother ran the factory herself for a while, but her son took over.

            When Nathan stopped paying the czar’s cigarette tax, he feared retaliation. He had traveled to New York with his oldest daughter, then only five, around 1900, then returned home. A few years later, he went back to New York with his wife and daughter and settled in what was called the East Side, now known as the Lower East Side or the East Village. By this time he had changed his name from Mucinic to Ohrenstein, presumably to hide his identity from any czarist police who might be after him.

            The family lived on the second floor of an apartment on East 9th Street facing Tompkins Square Park. For a time, they ran a restaurant in their apartment for “landsman,” people from their region of the Old World; presumably, they would know how to make food in this New World taste familiar. This is where my mother’s parents met.

            Nathan continued his taste for flouting the law. He owned a car that he claimed was bullet-proof, bought from a gangster. In the Prohibition era, he also had a license to make sacramental wine, and presumably sold it to speakeasies. Leah also remembers sitting in the kitchen with her mother, grandmother, and aunt, signing different names in different handwriting to long sheets of paper; she thinks these were political petitions to get favored candidates onto the ballot. Another job for which Nathan was paid by Tammany Hall, the local Democratic machine?

            Here’s a photo of his gravestone. One of these days I will go to the Center for Jewish History and see if I can find out where in Brooklyn it is.

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Over on Facebook, there is a page called #52Essays Next Wave, moderated by the incomparable Stacie Evans. Join us there, to write, to read, to comment helpfully...

 

Essay #1: What Am I Writing About? or When Will I Write?

Essay #1: What Am I Writing About? or When Will I Write?

            Since 2017, I have attempted to write an essay a week. I have usually gotten through January, and the first year I may even have gotten to early March. Then life intervened, or something. Anyway, I never, repeat, NEVER wrote an essay every week for even half of the entire year. So why will this year be any different?

            It’s not that I don’t have plenty to say, and many topics I would like to opine on. Part of the problem is deciding which idea will get and keep my attention this week. Part of the problem is a terminal lack of discipline. Dorothy Brande, in her 1934 guide “Becoming a Writer,” had two exercises: one put you in touch with your imagination, the other trained discipline. Of course, I failed totally on discipline. That exercise involved picking a time EVERY DAY when you would stop whatever you were doing and devote 15 minutes (only 15 minutes) to writing.

            Okay, maybe at the age of 77, I can attempt, one more time, to learn discipline. So what time of the day will become my writing time? When can I know that I can have 15 minutes without distraction to write? 8 p.m.? (But what if I go out in the evening? There are many groups I am part of.) 10 a.m.? (After breakfast, before I start my four-days-a-week freelance work? Followed by stretches and exercises?)

            Okay, let’s say 10 a.m. Every morning. Right after breakfast, before brushing teeth, before stretches and exercises. Write, brush teeth, stretches and exercises, whatever comes next.

            This will be my first essay. I’m leaving the original title, and adding what the essay became as a secondary title. I’m a week behind, but no punishing of self. Wish me luck.

 

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Over on Facebook, there is a page called #52Essays Next Wave, moderated by
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52Essays New Wave #6: Braised Cabbage, Jewish and Italian

            About 25 years ago I was in Budapest for a conference. One night I ate at Kispipa, a restaurant the was supposed to be Jewish haute cuisine. (This looks like a common restaurant name, with several still in Budapest, but I can’t tell whether any of them is the one I ate at.) I ordered roast goose, which came with deliciously “steamed cabbage” and something called “onion potatoes” (according to the menu). The goose, the first time I’d ever eaten it, had “the texture of juicy but very well done pot roast,” I wrote in my journal. The cabbage was less steamed, more braised for a very long time, possibly in some stock. I wrote then, “It still had an astringent bit, but it was mellow, not sharp like sauerkraut,” and it was perfect with the rich goose. The potatoes were roughly mashed, just as I make them at home, with tiny bits of onion. The whole meal was delicious.

            Some months later, back home, I was looking through Marcella Hazan’s “More Classic Italian Cooking,” and saw a recipe for Smothered Green Cabbage, Venetian Style. It was fall, and I wanted some cabbage. It called for very thinly sliced cabbage sauteed with some chopped onion and garlic in a quantity of oil and a dash of wine vinegar, and then cooked very slowly for a long time, an hour to an hour and a half, stirring every 10-15 minutes to mix in the caramelized bits. When I ate it, it brought back the taste of the “steamed cabbage” at Kispipa. I’m thinking the only difference might have been the fat, goose or chicken fat in the Hungarian restaurant, olive oil in the Italian dish. I’ve made this cabbage many times since, and I always slice by hand, since I find that meditative.

            And a few more notes about that Hungarian dinner. It started with sour cherry soup, covered with dollops of whipped cream. And for my coffee, I asked for cream, which puzzled the waiter until he brought me—a bowl of whipped cream. 

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It’s another year for the essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go on over to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there. I'm way behind this year (it's clearly no longer the sixth week of 2019), but going to try to catch up.

 

52Essays2019, #4: Dear Hannah Johnson

I’m traveling in Alabama and came across a newspaper called the Alabama Gazette. It had a front page “article” denouncing New York State’s new Reproductive Health Act, which removes abortion from the penal code and puts it into the public health code, and also permits late-term abortions to preserve a woman’s health or life. I felt compelled to respond to the author’s rant, but I can’t decide whether to actually send this to the writer. Will doing so unleash a torrent of hate e-mail at me? So I’m offering my rant to the Internet, and ask, what should I do?

Dear Hannah Johnson,

Concerning your front-page article, “Abortion vs. Life”:

            You clearly misunderstand what the New York State law that upsets you so is about. It has nothing to do with “killing” an unborn baby at term. New York State’s Reproductive Health Act maintains the 24-week limit under which women can seek abortions, but adds a provision for abortions at any time IF the baby would not survive the birth naturally. Additionally, the act permits abortions at any point if it is necessary to protect the MOTHER'S LIFE OR HEALTH. In other words, it applies only to permitting a doctor or properly trained medical professional to remove a nonviable fetus — that is, a baby that is already dead in the womb or that will die at birth from severe abnormalities — from the woman’s body to preserve her life or her health. In other words,

            I respect your beliefs and your right to hold those beliefs. But you do not seem to respect the beliefs of those who disagree with you. No one in New York State will be forced to have an abortion at any point in her pregnancy. Your article in the Alabama Gazette quotes the Christian Bible, but the laws of New York State and of the United States are not based on the Christian Bible. No doubt you think they should. HOWEVER, the United States is not a Christian theocracy. The United States Constitution states clearly, in the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....” This means you are free to practice your Christian religion, but you are NOT free to insist that the government enforce your religious beliefs on others.

            In the case of abortion, the life you care about is apparently only the life of an unborn person. What about the pregnant woman? Does she not have a life as well? What would you say about a 48-year-old woman, happily married, whose only child has just left home to attend college — and she finds herself accidentally pregnant? Would you force her to have a baby against her will? Isn’t FORCING a woman to bear a baby against her will akin to slavery? This 48-year-old woman is not hypothetical; it was me almost 30 years ago. I am not sorry I had that abortion at 11 weeks. I am relieved that I was able to have it safely and legally; I am relieved I was not forced to go through a pregnancy at such an advanced age, who knows what effect it would have had on my health. But that was MY decision to make, not yours, or anyone else's.

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It’s another year for the essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go on over to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.

52Essays2019 #2: The Marriage Story

            You could say I was forced to get married. It didn’t feel like that at the time, but it was part of the experience. When I called my parents to tell them Jack and I were getting married, my father said, “We’re not making you do this, are we?” I replied, “No, of course not.” But I thought, we wouldn’t be if not for you. Here’s what happened.

            It was the fall of 1964. I had returned to Antioch College in the spring after having dropped out two years before. Now I was in New York City for my co-op job (at the New York Times!) and living with Jack, who had fallen in love with the city when we’d visited in the winter from Washington, D.C., where we’d met. A few weeks into my job, my father called to say he was in the city for work and would I like to have dinner. Sure, I said, imagining a mean in a nice restaurant.

            When my father picked me up from work, we went to Penn Station to meet my mother, who was arriving the Philadelphia suburb where they lived. Odd, I thought; Dad hadn’t said anything about her having dinner with us. We went to a nondescript restaurant near the station, and chit-chatted about nothing in particular until our appetizers were served. As I dipped my spoon into my soup, my father asked, “Are you and Jack living together?” The soup never made it to my mouth. “What do you mean?”

            “I came by your address the other day and saw your name and his on the same mailbox.”

            The rest of the conversation may have appeared normal and quiet—my family did not yell or get overtly excited. It was, however, very uncomfortable for me. I had mentioned Jack to my parents as someone I was dating, but they hadn’t met. Jack and I were having a great time, in and out of bed, but I wasn’t thinking about getting married at that moment. I had just returned to college, had about a year and a half left, and wanted to finish. On the other hand, I did expect to get married sometime. But to Jack? Who knew?

            I said, “We’re not planning on getting married.”

            My father said, “My sister lived with her husband before they got married, but they were planning on getting married.” Oh, so it would be okay for Jack and me to be living together if we were going to get married sometime?

            I said, “I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m taking the pill.” This didn’t reassure my parents; “Nothing’s perfect,” my mother said.

            My father asked, “What would Antioch College think about your living with Jack?”

            I said, “Antioch College doesn’t care. They don’t have in loco parentis.” Was my father threatening to tell the college? I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, but I also was pretty sure that the college wouldn’t penalize me.

            My parents were lefties, but they were no bohemians. A few years earlier, while watching a TV program about a college considering co-ed dorms, my father was adamantly opposed. “You know what will happen,” he said ominously. “Why have that temptation?” At dinner, I didn’t know what was bothering them about my living with Jack. Did they have some old-fashioned idea that Jack was taking advantage of me? I knew that wasn’t true.

            I ate hardly a bite all evening, and I was still angry after they drove me to my apartment.

            “My parents are upset because they found out we’re living together,” I burst out to Jack. He was very comforting. But I ranted on about my father threatening to tell Antioch, and why did they care anyway, why were they being so old-fashioned? I didn’t think about it’s being only 1964, and people living together openly without being married was still rare.

            “Why don’t we get married?” Jack said calmly.

            That was totally unexpected. We had never talked about anything long-term or permanent. What did I really want to do? He was asking me to marry him. Maybe no one else ever would. Maybe I should take what was being offered. And if it didn’t work out, we could always get divorced.

            That’s how I came to be calling my parents the next evening and why my father asked his question. Who knows if we would have gotten married without that particular scene at the restaurant. The reality is, through many tempestuous moments and some really hard times, we did indeed remain married until death did us part.

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It’s another year for the essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go on over to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.

 

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52Essays2018: Eyesight Correction

            When I was 6 or 7, did my parents notice that I tended to watch TV by turning my head sideways and scrunching up one of my eyes? My grandmother noticed and told me to stop. My myopia must have already been starting then. But it wasn’t until fourth grade that I gradually had to move ever closer to the front of the classroom to be able to read what was on the blackboard. When I finally had to stand right in front of the board, the teacher must have sent a note home to tell my parents to take me to an eye doctor.

            I still remember coming out of the optician’s office with my first pair of glasses, looking up and noticing the side wall of the big department store in New Haven, Malley’s I think it was, which earlier had been nothing but a grayish-brown slab. Now I saw windows scattered up the wall. I’d had no idea. I soon lost all memory of what the world looked like before I had the magic of glasses, but living out in the country I didn’t always need to see details in the distance. I knew where the fences surrounding the adjoining fields were, the trees, the big rocks, the hedges along tiny creeks.

            I didn’t wear the glasses all the time. One of my favorite pastimes was to pretend to be a singer or dancer and perform to an imaginary audience. My stage was the concrete slab leading into our basement garage, and the audience was out in the graveled driveway. No performer I had ever seen on TV wore glasses, so of course I took them off when I did my imaginary performances, usually putting them in the back pocket of my shorts. One day, I forgot they were there and sat on the grass after one of my performances. Oops! Broken glasses. They must have been fairly expensive even then, because my mother was quite angry at having to replace them.

            Two years ago I had cataract surgery on one eye, which is now farsighted, while the other eye is still quite nearsighted. My brain has somehow learned to process distance with the right eye, reading with the left eye (at about 8 inches), while working on this laptop is the only task requiring glasses. Driving in bright daylight I can do with only the right eye—amazing. When it turns dusk, I need glasses. But most of the time I am most comfortable not wearing glasses.

            I began to wonder why glasses felt less comfortable if I can see better with them. Eyeglasses aren’t the only way to correct one’s vision. In fact, all through high school, I hated wearing glasses. On first hearing “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” I thought it was a piece of folk wisdom; I was astonished years later to learn it was a poem written by Dorothy Parker. Glasses in the 1950s were pretty hideous, the so-called cat’s-eye, strongly upswept where they met the earpiece. But that’s what everyone who needed to wear glasses wore, so that’s what I wore.

            I first heard about contact lenses when I was 19. A friend of my younger sister wore them. But they were so expensive, more than $100. I didn’t even think about asking my parents.

            But the next year, I had dropped out of college. I had my own job, making my own money. I was going to explore this possibility to toss the glasses forever.

            The first ophthalmologist was sure I wouldn’t be able to tolerate contacts. I had dry eyes, a condition called blephritis. I don’t care, I thought. I’ll try them out and see what happens. I can still remember the thrill standing in the middle of the opticians’ (Nichols and Oldt, in Washington, D.C.—that still remember that shows how important it was to me) and could see my reflection, sans glasses, in the mirror eight feet away. I followed instructions scrupulously: wear for one hour a day for a week, and gradually increase by an hour a day per week until I was wearing the contacts all the time I was awake. To my surprise, I had no trouble putting a small piece of hard plastic, which is what contacts were in the early 1960s, into my eye. Although getting water in my eyes had prevented me from learning to swim, the desire to not wear glasses was powerful enough to overcome the fear of putting my finger in my eye.

            I wore those hard lenses for 20 years, scrupulously keeping them clean, not sleeping in them, wearing sunglasses outside no matter the time of day to keep dust and other mess from irritating the lenses and my eyes. When I started going to a gym, sweating through weight-lifting, or race-walking for exercise, I couldn’t imagine doing any of these activities while wearing glasses; sweat would cause them to slip and slide on my face.

            Perhaps it was the dry eye problem asserting itself. My lenses smudged up more and more frequently. I had to clean them five or six times a day, then every hour, then every half hour. They became annoying, got in the way of my doing my work. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was now copyediting on a computer all day. I was also now over 40, a feminist, less concerned with my appearance.

            I returned to glasses, which were much more attractive. Wore them for four years. Until I met someone who wore soft lenses. Who persuaded me to try them. Soft lenses were different. You could sleep in them, if you wanted. I didn’t tempt fate. I did have one thing to overcome. From my earliest contact lens days, I’d had a recurrent dream: the lens I was about to put in my eye because as large as a salad plate, and floppy, something I could never put in my eye. Soft lenses turned out not to be as floppy or as large as I feared.

            I wore the soft lenses for another 20 years. Then the same smudging began again. Protein deposits, my ophthalmologist told me. At the same time, my aging eyes were beginning to require different correction for close and middle distances. If I read a recipe, I needed reading glasses. Working on the computer required reading glasses. Wearing glasses while also wearing contacts seemed excessive. This time I thought I’d given up lenses for good.

            I’ve worn glasses regularly for only 25 years, a third of my life. I’ve worn contact lenses for 40 years. My glasses now help me see the middle distance, but I’m still most comfortable not wearing glasses when I read or watch TV or wander the streets. It no longer has anything to do with vanity or fear that no man will make a pass. My face just feels freer without any plastic resting on my nose.

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This year there is another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. I am so far behind that I confess it is week 42, and this is only the sixth or seventh essay I've posted. I doubt I'll get to 52 essays this year, but I will try to do more before the year ends. If you’d like to try it, go to the Facebook page for #52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or read some of the essays that will be linked to there.

Essay #6: Cockroaches, 2

            I saw my first cockroach in a New York City apartment when I was 19. Having grown up in the country and the suburbs, I was acquainted with insects: a praying mantis, aka “walking stick,” in the schoolyard when I was 10 (so big, and so oddly human-like); crickets everywhere, with their nighttime trills; fireflies, who we chased and collected in glass jars and mysteriously were gone the next morning, even though we’d screwed on the top. Ants, mosquitos, ordinary flies, deer flies at college.

            The cockroach in my kitchen was ugly. And its reputation was ugly as well. I only knew about them from books, where they were stand-ins for poverty, filth, nastiness. “Is that a cockroach?” I asked my roommates, though they were suburban kids themselves, how would they know? But they knew. In my first apartment a few years later with Jack, we’d leave glasses with the dregs of Coca-Cola or gin and tonic in the living room; in the morning, there would be a jumble of dead roaches who’d gone for the sugar.

            One day Jack was home and decided to exterminate the buggers. He called me at work in the middle of the task; “Call in the air force,” he said. He’d taken the books out of the bookcase between living room and kitchen and disturbed a nation of roaches, who fled in many directions. We didn’t know that cockroaches liked paper.

            I visited a friend one evening after work. As we sat in the kitchen, roaches ran up and down the wall just inches from my head. I pretended I didn’t see them, and my friend pretended she didn’t notice me pretending not to see them.

            One day in another apartment, I was reading a book while lying on the bed. Feeling a prickly feeling on my thigh, I looked down and was horrified to see a cockroach crawling along my leg. I brushed it away, but couldn’t help the creepy sense that the roach thought I was a dead thing.

            Cockroaches are really, really ancient. They’ve been on Earth for 320 million years, while Homo erectus appeared around two million years ago. We’re the newcomers to this planet. But we still try to eradicate them. Sprays, traps, folk remedies, we’ll try anything. It took quite a while for us to try the cleanliness route, making sure we washed the dishes every night and wiped off the counters. In our current apartment, Jack would wake up in the middle of the night and go to the kitchen to get water. Turning on the light caused the brown creatures to run for the walls, where they slipped through invisible-to-humans openings.

            One evening I noticed a large bug (cockroach? waterbug?) meander toward the couch I was on. I dropped a heavy book on it, smashed it dead. But I couldn’t get rid of it. It seemed almost a tiny animal. I called Jack to take it away. We had a succession of cats, but only played with cockroaches, didn’t eat them. Perhaps they had a bad taste.

            Did we get cleaner or neater? Or did our building staff do a better job at extermination? For many years now, cockroach sightings have become rare. Mostly when there is work being done on nearby apartments, anything that disturbs the natural ecology of the building. I did see a cockroach crawl out of a hole atop the bathtub where grout had come loose; it was easy to make sure its family stayed inside the wall. 

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This year there is another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.

Essay #5: Cockroaches, 1

            Okay, it’s week 28, and I’ve not written anything in this essay challenge since January. It’s time to get going.

            Why start with cockroaches, you may wonder. Maybe it’s because I saw one of the big ones, the American cockroach (brown, about an inch and a half long), in my bathroom, huddled by the toilet. Naturally, since it’s July, I was barefoot. When I returned, sandaled, it was no longer visible, but was it still in the room? I walked in slowly, eyeing the area around the toilet, nudged the basket of magazines next to the toilet—and it came slithering out. I tried to stomp on it, but it zigged and zagged too quickly for my slowing reflexes, and dashed back behind the toilet. I needed a weapon.

            All I had, though, was a sponge mop. I got it from the cleaning closet and went back to the bathroom. It was still in hiding. I pushed at the basket with the mop, out raced the cockroach. I bashed at it with the mop, but again, it escaped. The mop was no good.

            Now I remembered a folk roachacide I’d read about: rubbing alcohol. So I filled my little sprayer bottle and returned to the bathroom. This time the cockroach was nowhere. I nudged the basket; nothing. Looked all around the white floor; nothing. Got into the bathtub so I could peer behind the toilet; nothing. It had either squeezed into whatever hole it had sneaked out of, or it was roaming the apartment.

            I gingerly used the toilet and went to bed—and put my slippers at bedside for when I’d have to get up in the middle of the night.

            Cockroach memories to come...

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This year there is another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the essays that will be linked to there.  

Essay #4: Breaking Down

           It started last summer. Actually, maybe it was the beginning of last year. Here's the setup. Many years ago I bought a handbag made by Eagle Creek. First, it held everything I needed to carry with me, yet was still small enough that I wasn't tempted to carry more than I needed. Plus, the manufacturer said it has a lifetime repair guarantee. Should a zipper or the brackets holding the straps break, I could mail it to a designated repair place, and it would be fixed. So I bought a second, identical bag, so when I had to send the first one off for repair, I'd just start using the second, and vice versa.

            After years of happily doing this, I noticed that the times between breakdown were getting shorter. When the zipper on bag2 broke just a few months after repaired bag1 had been returned to me, I started using repaired bag1, but didn't send bag2 to the repair shop. Why not? Did I think the repair people were getting tired of fixing my bags? Did I think they weren't replacing the broken zipper with a new one, but were simply straightening out the old zipper so it would work—for a while? Whatever, bag2 sat on my desk, and still sits there.

            Meanwhile, last summer, the main zipper on bag1, which used to zip either to the right or to the left, is now only zipping in one direction. Which means, oh, I won't go into the OCD details of why this matters. The fact is, both bags need fixing now, and I can't send both of them to the repair shop unless I have another handbag to carry my essentials. And I'm not buying a new bag.

            But it's not just these two broken-zipper bags. About a month ago, I wanted to wear a long-sleeved shirt, but when I went to open that drawer of my bureau, it wouldn't move. Ah, that explained the odd loud, unexplained noise I'd heard the night before. I jiggled the drawer—no change. I removed the drawer above and the drawer below, but there was no way to access whatever had broken inside to block that drawer from opening. I should add that about a year earlier, a piece that ensures smooth opening of the top drawer had also broken, but that drawer still opens and closes. I should further add that this bureau is older than I am. Blond wood, Heywood Wakefield, circa 1940, one of the first pieces of furniture my parents bought after they got married, I think.

            My first impulse was to replace it with an identical bureau. An Internet search revealed that all such bureaus are used, and who knows what shape they are in, if I can "inspect" them only via computer screen. Further Internet research revealed that no bureaus I can inspect in a store have exactly the dimensions of my old bureau. Plus, they are really expensive. Finally, I took a long (subway plus bus) ride out to Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where I saw a couple of bureaus that might work, but I have to write out their dimensions and compare them to what I have to make sure I am making the absolute correct choice—especially since what I really want is a replica, not something different. (Is this more OCD?)

            And wait, there's more. A couple of weeks ago, my printer stopped working because the yellow cartridge was empty. The cartridges of this Epson printer do seem to run out frequently, Was it annoyance over this apparent fact that prevented me from going out that day or the next to buy more cartridges? Whatever, it took over a week for me to buy the required cartridge and another few days to replace it. Once I'd made the replacement, I clicked "Copy," the first task I needed done. The printer made its usual sounds, paper came out—but nothing was on it. Meanwhile, I'd left the printer open (so I could remove the old cartridge and take it to the stationery store to show what I needed; doesn't everybody do that?). Had that caused some harm to the printer's innards? I don't know, because I have neither taken the printer to a repair place nor called Epson for repair help; I'd have to dig out my receipt to see if the printer is still under warranty, and the longer I wait, the more likely it won't be.

            So, three major parts of my daily living are broken, and I'm making little to no progress in getting them fixed. What is wrong with me?