SOL March 13: Reminiscence

I walked today from the neighborhood I have lived in for more than 50 years to the neighborhood my husband and I lived in when we first moved to New York City.

            I was ostensibly checking out a restaurant some friends are planning to meet for lunch next week. But because it was my old neighborhood, I tried to remember what remained and what was new.

            Almost everything was new. The area has gentrified considerably. Restaurants that didn’t exist then line Columbus Avenue. Joe’s Seafood Restaurant, really a classic New York coffee shop,  is gone; where it stood is a string of storefronts under construction, the building above them for sale. The Cuban deli on our corner is now a fancy hair salon. What had been the Sloan’s supermarket is now Gristede’s; the two chains appear to have been part of a series of mergers, according to a Google search. What had been a seedy, even dangerous bar called Donohue’s is now a trendy café, with lots of pandemic-generated outdoor tables.

            What remains the same? The Spanish-language Mision Bethel still has its sign, but the building is for sale or rent. The elementary school on 83rd Street and the high school on 85th remain. That’s about it.

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SOL March 12: Mail

The U.S. Postal Service is suffering because people send e-mail and e-cards now rather than postal mail, bt I still get tons of mail. If I don’t open it every day, it piles up alarmingly. I’m also having time management issues, and today I had four days of mail to tackle. Here’s what came into my mailbox.

1. A packet of new checks. Yes, I still write checks rather than have money automatically taken out of my checking account. I feel more in control and using my brain; too much convenience leads to loss of brain power.

2. Reminder from the Museum of Modern Art that it’s time to renew my membership. I will do that.

3. My bank statement. I always balance my checkbook. My husband never did, said the numbers were all in his head. We kept our money separate — but that’s another story, for another slice.

4. Visa bill. I’ll go through that statement, too, writing down what everything is for in case there’s taxable stuff in there.

5. Statement from one of my TIAA retirement accounts, and separately a prospectus. Maybe I shouldn’t get those on paper anymore. (Take one away from the Post Office.)

6. Postcards from two of my retirement accounts that the shareholder’s reports are online and including links. (Take two away from the Post Office.)

7. A letter from the editorial department of the Marquis Who’s Who. This deserves its own story, perhaps tomorrow’s slice.

 

That takes care of the personal mail, the mail I need to open and attend to. But it’s a tiny percentage of what else I received in the past four days.

Magazines and catalogues

The New Yorker, Mar. 15 issue

Eating Well, April issue

Consumer Reports Annual Auto Issue

Catalyst (publication of the Union of Concerned Scientists)

The Vermont Country Store (I did recently order from them)

Garnet Hill (never ordered from them)

Parachute (never heard of this company)

Whatever Works (or this one)

Marketplace (a nonprofit selling clothing from India; I’ll look through this one)

 

And finally, the solicitations for money, first, the political

Democratic National Committee (2)

Senate Majority PAC (identical appeal to different versions of my name)

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Democratic Governors Association

4 individual Democratic senators and congressmen

 

Some of these nonprofits I’ve donated to, others not, but the appeals keep coming

American Heart Association

Amerian Jewish  World Service

American Prairie Reserve

Americares

ASPCA

Cohen Children’s Medical Center

Feeding America

Fresh Air Fund

Inner-City Scholarship Fund

Jewish Foundation for the Righteous (this organization helps gentiles in Nazi-occupied Europe who helped Jews; many are now quite elderly and poor)

MAP International (medical services)

National Wildlife Federation

New York Public Radio

New York Restoration Project (supporting parks and open space in the city)

Oglala Lakota College

Planned Parenthood

Polaris (fights sex and labor trafficking; first I’ve heard of it)

International Rescue Committee (with beautiful note cards)

Rosenberg Fund for Children (founded by a son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the organization helps children of progressive activists)

Simon Wiesenthal Center

Wounded Warrior Project

United Farm Workers

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SOL March 11: Ancient Expenses

I spent more time than I wanted to today looking for bank statements from 2010 — which I no longer have. The bank doesn’t have them either; they purge records after seven years. But in the bottom of a closet I found some really old checks, as well as the lease for an apartment my husband and I lived in, in the mid-1960s.

            So what did things cost more than 50 years ago? Rent for that small but recently renovated apartment was $135 a month, and that seemed like a lot of money at the time. A therapy session cost $12.50. A doctor’s visit was only $5.

            And W-2 forms. For eight months of work at a new job, as copy boy at the New York Post, my husband earned $3,170. For a full year of work as a secretary at Bantam Books, I earned $3,804. And we lived a normal life, eating out, drinking in bars, going to the movies (probably $2.50 or less; a movie ticket didn’t go to $5 until 1972, and I remember the first film we saw at that exhorbitant rate, “Last Tango in Paris”).

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SOL March 10: Taxes

I took all my documents and numbers to my tax preparer yesterday and sat across the desk from him for more than an hour and a half. Some of the time was taken up by chit-chat — he had covid last year, but has recovered. The company had installed a plastic shield across his desk, with a slot for papers to be passed through, but my preparer took them from me from around the edge of the shield.

            While he entered numbers into my file, I played videogames on my phone: Sudoku, Solitaire. I wondered why I was there, then realized it was to answer questions — like why there was no 1099 from one company, but a 1099 from a company he’d never seen before (one replaced the other).

            It was also to be told that I was missing some numbers. How much was my first stimulus payment? Had I paid the long-term care insurance premium, and how much? How much did I pay in premiums for my medigap insurance? Had I paid any estimated tax last year?

            Once I got home, I had homework: to supply those missing numbers. Today, that is done. Next, I’ll learn how much I have to pay (because I didn’t pay estimated taxes last year; the tax preparer who’d done my taxes last year, when my usual guy was out sick with covid, hadn’t sent me any of the necessary forms). As Daniel Defoe wrote in 1726: “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

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SOL March 8: Communities

Growing up, I thought I wasn’t a joiner. I didn’t belong to any groups in school or college. I didn’t know how to just join something on my own, I had to know someone or be invited. But women’s liberation changed all that. It was the first place where I felt that I totally belonged. And women’s liberation gave me the courage and confidence to join other groups.

    And now... I belong to so many groups. Groups that have kept me sane through the pandemic. Social isolation has meant isolation from face-to-face gathering, but  Zoom has been a lifesaver. I know there are people who hate Zoom, but without Zoom, I would have been really isolated. Seeing people, even on Zoom, has been better for me than the telephone. But back to groups. Here are the groups I have been Zooming with over the past year.

    1. Women’s group. This group has been meeting for more than 20 years. It’s a group I organized in my mid-50s, after a conversation with a friend about whether I was thinking about women and aging and sex. In fact, I had been, and began asking my friends whether they’d like to be in a group to discuss these issues. Once I had a critical mass, six or seven women, I think, we held a meeting, and we were off. There’s much more I could say about this group, but let’s get on to my other groups.

    2. Writers’ group. I joined this group a few years before the women’s group started. I was teaching journalism at the time, and one of my students invited me to a reading by her writers’ group. I had been thinking about a writing project, and I wasn’t going to get tenure at my teaching job. I went to the reading, each reader was better than the next, and I got up the courage to ask if I could join them. Of course, they said, and that writing project go underway. I could say lots more about this group, too.

    3. Book group 1. This is a group I joined when I noticed that a friend in my writing group was reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, which I was also reading. She was reading it for her book group, and I asked if I could join them for that discussion, because I wanted to talk about this novel. Of course, she said, and I was in a new group. This group alternates fiction and nonfiction, which

    4. Book group 2. Initially, this group started to discuss aging and retirement. It was mostly historians, many at the university where I had taught, and soon it evolved to be a political group once Trump was elected. But after almost three years of politics, our organizer felt she was in so many other political groups, she wanted respite. Let’s read novels, she suggested, and that’s what we’ve done for the past many months — though even the novels we’ve read have had a political bent.

    5. Book group 3. A woman I’d known for many years had terminal cancer. Years earlier I had invited her to my women’s group, but she was already in a group talking about retirement — they called it “refirement” — so after she died, I asked if I could meet with her group, and stayed. Many of the members were midwives, ret. It had become a book group as well, but relied more on books that were available at the library, so not the latest titles.

    6. Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon. I learned about this salon from the writing friend whose book group I’d joined. This group, started by a lawyer by day, poet by night, meets monthly with a featured writer who holds a brief workshop, reads from her (occasionally his) work followed by a Q&A, and then an open mike. From one of the members, I heard about the next writing community.

    7. Creative Expression NYC (originally Open Expression in Harlem). This group also meets monthly, and also includes a featured writer and an open mike, though with the open mike first.

    8. Movie group. Another friend started this monthly group. We agree on a film in advance, see it on our own time, and then meet to discuss. Once we couldn’t agree on just one film, so for a while we would see two movies to discuss, often a foreign film. When one of our members’ macular degeneration made subtitles hard to read, we’d always have one English-language film along with the non-English-language film. There’s also a strong political bent to the movies we choose.

    Is there another group I’ve missed? Aren’t these enough?

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SOL March 7: Fragment

Found in my journal from 2010, possibly a note for a story (which I never wrote)?

 

"History—the effort to connect the discrete moments of life into a narrative whole

"A person who tries to escape that narrative, but focusing on the moment-by-moment, always starting over, but the power of narrative overcomes his[her] resistance by creating alternative narratives that he[she] recognizes as false"

 

What kind of story could this be? an accumulation of "slices of life"?

 

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SOL March (5 and) 6: History

Just a week into the daily slice of life challenge, and I’ve already lost a day.

            Yesterday I could have written about going to the doctor about my eye (nothing serious, it turned out), but I didn’t want to go into the detail. So let’s say this paragraph stands in for Slice of Life 5.

            Today I am searching through old journals to find out what I can about the sale of my mother’s condo in Florida in the months after she died 11 years ago. Why am I doing this? Because last week I received a check in the mail, a check dated July 28, 2010 (11 years ago!), with an unsigned handwritten note on the stub saying, “Please note this is for the wire payment for the purchase of unite #680” — my mother’s condo. The amount of the check is far more than the amount I actually received at the time and the amount in the documentation I have. What is going on?

            So I am searching through my journals for that period to see what I noted at the time. What the journals are full of are my notes of going through my mother’s papers, mixed in with worries about the fate of the magazine I then worked for, which was either going to be sold or killed by the global corporation that owned it, in the midst of the Great Recession, as that corporation was selling or killing others of the hundred or so print trade journals.

            Death of people, and institutions.

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SOL March 4: Dreams vs. Real Life

I’m reading a novel in which a horror dream version of New York City's West Side coexists with the waking version. The night after discovering this facet of the plot, I had the following dream.

 

I’m asleep in bed, face down, my nose barely free to breathe. People are gathered around wondering if I am merely asleep or actually dead. I can see myself from above, and the sleeping me in bed wants to wake up to prove that I am alive, but I can’t seem to move. The voices talk around me as I try, try, try to move, to wake up in the dream. Finally, I wrench myself awake — and wake up in real life.

In the novel, the protagonist in the dream-city allows herself to be shot point-blank so as to wake up in the real-world city; as she explains to another character, “It’s like a dream—die in it, and you wake up.”

So, was I dead in my dream, though unaware of that, and that is what woke me up? My real waking up felt unexpected, almost violent, a visceral tearing from imagination into reality. Very unsettling.

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SOL March 3: Smartphones and Their Accessories

I grew up with telephones that had handsets with an earpiece that fit comfortably around your ear. True, you had to stay near the phone as you talked, you could not wander around your home, or talk to anyone as you walked down the street. But when you held the handset, you knew where your ear went and where your mouth should be.

            Not so with a smartphone. It’s a flat, rectangular object with no obvious location toward which to orient your ear or your mouth. I hate it. It feels like I’m talking to a pack of cards. Earbuds are the perfect solution to my annoyance. The earpieces go directly into my ear, and as an added benefit, my hands are free. I can be preparing dinner, washing dishes, knitting, while still chatting away.

            You know your phone can get old. But did you know your earbuds can get old as well? When earbuds get old, they start trying to take over your iPhone. (I didn’t think to ask the young tech at the Apple Store whether this phenomenon is limited to iPhones or also afflicts Samsung’s Galaxy or other smartphones.) When the following started happening to me, I thought it was the phone. Then I thought my phone was haunted.

            At first the phone would hang up in the middle of calls. I thought it was a reception problem; maybe some parts of my living room got less of a signal than other parts. Then a blue screen with Voice Control in white letters started popping up at random; sometimes it would appear then disappear, other times it would appear and remain. If it popped up in the middle of a phone call, it would kill the call.

            I had disabled Voice Control a few years ago. I have no desire to talk to my phone, only to talk to other humans through my phone. Had the phone turned Voice Control back on? I went into Settings and saw that feature was still turned off — yet the Voice Control screen continued to pop up.

            Next, the phone started turning off the audiobook I was listening to as I did my daily walk. (I had the audio version of Obama’s A Promised Land, which I wanted to listen to so I could hear his voice regularly again.) I would press start, hear Obama repeat his last sentence, and the audiobook would stop. This happened repeatedly during a walk a few days ago. Maddening.

            Later that day, it got scary. Voice Control popped up on the screen, again, and I shook the phone — that sometimes turned it off. Then the Siri voice came on: “Calling Bob.” On the screen appeared: “Bob FaceTime audio.” Who is Bob?! There’s no one in my contacts named “Bob.” Had someone somehow taken control of my phone?

            I called Apple Support immediately. Of course, the phone hung up soon after I got a tech, who had said reassuringly that he was sure no one had taken over my phone. The next tech had no idea what the problem was and made an appointment with my local Apple Store for the next day. One of the first things the tech at the Apple Store asked me? “Do you use earbuds?”

            This is apparently a known problem. So if you have an iPhone, and if you use earbuds, if your phone begins to behave as if possessed, go to your Apple Store, but also be prepared to buy a new set of earbuds.

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SOL March 2: Addendum to Yesterday’s Yiddish

There is one Yiddish word that is native to me: gesundheit. It’s what anyone said when another person sneezed. I’d say it, too, not knowing what it meant. By the time I learned the English — bless you, or God bless you — I was atheist enough that those were words I would never say.

            A couple more language notes about my mother: In college she signed up to take German, having studied Latin all through high school. She was fluent in Yiddish, so she was sure German would be easy. Not only was it not easy, it was the only class she ever flunked. German was just different enough from Yiddish, yet with enough similarities, that she couldn’t disentangle the two languages. But again, the unasked, thus unanswered questions: what were were the differences, and what were the similarities?

            In her 60s, she traveled to China many times, and attended a month-long language class for “foreigners.” She learned Chinese and was one of only two students in that class who wrote their final exam using characters instead of the pinyin transliteration. 

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SOL March 1: Yiddish

 It’s Slice of Life March, meaning I am going to once again try to write a slice of life every day this month. I haven’t been that consistent with Slice of Life Tuesday, but let’s hope the daily slice jump-starts the memory projects I’ve been sputtering in fits and starts. Here’s the first.

 

Last week, a friend sent me a link to a Yiddish version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” on YouTube. Before I even listened to it, I e-mailed my friend that I wished I could read or understand Yiddish. She responded with a link that offers a Yiddish word-of-the-day.

            I listened to the first word on the list, which was about parents-in-law and learned for the first time that calling one's grandparents bubbe and zayde were signs of respect. I had no idea! I thought they were just the Yiddish equivalents for granny and grandpa, which were the words I used as a child, and which I felt were more terms of familiarity than of respect.

            Background: My family is Jewish, and all my grandparents were immigrants in the decade before WWI. They were also leftists, so their relationship to Judaism as a religion was pretty nonexistent. But Yiddish isn’t the language of religion; it’s the language of the people. There were times in my childhood when my parents and grandparents had lively conversations in this other language, and if I asked what they were talking about, I was told it wasn’t for children, only for grownups. I was sent to a Yiddish shul for a year or so, but I don’t have the facility for languages that some do, so what I learned didn’t stick.

            More and more, I am finding questions I want to ask my parents, especially my mother, now that it is impossible to get answers. Like, how did they feel about Yiddish? Why did they make no effort to connect what I was learning in the Yiddish shul with the rest of my life? Of course, I know the Yiddish words that have been adopted into English: schlemiel, chutzpah, dreck, kibbitz, klutz, maven, etc. But I know those words as English words, and if my goyische husband asked me what a particular Yiddish word meant, I often couldn’t tell him. For a while, I thought all grandparents should speak with a slight accent, and that I was depriving my daughter of something, I didn’t really know what, by giving her grandparents who spoke English like the natives they were.

            My father understood Yiddish, but didn’t speak it, and as a child I marveled as his participation in this conversation, yet his contribution was always in English. Did he have the same lack of facility for language that I have? My mother’s first language was Yiddish, and she didn't really start learning English until she went to school, but I never asked her what that experience was like. I did tell her about the Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, Mass., and we both contributed money to their efforts to collect books in Yiddish and hold Yiddish classes for young people. After my mother died, I kept her collection of books about Yiddish, but have only dipped into them, feeling they will raise more questions that can never be answered.

            As it happens, I recently used "tsuris" in an e-mail with another friend about a serious problem she was having. Now that I’m 78, will I finally start learning Yiddish?

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SOL Tuesday: Phone Tsuris

             (I never learned much Yiddish, but this is the only word, meaning aggravating trouble, that adequately captures my feelings.)

            Yesterday, I wanted to buy a new flannel nightgown, so I went online to L.L. Bean  and found that the pattern I wanted was sold out. Maybe they would be getting more soon? I decided to call.

            I got the recording, punched in the proper number, but the customer service person who answered the phone couldn’t hear me. Funny. I hung up and tried again. Another customer service person couldn’t hear me. I use earbuds with my cellphone, so I tried another pair, calling twice more, and still, no one could hear me.     

          Maybe the problem was my phone. I called a friend. She couldn’t hear me either, with the earbuds, but when I unplugged them, she could hear me fine, so it wasn’t the phone. (I seem to hear better with the sound plugged directly into my ear; don’t know if that is a function of my hearing or the fact that cellphones have no obvious earpiece.) Later in the day, I talked to my daughter on the phone, with earbuds, and no problems. Go figure.

          Today I tried to call L.L. Bean again. The first time, the phone hung up in the middle of the recording. The second time, the phone hung up after I reached a customer service person. Third time, finally, everything worked the way it is supposed to. I spoke to a customer service person — and learned that all the flannel nightgowns are sold out... until June. 

         Technology: can't live without it, and can't live with it.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOLTuesday: Ancient Bug Bites

A slice of life from the 1950s.

            I’m 11. It’s a drizzly summer day in West Haven, Connecticut. The neighborhood kids are wondering what we can do on such a dreary day. A pile of logs in the field between Joanie and Karen’s old house and new house gives someone an idea. “Let’s build a cabin.”

            Joanie picks up one end of a log and I pick up the other end. Immediately we are beset by a swarm of insects, biting insects, stinging insects. 

 

            “Run!” someone yells, and everyone else runs, while I’m trying to swat the stingers away, to scrape them off. There are too many, they just keep coming back for the attack. Finally, I run to the end of the field, and the dampness and air brushing my body as I run wipes the yellowjackets away. But stings are painful.

 

            “Put mud on them,” I’m advised. “It will pull out the stinger.” So I slather mud over my painful arms and legs.

            

            When I get home, my mother threatens to hose down my mud-caked body, but lets me take a shower instead. Four scar, one on each arm and leg, remain for decades. A dermatologist diagnoses the spots.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

 

The Bag in the Closet

            I keep things. Occasionally, they aren’t even my things. For many years, a small, duffel-like bag sat in the bottom of a closet in my apartment. The bag belonged to a college friend of my husband’s. Here’s how it got there.

            This college friend, let’s call him J.C., visited us in New York soon after we got married, back in the mid-’60s. He and my husband told stories, talked about people they both knew; we drank a lot—this was before pot was a part of our life. My husband had told me J.C. was a charismatic figure, always a crowd of girls around him, always organizing parties.

            I developed a crush on J.C. He was lean, dirty blond hair, blue eyes, just my type. (I should insert here that while I was newly married, we had only gotten married because my parents found out we were living together and made a fuss. We were relatively young, only 22, hadn’t dated much in high school or college, so we had both agreed that sexual fidelity wasn’t anything we particularly cared about. But neither of us had yet acted on this bohemian belief.) I flirted with J.C. while we sat in the living room, drinking and talking. Late into the night, my husband and I repaired to our bed alcove, while J.C. wrapped himself in his sleeping bag on the floor of the living room.

            One night in bed, my husband asked, “What do you think of J.C.?”

            “I have a real crush on him,” I admitted.

            My husband said, “He told me he thinks you’re really hot. He wanted to know whether it was okay if he slept with you.”

            “What did you say?”

            “I said, it was up to you.”

            I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. On the one hand, it was exciting that J.C. wanted me as much as I wanted him. On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea that he’d asked my husband for permission. I wasn’t a piece of property that J.C. could borrow for a night of fun.

            I waited to see what would happen. Would J.C. make a move on me? What would I do if he did? He spent another week sleeping on our floor, then returned to Kansas. He never made a move. I was a little disappointed.

            After he was gone, my husband asked if anything had happened between us. I said, no. He said he thought J.C. was more afraid of losing a place to stay for the night.

            Some years passed. My husband and I moved to a bigger apartment and had a baby. A few months after the baby arrived, J.C. was in New York again, this time on his way to Europe for a year. There was some woman he knew, they were going to meet up in Venice—or something like that. He talked more than he had before, ideas more than stories about people they knew, something about “extended life.” I was less attracted than I had been.

            This time he brought marijuana. We sat in the living room, smoking, he at one end of the couch, me with my babe in arms at the other. The dope infused a repulsion toward J.C. so powerful I had to leave the room.

            My husband joined me in the baby’s room some minutes later. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

            “He’s giving me a strong feeling of paranoia,” I said, and my words flowed into the air in balloonish letters, like cartoon dialogue. I admired them until they faded like the Cheshire Cat.

            “Do you want me to tell him to leave?”

            “No, I’ll just stay away from him.”

            J.C. left the next day, but returned a few weeks later. Something had gone wrong, the woman wasn’t there. He was on his way back to Kansas. Could he leave this bag with us? He’d pick it up some other time. My husband put it in the closet in the baby’s room.

            J.C. never came back for the bag. Every few years, he’d call my husband on the phone, each time talking more and more incessantly about his discoveries of life extension. After a while my husband heard that J.C. was haunting his congressman’s office, claiming either that others were stealing his ideas about life extension or the congressman himself had stolen the ideas. Then we stopped hearing from him.

            About 30 years after the bag was left with us, I opened it. There was nothing inside. It was an awkward size, neither small enough for a carry-on, nor big enough for more than a weekend. It had a stiff top, like an old-fashioned carpetbag. My husband was happy to get rid of it.

SOLTuesday: Are You Bored?

 Since the pandemic started and people have been staying at home, I’ve seen many articles about how to deal with the boredom. 

 

            I am not bored. I’m retired, but I do have about eight hours a week of free-lance work. The rest of the time, I have no problem dreaming up projects. For instance...

            Cleaning out the bottom of one of my closets four months ago, I found a bag full of knitted squares, 36 different squares, already pinned together in groups of six and labeled rows 1-6. I had, who knows how many years ago, laid them all out and decided how they could be put together into an afghan. Then put them in a bag and forgot about them.

           A couple of months ago, I decided it was time to finish this project. First, I stitched together each row, then put all the rows together. Finally, I saw it needs a border, so that is what I am working on now, 15 to 30 minutes a day, not quite every day. Once it’s done, I’ll decide what to do with it. 

 

 

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