"Whoever discovers what these sayings mean"

My grandfather started it.

Sitting at the dining room table, my grandparents, my father and I forming a perfect north, south, east and west compass. He started talking about knowledge, ancient texts and some other things I can't remember as I was too distracted by the large book he had on the table that contained all of those ancient texts.

I love books and knowledge too much to pass a gem like that up. Made a mental note that when I got back to my home on the island of misfit toys I would look for it.

After looping in circles in the bookstore, I found the large book of ancient texts and bought it to add to the loving piles of text already accumulated in my apartment.

Instead of taking the express train home, I got on the local, absorbed in another book. At some point I turned off the music in my headphones and had the low hum of the subway as background noise as I became increasingly engrossed in the words between my fingers.

" Oh that's a wonderful book!" says a very regal woman who had sat next to me in the course of the ride home. " How are you enjoying it so far?"

" I've actually read it before. It's been awhile so I pulled it out. Need a bit of knowledge in my daily routine."

She asked me what kind of books I liked to read, made recommendations. " Isn't it wonderful to read books? In my country, I didn't grow up with a television or movies, my family told stories, a way to charge our imagination."

She paused. " So what do you do to get knowledge everyday?"

" Through these.." I ran my hand over the cover of the book. " Through texts, through life. It's the only way you grow."

I had reached the station that would allow me to transfer to my train, but I stayed on the local, wondering how this conversation would end.

I asked her the same question, she replied in kind. Through life, through the arts ( she was a drama therapist) and had been in acting all her life.

"I like going to Met museum too. Great place to go for solitude and thinking."

" Oh how lovely!" She exclaimed. " A wonderful place indeed. Whenever I feel lonely I go there."

After a few minutes of silence she turns to me and says:

"Always follow your heart's desire. Sometimes you have to be a bad girl and do what works for you. You can be the easy girl, but then you conform to everyone else's standards. Always keep searching for knowledge."

She got up at her stop and waved goodbye.

" Maybe I'll see you at the Met sometime," I say before she gets off.

"That would be nice!."

The ghosts of new year

repost from Jan. 1, 2010

the name of the man who moved in 82 years ago is still on the front door. Telephone wiring from an era long gone still runs on the baseboards. Original moldings, furniture and pictures throughout, including a letter carrier from around 1910 showing the first Model T's. My neighbor had knocked on my door the night before asking if I would like to ring in the new year with her, her sister and uncle. I had planned to spend it curled up in my living room or working on my project, but I happily obliged.

The air was warm and inviting and people who I consider to be family warmly welcomed me. I long ago accepted ghosts as constant companions, in my field of interest they would be hard to ignore. So it came as no surprise when my neighbor said as if it were a common occurrence that the gold trimmed glasses used to ring in this new and unknown year where originally brought by her now deceased husband's mother sometime in the then unknown decade known as the Twenties. Still intact, gold trim and all, bought long before they were born. I had never known people to possess such tangible objects connecting the past and the present until I moved here. Maybe because in my family such things are lost, fought over by elders or hidden in secret places until people forget about their very existence.

We danced in her living room to music from the 50's, me promising to return for the big dinner scheduled for later in the day with more people, and eventually me leaving her and her ghostly companions behind and returning to mine spread out in the stacks paper where I had left them.

Happy New Year Everyone!

walking with my mind

when every other girl was longing for dolls, I longed for books. Everytime I got money from a grownup, usually around my birthday or the holidays, I knew just what to do with it. Invest in paperbacks and hardbacks. Even after my mother took me to the bank to open a savings account. My bookcase filled up faster than that account ever did. The items on the shelves have rotated and changed over the years, but the bookcase is still with me. Though now I'm the tall one verses the days when I had to peer up to the top shelf.

Besides loving to read, books were my escape route. I could vanish into far off places and imagine myself anywhere than where I resided at the time. Walking was out of the question as I lived in car country. Instead of walking with my feet, I walked with my mind as far as I could go. Books opened up a whole new world for me, encouraging a desire to see a different view than what existed outside the living room window. Everyone laughed at me.  Bluntly told me that I would never make it outside of said car country and that I shouldn't expect anyone to help me if I were to venture past the limits of their horizon.

Then I put on walking shoes, dragged a suitcase full of clothes and books to this city that I made my home. I also didn't ask for help. In that first year I had to create makeshift shelves as I was living in a space that was not my own. After finding my own little private corner in my new hometown,  I put my walking shoes back on and ventured back to car country to grab the two things that mattered the most to me: my bookcase and my books. And in the start of my new life, with a window that provided a different view, one thing from my past remained unchanged: those shelves filled up faster with new additions than any other room in my apartment.

The Medicine for the Day

Repost from 2010 as I regroup and refocus from the chaos of the last few weeks :)

Wasn't feeling well, but there is only so long that I can stay in the house before getting cabin fever. Had enough strength to go somewhere familiar.

"Hello Mr. N"

" Oh hello!, you know what you're doing so you don't need my help." He says in his thick Russian accent and gestures to the back with a smile.

tabletops, shelves, floorspace and every corner filled with books, ledgers and boxes documenting over 100 plus years of history. All permanent, and a stroke of luck for me the originals as the state is too poor to document anything. Anger from the records keeper as no one seems to care.

Almost breaking my back to coax a cabinet to open it's drawers. This thing must be as old as some of the dusty ledgers around it. Been through it on three separate occasions and each time it refuses to open a different drawer.

Fingers black with dust as I gently sort through papers and for the second time this month I hear how unusual I am from the bespectacled man in the corner.

" You know, where I came from...history was destroyed on purpose, and here I go to work surrounded by it. People need to listen to what is in the documents as this is our future, not the technology that can rewrite history." He shakes his head and stares off in the distance for a minute. I try to keep the pages of ledger book from coming loose.

Steps out of the Darkness into the Light

The silence came first. The only thing that could be heard were Muslim prayers blasting from a radio in the bodega across the street.  My neighborhood had never been that quiet. Unless you count the winter nights somewhere between dusk and dawn.

Lights flickered like mad for hours, everything was prepared just in case. The wind a resounding roar that rattled the glass and the trees in the courtyard. But that was it in my neck of the woods. When it was deemed safe to go out I do what I normally do. I donned my sneakers and starting walking.

Walked over one hundred and twenty blocks down and back, addresses in my pocket to help guide me as I bounced back and forth from East to West to bang on windows and climb up stairs in the dark to check on elderly friends of mine. Passed banks running out of money, passed the ambulance stuck in a slow ride down Broadway even with a police escort. Passed the tourists that could turn a dangling crane on 57th street into an attraction. In one building the doorman refused to let me climb over twenty flights of stairs to check on someone out of safety concerns but was kind enough to take a note up to the spunky lady on the 20th floor whose smile and laughter masked a deep pain and fear of getting old. In another building the super offered me a slice of pizza on the way out. I smiled and declined saying others needed/wanted it more than me.

Lights come on. Phone call from the boss out in Queens. " Get your rest cause you're gonna need it."

Can't go back to the office cause thirty feet of water flooded the basement and over twelve in the lobby. Have to relocate a portion of 6000 employees with no space to put them. Chaos on the first day as more and more people show up with heartbreaking and humbling stories.

My house was surrounded by seven feet of water. Is it hot in here? Maybe I feel that way cause my house still doesn't have power.

I have my parents and my brother staying with me. They both lost their houses, one to the storm surge the other caught on fire. I'm just happy and grateful to be here.

When we went to my mother's apartment, it was surreal. Everything looked normal except it was soaked and thrown in disarray. Except for the little angel on top of the bookcase. Lady stood her ground.

Bouncing between New Jersey and Brooklyn to help create some sense of normalcy. First time out there my boss gave me a ride.

" I hope this isn't an indication on how the day is going to be." He says. "On the highway I got a flat tire, then my son says he can't find his cellphone ( it was found in the house, after he suspended service) and now I need to get gas. I passed/called over twenty stations and none have any. I really don't wanna go all the way to White Plains."

" What about New Rochelle?" I ask as I pull out the phone that knows how to do more things than I can think of. Boss doesn't hear me, lost in his frustration. I call one gas station listed on Main Street. " Hi. Do you have gas?"

" YES! YES! WE HAVE GAS! COME UP! NO LINES!". I hadn't even hung up and he was racing towards the expressway.

" How is that possible?! I call twenty and you call one and find one!" A grin spreading across his face.

" It's gonna be a good day."

The light comes one step at a time.

An Unusual Measurement of Personality

 

It was the tallest ladder I had ever seen. I marveled it more out of curiosity than a desire to scale it.  During a weekend preparing for a wedding reception it was nice to look at in between cutting flowers and setting forks.

 

The uncle of the friend who was having the reception, who owned the ladder and the barn it sat in watched me counting all those rings.

 

" Wanna go up?"

 

" Nah, that's alright..it's impressive though"

 

Before I knew it the ladder was spread out in the middle of the floor in the midst of pumpkins, flowers and fake fall leaves. A huge grin was spreading across Uncle John's face.

 

" Go on! Climb up!"

 

I laughed, placed the flowers in my hand on the table and to the cheers of my friend who finally looked up from arranging party favors, slowly climbed the steps one by one.

 

 

I got within five of the top rungs before I loudly shouted that I didn't want to go any further. The view from where I was satisfied me. I didn't need to touch the light bulb in the ceiling.

 

During the dinner, Uncle John explained that he was able to measure his children's personalities based on that ladder.

" My eldest boy Justin, no more than four years old. Saw him eyeing that ladder. I pulled it out. He climbed up one step, looked around and went back down. He did that for each step, all the way to the top."

 

" My second boy, Tim shot straight to the top, looked around and screamed. Had to climb up there and bring him back."

 

" One was methodically, the other brash"

 

Contemplating this I glanced at the ladder in the corner and summarized myself. " Guess you could say I know when I've reached my limit and satisfied with what I got."

 

Uncle John smiled and nodded in agreement.

No longer my footsteps

Just arrived on the seven ten,
Thought I’d see the old gang again,

but you know how they come and go,
I’m just a stranger in town.

Ev’rywhere ev’ryone I see
Seems to wonder who I can be


And I swear no one seems to care
About a stranger in town.

I saw a cottage on a lonely old street,
The weeds have grown ‘round the gate.

Somehow I felt that you would wait here,
My sweet, but it looks like I’m too late.
Guess I’ll leave on the twelve o’ two,
Can’t believe that there’s no more you.
Is there nothing for me,
Will I always be
A stranger in my own home town?

Lyrics by Mel Torme