Friday May 25 2007
I dreamt about Nina Wilner last night. In my dream I was so happy to see her. She looked beautiful. I was overjoyed to see her and be with her. There were other people there, and I introduced them all to Nina. I said she was my best friend. I couldn’t remember whether I was 7 or 8, I decided on 8, “she was my best friend when I was 8, she came to my 8 year old birthday party, we used to ice skate together,” I told everyone. “We had pompoms on our figure skates” I told someone. In the dream the photo of Nina in my scrapbook, at my 9 year old birthday party, Nina and my other 3 best friends all together, was clear in front of my eyes. Nina in the middle, so vivid. In fact I don’t remember who else was in the photo, for me it was always Nina. I guess the other girls were the girls in my building, who I played with all the time. Playing with Nina was special, she did not live where I lived.
Now that I am awake, and remembering my dream, but also remembering Nina and our friendship, everything is the same as it was in the dream. I still don’t quite remember whether I was 7 or 8 when we first became best friends, but I would still go for 8. I can still see that photo in my scrapbook in front of my eyes. Everything is the same, except for the pompoms on our ice skates. That is true, we both had those big red wool pompoms on our ice skates that we made ourselves. However I remembered that in my dream, I wouldn’t have remembered it now if it had not been in my dream.
I had bought the photo album at Saks 5th Avenue when I was in my mid-twenties. Never in my whole entire life would I have bought an expensive fancy leather photo album at Saks 5th Avenue, if I had not been stoned on pot. I have no idea now why I was walking along 5th Avenue stoned on pot. It was not something I typically did. Either I stayed in the house when I was stoned, and thought about astrology, and made diagrams to help me, or I walked along the streets of my own neighborhood, the East Village. I did not take the subway up to 57th Street and stroll along 5th Avenue.
However I was strolling along 5th Avenue stoned on pot, and I did walk into Saks Fifth Avenue stoned, a very expensive store I had never been in. And on one of the first counters where you enter, was this black leather very expensive photo album, and I liked it and I bought it. It was completely out of the usual for me, because all I spent money on was clothes. If I had decided I wanted a photo album I would have gone to Woolworth’s and bought a cheapie one. But I had never wanted a photo album, all my photos were stuffed at the bottom of the bottom drawer of my dresser.
Of course having made this extravagant purchase, I came home, got out all my photos, and placed them in the album. It was huge leather-padded luxurious and fancy. Oddly enough, looking back on it, I think it was one of the best purchases I ever made. I never would have had the incentive to actually put all my photos in an album, if I had just bought a cheapie one from Woolworth’s, but of course with Saks Fifth Avenue photo album, you put all your pictures in right away. You use it. And it displayed them all beautifully and kept them safe. And for a long time I had the joy, whenever I wanted to look at the photos, of getting out the beautiful album, and looking at all the photos, put in with care, and nicely set up there.
And that is where I always saw the photo of Nina at my 8th birthday party. My dad took the photo. He took all the photos in my album. He was an amateur photographer and loved to photograph. He was also a brilliant photographer, all the photos were filled with life. He always had his camera with him, so it was more than pics at my birthday party. After I played punchball or stickball with my friends Myrna, Jane, and Carol, in the tiny little park behind my building, I guess on weekends my mom would send down sandwiches for all of us. We'd sit on the little bench and eat them. How my father happened to be there with his camera one time I don’t know, maybe he brought down the sandwiches.
The photo wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, 4 little girls bent over their sandwiches, in their punchball playing clothes. My friend Diane sitting next to us in the dress she always wore, I have no idea why her mom dressed her in dresses, it meant she never played any rough and tumble games with us, maybe she was “steady ender” if we played jump rope. Also at the end was my brother, because he hung around with us when he wasn’t playing with his own friends. It is a good snapshot because it captures our whole life of play back then, altho all we are doing is eating our sandwiches. But for me, I looked at the photo and see our whole life of play in that tiny little playground, where we played Chinese Handball for hours on end, Asses Up at the end of Chinese Handball, punch ball, stick ball, and Skelsy, also Catcher Flies Up.
The end of the photo album was as unexpected as its beginning. I bought it on impulse stoned on 5th Avenue, it was one of the very few things I took with me to Tucson. 6 months after we moved to Tucson I found “A Course In Miracles” in the public library here and began reading it. After renewing it 4 times I bought it, it became my whole life. It took me a whole year to read the 1000 page Text and then another year to do the 365 Lessons in the Workbook, one lesson a day was the rule. After I finished the Text and before I started the Workbook, I was completely convinced of what he was teaching, that the past doesn’t exist, that the past never happened. I really wanted to believe that because there had been troubles in the years before we left NYC for Tucson, and the idea that the troubles could be gotten rid of, and replaced with a clean slate, was all I wanted with all my heart.
I decided to take my precious photo album with all my precious photos and throw it in the garbage can outside, to be taken to the dump. It took a lot for me to do that because I loved the album. I loved the photos my father had taken. There were photos in there before memory really began for me, of me and my best friend Francis on the swings in Old Forge beach. And beautiful photos of my father and mother, so young and beautiful, when they visited Miami before I was born. Photos of me and my first best friend Betsy in our snowsuits, she had that pink pretty woolen coat with leggings, in Central Park and Riverside Drive, and even one of me kissing her. And one of my father giving me my bottle, you don’t see me, just my father, dressed so nicely leaning over the beautiful high English carriage he had bought my mom when I was born, so it would be easy on her back. There is Leon on Riverside Drive leaning over the beautiful carriage, and maybe you see the bottle. I am not sure if you see baby Annie, my mother took the photo and she does not have my father’s flair for composition.
But I was adamant. Believing what he said in “A Course In Miracles” was my salvation, my way out. I wanted more than anything else in the world for the past to not have happened, and to have all my recent troubles disappear. I wanted fresh new sparkling clean slate, a present with no past. I couldn’t think of any way to put my money where my mouth was, but to consign my beautiful photo album to the garbage dump. And I did it. I felt like acting on it I would make it happen.
I met Nina because both our moms sent us to the same Shula in Forest Park. I don’t know why my mom sent me to that Shula. The reason she gave me, “I want you to know that there are other parents who think the way me and daddy do,” may be the real reason, or may be not. I guess I did ask my mom the reason for everything she did. Altho that surprises me now. I have no memory of ever asking her “why?” about anything, except for the time when she refused to let me go back to Catholic Church summer school when I was 4 years old and I really really really wanted to go back. “Why can’t I go!” I kept saying, “why can’t I go!” “Because we're Jewish, that’s a different religion,” she kept saying. “So what!” I said, “so what!” I said. “We're Jewish it’s a different religion” she kept saying. I didn’t understand her answer but she wouldn’t back down, I was not allowed back. I have no memory of ever asking her “why?” about anything else, unless it was something I wanted with all my heart, she wouldn’t let me have it, “why can’t I have it?”
Maybe I asked “why do I have to go to shula on Sunday mornings?” (Shula is Jewish Sunday school, I went to school all week, I liked having Saturday and Sunday just for play.) And she said “because I want you to see that daddy and I are not the only people who think the way we do.” My parents were socialists, and she was right, no one in my class and no one in my building, their parents were not like my parents, they did not spend the weekends giving out leaflets, or standing on the corner collecting signatures to petitions. And I knew my parents’ ideas were different from the ideas of other parents, because I was warned repeatedly not to say a word to anyone (it was the McCarthy era).
But I had zero desire to give up playing on Sunday mornings to go to Jewish school in order to find out other kids had parents like mine. I accepted my parents were different. It seemed normal to me my parents were different. And in fact it wasn’t their ideas that bothered me (the difference in their ideas). What embarrassed me is they went bicycle riding with their tennis racquets to Kissena Park on the High Holy Days, when everyone else’s parents stood on the corner in their fanciest clothes and women wore their mink stoles. I guess I thought if my parents were not going to observe the High Holy Days, and I didn’t think there was any reason why they should, they should not embarrass me by letting everyone (I guess by this I meant my friends) see them in their Bermuda shorts either. They should stand on the street corner too, in a mink stole which she did not possess, and join the discussion about how not one drop of food went down their mouth all day. Which wasn’t true of course. My mother had served us all the same breakfast she always served when it wasn’t a school day, pork sausages and scrambled eggs, orange juice and toast and cream cheese. I had no problem that our family ate this when you’re not supposed to touch food or water, but it should be a secret, and my mother and father should put on their fanciest clothes and stand on the corner with everyone else and say how they did not eat a thing. And if they weren’t going to do that, they should hide out, not parade on their bicycle with their tennis racquet as they took off for Kissena Park.
Maybe my mother sent me to shula because she had been sent to shula as a kid in Rochester. Her father was a socialist. I don’t know if her big brother and big sister were sent to shula, but little Marion was. Her grandfather (not a socialist) had a Hebrew School (to prepare boys for their Bar Mitzvah) and Gus and Annie were sent to that. But baby Marion was too little for Grandpa’s Hebrew School, so maybe when she got older, her dad sent her to Shula instead.
The Shula I was sent to was in the area of Forest Park, so we drove thru the endless most beautiful park in the world. That drive was incredible. It went on forever. In Autumn the leaves were all changing, I never experienced so much beauty, I loved that drive. I guess during the week it was a private school in Queens, and they rented it out on Sundays for the shula.
We sat in one of their classrooms, maybe it was a kindergarten classroom, we sat on such little chairs, and the toys were all around in cubbies colorfully painted. And the woman in charge of the Shula hung out in the principal’s office, Miriam. However her son always acted up in Shula, so she had to come into our room and tell her son to stop acting up, but he refused to stop acting up. Irving would sit at the head of the table, they pushed all the little tables together, so we sat around it, with Irving at the head and he taught us Jewish history. Then he got up and Martin sat down and we were taught how to read and write Yiddish.
Jewish history was interesting. It turns out that everyone was always trying to kill all the Jews. So all the stories were how about first-- they were all strange names, interchangeable in my mind-- first the Assyrians tried to kill all the Jews, but the Jews saved themselves, then the Babylonians tried to kill all the Jews, but they saved themselves. The names were all like that. The only story which was interesting, even tho the theme was identical to the rest, was the Purim story, because that featured a beautiful young woman, which is the only thing which interested me. Her name was Esther, which of course resonated for me because of my aunt Esther, and there was a beauty contest and the king chose her to be queen and she was Jewish, so of course when they tried to kill the Jews again, beautiful Queen Esther saved the Jews. Remarkably it made no impression on me that everyone was always trying to kill the Jews, that that is what Jewish history is, I could care less, I only cared about how beautiful Queen Esther was.
Then Martin came in and we got out our notebooks and first we learned how to say the alphabet in Yiddish, and we learned how to say “ich bin a maidel, du bist a yingel” (I am a girl, you are a boy). And we learned the Yiddish word for notebook, and for pen, and for read. And we learned how to write in Yiddish “I write with my pen, I write in my notebook, I read my book.” And that is all we learned. We didn’t spend much time learning during the reading and writing Yiddish class because of Miriam’s son acting up. That was very dramatic and took up a lot of time. And culminated with Martin going to the principal’s office and bringing in Miriam. Who would yell at her son to stop acting up, and he wasn’t afraid of his mother, and he acted up more while she was yelling at him. However as a result of all this my mother found out Miriam’s husband was an optometrist, so when I could not read the bottom two lines of the eye chart in 6th grade “line up to read the eye-chart,” she took me to Miriam’s husband to get glasses for reading the board and for going to the movies.
However I think it was at shula that I met Nina Wilner, that has always been my impression of where I met Nina. Altho it seems to me, my mother must have mentioned to Jane Pollock’s mother, Celia-- no! I bet I told Jane, my best friend who lived in the apartment above us, that I was being sent to Jewish Sunday school to learn Jewish history and how to read and write Yiddish, and Jane told her mother “Annie is going to Jewish School to learn Yiddish” and Celia must have asked Marion “where is the Jewish school? how much does it cost? I want Jane to learn Jewish history and how to write and read and speak Yiddish too.” And my mother was boxed in. She didn’t want to tell Celia it is socialist shula for the children of communists. So since the price was cheap enough, Celia decided Jane would go too, and my mother drove both me and Jane and picked me and Jane up when it was over. And fortunately Celia never found out it was socialist shula for children of communists. They didn’t teach any socialism or communism, it was strictly Jewish history, and how to read and write and speak Yiddish. So Jane and I had sat together and had a great time when Miriam’s son acted up, and Martin could not control him, and then Miriam was brought in and she couldn’t control him either, that was really the high point of the morning. Altho I always loved learning and loved to learn what I did there, it was just that it did not compare to playing, which is more fun. Yes I do think Nina showed up, so then it was Nina, me, and Jane. But the reason I became best friends with Nina is because my father was best friends with Nina's mother from “the party.”
This is why on the weekends, when we didn’t drive over to visit our cousins, we would drive over to Nina’s house instead, so Marion and Leon could visit Nina’s mother and father, and I went to Nina’s room and played with Nina. Or we went outside to play jump rope with Nina’s friends.
To explain how much I loved Nina, you’d have to include how much I loved her house, her street, her neighborhood. I lived in an apartment in a housing project, a huge housing project, it stretched for miles in all directions. And right next to it was another housing project, huge, which stretched for miles. And all of this was built on a swamp in Flushing. I don’t think there were any trees at all, just these new housing projects and new shopping centers. There was nothing here for me, for my little girl’s passion for beauty, and for mystery too. Altho I had a great childhood there it was a flat dull world to look at.
But where Nina lived was heaven for me. We rode for a long time till we came to some old part of Queens, it was all old houses, with slender, tree-shaded streets, curving roads, little roads, so many trees, all dark and shady and wonderful; and houses, houses are so much more interesting than identical apartments. I loved Nina’s neighborhood, I loved Nina’s house, and what I loved most of all was going with Nina outside to the little little street with trees all around us, and playing jump-rope with her friends. It is where I learned how to jump in backwards. We had a ball till night fell and I couldn’t see the rope. And on Nina’s 11th birthday party, Nina had a girls and boys party, and I had the ecstasy of playing Spin-the-Bottle and Post Office which I loved. It’s possible the party even took place in the evening. Nina, for me, was a girl made out of treats.
All treats happened when I was with Nina, and especially at Nina’s house, it was a world of treats which I didn’t have in Electchester. Of course we had great jump rope in Electchester too. We played it in one of the parking lots behind the building we lived in, and because of the projects, we had a lot more kids. There was a very long line when we played “Contest”, which is the most fun game in the world, and I was always the leader for it. That was great jump-rope! But there was nothing sweeter than jump-rope with Nina and her friends, in all that prettiness and sweetness of her neighborhood, it just made it such a treat.
I am sure mainly I went ice skating with Jane. First we would ice skake to our hearts content, we had our own ice skates. And then buy pizza and soft ice cream at the concession. Then when we finished ice skating, we would rent roller skates and play on the roller rink. But sometimes I went ice skating with Nina, she liked to ice skate too, and Nina was more special to me than Jane, because I didn’t see her as often, Jane I took for granted, Nina was special.
Maybe my mother was nice enough to drive all the way to Nina’s house to pick up Nina, or maybe Nina’s father brought her. I just remember waiting on the line to get in with Nina with our ice skates around our neck. In the dream all that came out about Nina was going ice skating with her, that we both put red pompoms on our ice skates together, and that she came to my 8th birthday party. Maybe I learned about pompoms from Nina and then Jane and I made them for our ice skates. It is logical I would learn them from Nina because all treats derived from Nina.
The game I played with Nina when we were in the house was “Sense and Nonsense” which was based on a tv show then. But we would skip all the other senses, touch smell sight etc and go right to “taste” which meant we went to Nina’s kitchen and ate all the delicious food which she always had in her kitchen.
And one Christmas her parents invited our family over for Christmas dinner. My parents rebelled against the Jewish religion too but they don’t go so far as to have Christmas dinner. It was the only Christmas dinner I ever had as a child. Sadie, Nina’s mother was named Sadie, my father liked her a lot. And Nina had a little sister too, I forget her name, but she hung around with us.
Then Nina’s parents bought a ranch style house in Long Island, near Jones Beach, we visited once or twice but it ended the friendship, because I never saw Nina after that. And maybe never even thought about her after that, till I began going to the Paradox in the East Village, a macrobiotic restaurant, and there was a guy there who sold belts on a rack, I remember that because when I began to date Bill he bought one of the belts. His name was Jonathan. Jonathan and I became friends, he was quite attractive, and he told me he was dating Nina Wilner. “Nina Wilner!” I said. “Nina Wilner” he said. “I know Nina Wilner” I said, “where does she live?” “On 11th Street.” “On 11th Street!” I said, “take me to her!”
And he took me over to an East Village tenement apartment on 11th Street and there was Nina all grown up now, a young woman with very long hair, she always had long hair, even in that photo of her at my birthday party she had her long hair. And I said “Jonathan is cute,” and she said she doesn’t really go for him, so I said “can I go out with him,” and she said “fine.” But I think I just had one date with Jonathan, if it was even a date. Because Bill became my boyfriend instead, and has been ever since.
I saw Nina about 10 times after that. She and I were both school teachers, her school was near Columbia. I remember telling her as we were walking along First Avenue together “I have decided to give up shoplifting” and Nina said she shoplifts all the time, and the problem is she shoplifts in the same stores where the kids in her class shoplift.
I guess Nina and I didn’t really stay friends, we drifted apart. There wasn’t anything to hold us together now, nothing was happening between us. It was kind of like the shell of a seed, the left-over shell; once the seed has sprouted and turned into a beautiful flower, the beautiful flower was our friendship back then, and finding each other now was just the left-over shell, we had outgrown our friendship. Altho there was a taken-for-granted warmth and intimacy, it was accepted between us we loved each other, but we didn’t click in any way, it seemed a little empty.
Then Bill moved in with me, we began our life together. I quit school teaching and began working part time in various places, first at the Museum for Lew Irizarri again, then at the Museum Shop downstairs, and then for a Wall Street newspaper. And maybe it was towards the late ‘70s that someone who knew Nina and me (but who would? maybe Abbie Cohen) said “Nina is living in California now and she is the girlfriend of the guy who started Esalon.” It was some famous name from the '60s and I was surprised Nina was with a guy who was our parents’ age, also that some famous guy in CA our parents’ age chose Nina for his girlfriend. I couldn’t understand it. I just thought Nina and I sure went different ways, here I am with Bill in my East Village apartment, and she is out in California with a much older man, whose name everyone knows because he started Esalon or something like that, something very California ....
And I guess you could say that was my last contact with Nina, till she showed up so beautiful and happy and glowing in my dream last night.
Love, Anne
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