October 11 2006 Wednesday Tucson AZ
It is a beautiful morning. Early morning still. I don’t see any birds yet. Maybe they are sleeping late, they don’t want to leave their warm nest for this early morning chill. Lulu is asleep too, so is Bill. Yesterday Bill woke up early when I did for first time. He said “Lulu is the only one who is still sleeping.” She never arises before 8 AM.
It is Columbus Day which was a no-school holiday when I was kid. The idea of school begins off as great adventure, but somewhere along the line it changes, to just get it over. You are always waiting for time to elapse so you can have your freedom. When school finally ends you start a job. You’ve been in harness since kindergarten, have not known any other life.
And then maybe 10 years later or whatever suddenly you find yourself with no job. All your time is your own. The days belong to you. It is a big transition. I once heard a girl in a coffee shop, when it first happened to her, say to her friend “What am I supposed to do now? Go to a museum?”
I entered the dreamy life of my neighborhood. I would go to the Italian bread store in the morning, where the beautiful Italian girl with the big hair presided over it, and she would tell me about Priscilla Presley. And once I was in the Jewish bakery instead. And I turned around and she was waiting on line. And she turned to all the customers there and said “hahaha I caught you.”
I would market in all the little stores and chit-chat with the owner and get to know him. The Italian sausage store, the Polish sausage store, the Italian bread store, the Jewish bakery, the fish store, and the dairy and cheese store. I began to chit-chat with my neighbors. I got to know the whole world who doesn’t go to work. I joined the meandering rhythms of my neighborhood. Talking to the postman as he stood in the hallway putting all the letters in the boxes. I got to know my neighborhood: the shopkeepers and the women who market. I dropped out of the professional class.
I began to realize that everyone who had stayed behind in my neighborhood, an immigrant neighborhood, were immigrants who had not bettered themselves. They all had family on Long Island and Brooklyn, and some of the owners of the stores lived there. But for the ones who were born in their tenement apartments and stayed there and lived there their whole life, the Lower East Side was home, they had never lived anywhere else. Either they had no ambition or they didn’t want to leave their mother, or both. Many had been born in the building and their mother lived in the apartment across the air shaft. The ones who never married, or for whom marriage didn’t work, still lived with their mothers. I began to see their childhood in the neighborhood. There was a big step down to the feather pillow store, and to my surprise I discovered my neighbor Vee (Vincenza) when she had been toddler, would try to make that big step.
My neighbor Carmine was the oldest one. I heard from my neighbor Sal (Salvador) Carmine used to play stickball on 7th street, but when the boys became interested in girls the stickball stopped. Sal was still younger and serious about his stickball, but Carmine and his friends stopped playing seriously. Sal said Carmine and his friends belonged to an older crowd, they were called “the old crowd,” and on Sunday mornings they all went to the saloon by the Precinct on 5th Street, they would call it "going to church.”
I was starting to discover where I was. Baby Vee had played on the big step on First Avenue down to the feather man’s store. Carmine had played stickball on 7th Street and spent Sundays in the bar by the Precinct with his friends. Dottie and Mike had been the first ones to rent an apartment in my building after the landlord, a doctor, renovated it. It was hard to find tenants then in the ’40s, and the landlord had offered them any apt. they wanted and offered to repaint the walls any color they wanted. Before landlord renovated and put in the parquet floors and French doors and in-door bathrooms, our building had had toilet-down-the-hall. “We were first building on First Avenue with in-door bathrooms” Dottie told me.
Vee was born in apartment 4A. When she and Bob married they moved to Apt 3A. After their wedding they went on the bus upstate for their honeymoon but Vee got nauseous on the bus so they turned around and came home. Vee showed me her autograph album for 8th Grade. She only got as far as 8A. On the pages the girls had written “If all the boys lived across the sea, what a good swimmer Vee would be.”
Dottie’s Polish priest had refused to marry her to Mike, so Dottie said “if you don’t marry me I will just live in sin with Mike,” so the priest did it.
Carmine referred to where he grew up as the 4th Ward. When Jimmy Durante came to visit Carmine, Carmine said “Jimmy Durante grew up in 4th Ward too.” When that famous movie star who was in “Laura” walked into the pizza shop on corner of 4th Street, where Carmine hung out all day-- this is when Carmine and I were already friends but I wasn’t there when it happened-- Carmine recognized his old friend from the 4th Ward and the famous movie star recognized Carmine. “Carmine, what are you doing here” he said. And Carmine said “let me treat you to anything you want.” Dana Andrews, that is the name of the famous move star.
When I asked Carmine “who is your favorite movie star?” he gave the question a lot of thought. And finally he said-- I forget his name now but it was familiar to me, I watched him recently in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” They rarely play the movies on my cable tv old-movie station which feature Carmine’s favorite movie star. (I just remembered, John Garfield.)
I was learning where I was. My relationship to time changed. I was living in a stop-time place. And I got caught on a thread of history. In some ways, as the world moved forward in time, I moved backwards in time. For me personally, the world had begun in 1949 in upper Manhattan, that was the world I opened my eyes to, the old A & P on Broadway.
But this world anteceded that. I realized Carmine’s slang was the slang of the '30s. He didn’t say “I’m broke” he said “I’m busted.” He would offer me a “slug” from the bottle of whiskey I bought him in the morning. When he got back from the “saloon” I made him fried egg sandwich and coffee. He called our French neighbor Catherine, "Frenchie."
It all came to a moment of finality, of apotheosis for me, about a year before I left my old neighborhood. I was on the other side of Houston Street, the real Lower East Side, it must have been around Pesach. I went to the matzo factory and bought a box of matzos there. And then for some reason I wandered into a wine store there. I saw all the wine bottles in their dark bins and knew this store had not changed one iota since the 1930s. It was April 1991 and I was in a store from the 1930s. I had reached back as far as it could go.
That was the Spring I was buying Carmine his underwear. He had sent me to the real Lower East Side to the store where he used to shop at for his sox and shorts. Maybe that is why I was wandering around there, buying the matzo at the matzo factory and walking into that old wine store, I had bought Carmine his sox and shorts and undershirts.
A lady with red hair, I forget her name now, such a nice lady, who lived with her brother on 4th Street, said “you are buying Carmine his underwear now, I used to do that for him.” That was another thing about my neighborhood, how many sisters and brothers lived together. They had grown up in that apartment, and when their parents went to Heaven, sister and brother continued to live there. That lovely red haired woman and her brother were the generation of my parents, but my friend John and his sister Theresa and their brother Rick, were my generation.
I think when I walked into that old wine store around the corner from Orchard Street and saw the world of the 1930s before my eyes, I knew then my excursion back into history had completed itself. 6 months later I moved into my new Tucson apartment. I had a lot of catching up to do, I was 60 years behind the times. I had lived in the modern world in the '50s and the '60s, but the modern world of the early '90s was very different, and I had spent the previous twenty years working my way back to the 1930s.
I spent my first 6 months in Tucson catching up with the modern world, and then opened up A Course In Miracles and the glorious future opened up before me. And I moved into the future and never looked back. I love this new modern world I have found in Tucson, but my feet are in it very shallowly. My mind is in the stars and the glorious future. O what a voyage I have been on!
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