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Hamilton Stone Review #33
Fall 2015
Nonfiction
Reamy Jansen, Nonfiction Editor

Reamy Jansen has been nonfiction editor since 2010. He writes poetry (Two Ways of Not Hearing, Finishing Line Press 2012) and nonfiction, including a memoir, Available Light, Recollections and Reflections of a Son, Hamilton Stone Editions, 2010. His memoir is also available as an ebook.

 

 

 

Kenny Yuan
Forty Feet: Peacemaking Through Dance

Forty feet pounded against the paint-splattered concrete garage floor as the reverberating bass faded into nothingness. Breathing heavily and dripping sweat, the fledgling dancers eyed themselves in the mirror and made their way past piles of half-empty water bottles out into the revitalizing summer breeze. Soon enough, the group had formed a circle under the shade of the grapefruit tree, away from the sweltering waves of the sun. Some were standing, some were lying down, some were drinking water, some were talking, and all were actively listening and laughing—all except for two. In a blatant attempt to get as far away from one another as possible, two normally hyperactive boys stood silently on opposite sides of the gathering, avoiding any form of eye-contact and refusing to acknowledge each other. What had begun as a light-hearted break soon deteriorated into an uncomfortable silence as others started to notice. Sensing the growing tension, I called everyone back inside the garage to resume practice.

Back in mid-May, when we began the preparation process for our annual homecoming men’s dance, I did not foresee the rocky terrain that we would have to navigate. At the time, all I knew about was the magnitude of our endeavor. Homecoming at our high school is a massive event. Instead of having a simple spirit week followed by floats at a football game, our high school’s homecoming has each class compete by decorating the entire campus for a day, producing a 20-minute skit, choreographing three original dances, and participating in a school rally—in total, this amounts to an exhaustive five-month preparation period from May to October. In our time at the high school, our class men’s dance had evolved into a particularly well-respected and anticipated act. As the choreographer and designated leader of the crew, I was focused on not only pushing our performance to the next level, but also engaging as many aspiring dancers as possible and creating a comfortable, fun environment. Unfortunately, the latter proved to be more difficult than I anticipated.

On the first day of practice, the crew began to trickle into my garage one at a time, some wearing nervous expressions and some joking around. There was a jovial atmosphere about the group, as most of the boys were close friends. One was absolutely bouncing off the walls with energy, running around the garage yelling and screaming and passing out hugs. This, I was not surprised about—Luke had a reputation for being a social and fun-loving character. With an amused smile, I heard a knock on the side door and walked over to let my late-arriving friend into the garage. Matt greeted me with a hearty smile and hug before running inside to greet the others. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary until Luke suddenly stopped running around and yelling. An uncharacteristic scowl crept across his face as he glanced at Matt. The two made brief eye contact before putting their heads down and turning the other way. I glanced around the room to see if anyone had noticed, but it had happened so rapidly that nobody seemed perturbed.

Putting it out of my mind, I called the group together, introduced the choreography, discussed my expectations, turned on the music, and began teaching the most difficult move—a quick step into a rapid, one-footed, 360-degree spin. As always, I began the lesson by showing a full-speed demonstration of the moves, up to the point that we would learn to for the day. While many dance teachers simply perform each stretch of choreography full-speed and expect the students to catch on, I had to break things down, since the group consisted mostly of beginners with no dance experience. Turning off the music, I talked everyone through the entire process of performing the spin move, slowly showing exactly where every limb should be positioned at each precise beat. I walked the group through the single move over and over again, stopping by each individual to fix minute details such as angles and footwork. Only when most people seemed to understand did I turn on the music and help them match the spin to the rhythm.

As I watched the group repeat the move, I noticed that Matt and Luke had taken their spots on opposite sides of the garage. Between run-throughs, each was talking to the nearest few people with his characteristic excitability. Once again, all seemed normal, and I was thoroughly confused. After an hour of teaching, I gave everyone a water break, and we all gathered outside for some fresh air. As a whole, the crew appeared to be having fun and enjoying the summer afternoon. I, however, was focused on trying to figure out what was going on between Matt and Luke. Neither made any eye contact with the other, even though we were all conversing in the same, single group. Their normally energetic selves were greatly subdued. The other boys began casting uncomfortable, inquisitive glances at the two feuding members. Matt and Luke both made an effort to interject jokes here and there, yet whenever one of them spoke, the other would look down at the ground or pull out his cellphone and pretend to be occupied. They would each laugh at jokes told by others in the group, yet they acted as if the other were invisible. As more people began to notice the unusual dynamic between Matt and Luke, the atmosphere of the group became more uncomfortable and awkward. Unsure what to do at that point, I jumped to my feet and called everyone back inside.

That night, I reflected on the events of the day and concluded that the personal issue between Luke and Matt was hampering the dynamic of our crew. I could not let it perpetuate for the long months ahead, but I knew nothing about the situation. Frustrated and stressed, I tried asking around to see if their dispute was an issue that I could help mediate. Within ten minutes of talking to a disseminator of gossip, I had learned all that I needed to know. Over a year before, Matt had been dating a girl at school. At the time, Matt and Luke had been inseparable friends. Both shared a similar social, hyperactive personality, and they were constantly by each other’s sides. Matt’s relationship came under pressure when there was suddenly a big misunderstanding involving Luke (the gossiper herself did not know what precisely). A day later, Matt’s relationship was nonexistent, and Matt and Luke were bitter enemies. For months, Matt fell into a deep depression, eating lunch alone every day—a dramatic departure from his former self—and often appeared with puffy eyes as if he had been crying the night before. He was notably absent from the usual groups of friends he hung out with, and there was an eerie silence around the areas he usually sat during lunch. Once, as I was walking away from my locker, I spotted Matt munching on a salad by himself in an obscure corner of the school behind the locker rooms. Jacket hood on and earphones in, he looked dejectedly at the ground. Walking over, I sat down next to him and talked to him a little. All seemed well, but when I invited him to walk with me to the quad, he simply shook his head and stared back at the ground. This change in demeanor persisted for many months, and though I worried about him, there seemed to be little that I could do. Meanwhile, Luke was heavily blamed for the situation and ostracized by many social circles, even though most people did not fully understand the details. He remained adamant in his innocence and refused to apologize for an issue that he claimed he had not caused. Walking by the quad one day, I spotted Luke sitting with a friend talking quietly over hamburgers, which was a tremendous departure from his tendency to be the center of attention in large circles of friends. Around him, I saw his former friends cast glances in his direction, as if gossiping about him from a distance. All the while, Luke wore a pained smile on his face, an expression that he continued to bear for several weeks.

In the year since the incident, both Matt and Luke had regained their social reputations and friends. Now, everything seemed normal again, except for their still-unpatched friendship. Their conflict was not simple one. For one, it was a deep and long scar on the heart that still had not stitched itself up. For the other, it was a battle with criticism and blame and an inability to prove his innocence. As much as I hated to admit it, I concluded that there was no way I could help make amends for their past feud. It was far too deep and far too personal. They had not interacted with each other in over a year. There was little I could do, and, for the time being, I decided to just focus my energy on teaching the choreography. I was particularly concerned with the opening of the dance, which involved a diagonal slide with extended arms leading into an abrupt finger snap and intricate footwork. When I first demonstrated the complex series of pivots and foot flicks and step-backs, I could see many of the guys completely blank out with confusion. They simply could not process and understand the flow of moves, so as usual, I broke it down step by step, beat by beat. Some of the guys picked it up quicker than others, so I broke the group up into several smaller focus groups, each led by someone who had mastered the progression. Soon enough, we were comfortable putting the moves to music, and we marched forth through the choreography.

For the next two weeks, little changed between Matt and Luke. They danced as far away from each other as possible, they avoided eye contact during the group breaks, and they acted as if the other were nonexistent. The only change was in the overall group dynamic. The crew began to just ignore the awkward silence between Matt and Luke, opting instead to have fun and enjoy these summer dance sessions with those who were willing to loosen up. The overall atmosphere of practices became light-hearted once again. We got better at the 360-degree one-footed spin and more confident performing the hip wiggles, and I could see everyone paying more attention to detail in the slide and footwork. More importantly, I was thrilled to see everyone—or almost everyone—have fun learning the dance and grow closer not just as peers, but as friends. Even Matt and Luke seemed to have fun with the group as a whole. Though they retained some animosity towards each other, they laughed and joked with the rest of the group and seemed to genuinely want to come to practices.

Over time, there appeared to be something therapeutic about dance. After weeks and weeks of coming to practices, putting in hard work to learn the challenging choreography, and laughing with the rest of the crew, Matt and Luke began to behave slightly differently. It started off as barely perceptible gestures that I thought I was imagining. First of all, they each stopped looking at their phones whenever the other spoke in the large group. They began to laugh at the same jokes and crack jokes of their own. Though they seemed reluctant to laugh at each other’s jokes, I noticed that they could not help but smile. Anytime the group came together for a cheer, both of them joined in. Above all, they both began to take part in teasing the same guy. In our crew, there was one particularly good-humored person, Dan, who everyone liked to joke around with. Being the jokers they were, Matt and Luke could not help but join in on the light-hearted teasing. Soon enough, they were cracking jokes together and laughing at each other’s antics, all by nature of this group unity. On one particular day, Dan had come to practice with his athletic shorts turned inside out. None of us had noticed initially, nor had Dan himself. Matt and Luke, of course, were the first to point out the little tag hanging out off the back of Dan’s shorts. After the two of them lobbed some good-natured ribbing at Dan, we were all laughing, even Dan himself. Sheepishly, Dan eventually went inside to flip his pants around, as we all tried to calm down and refocus. Though moments like these took minutes away from our practice time, the laughter and good-natured humor brought the eighteen of us closer together as we progressed through the receding summer.

In the final weeks before our performance, a sense of urgency and adrenaline seized our crew. Everyone started to focus harder than ever before, determined to perfect every move and hit every beat. At this point, most of the dancers had become familiar with the moves and were able to execute the details of each move properly. The challenge we now faced was what I called “cleaning,” the process of perfecting the details and, more importantly, looking coordinated and cohesive as a group. Though each person was individually able to perform the dance, we lacked unity, and each person had a unique style. Matt, for instance, had a habit of selling himself short and not fully extending his arms, while Luke and Dan had a tendency to overdo it and insert their own swagger into certain moves. As a team, we met four or five times a week to run through the dance again and again, working to make sure that all our arms were angled at the same slope during our opening slide and that we all started and finished our 360-degree spin on the same snare beats. On the big day, minutes before our cue, I gathered the group in a huddle for a rather emotional pep talk. Wiping off a nervous cold sweat from my palms, I managed to utter, “So we’ve been practicing for five months . . . And now we’re here.” I was having difficulty speaking, but fortunately, everyone in the group had something to say. Matt piped up, giving us a motivating speech about how it was “our time to shine” and “our moment to show our high school the dancers we’ve become.” Luke joined in, with a hint of seriousness to his humorous speech, explaining how “this was going to be our legacy” and that “we’ve worked too hard to let this moment go to waste.” Even Dan offered his wisdom, yelling that it was “time to go ham” as he hopped around and slapped us each on the back. It was in these final moments before the huge performance that I realized just how close we had become as a crew. Everyone was fully engaged and shaking with excitement, and any sign of conflict had been replaced with unity, comradery, and eager anticipation. Everyone wore the same expression of a nervous smile, and we jumped up and down as a group to get the blood—and courage—flowing through our veins. Suddenly, we heard our skit cue ring out from the microphone, “The millennial calling of the Gods begins in exactly 16 minutes!” With a few final jumps and hops, the eighteen of us ran out onto the stage, the crowd’s deafening roar and the beat of our pulses ringing in our ears.

Standing on the brick floor of the quad under the sweltering waves of the sun, I realized just how many people were watching us. We were in front of a sea of students. A thousand pairs of eyes surrounded us on all four sides, watching us from bleachers and stairs and the ground. I wiped off my clammy hands and turned my attention back to the dancers, waiting for them to get into position. As soon as they were ready, I turned around and gave a thumbs-up in the general direction of the music booth. I could hear the collective deep breath exhaled by the guys behind me, and I smiled. We had practiced for so long and these guys, who were clueless about dance, had become capable and elegant performers. We had a complex choreography that was unmatched as far as homecoming went. I smiled because I was confident. Confident that we would dance our hearts out, confident that the audience would be amazed, and confident that we were going to make ourselves proud. As the introductory beats rang out and we awaited our cue to start dancing, all thoughts in my mind were replaced with the rhythm of the song. Though the audience clapped along to the beat, I no longer realized their presence. All eighteen of us were solely focused on the music. At the sound of our cue, we slid into our opening move and the rhythm took over our bodies, carrying us through the progression of footwork, 360-degree spins, and hip wiggles that had become second nature to us. There was an indescribably uplifting feeling gained from the sound of the familiar music and the invigorating roar of the crowd. All the while, our minds were empty. For three minutes and twenty-eight seconds, we were one with each other.

When the final beat of our performance rang out and the reverberating bass faded into nothingness, the entire school—students and staff alike—burst into a standing ovation. Backstage, I gathered the crew as we let out a massive, celebratory cheer. It all passed in a blur, but I remember witnessing one particular interaction that brought a huge smile to my face. Matt was in the middle of talking to two friends when Luke approached them and, from what I could hear, asked if they wanted to go out to lunch together later. From their smiles, I can only assume that they all agreed, and the four of them walked off together to their next classes, Matt and Luke jumping around and cracking jokes side by side.

In some ways, it almost seemed too good to be true. A bitter, year-long animosity repaired by a single dance performance. A rifted friendship and a broken heart mended by a piece of choreography. Looking back, I can conclude that it was no accident. There is something therapeutic about dancing together on a team, something that makes peace-making a possibility. This “something” is composed of the same factors that built the tight friendships and sense of unity between our dancers over the course of the five months of practice.

On an individual level, dancing is an emotional and challenging process. None of the boys who signed up for our homecoming performance were dancers beforehand, so a huge part of the challenge of learning the choreography was the vulnerability of inexperience. All twenty boys were in full view of one another as they struggled to learn the moves, match moves to the rhythm, and retain the moves. They were hesitant to put themselves out there and fully commit to moves that they were uncertain about, especially one humorously extended hip wiggle. Over time, they each learned that the only way to succeed was to let go of fear and just try. This evoked a sense of genuineness and openness in the group, as each person saw the people around him trying as hard and as honestly as they possible could. Moreover, each person experienced the same ebb and flow of emotions during dance. Learning difficult choreography is a cycle that runs from frustration while trying to perfect a move to satisfaction when a segment is completed successfully. This common struggle developed a sense of respect for one another, and there was a shared mindset of withholding judgement and trying to improve. And during breaks, the group vibe came into play. Having successfully learned a segment of choreography before going on break, everyone felt a sense of satisfaction, which naturally created a light-hearted, feel-good atmosphere. This is furthered by the fact that everyone was talking in a single group. Everyone was forced to face everyone else, talk to everyone else, and laugh along with everyone else.

In the case of Matt and Luke, though they harbored negative feelings towards one another, they shared a common challenge, experienced similar emotions, and talked to the same group. They were not only forced to confront each other, but they each saw the other in his most vulnerable, honest state. Each was trying his very hardest to learn the choreography and each faced his fair share of struggles, be it retaining the correct spin technique or angling each limb properly during the slides or wiggling hips in sync with the rhythm of the music. Through this, each member of the team was able to empathize with one another and respect each other’s efforts (though neither Matt nor Luke would have admitted to it at first). Above all, there was a contagious group vibe of friendship and fun, which encouraged everyone to become closer with one another—it was only a matter of time before Matt and Luke, too, were affected.

Though it is certainly a departure from traditional forms of peace-making and diplomacy, dancing in a team is a moving and eye-opening experience. It puts people in a vulnerable yet open and supportive environment, where interactions are conducted through actions and dictated by mutual respect. And it does not take much to get started. There really is no entrance hurdle to learning dance. It should not be seen as an elite skill, but rather a medium of expression accessible to anyone with a mirror, YouTube, a few friends, and the ability to move. It is an unmatched experience that all people should try once in their life, lest they miss out on a chance for self-discovery. Dance has the power to inspire new passion, create a fun environment, establish a sense of unity, and repair broken friendships. All it takes is the willingness to try.

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Lowe
Alef, Bet, Gimel: Contemplations of a Wandering Jew  

 

Alef

 

Being Jewish is my legacy, but what does that mean? It isn’t a race or nationality; I didn’t grow up within its culture and I don’t claim the religion. Yet there’s something—a tether, a tinkling bell—that tugs and chimes in my head and heart to remind me that it’s who I am.

My mother, Lena, was raised in an orthodox Jewish household. When she married my gentile father, her mother—Clara, my fiercely observant bubbe—sat shiva and mourned her as dead. Clara relented, but I have little memory of her. Four days after my sixth birthday, my family left New York to follow my father’s family to California, golden land of golden people, where to my confused and curious eyes everyone was as blonde and blue-eyed and Catholic as my San Francisco cousins.

 

 

Bet

 

We’d left our Jewish ties behind, so it was a little weird that my brother had his bar mitzvah in San Francisco when he turned thirteen. David clears up the mystery for me. Lena and Clara had reunited after he was born—our grandmother wasn’t about to be deprived of her first grandson, named for her deceased husband. When we moved, Mom promised her mother that David would have a bar mitzvah. I have a lingering image of him that day—tall and gangly, his hair trimmed high over protruding ears, a boy-man in dark suit and tie, shawl and yarmulke. David recalls the rigorous instruction and preparation, the façade of the ceremony. It was a hollow ritual to all but bubbe Clara back in Queens, and it was the family’s last tangible observance of Jewishness.

My mother flew back to New York when Clara died, seven or eight years after we’d come to California. Every year thereafter, she lit memorial candles on Yom Kippur and the anniversary of her mother’s death. When Mom died in 1975, I kept that ritual alive by lighting token candles for her. I learned only recently that David had been performing the same act of remembrance.

 

 

Gimel

 

My mother never talked about her early life or family history, showed no photos of her parents or of herself as a child. Cousins on my father’s side were tracing that genealogy, but I knew nothing about my mother’s family until about ten years ago when I happened across the Zev Family Tree. No, I couldn’t have “happened across” it—I must have entered my mother’s birth name into a search engine. There we were, my mother, my brother and I, in that ancestral tree, its branches, limbs, twigs and sprigs jutting out into a vast and alien network.

The lineage of Marc and Jacqueline Schuster Zev comprises thirteen descendant lines, more than 700 families and 2000 people. On the Sudwertz branch is Clara, my grandmother, born in Galicia—a region straddling Poland and Russia—about 1882. She and “husband Steinberg” had a daughter, Rose, in 1909. Widowed young, Clara then married David Gart, and Lena was born in 1915. Lena married Harold Lowe in 1937; they begat David and Alice.

 

 

Dalet

 

The family history includes ship manifests and census data from the teens and twenties. Clara and David appear in the 1920 census, living in Queens with their two daughters. As I can’t trace their transit to or beginnings in this country, I imagine them from real and fictional scenarios. Did they arrive in New York Harbor together, arms clasped as they gazed with hope at the Statue of Liberty? Or did David come ahead, like Yankel in the movie “Hester Street,” to establish a livelihood and find them a home in the Lower East Side? Did he then, fattened up on cheap American food and full of American chutzpah like Yankel (I’m Jake now, he says, I’m a Yankee fella), send for Clara and meet her at Ellis Island, and was she, like Gitl, hollow-eyed and waifish, frightened of both her vast new home and this bold stranger, her Americanized husband, and did he, seeing her with now-critical eyes, wonder if this frowzy foreigner was really his once-beautiful, once-adored bride?

I search for clues in The World of Our Mothers, a collection of oral histories of Jewish immigrant women interviewed in the early l980s. The author’s grandmother, like mine, had emigrated from Galicia and died when the author was a child. She too was examining others’ experiences to quench her curiosity about her roots. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars tracks women who migrated, worked, married, and raised children in lower Manhattan. Their lives were bound by domestic duties at home and tedious jobs on assembly lines. This immigrant experience wasn’t exclusive to Jews, but the Italians weren’t forced out of their homes under religious persecution.

 

 

He

 

I don’t know what my mother’s family endured in their homeland or here, but I shudder at the 2,000 years of hatred that was their inheritance: expulsion, forced conversion, property confiscation, synagogue burning, pogroms, the Holocaust. It continues today. In a 2007 survey fifteen percent of Americans admitted to anti-Semitic views. With the recent rise of neo-Nazism, is it any wonder if Jews are paranoid?

I’ve been involved in a number of progressive political causes. The activists I’ve worked with aren’t anti-Jewish, but they abhor Zionism and vehemently oppose Israel’s aggressive assaults on Palestine. I share these views to a certain extent, but I see both sides. If I express doubt or the slightest bit of sympathy for Israel’s plight, I’m rebuked, reminded of its warmongering, bullying ways. Secular Jews have always gravitated to left-wing politics in this country; I wonder how many of them feel the same tug as I do, find themselves divided about Israel.

Dismay and uncertainty follow public revelations of celebrity anti-Semitism. Do we lose something of value, throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water, when we reject the accomplishments of T.S. Eliot, Richard Wagner and Charles Lindbergh, or does their intolerance tarnish, even negate their achievements? Virginia Woolf’s anti-Semitism is a painful subject for her followers, of which I am one. She mocked her husband as “a penniless Jew” before they married, repelled by his foreignness. Her diaries and letters contain cruel and crude affronts about Leonard and his family. Some Woolf scholars make excuses for her jibes—she was a product of her times and upbringing, they say—while others shrug and move on. She was a snob and a racist too, but I’m not prepared to deprive myself of To the Lighthouse.

 

 

Vav

 

I absorb the history and return to my own. As I saw it, we were Jewish in New York, comfortable in our identity even if we didn’t demonstrate it actively. We shrugged it off when we came to San Francisco where it wasn’t common or convenient, then buried all lingering remnants when we moved to a small Southern California beach town two years later. Our going to ground may have been a response to isolation—there was no sign of any Jewish presence in our community, and the nearest synagogue was in San Diego, 25 miles away. There were two churches in town, Catholic and Presbyterian, and I sometimes went with friends to Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church. I enjoyed the songs, stories, and games, dressing up, the feeling of harmony. My father didn’t claim any faith, and my mother had given hers up. Agnostic by default, our household was benignly irreligious. They viewed my church outings as harmless, even humorous, neither approving nor opposing them.

In fifth or sixth grade, someone asked me, “Do you believe in Jesus?” I recall giving some vague and non-committal answer; I know I didn’t say I was Jewish. In my teens I had two bluntly anti-Jewish boyfriends. There was Ronnie, Polish Catholic, a friend’s brother. I squirm as I recall my embarrassed, guilty silence at his expressions of loathing toward “dirty Jews.” I was more assertive years later when I was going out with Ed. I remember once when we were hiking and stopped to rest at a trail bench. He said something about always being able to recognize Jews. I asked how, and he cited stereotypical physical features. I scrunched up my hair, wrapped a fist around my nose, and turned to him with a contorted grimace—“Like this, you mean?”

He back-pedaled, stuttered at my confrontational admission: “…of course you’re not like most Jews.”

Thick-skinned as I may have thought I’d become, I could—can—still be stung. In “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock says, “If you prick us do we not bleed?” Is this what he meant?

 

 

Zayin

 

Custom and culture, family and ethnicity, ritual and religion—all are manifest in what we eat. A town without a synagogue isn’t likely to have a Jewish deli either, and while we didn’t miss the former, we yearned for the flavors of our forsaken heritage. Better than a picnic at the beach, we cherished our once or twice yearly trips downtown to the Bohemian Bakery. We would bring home bagels and lox, pickled herring and gefilte fish, pumpernickel and matzoh, hamentashen and halvah. My father would portion out the precious few ounces of silky salmon, a couple of thin slices for each cream cheese-“schmeared” bagel half.

I made bagels during a bread-baking flurry in the ‘70s. It was a labor-intensive undertaking—rolling the dough, shaping the rings, boiling and then baking them—resulting in dense, rubbery disks. I didn’t try again. Now all of our ethnic delights are popular and plentiful. They’re “in.” I indulge in latkes and blintzes, cabbage soup, pickled herring. It’s not nostalgia—or is it?

 

 

Het

 

My friend Helen, raised a nominal Protestant, was for a time more Jewish than her non-observant Jewish husband. They celebrated Hanukkah and hosted Seder spreads (in addition to Christmas and Easter), but these rituals were more about food and festivity than religious observance. Seeking something intangible—a sense of belonging, perhaps—she coaxed Jerry into attending classes for “mixed” couples. These gatherings sought to revive fallen-away Jews and educate their gentile partners about heritage, customs, and the faith. Helen embraced it all, almost to the point of conversion. I enjoyed the challah she made on Fridays for the Sabbath until her enthusiasm dimmed.  

When Don and I married, I could have found an agnostic justice-of-the-peace to officiate at our home wedding, but an urge emerged—where did it come from?—to be married by a rabbi. I knew someone through my work, but upon learning that Don was a gentile, he refused. A friend’s husband, a retired Protestant minister, performed a generic and inoffensive shtick. Don rues the fact that he’s “just a middle-class white kid from the suburbs.” He likes to say he rectified his white-bread blandness by marrying an exotic New York Jew. No matter how removed, to him I qualify as both.

 

 

Tet

 

Woody Allen, born Allan Konigsberg, was raised by parents who were products of the Lower East Side immigrant experience. Woody cast himself in his movies as the nebbish, the hapless Manhattan Jew who sees anti-Semitic slurs behind every billboard. In "Annie Hall," Alvy Singer is suspicious of everything to do with California. He tells a friend about a meeting with some television people there: "… so I said, 'Did you eat yet or what?' And Tom Christie said, 'No, JEW?' Not 'Did you?' … JEW eat? JEW? You get it?"

What’s a nebbish? A misfit, a loser, like a schlemiel (though there are discrete differences between the two). I keep The Joys of Yiddish next to my desk. You’d be amazed at how many Yiddish words and phrases have been incorporated into colloquial English. I’ll hear an intonation, a certain formation of consonants, something that sounds like my mother might have said it. I swish it around in my mouth like wine at a tasting party. I look up the word or phrase, and inevitably there’s an incisive thrust, an expressiveness in the Yiddish that’s absent in its English counterpart. Take the preacher’s shtick at our wedding—with one word you get my meaning—he performed a standardized ceremony, maybe a bit rote and contrived. Which has more oomph, chutzpah or “bravado”? I love that you can use obscenities, say vile things without raising an eyebrow. I can call someone a schmuck that I might not feel comfortable referring to as “dickhead” or worse in polite society, and yet they’re the same. I have a right to this colorful language, but sometimes it feels like an affectation—see how ethnic I am….

 

 

Yod

 

In the course of probing and pondering my origins I’ve become infused with respect and affection, even a little awe, for the history that runs in my blood. Its meaning is woven through my life. You may have figured out that these foreign syllables heading each section are the first ten letters of the Hebrew alphabet: A and B, alef and bet—Alefbet, the alphabet. They also represent the digits one through ten. I stake my claim with pride. The words and symbols are the tendrils of the vine that I cling to, the one that snakes up the trunk of the Lev Family Tree. 

 

 

 

 

 

Helen Park
The Pit

I was coloring with crayons in the living room when my grandmother picked up the phone in the kitchen, heard the news and broke in two. She bent over with youthful speed and drama and collapsed onto the kitchen tiles on all fours like an animal. She began to howl without tears, a dry wailing that undulated in sound as her head bobbed up and down, a squall landing right there in the center of the house. In terror my coloring hand froze over the paper. I then realized she was uttering something over and over again—it was just coming out thick and curdled: “She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead...” my grandmother moaned over and over again.

My brother was two and I was six when our newborn sister died. Her heart stopped three days after my mom gave birth to her. She had a name, a photo, a place in our family. I remember visiting my mom at the hospital and stroking the rigid fixtures of the gray railing along the sides of the bed. I only recall bits of the scene: a plastic medical band that ensnared my mom’s wrist, her thick, curly black hair tumbling across the blue pillow, my brother’s chubby limbs spilling over my dad’s arms as he sat in the chair next to her. I remember feeling something very momentous and dark inhabiting that room, something that I could not articulate.

At my baby sister’s funeral, she was buried near my paternal grandfather. My dad shed some tears, but I can’t recall if my mother was present. I don’t know how one gathers that type of strength, of keep-it-together-ness, to attend such a funeral, but my mom most likely did not have it. If she didn’t, I’m glad.

On a bookshelf in my parents’ house reside all three of us in framed baby portraits. We are lying on the same baby bedding, with soft pastel-colored elephants patterning the surface. We all have the same mass of ink black hair, red crying faces and balled up fists. Our bodies, in such tense positions, seemed to disclose a ferocious need to live.

My mom had me at twenty-six. While I write this, I realize that next month I will be turning thirty. I am not married and I don’t have any children, but I know that these proceedings are as inevitable as heartburn, cataracts and bad knees.

If my sister were alive today, I imagine a woman chasing a few kids around, someone who practices law and goes to church. A kind of daughter who would make my parents proud. A kind of daughter who always wanted to be a mother. This image of my sister, of course, is purely selfish, satiating my cathartic need to try and dispel some of the burden I feel yoking me to the same well-trodden path. The indifference (or resistance) of many women in my generation towards marriage and childbearing is not an uncommon attitude. However, it is still the case that my mom expects me to marry and have children, because for her it was, and always will be, the most fulfilling thing in life. I don’t question the statement because I respect her intelligence and the road she chose to travel. It’s just that even with her assurance I have yet to find the faith that the same spirit of fulfillment will arrive with the birth of my own.

Most of my second-generation friends are unmarried. It breaks our parents’ hearts that we are still unmoored, our rented residences barren of children. They are baffled by our Bedouin nature, our determination to work and eat under a transient roof. The hesitancies, indifference and fears that defer us from action did not plague our parents; they married and had kids because that’s just what adults did. Our Peter Pan generation is as repugnant and incomprehensible to our parents as our parents’ willing dive into procreation and settlement is to us. We won’t, and never will, meet toe to toe on self-perceptions of capability or accomplishment.

Regardless of the fear of my shortcomings, my subconscious knew that my path was already paved. As my denial and resistance grew, so did my guilt for having those feelings. My first severe panic attack occurred while I was waiting alone on the platform of the Brookland-CUA metro station on the D.C. red line. I was finished with that evening’s class at Catholic University and my body was weary from working two jobs before night school. I remember staring at the round floor lights that blinked to warn of arriving trains. They reminded me of the recurring dream I recently had about giant squid eyes attempting to communicate from below churning waters. As the lights began to blink, my breath suddenly fell away from me, as if my lungs had manifested into other passengers running to catch other trains, leaving my chest unhinged and empty. As my vision muddied, I bent down on my right knee and pressed my chin hard against my kneecap; I grit my teeth and prayed to the man above that I would not pass out here at the subway stop, dear God please, not here outside my home in front of so many strangers. If only my sister were here, if only she were alive, I thought.

The panic attacks subsided with age. Less and less did I wrestle with the fact that the option to have a family or not had winked out at the moment of my conception, and made further moot by my sister’s death. What’s more, as my mother likes to emphasize, I cheated death three times as a child. “Three times!” she exclaims, with her brow furrowing a bit deeper as she re-experiences those moments. With so much effort put forth by death, the least I can do is make the effort to create life.

The third time I “escaped death” is the only one I remember, vaguely. We were on vacation in Pennsylvania and while my brother and parents were swimming in the main pool, I wandered over to the Jacuzzi marked “Adults Only.” The nozzles shot out violent streams of water into the center of the large tub and steam cloaked the surface. I remember peering over the edge and studying the dark hole at its center, a roaring maw tumbling down into unknown depths. The contrast between the peaceful steam and the destructive, roiling water beckoned me in. Before I could get my bottom in contact with the bench inside the tub, the water from the nozzles had already ushered me down into the heated pit. I remained unafraid. I remember being soothed by the seashell pink color of the tub tiles that encircled me and the clusters of air bubbles that danced and tickled my feet and hands. I remember looking up from inside the water and seeing a ring of faces through the surface: colorful blobs that changed shape with the current. My mom says that she yanked me out of the hole with one arm, as though pulling the plug from the bottom of a bathtub. A bystander who happened to be a nurse was able to assess me.

And now, a foiler of death, I wait for the next leg of life. I know that I’ll keep the promise made. I can no more fail my parents in this respect than resurrect my sister. Maybe one day my heart will cease to bubble and boil, but either way I’ll just have to get on with it. I continue to grit my teeth against my kneecap sometimes, wanting to fish down my throat to try and hook some semblance of assurance inside my gut. But the guilt holds steadfast, as my grandmother takes my soft hands with her weather beaten ones and speaks to me only with her eyes. I will cradle a life one day, just as my mom did with me and then my brother; as she did with my sister at birth and at last breath, small fists still clenched. The image of my sister fuels me and further fortifies the guilt, which I am grateful for; I will be pushed forward and through the fear, without mercy.

 

 

 

 

 

Reamy Jansen
Shaken                      

He decided that it was bad for his right hand for fishing…

But his left hand had always been a traitor and would not

Do what he called on it to do and he did not trust it.

                                  Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

 

 A few years ago, my two sons, Paul and Gabe, and I, would compare an ever-so-slight tremble in our dominant hands, an exercise in a joint inheritance.

Their right hands would mirror my left-hand shake with a somewhat lesser version of my own, one that I now believe has since become a more pronounced and too familiar an intimate part of me:  it’s a presence, one that came to my notice while playing the clarinet in high school. When my fingers would hover weightlessly above the middle octaves, making me feel hip in first chair.

Now, this slight and periodic tremble will usually stop whenever I extend a finger or two, or better, closing my hand into fist, and the trembling remains banished, rusticated. Of course, the tremor eventually saunters back onto my digital playing field and takes its innings.

Now in my early 70’s, I’ve become more of a prisoner of this most uncanny of beats, and I too frequently become a center of awkward attention when I’m sporting my plastic carrier bag—one holding text books and student essays. It jounces enough to broadcast a noticeable rattle, part of a potentially embarrassing repertory.

I switch to my right hand to quell this not inconsiderable and seemingly unstoppable rustling, with my no-longer-little-shakes morphing into quite noticeable ones. Ones so pronounced that I do my best to mute them. In fact, since the shakes seem to possess a life of their own, they’re bent on embarrassing me at will.

In fact, these hand jives were an element in my retirement, as my writing on the blackboard began to look like heaps of distressed lawn furniture, And my comments—my “tortured cursive,” as one of my Honors students, christened it-- on essays became more and more indecipherable and obscure.

Right now, my current fear is that this digital incontinence will leap over to my ever-so- reliable and pacific right hand.

Then the game may be up.

Of course, there’s a certain pride in being a lefty, I was singled out as a “Southpaw” and certain unearthly powers were implied when I was quite young, thus my tennis tennis partner was always forced to his backhand on the first serve And baseball pitches could be equally disorienting. Of course the novelty wears off.

Nevertheless, left handedness possesses a certain folkloric cache—for example, one’s IQ was supposed to be higher (Or was it lower?)

However, even as members of Mensa, we’re likely to be maimed by household appliances, with multi-bladed blenders, and, worse, lawn mowers of whatever design can leave us fingerless or toeless.

And, yes, my “traitorous left foot” seems to have gone over, or come back from, the other side.   And to what degree will my left invade and occupy my right and how much influence will the occupier have throughout my body?  Will my body become Ukraine? Or Crimea? Will I speak with a fake Russian accent?

In fact, odd things have begun to take place in my left foot—for instance, my shoelaces unravel at will, while the right side remains tight as a noose.

Still, my “traitorous left foot,” as I like to call him, may find delight in tripping me up on the stairs on my daily route to my second and third-floor classes.

But who is fooling whom?  This focus on the foot is merely a diversion from what I’m afraid I can’t handle, since I continue to set off more and more of a racket with my various carrier bags that hold my papers and call attention to my jumping bean of a hand.  My worry, of course, is—are things going to get gradually worse?  Nevertheless, as head of the rebel force in Crimea, I avoid diagnoses.

Still.  While I’m not overly worried at my college, it doesn’t help that I have begun to recall my undergraduate studies in the Middle Ages, and I now remember how St. Vitus’ Dance would present itself as a leif motif throughout my considerable reading of the likes of the medieval historian, C.G. Coulton.  Like it or not, victims of the disease were the unwitting song-dance-men of their time.

But, wait, it gets worse, and St. Vitus turns out to be small beer when we get to Michel Foucault’s master work, Madness and Civilization, and we hit the big-time with Foucault’s account of the Narrenschifte, -Ships of Fools-riverboats that would ply the Rhine with a cargo of the possessed mentally ill, who were a cargo, as they would disembark at river cities small and large and become, with their high spirited drunken antics of fist fights, falling into the river, tumbling off walls,  an unwitting version of summer stock along side the theater of cruelty.

I don’t believe I’d fare well with my spastic gestures. Or would I in my later years be the top act of the wharf? Of course, one can see how I’ve stampeded a slight shake into something of historical proportions. But it’s my hand and not yours, and I’m in my rights to puff it into something grotesque. So there. This in order to keep my little fears at bay.  And little they are, as I am in perfect health—one of my doctors started intoning, “Longevity” as if she were Dr. Martin Luther King. And it’s true that my dad lived a strong and determined life into his nineties, although he had to stop writing in his 80s and gradually, literally, “passed away,” sleeping, sleeping some more, and then sleeping all the time at 93, which is my “guesstimate” of my sell-by date.

And so, Dear Reader, did anyone consider Parkinson’s when I began this essay, which over the past few years has felled-gradually and humiliating-- two of my colleagues?  My overly exercised self-consciousness creates more difficulties concealing my troubles in class, and at department meetings. And luckily, nobody seems to notice and none of my enemies—yes, one always has a few in one’s institution—have gone into Monty Python village idiot routines or scenes from Hee-Haw in the privacy of their own offices.

This morning I followed my usual morning coffee ritual, carefully scooping out three teaspoons of my own blend. To my dismay my right hand went totally amok, broadcasting fine, dark grains over the kitchen counter.

As things may become even worse, I know it’s about time for me to see a doctor.

That is if it will let me dial the number.

 

Author Reamy Jansen has only been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

 

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Jones
How to Write a Roman Post Card

18th February 2009

I was sorry to hear that my last postcard didn’t get through to you, but hopefully this one will.

 

Only now it’s too early in the morning to talk and many words are indecipherable. A backstreet you’ve never seen before and the night sky chipped silver is a hard distant finger of black ice. You can taste the last breath of someone else’s cigarette the way senses catch and snag as shadows curl up to walls smooth and jagged. When it comes to how to write a Roman postcard, it takes a lot of practice to avoid the simple errors that lie in the pitfalls of a regular correspondence. There are moments when you can only describe things in a simple childish way at best. Some postcards are silent and other ones too loud; collectors items, three for December, nothing more until late May and then one every other weekend until September. Each postcard is another bridge you burn, a shorthand form of honing the assertion. There’s no logical order to them, only moods and the odd idle moment. Less true to the myth of the authentic historical document, postcards are that private glance aside that hints at the real inner monologue. Shiny pictures of monuments that aren’t really pictures at all.

 

 

The Metro Stop at Furio Camillo

During Feriagosto, (the two weeks in August when most of the city closes for its own informal summer vacation) Furio Camillo shrinks into my apartment. It’s a comfortable breathing space, an antique chair and set of drawers, a 1940’s radio. The bookcase and bookshelves where I prop the photographs of  my family and friends in England. You keep the room cool in the day by closing the green shutters which growl as you raise and lower them like great cats looking for the shade. Against the far wall the dark wooden writing desk sits as sturdy as the first piece of furniture for Noah’s ark. There’s nothing here to come and look for; it’s a regular suburban neighborhood looking out towards the south of Rome and fairly economical as far as an affordable rent goes.

Directly below my apartment nine floors down is the Metro Stop itself wedged on the crossroads between Via Appia Nuova and my own street Viale Furio Camillo. During the worst of the summer heat I only tend to venture out towards early evening, and the station while open is often semi-abandoned by any signs of staff. You get the feeling it’s lost its purpose somehow like a flat-line on some distant monitor. A local outpost with no signs of life, this is the everyday point of contact with another city ten minutes away; the Rome you have to live with and unfortunately rely on for getting around.

The neighborhood’s one claim to fame would seem to be that among it’s more notable clientele the local pizzeria has a picture of Sean Connery shaking hands with the owner; a glimpse by proxy of someone you’d never expect to see in the flesh. As a public service the metro certainly has the mind of a Bond villain; the way at certain random stations unsuspecting travelers are practically decapitated between doors, while at Furio Camillo I’ve seen some of the most beautiful women in the world glide off and on. Or maybe it’s just that they’ve seen the picture of Connery too and think there’s something in it.

It’s an early morning or a late night working to its own particular curfew, while the escalators creak at times as though they’re being wound by hand. Down there in those badly run cavernous regions can feel as though you’ve been taken under the wing of some mysterious witness protection programme. I get back to my apartment and think how temporary Rome is, even in my own small corner as the three a.m. traffic hums past in the night’s perfect temperature. And none of it is mine.

 

14th March 2013

‘Whoever, being fond of pursuing the joys of fugitive forms, reaches out to the leafy branches to pick fruit, will instead reap sorrow.’ I like this very much. They are predicting Rome will have bad weather next week so it was good to make the most of the sun today.

 

 

Santa Stefano Rotondo (before a thunderstorm) San Clemente (in a thunderstorm)

Atmospherics aren’t to be exaggerated. When you have a thunderstorm in Rome, it’s not uncommon to find yourself in a place you’ve never been before. Thunderstorms are those doorways tucked away that you dive into for shelter. For a genuine appreciation of a thunderstorm before it breaks Santa Stefano Rotondo takes a lot of beating. When you can see the sky darken and feel the humidity glistening in the air and the city becomes still and semi-deserted; this doorway shows a gentle terror.

 

The frescos on the walls represent numerous scenes of martyrdom in a way that leaves nothing to the imagination. Saints are decapitated, boiled alive, buried alive, dismembered and thrown to wild animals. You realize for all of the modern day exposure to such scenes of torture and death in the news or at the cinema; you’re not as desensitized to it as you might think. Atmospherics aren’t to be exaggerated. The thunder still hasn’t arrived, but you can feel it closer in the air as you leave.

 

The rain arrives less than half a mile down the road. The Basilica of San Clemente is a good place to wait out the storm. It feels later in the year and in a strange way more civilized. The thunder is very loud outside and the church full of human voices, children laughing, parents softly scolding. There is great beauty here, but more removed, like the accent of a foreign tourist. Christ is here, but not in the way he was before the thunder in Santa Stefano.

 

Once the storm has passed you can go anywhere. Yet nothing immediately comes to mind.

 

August 6th 2008

There are times it feels like overload. I’ve yet to see the sea. Sunlight a soft drug that you don’t wake up from. Other times a sudden downpour in Rome is more like an earthquake, where streets begin to bubble up in front of you.

 

 

Keats’ Grave

The grave itself imitates his own self-conscious legend. That white faced, slim wafer of a headstone and the broken lyre immersed in background greenery. It’s a lonely place open to the public and the Pyramid which Keats heard so much about yet never saw himself is a hollow tomb by comparison. The Protestant Cemetery adjacent to Via Mamorata occupies  a brief moment and then it’s gone again. You go, you have a look and then you leave.

It was my second week in Rome and England had not yet distanced itself from a warmer February sun. I already had in mind the mental image of Oscar Wilde sobbingly prostrate on the ground declaring it the most sacred spot in Rome and for a moment the thought occurred. What if it isn’t Keats’ grave at all? Just another expatriate struggling with the language and what it meant to be here of all places looking for a miracle cure. Even then standing less than three feet away from the earthly remains of a man some critics consider to be only second to Shakespeare in poetic achievement; I felt Keats himself would have questioned it. A stranger in a not so silent land.

I think there is for the English some unconscious perception of Rome and Italy that has never outgrown the image of the Romantic living in exile whether it be Byron brooding in Venice or Shelley beating his own revolutionary drum. The notion one must go far away to find a place to die, exerts a certain hold over a peculiarly English imagination. Despite how little Keats must have seen of it, enough remains to go into his gravestone and the words Shelley himself wrote on hearing of his death in Adonais, “Go thou to Rome,…/From the world’s bitter wind/Seek solace in the shadow of the tomb./What Adonais is, why fear we to become.” A city from which there can be no return. Streets that were often empty at night and closed shutters everywhere. The constant feeling I was walking too quickly and the rhythm and pace of the city which was as much in the buildings themselves as the language and the traffic. Later there were people who told me how they were “over it” and ready to move on and I understood what they meant, just as I knew they were speaking of a quite different city to the one Keats never saw at all.

What Adonais is, why fear we to become. There are times when the relentless humidity of mid-September leaves me tired and at times bewildered at how it could ever have been considered a cure for anything. I hum along to “The Smiths” defiantly as I pay for my cappucinno and the barista rolls her eyes at the fact I’m still paying with a twenty euro note. “A dreaded sunny day. So let’s go where we’re happy and I meet you at the Cemetary Gates. Keats and Yeats are on your side.”

 

June 17th 2011

The real skill to surviving here comes with waiting and then more waiting.

 

 

Belvedere Romolo e Remus

Some things read better in the past tense. During summer and early autumn at night groups of young people gather and light small fires around which they drink and smoke and talk and sing. Behind them the Palatine Hill and the ruins of the Imperial Palace stand dark as though eavesdropping. Overlooking Circo Massimo, there’s a quality of ritual to the torchlights and candles. Hoots and whistles and applause unearthly as the thought of the ancient arena. Part of me would like to go down there and introduce myself and tell a story. Because these lights are real and not the product of my imagination. A secret magic trick, as the nights grow short, to say goodbye.

 

 

E.U.R  Laghetto

It’s a fairly well to do area one of whose chief landmarks is Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, or what some refer to as ‘Colosseo Quadrato’, the Square Colosseum. A slightly verbose neo-classical monument, essentially what you’re looking at is a giant marble waffle which shouldn’t distract you if you get the chance, from a quick walk round the lake in the early Spring. It’s a small green landscaped park lying in the shadow of the ENI corporate building where I used to teach business English to the company’s middle management. It had different colors early morning giving you the idle idea you were really thinking. Later I’d come back and still find it there in the middle of my working day like the parallel universe where I worked my own hours and spoke Italian fluently. It was a view of a different life in Italy, flipside and without complications of rent or the ever diminishing savings keeping me afloat. Through the prism of reinforced tinted glass the illusion of leisure was never more real staring down at the lake. Men and women sharing their lunch-hour together; young families enjoying the first of the fine weather.

    Hemingway called it ‘false Spring’ in Paris when he felt the happiness and the hunger, at the same time as he was risking his savings at the racing track. There’s a certain way he uses seasons to suggest the reality and the illusion of happiness in a perfect world full of courage and integrity and war wounds. In Rome, Spring suggests a similar kind of hunger in that there’s an implied contradiction to the thing that keeps you going; the edge or angst that tells you these words are more than mere ruminations on an indefinite existence. There are times I still think of E.U.R larghetto as a symbol of those hunger changes. The false hope that whatever starves you is enough to make you want to stay.

 

May 3rd 2010

Or maybe it’s hearing so many American accents on a daily basis. Americans everywhere.

 

 

My (favourite local) Chinese Italian Café – La Greace

This is another good place to start. La Greace is a small café run by a Chinese family, a handy ten yards from Metro Furio Camillo itself. I like the non-European quality it has, which is ironically its most continental feature.  If I need to change a twenty euro note there’s no problem and no questions asked. A polite trust is immediately established and I like the fact that they don’t ask my name or try to sell me anything except a simple cup of coffee.  There is a woman, the Matriarch and two young men in their early twenties and sometimes a couple of girls helping out.  Occasionally the mother will give me a cornetto or small pastry for free.

The poster art on the wall and the atmosphere of cut-out magazines is colorful with a distinct throwback to the late Eighties. In its own way the Eighties effect, (suggesting as it does for me the unconscious backdrop to a provincial northern English town), is a page stolen straight out of Hemingway’s Paris. The mirrored wall behind the bar with it’s neatly arranged bottles of Grappa and Cointreau and Hennesy is a more colorful 1920’s where Hemingway knows what his future will be at the the safe distance of forty years as a successful writer. It doesn’t belong there; this real place in my memory that I call my favourite Chinese Italian Café. The same songs on the radio and a clock with the face of Marilyn Monroe on the wall blowing out a full pair of red lips. The glamour isn’t hers, or Rome’s or any particular memory as such. The matriarch smiles and nods at me, “Ciao Capo, tutto bene? Hai lavoro oggi?”

 

November 24th 2013

It’s clear that Rome is maybe only half a dozen moments I’ll be able to call to mind if I live to be a hundred where I was sure, the way you expect to ‘know’ for sure as an adult when a done thing is right as opposed to wrong.

 

           

Santa Maria in Trastevere

It’s a church that has seasons like a tree. The predominant color is the gold of the ceiling and the mosaic cupola, where Christ and the Madonna sit amongst the apostles. Below the cupola you find scenes from the Life of the Virgin by Pietro Cavallini who as a contemporary of Giotto was one of the first artists to break with the Byzantine tradition in anticipating the vibrant new forms of the Renaissance. Against its background landscape of scenes from the Holy Land, palm trees offer soft calypsos from a shimmering oasis. The wood ceiling, a relatively late addition in 1617 by Domenichino is a gold and green foliage of its own.

Perhaps it’s the gold that makes me think of Wilde’s The Happy Prince. It might not be as grand as the major basilicas of San Giovanni or Santa Maria Maggiore, but it certainly has the warmth of a storyteller.  There’s a throwback here as I think there is with all churches to childhood. The way that you were back then, too confident or at times, too scared. The way you can’t take in Santa Maria, except through seeing other people and the way they become part of it, perhaps only momentarily to light a candle and then leave. You start to realize nothing is all that visible. With the early evening come vespers, voices building and fading in chorus and solo. The church is alive like an old vinyl record, and it’s as though you’re more sure of yourself as a stranger not knowing the exact words.

            A clear geometry at work, rational thought and science applied to support the design measured in the rhythms and the algebra of structure. The classical lines of the Ionic columns where the late afternoon sun provides an exact angle and spotlight. It is a masterpiece that in its various moods makes me think of the pure language which is the same as the equations NASA scientists send out on satellites into deep space to communicate with what it is they barely understand. The faithful are more easily recognized as travellers.

            Outside by the fountain you can sit and watch it dim in the summer evenings as the temperature cools on your shoulders. A human statue breathes. The street performers take a bow. You see it all in its different lights and colors. A young girl or a restive waiter. The old woman unconscious on the cobblestones and the drunks and the frescos have faded now, but the gold remains. The campanile chimes an hour more than a thousand years ago. What you see inside there, dreams outside, like those who have love and those who don’t. There are times when I just like to look at it fading around me in the violet and blue.

 

 

September 5th 2008

Even after 2,000 years there isn’t any distance or perspective to it yet. Ironically all you have is ancient history to remind you.

 

 

The Jewish Ghetto

Nothing has ever happened to me in the Ghetto. I have no story of my own to bring or take away from here. It has a slower atmosphere than the rest of the city, less of the hustle of Trastevere or Piazza Navona. Despite being part of the historic centre, the Ghetto remains in many ways a backdoor  which doesn’t directly announce the fact it is the only part of Rome that represents over two thousand years of continuous community. A starless juxtaposition as you stare at a wall which is blackened as though scorched by fire and the yellow cat’s eye in the distance which must be an attic window hovering above the Theatre of Marcellus. It’s charm is much to do with the fact you don’t know what it is. There’s no arguing with a darkened window or the glimpse of a wood beam ceiling. In layers you can see through the archways an ongoing process.

 

 

Ponte Sisto

The river is dark by nature. You can see it in the electric lights which barely penetrate the surface. Jetsum that floats out towards an unseen sea.  From a distance Ponte Sisto stands out with a hole in its side like a bloodless shotgun wound.  At a certain angle it adopts a slight optical illusion, as if you could almost stretch your hand through its mysterious portal like a cheap magician’s guillotine trick. A hundred yards down river Tiber Isand curves up like a Roman Galley frozen at the point of ramming speed. Perspective again can be a tricky thing when you’re trying to judge certain distances. Ponte Sisto like so much of Rome is part performance where there’s a kind of gladiatorial prelude to the gentle incline which brings you to the centre of the river. The bridge is a trade of sorts; a glimpse at how other people look in exchange for your loyalty. Call it continuity or culture or the nieve idea that there has to be a point of connection between the person I was before I crossed the river and the one that came after. I like to dispose of those various human disappointments here, where the river is a convienient depository for certain names and places. It forms part of your routine; the same constitutional route you take of an evening.  Memory dropped like a five centissimi coin  into the darkness without even making a wish. Everything after is Trastevere.

 

6th July 2011

Good restaurants in Rome have a backstage quality of amateur theatre.

 

 

The Time Scott Fitzgerald didn’t meet me at the Vatican

I’ve never met anyone famous in Rome although I did once pass the American actor Willem Dafoe walking down Via Merulana. He’d grown his hair long like that time he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ and me and a friend doubled back just to check it was him ordering ice-cream. There was another time early in my first year when I saw a crowd gathered round a jewelry shop on Via dei Plebiscito and caught a brief glimpse of Berlusconi’s toupee as he made his Il Duce style exit surrounded by bodyguards hand chosen by Gucci. Then there was Good Friday 2010 and a momentary glance at  Pope Benedict who was speeding past in a convoy of limos and police sirens  doing an easy 120 mph on his way back from saying Mass at Colosseo. Yet none of these minor claims to fame come close to the time I didn’t meet Scott Fitzgerald at the Vatican.

 Of all the places in Rome I’d remember not meeting Scott Fitzgerald, the Vatican is in many ways an inspired choice. It’s got everything you need to ensure you remember a day when Scott Fitzgerald might have given you some valuable life advice and yet for some inexplicable reason he just didn’t turn up. The Piazza and the Pieta and the touch of early genius. More than the combination of historical period, Constantinian, Renaissance or Baroque; St Peter’s beauty covers more than the impenetrable seat of power and assension. It’s the one person you’d like to meet and swap wisdom with or ask that simple series of questions which proves it can’t just all be about the American dream or a love affair gone wrong or the whispers of lost youth.

Rome gets you in its clutches with the Trastevere moon and backstreets smelling of fresh bread and the open windows of a hundred kitchens and restaurants and before you know it your pockets are empty and your shoes shredded with those romantic cobblestones. It’s no surprise not meeting Scott Fitzgerald would leave such a lasting impression on me given the circumstances. Fitzgerald’s brief encounter with Rome ended with him taking a beating from the police after he drunkenly attempted to engage the locals in fisticuffs. That said he did rewrite a large chunk of Gatsby here despite him carrying a certain resentment towards Italians in general after this unfortunate fracas. Nevertheless, the fact I live in a city where any part of that book came to life alone is enough to fill me with genuine satisfaction. I still feel the Vatican would be the perfect place to deal with the disappointment of a missed appointment with the man himself. If he had turned up I’d have told him not to take it all so personally. There’s an Irish bar within walking distance where we could set the whole thing to rights.

 

 

 

December 12th 2008

It’s impossible to make any predictions when it comes to next year or the year after that. It’s like the beginning of any new friendship.

 

 

Scholar’s

I wrote my first postcards here; I remember that because I was always putting too much into them. I didn’t know then whether I was just a tourist or a future citizen or simply in over my head. It was a strange way to finally learn a trade and find the only real education in life is to look around you.

Scholar’s Lounge is an Irish Bar that lies halfway between Piazza Venezia and Largo Argentina on Via del Plebiscito. As a place to write postcards it offers good company and lots of background conversation. My favourite time there is when it’s quiet, the same way Raymond Chandler has Philip Marlowe’s erstwhile drinking partner Terry Maddox describe bars being quiet just before opening in The Long Goodbye, “When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny … I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation.” You can sit there and think of all the postcards you wrote and the fact you know better now when it comes to taking out the part about ancient history. When I talk to people about it back home I’m often tempted to come up with some memorable drinking stories about the time I challenged an entire travelling convention of Oliver Reed lookalikes to an arm wrestling competition, or the night I worked my way alphabetically through every fine and rare whiskey the bar  has to offer. Unfortunately, abstinance rarely makes for great material in the true vein of a legendary bar fly anecdote.

Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Yeats and Shaw stare up from the menu and I can’t help but think that Yeats’ in particular doesn’t like me and you realize how ludicrous your own small ambition compares, but there’s always a double cheeseburger to console you filling in the white space on your postcard that tells you not to write below the line. Only I’ve never understood why that is.

 

February 2nd 2014

It’s easy to be wrong about Rome in the same way as it’s easy to be wrong about art and religion.

 

           

The horse is Rome

There are certain parts of Rome where you hear the water before you hear the traffic. Piazza di  Campidoglio is the vantage point. Designed by Michaelangelo you must first climb the Cordonata steps passing under the eyes of Castor and Pollix to reach the inescapable geometry of its spiders web, a clean circle of pure construction. Home to the Musei Capitoline and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The animal is huge as Caesar grips through the stirrups the weight of its flanks, a stallion with a full veined belly moving at at steady relentless pace. This is death and mercy and the sightless arch of intelligence where the world is long out conquered. The horse is Rome and the man is the author of the ‘Meditations’ which in their individual brevity would probably fill no more than a postcard each themselves. As you come closer you realise he’s not even touching the reins. That’s an incredible thing to see, to know that the man is not afraid to fall. The old world is behind the old Emperor now and the Tarpeian Rock where traitors were publically executed by being thrown to their death.  Looking out across the Forum at night is the time to see it. A bride and groom approaching with their wedding guests. The Goddess sits at her fountain, light glimmering in marble like a 1930’s cinema reel.

 

October 7th 2010

I haven’t kept in touch with anyone from last year. I look at photographs on the internet, and it’s not the same thing.

 

 

Short Cuts to Santa Maria Maggiore

Now it’s all uphill for a time. The cool glow of a Saturday afternoon in early March along Via Cavor reminds me of people quite literally on the other side of the world for who Rome was the space of a postcard gap in their lives, between starting a family or meeting their future wife or husband. Postcards you crossed off your map one by one like the streets where you’d arrange to meet them on a weekend and what they left behind were short cuts to the second biggest church in Rome after St Peter’s. You didn’t notice how close you were at the time and then with a sharp right you turn a corner and Santa Maria Maggiore is lionlike in the way it appears to rest its hindquarters atop the Esquiline. From behind it feels as though you aren’t looking at a church as much as the rounded loins of some great cat about to pounce. I’m perspiring with the climb, but once inside those short cuts come back to you whispering “Take me”. These are the postcards that are their own means of transportation as you come to realize there is no way to circumnavigate Rome and draw a perfect circle. People are far too complicated when they arrive. I’ve long since learnt to recognize a run down neighbourhood where a woman might let you hold hands with her. Nothing more profound than a brief smile and a couple of drinks, and only afterwards do you realize how much it makes you feel ashamed. Short cuts to enhance and prolong an all too quick and easy friendship. Holy Ground looking to play with you with its paws.

 

January 12th 2012

It gets old for saying it, but I hope you’ll come out to visit this year. There’s nothing else about my life here I regret.

 

 

Sleepers

Springtime you start to see the breeze and the brassy accent of the buildings turning their secret terraces to a blue sky whose word you can only take for it. Light painted on a faithless parchment’s skin all colors like the song of the preacher in Ecclesiastes. The sun is out and the sleeper faces the sky from his stony bed beneath the figure of St Francis in Piazza Di S. Bartolomeo All’Isola. You’ve just crossed Ponte Fabricio – The Bridge of the Four Heads whose marble features have all appeared to melt like wax. At the back of Tiber Island the river begins to flow more quickly and there is a minor dissonance of  footsteps and Arabic dialect. Black men trying to sell fake Gucci merchandise and artists painting from memory a door in Technicolor. Nothing disturbs the sleeper and no-one paints a picture of this, his own private city complete in itself. I have to keep moving and it’s only back in my apartment that I allow myself the luxury of an hour’s siesta. People choose the strangest places to rest their eyes in Rome, but sleep is like that here; a comman feature of everyday life, these urban snorers. How wonderful to take such full possession of oneself in this way! It’s sleep that serves the common good, a brief pause in the continuum, often shameless as a missing shoe, one of many who appropriate the city with eyes half closed lying down at their leisure on a bench or the steps to a cool grey archway. A tiny irregular heartbeat that constantly serves to break my train of thought.

 

 

2nd March 2009

There’s a man on his knees in Trastevere. His knees may as well be his knuckles and he doesn’t say anything. This is the only postcard I have to send to you today.

 

Muse  

The American humourist Garrison Keillor writes that a postcard in order to maintain its grace and integrity of meaning is ideally no longer than fifty words and comes with a clear picture. He describes it as a strict form that shouldn’t attempt prosaic overpour. In Keillor’s view, with a postcard you are very much in, then out of the moment with no time to linger on schedules or itineries.The problem is a Roman postcard wants to talk a lot more than that. It doesn’t describe an image as much as serenade one. A Roman postcard wants you to hum along rather than read in silence. It’s the tight compression and contradiction of both flesh and spirit, where a local prostitute can suddenly reveal a very real figure sat in a bar or taking Holy Communion. The analogy of Rome as mother whore to the civilized West is nothing new in literature or art until you consider that as the combination of both a spiritual and sensual life, fifty words are not so much hyperbole as a false understatement which to anyone else must seem like the muse of a lifetime.

 

21st February 2015

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:

Presume not that I am the thing I was;

For God doth know, so shall the world per-

            ceive,

That I have turn’d away my former self;

So will I those that kept me company.

Henry IV, Pt 2 Act V, 60-64

 

The Ones That Have No Name

I don’t remember when I first realised Ciampino Airport was actually a trapdoor. Something along the lines of that scene from the movie The Prestige where Hugh Jackman plays a magician who convinces everyone he’s disappeared, only he’s really dropped his double into a sealed water tank to drown beneath the stage. From security to gate, you can’t escape the feeling any moment the floor will give way, like the sensation of looking down on the coastline of Lazio from 30,000 feet. The rehersal of coming home with tales of a new life. Flying out of Rome for the first time seven years ago I’d no idea how well I’d get to know it. The uncertainty of what keeps you in the air or how I’d feel when I got back. You’re up there for seconds or maybe it’s hours the same way you’ve been here for years now thinking about the ones that have no name. The actions inside each observation, small cruelties and kindnesses impossible to assimilate or deny. A postcard. To write. The verb accelerates towards you with so many dopplegangers. Your first day or your last. Tree’s darkening in June heat languous as bodies during sex. You can almost taste the sweat on those razor sharp leaves. An hour’s wait for a bus travelling back up the coast skin tenderized with the intensity of the July equinox. The expression half laugh, half snarl, of a middle class matron refusing to take a free seat next to an old gypsy woman on the bus. White gravel that blinds you with the scream of an ambulance siren. A lick of female perfume laced with the street’s dark over ripeness as the garbage trucks go to work hosing down the night that’s gone and will never be again. Your flight finally touches down and instead of finding England look up and you’re already back in Italy. Endless lines of Vespas blocking your way across the street. A pre-laid table for one you didn’t ask for.

 

September 17th 2014

If it was ever just one person it shouldn’t be. One night when the Pantheon was just another building by comparison that leaves you wondering.

 

End of a Season

Towards the church of Quo Vadis the proximity of the old countryside and the city blur lines. Here on Via Appia Antica is where St Peter is said to have made his decision to turn back to Rome and face his death. It’s a long road serviced by the 118 bus leading out towards the Catacombs which also passes by the Ardeatine caves where 335 Italian partisans were executed by the Nazi’s in 1944. The matyrs of historical fact and religious legend are a curious mix to establish your bearings. The dead are never where you find them in the Spring, which is perhaps to say their natural element. Between the two locations a man may be a matyr or a murderer depending on the form of execution. It’s always easier to be one than the other.

There’s no way to test the theory when it comes to hieroglyphics in high definition. In another thousand years will it all seem as new or as alien? A mysterious Latin font like new technology creeps up on you. It’s a city captured on smartphone and tablet nowadays rather than in  postcards. The idea of a city you can carry with you to email, surfing the net as much a part of what you’re looking at, as the thing that’s slowly crumbling before your very eyes. The ruins smooth out on a cracked surface; a portal with a limited battery life, imperfect as anything prescribed; an antiquated form each to their own separate season.

It’s a machine filled with gigobites of data without memory. A computer screen or a postcard without a date or signature. I’m looking at a man in front of me who’s reading through a small manuscript of what I can only assume to be his own handwritten notes. He seems dissatisfied, anxious even, unable to add to what looks like a short story or perhaps the first chapter of a novel. I have everything and nothing in common with this stranger; the silent thoughts he is struggling with in his head in another language. Good Friday and I’m sat in Santa Maria di Trastevere wondering if prayer is no different than to see ourselves limited by our five senses. Postcards drifting through the eternity of bric a brac shops in the backstreets of major cities for whom their sole existence is to say to someone else I was here, and I saw with my own eyes, and it was glorious.

 

 

 

 

 

Jim Brega
Twenty-one

I figured the party was being planned as a surprise, if only because—as the date approached—there was absolutely no sign of preparation. If it were an ordinary birthday, plans would already have been made for a special dinner. There would have been a discussion of what kind of cake should be prepared, and questions about what I wanted as a gift. This last was important; one lapse when I turned thirteen had resulted in my receiving an awkwardly gift-wrapped safety razor and a stick of deodorant with a bow around it. I worried that there’d been no birthday-related questions, not even about the dinner. And as far as the party was concerned, there’d been nothing: no slip, no peep, no hurriedly shushed conversation, no clumsy attempt to secretly compile a guest list through “innocent” inquiries, no clue at all as to what was being planned. It had to be big. After all, this was not an ordinary birthday. It would be my twenty-first.

 

I was living at home, in my old room, just for the summer. My job at the university had petered out between sessions, leaving me penniless and dependent on my parents’ generosity. Our mutual discomfort with the arrangement wasn’t helped by the sweltering summer days, the nights that were not much cooler, and the fact that my parents didn’t believe in air conditioning. Each morning my mother and I, both exhausted from a night of fitful sleep, would run through some variation of the job conversation:

 

Mother: Are you going to look for work today?

 

Me: Yeah, I thought I’d try the hardware store.

 

Mother (disappointed): Oh, Bud—you don’t know anything about hardware, do you? Don’t you think you’d do better if you tried for a job you know something about?

 

She was right. I knew nothing about hardware, certainly no more than I knew about bicycle messengering, operating a cash register at one of the local antique stores, or any of the other jobs I had applied for in recent weeks. I was majoring in telecommunications and film at school, but our village didn’t have a movie theatre or even a camera store. Anyway, we both knew I wasn’t going to get a summer job at this late date. I’d be returning to school in another month.

 

Yeah, a birthday party would be a welcome distraction. It should be a big one. With lots of presents.

 

I wished my older siblings could come, but neither of them had any desire to visit the old homestead. My older brother lived too far away, was already married and had taken a teaching job in a Los Angeles slum to avoid the Vietnam draft. My sister, one year ahead of me at State, was hitchhiking through Mexico for the summer. My younger brother still lived at home, biding his time while he finished high school, planning his own eventual escape from the house’s rancid atmosphere, an atmosphere caused by more than the summer heat.

 

Perhaps it was the way the house was situated—built on a failed citrus orchard and cut off from the freshening salt fog of San Diego Bay by ridges of low, brown coastal hills—but something had long ago soured the very fiber of my parents’ relationship. Any attempts at conversation devolved quickly into endless bickering. They should have seen at a glance that the arid climate and the ruined soil the house sat on would never nurture anything, animal or vegetable. Yet it was here, among the bitter oranges and mealy lemons from the orchard, that my parents had chosen to raise their four children.

 

How we all managed to make it through adolescence is a mystery. Our most banal misbehaviors aroused an unchecked rage in my mother and successive stages of withdrawal in my father. A fight would start that could go on for days with rare intermissions, my mother weeping hysterical tears, my father quiet but resolute in his pronouncements, children practicing invisibility. But there were certain occasions that were considered sacrosanct, “truce days” on which weapons would be sheathed and we would enact the roles of “family.” A birthday was one of them.

 

 

 

Fried chicken was my favorite meal. I’d asked for it on my birthday every year since the age of eight, when it had unseated my devotion to waffles with Velveeta cheese sauce. I loved the sensation of biting through the crusty greasiness of a drumstick to savor the hot chicken juice as it rushed into my mouth, salty and rich with fat. No one else in the family liked fried chicken, so my mother never fixed it other than on my birthday. Now I worried that I hadn’t been given the chance to confirm my choice, but decided that, after thirteen years, my mother had figured it out. Still, I hunted out of the corners of my eyes for hidden presents, secreted cakes (chocolate with green mint icing, she knew, was my favorite), anything that would give me a hint as to what was coming.

 

When the day at last arrived, I had still seen and heard nothing. There hadn’t been a single breach in what I’d come to think of as my parents’ conspiracy, and in an odd way I was proud of them for working together on the project so successfully. As the morning passed without comment and the afternoon stretched toward dinnertime, I realized that it was past the reasonable hour for a party to begin. Well, it was Wednesday. Perhaps the party was planned for the weekend; that would be easier on everyone’s schedule. There was still my special meal to be enjoyed. I wasn’t worried about that; I heard my brother being given the job of mashing the potatoes. But when the four of us took our places at the cardinal points of the round kitchen table, I was staring—not at generous piles of browned, breaded drumsticks; not at plump, crispy chicken breasts—but at four plates of glazed Spam with mashed potatoes and boiled carrots. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. No one, not even my mother (with her atrophied sense of humor), would dare suggest that the pink slab of vacuum-formed pork resting on the scratched sea-green melamine plate in front of me was an acceptable substitute for my birthday-entitled chicken.

 

As everyone else began to eat, my last hope began to fade: a fantasy that, at any moment, my aunts and cousins would arrive, their arms full of presents and a bucket of Kentucky Fried, Styrofoam cups packed with sides of runny coleslaw and watery cut corn, and waxed-paper envelopes filled with the Colonel’s doughy biscuits. But that wasn’t the way we were going to celebrate my official transition to adulthood. No, we were going to celebrate with a plate of Spam and some over-cooked carrots. No party. No presents. No cake.

 

My brother began arguing with my mother as to whether there was any actual pork in Spam and whether cloves cause cancer. My father was yelling at them to stop arguing at the dinner table. No one noticed I hadn’t touched my plate. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I interrupted.

 

“Can anyone think of anything special about today?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice neutral. The other three fell silent, expectant.

 

“IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!” I shouted. “MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY!”

 

More silence—a good five seconds.

 

Finally, my mother spoke. “Oh, I’m sorry, Bud. Would you like a glass of wine?”

 

I fixed on the square, half-empty cast-facet Manischewitz bottle on the table. I’d gagged on the small sips of it I’d been stealing since I was twelve. Why my parents were so fond of the wine’s sweet stickiness was a mystery; they weren’t even Jewish. But I was certain I did not want a whole glass of it now.

 

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “You all actually forgot my twenty-first birthday. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

 

I stood up and turned to my mother. “And thank you for all your effort on the meal, but I believe I will eat my birthday dinner elsewhere.” And I left.

 

 

 

Valley Grove is a small town with only a few restaurants. I pulled into the first one I came to, under a sign that spelled out “Lucky Chinese Food” in blinking script. The parking lot was three-quarters empty, probably something to do with the lights being out on the “L”.

 

“Do you have fried chicken?” I asked the hostess.

 

“Yes, yes; fried chicken,” she replied, nodding.

 

After finishing an order of chicken wings—all bones and skin—and two beers, I confided to my waitress that it was my birthday.

 

“Yes, yes; birthday,” she agreed, tapping the Chinese zodiac printed on my placemat. I noticed that her finger pointed directly at the pig.

 

My bill came, accompanied by a saucer holding a sectioned orange and a fortune cookie.

 

“In life,” the fortune read, “you must be willing to take the bitter with the sweet.”

 

I paid my bill, ate the cookie, left the orange.