The Truth at Thirteen

 

   The notice came through in my Facebook notifications. “Dave Weisbord has tagged a photo of you.”  It didn’t take long for the “likes” to begin, followed by the comments.

      You can travel the entire globe,  move to a city thousands of miles away, make friends with people of every age and from all over the world, but no one will ever understand you better, or how you view the world than the people you grew up with. 

        Blame it on the zeitgeist.   Our childhood friends determine for us what matters and what does not.  And they are how we measure the distance we have travelled from our shared humble beginnings.  

        The picture was taken in January, 1966 at Dave Weisbord’s Bar Mitzvah.

    

        Dave was my neighbor in Pine Valley, a sub division of brand new split level houses sold to upwardly mobile veterans in the early 1960s.  It was their little piece of the American Dream and our neighborhood was filled with Jewish men and their wives and their children.  

        Dave was a little guy on that snowy January day when he became a man.  A few weeks ago though, he was sixty, a grown man posting pictures on Facebook so his new girlfriend from the Phillipines could get a look into his life.

       So you would think that Dave’s new relationship would have nothing to do with me.

       But his walk down memory lane kicked up a photograph that collided with a memory of my own and his decision to tag me in that photo brought an image of my long forgotten and somewhat reviled thirteen year old self back into my life.

         I hate when that happens, don’t you?

         Thirteen was not a very good year for me.

         From the short haircut, with the long bangs ( which I knew would soon be curled up and be ugly after a couple of sweaty dances) to the frosted pink lipstick ( the only color my mother permitted me to wear)  to the black eyeliner penciled inside my bottom lid, ( snuck into the synagogue ladies room and worn on the inside bottom lid, making my eyes look deeper and beadier) to the tightly fitted maroon velvet empire top on the pink satin dress, to my bare neck, legs and arms,  I was neither girl nor woman but some half and half being caught in the precise moment of transition.

       My body with fresh new breasts bursting against the velvet and my waist drawing in the satin, close to my skin, stood awkwardly beneath my lowered head,  eyes peering up from below, looking straight into the camera with an innocent guile that suggested a sexual promise which would not be delivered for a few more years.

       “You look so sophisticated,” my friend Tobi wrote beneath the picture. And “I remember that dress."

        I remembered it too. I had worn that dress a couple of months earlier, to my own Bat Mitzvah at Rhawnhurst Jewish Center on November 27, 1965.  My parents were separated then, not yet divorced and it was still a secret,  a shanda  that this had happened to our family. And I was very ashamed.

        Before my Bat Mitzvah, I had begged my father to please sit next to Mommy at the service, or at least that’s what I remember asking, even if only silently from the depths of my thirteen year old heart.  Please, I prayed, let us look like a family.

        I had already been devastated once in this whole Bat Mitzvah process when I learned for the very first time that I would not be permitted to read from the Torah. This, after sitting for weeks with the boys in trope class learning the melodies for each of the small symbols under each syllable.  The notes for the Torah trope were major; those for the Haftorah, minor

       And I was such a good student. Better than any boy in that class, most of whom needed the cantor to sing their portions and press a press a record for them , which they would learn to imitate.  But I, who studied hard and learned it all who needed no recording, I was relegated to Friday night, deemed unfit to read from the Torah on Saturday.

      Still.
   
     That Friday night in November,  when I walked out onto the bema from Rabbi’s study’s door where I had been waiting with him in my maroon velvet and pink satin empire waist dress, I felt a sense of joyful anticipation.  I was ready for this.

     I stepped up to the pulpit proudly, confident and ready to lead the congregation in  the first blessing of the evening service.  It was then that I looked down on the first row and saw my mother in her hot pink coat dress and her ostrich feathered hat sitting on the aisle and my father’s grey suit and crew cut three seats away on the other side of my sister and brother.

      He didn’t look up to meet my gaze and I don’t remember looking his way again.  What the news of my not being permitted to read from the Torah had begun to do to me, my father’s self indulgent  intransigence finished off.

      There were always many old men present in the synagogue in those days,  bearded men with thick Yiddish accents,  their words laced with strange vowel sounds from Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary.  And they would follow each word and trope when the Bat Mitzvah girl would recite her Haftorah, not hesitating to call out a correction for a wrong pronunciation or a missed note.

       The quorum of old men sat silently as I chanted my piece. They stayed silenced as I  uttered my final “amen,” turned my back to the congregation and took my seat next to the Ark in a red velvet chair along the  synagogue's western wall.

       There are only a few pictures of me from my own Bat Mitzvah.  I don't really blame my parents for not taking many. There was a lot going on in their lives at the time.  And I had forgotten about  that girl and her anger, her shame and her disappointment.  I hadn't seen her for almost fifty years.

        Not until an old friend from junior high school tossed a stone into the water of his memory and sent ripples into mine. 

Remembering the Summer of Love

Write about a place that is important to you.  That was the writing prompt for last week's writing groups session.  

Is the past a place?  How about my inner world? Are those settings? I spend an awful lot of time in both of those places, especially when they intersect.  

Have you ever seen the fountain of Diana at Ephesus?  The one of a woman with many breasts, each one gushing forth with water?  

That’s what my inner world feels like when it mixes with my memory. I  have so many stories inside of me.  I am  always overflowing.

I need to stop. Nothing ever gets finished this way. 

So I have made myself a promise and I have set myself a goal – one that even feels doable.

I am going to write a draft of a screenplay for one of these geysers.

And, I am going to finish it before I am sixty.

Which is only two months away.

Small steps.

Shots.

Scenes.

Sequences.

I need to plug up all of the other openings, gather any and all of the discipline I have ever mustered in my life and focus on telling this one story from this one place in my past of this one inexorable memory from when I was sixteen years old  in July of 1969, down the shore in Atlantic City staying with my girlfriends at the La Concha,  ( or was it The Dunes?) when our room somehow became the destination for all lost Jewish boys of the boardwalk who, in a contagious frenzy of hedonistic self destructive ecstasy, placed lighters under silver spoons, sucked warm substances into glass syringes, wrapped wide leather belts with thick brass buckles around the skinny, still trackless arms, plunged needles into their delicate blue veins and let their young blood splatter onto the whitewashed walls of the cheap motel.

While we girls watched.

This is the place where my past intersects with my inner world and it all confounds me.

The Summer of Love. 

I can never know what the post-Bar Mitzvah boys were thinking as they congregated in this  motel room and performed this unholy rite. I can’t ask them. Most of them are dead. The ones that didn’t die as teenagers from overdoses haven’t lived much past fifty, their bodies  unable to withstand the ravages of addiction or too many encounters with dirty needles.  The ones who survived are silent about this. I imagine that they are superstitious.  If they speak of it, their words  might somehow pull them back. 

Fate is lying in wait with some unfinished business.

There is a debt that must be paid.

So I will never know what brought these boys to this place during the summer of 69 – sons of Holocaust survivors, D-Day veterans, GI Bill doctors and lawyers, secretaries and Donna Reed housewives.

But maybe through some kind of excavation, an archeological dig into my own soul, I can find what these girls were thinking – what THIS girl was thinking and feeling as she stood paralyzed and silent witnessing this hell.

Small Steps is what I am tentatively calling it -  like the process of writing a screenplay;  like the eventual movement of the girls away from these self destructive boys;  like the journey from the joint to the needle. 

Small steps towards writing another sequence in the screenplay, when one week later,  in a dark basement in a semi-detached brick ranch house in Northeast Philadelphia, these same girls once again bore witness to the boys shooting themselves up while watching Neil Armstrong take his small step on the moon.

Another place I cannot look at anymore without seeing tracks.

Cold War Summer

Cold War Summer

Let’s drop a bomb.

Why shouldn’t we drop a bomb?

Now is the time for it

While we are young

Let’s drop a bomb.

            Suzy Cohen’s mother’s voice boomed out at us through her kitchen window as we played in her rocky back yard. Suzy, her brother Robert,  my friend Ellie and I were playing “statues” – a game which required you, once “frozen” by a rival team member, to remain absolutely still until someone from your team animated you with their touch. Gladys Cohen was a Pine Valley anomaly – a Democratic committee woman and small business owner who wore an old fur coat with sneakers over dungarees when she went to the grocery store. And she was fat in a boxy kind of way. Once when I was sleeping over her house, Suzy confided in me that her mother looked that way because years ago after giving birth to her and her brother, she got pregnant for a third time and the baby turned to stone in her stomach. Like a Shakespearean fool or a deranged Chicken Little, she’d bellow her warnings of the apocalypse in song then laugh sardonically at her own black humor. 

             She terrified me.

             This was 1962, the summer of the 17 year locusts, the last summer of my life without structure or responsibilities. It was a time of surreal calm, sandwiched between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the assassination of JFK when the children of Pine Valley would go outside and play from sun up to sun down, devising our own complex rules of engagement for every game we would create.  And as I listened to Gladys Cohen's doleful revision of Nat King Cole, I felt a shiver run up my ten year old motionless spine as I waited for Ellie to tag me and release me from my paralysis.

            With uncoiffed graying hair and a voice like Ethel Merman, Gladys Cohen was very different from the other women in this neighborhood.  First, she worked, side by side with her husband in a relatively successful sign painting business. None of the other mothers did that. Second, she spoke her mind in a booming voice. None of the other mothers did that either. Their role models, Marilyn Monroe if they were trashy, Jackie Kennedy if they were classy, spoke in tiny breathy voices that men had to move in close to hear.

           

          My mother was more the Jackie than the Marilyn type except that in addition to being soft spoken arm candy for my father, she was an aspiring domestic goddess. Our newly built split level home was always immaculate and a full course dinner fit for a king was routinely served on green Melmac dishes at 6:00 sharp every night. My father was a furniture and appliance salesman and had decorated the entire house in the French Provincial style and stocked the kitchen with the latest time-saving electric gadgets so that it looked every bit as staged as the model house that my parents had fallen in love with two years before when they sold their post World War II brick row home and traded up for their piece of the American Dream.  My mother, always the over-achiever ( she had given up a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania to marry my father – women, after all, weren’t supposed to be smarter than their husbands)  actually refused a dishwasher when my father offered her one because she thought allowing a machine to do the dishes would somehow be cheating. She was smart enough to permit him to buy her a huge stand alone freezer, making her the envy of her appliance hungry peers,  who poured through our back door into our basement with their  monthly meat orders wrapped and carefully labeled to be placed on their self-assigned shelves.

           

            If the women (except for Gladys of course) seemed like cardboard cut-outs from Good Housekeeping magazine, or pale imitations of Donna Reed or June Cleaver, at least they were a constant presence in our young lives. The men, on the other hand were a complete mystery, shadowy figures who came and went at will, drifting in and out of our lives like the Lone Ranger.

            I can still picture the three of them, an unlikely trio:  Bill Rosenzweig, the silver-tongued salesman who stood five feet six  and talked out of the side of his mouth, Freddie Gorman, the tall,  ruggedly handsome plumber with the mysterious eyes and Dave Braverman the young Philadelphia lawyer –who wore expensive suits and had a degree from Princeton. These three very different men were the proud owners of three successive split levels on Grace Lane, and fathers of nine of the children who vied for their attention as they stood in a tight circle near the end of our asphalt driveway on a hot summer night.

           

           “Hey Bill,” I heard Dave, say pointing to our house. “I think they made your roof red so the Commies will know where to bomb first!”  The men laughed and laughed as if this were the funniest thing they had ever heard and I had nightmares for months.

            Years later,  I would learn that what Freddie, Bill and Dave had in common was the fact that they were all cheating on their wives:  my father with a woman he met when my own mother’s Chevvy had hit the would-be mistress' Pontiac in the Thriftway parking lot. 

            Bill Rosenzweig abandoned his family for good on November 11, 1963, two weeks before Kennedy was killed and everyone’s lives, not just my family’s were turned upside-down.  It took a few more years for the truth about their husbands to be revealed to the Mrs. Gorman and Braverman. My mother later told me that my father had blind-sided her -making love to her the very night before he left  -- as if everything was as it always had been.  

             No wonder she remained immobile, in bed,  for the next sixteen months. 

            In the days that followed my father’s departure,  as the news of his infidelity spread through the neighborhood, I watched in still silence as the women of Grace Lane, came marching one by one through our back door and into our basement to retrieve all of their steaks and chicken parts from my mother’s freezer. Perhaps they thought that being left was contagious. Or maybe they were afraid of my mother, now a beautiful single women, adrift among their ( soon to be revealed as ) philandering husbands. She, as well as her now fatherless children, became pariahs, shunned by the community that had once embraced us.  

          

           And during that sad,  fearful winter of 1962, only Gladys Cohen, wearing her peculiar costume and singing her portentous songs, strode up our driveway, knocked on our front door, and offered her support to my devastated mother.

           

 * all of the names have been changed except for mine and my family's. 

Fourth Street Positively -

By the summer of 1968, smoking marijuana with my friends had become a tired ritual. Each hot and empty night followed the previous one in an endless cycle of semi-suburban tedium. First, my fifteen year old girlfriends and I would gather on the corner of Darlington and Flagstaff in our Pine Valley neighborhood. Then we’d  wait for one of the older boys to drive up in his father’s Dodge Valiant or Chevy Malibu after scoring a couple of nickel bags from the local dealer in the parking lot of the Thriftway Super Market. We’d pile into his car and he’d chauffeur us to the house of whomever’s parents either weren’t home or were so clueless that they would barely shift their gaze from the hypnotic light flickering from the television set in the center of the living room as the five or more of us dull eyed teenagers made our way past them to their child’s bedroom or their finished basement.

That sweltering July night we ended up at Steve’s family’s apartment. That at least was a little break from the tired routine. Steve’s family lived in an apartment building, unlike the rest of us whose families inhabited small split level boxes with red roofs, white aluminum siding and black shutters. Evergreen Towers was the only luxury apartment in Northeast Philadelphia in the 1960’s and just entering the elegant building and smiling innocently at the security guard at the night desk added a tinge of daring to our otherwise predictable escapade.

At sixteen, Steve was the youngest of three. His siblings were both grown men in their late twenties and his parents were considerably older than most of ours. They were also richer, or at least appeared to be by their lavish life style and expensive furniture. Steve was a bit indulged too – he had two cars at his disposal – a brand new Chevy Impala and a vintage green MG convertible.  He had his own room at the end of a long hallway and that was where we gathered to smoke pot and listen to music on Steve’s brand new and top of the line stereo player.

I was fifteen at the time and crazy in love with Steve’s best friend Dock. I had been in love with him for almost two years and during that time my love had become somewhat of an obsession. I thought about him day in and day out. How he felt about me was always a mystery to me. He came in and out of my life at will and would go from confiding his deepest secrets and desires in me to ignoring me for weeks on end.  And while I was more than a little happy to see him sitting on Steve’s bed, propped up against the wall and rolling a joint, I was also wary.

I never really enjoyed being high. I was the kind of person who was always worried about getting caught. So I was totally paranoid all of the time. Being high also exaggerated all of my feelings of self consciousness and I spent a good part of the time that I was high worried about how I looked, how I was sitting, how my voice sounded whether I was sitting too close to someone, whether I was making a stupid face. All of this worrying took an awful lot of work. I tried mightily not to be noticed --- not to look stupid – not to laugh at the wrong time, not the say the wrong thing. Looking back,  it was more like torture than pleasure.  Just what a totally insecure adolescent self conscious girl  needed – a drug to increase her self consciousness…

I both hated and envied that my friends could get high and abandon all of their inhibitions – and just have fun do and say the silliest things --- like that one time when Randy  was convinced that her pocketbook had grown teeth and was clamping down on her hand keeping her from removing it after reaching inside for a cigarette. Everyone around me was laughing uncontrollably. I can’t remember whom I hated more that night -  her for enjoying herself so much or me smiling bleakly through the hilarity, praying for invisibility.

I was just getting to the part of my high where I was almost comfortable with myself  -- the part where I could feel safe enough to go sit alone in a corner on the floor and indulge in my favorite marijuana induced activity – imagining that I was on a very slow moving and erotic ferris wheel. Just when I was settling in a pleasing rhythm, Steve’s voice jolted me to attention.

He was standing above his stereo with a record in his hand. “You’ve got to hear this,” he said. “It will blow your mind.”

         

          By the time the first song had finished playing, the night had changed – it was no longer just another night in a string of meaningless nights – This was the night when I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. And what a great person to listen to when you are high.  “No body feeeeeeeeeeeels any pain” was the first line I heard sung by a plaintive voice which drew out the syllables and teased and tantalized the listener, bringing me to the brink of release.

“Marsha,”  I thought I heard Dock say through the haze.

“Yo Marsh,” he said again , because I guess I was too paranoid to acknowledge him the first time just in case he hadn’t been talking to me.

“I want you to listen closely to this next song. It reminds me of you,” he said in the prolonged silence between songs.

His words had put all of my senses on alert. I leaned forward and felt my blood begin to pulsate through my veins as a cascade of electric sound poured out of Steve’s stereo.  

The first words of the song grabbed me by the throat.

Yoooooooou’ve got a lot of neeeeeeerve to say you are my frieeeeeeeeeeeend.

When I was doooooooown you just stood there griiiiiiiining.

Yooooo’ve got a lot of neeeeerve to say you’ve got a  helping haaaandto lend

You just waaaaant to be on the side that’s wiiiiiiiiiiiiniing.

The rest of the song slammed me into the wall repeatedly until by the final verse all I could do was sit numbly and dumbly accepting the final blow.

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

And just for that one moment I could be you

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

Yooooou’d know what a draaaaaaaaag it is to seeeeeeee yooooooooooou

By the time the electric tidal wave of sound retreated I was devastated. To this day, I can hardly hear this song without feeling the acute meanness of the words and the sadistic glee with which they were sung. Someone else may have been the target of Dylan’s wrath and disdain, but Dock had harnessed it for himself and redirected it at me  -- barrels blazing. 

Maybe even at that time, there was a part of me that knew I didn’t deserve this attack. Maybe, a tiny voice inside my head was trying to tell me that this had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him and how he felt about himself. All I had been guilty of after all was loving him far more that I ever should have and believing in him when he hadn’t believed in himself. Once during one of our telephone conversations that would sometimes last all night long, he told me that he wanted to be a lawyer one day. The next day,  I searched the Yellow Pages for a trophy store that I could get to by bus and with forty of the seventy-five dollars I had earned for a whole summer as a camp counselor, I bought him a custom made name plate for his future legal desk. It read “Alan Dockler, Esquire.”  

            I can’t remember what he said after I gave it to him or even if he said anything. I can’t even guess what he thought about my incredibly naive gift or if he was thinking about all that when he told me to listen to that song.. What I do remember is that when I finally got up the nerve to look at him after the song had ended, he wasn’t looking at me at all. Instead, he was sitting in the same position, staring straight ahead with an empty look in his eyes.

That night, I had no way of knowing that the boredom would soon give way to increasingly dangerous behavior and by next summer – the summer of 69 --- the summer of Woodstock and peace and love, these middle class white boys would already be addicted to heroin. Nor could I know that I would soon stop getting high altogether but I wouldn’t stop accompanying Steve and Dock and their friends as they scored and shot scag in the same bedrooms and basements where we had once smoked pot.

In the psycho jargon of today, I became an enabler. By the time they picked up the needle, I had forsaken the joint. Someone had to remain alert as they drifted into their ecstatic oblivion. Someone had to hide the burnt spoons and throw away the bloody balls of cotton. And someone had to be there when Dock outstretched his arms to me. 

Despite his disdain for me, or perhaps because of it, my love for Dock was a constant that he could rely on for years. Things would change: national leaders would be assassinated, men would walk on the moon, his father would get fired from his job, his grandmother would die, he would get thrown out of high school, he would discover heroin and his best friend Steve would die of an overdose and we’d go to his funeral instead of Woodstock.  I’d go to college, discover the women’s movement, have my consciousness raised and one day in a righteous rage, send him a letter with the lyrics to Positively Fourth Street addressed directly to him.

            I wish this is where the story ends. I wish I could tell you that I sent this essay to the New York Times and it was published in the “Modern Love” section and that Dock read the essay, emailed me, arranged to meet, and we shared our life stories, embraced and forgave ourselves for hurting ourselves and each other in the past.

            I wish that is what happened. But it’s not. After I finished writing this, I decided to “google” Alan Dockler. I hadn’t done that in a really long time. The last time I had looked him up, I learned that he was married and living in Florida.  This time I typed his name into the search engine and found the MySpace page of a young man who called himself DJ Dockler. And in a tiny line in the space marked “heroes” was written R.I.P.  Alan Docker 12-28-51 - 10/7/02.

            He had died four years before and I hadn’t known. His surviving son’s name was Steven.

            Sometimes life just ends that way like this story – with no closure, only questions and regrets for missed opportunities.

Coming Apart - Coming Together

Recently, my therapist, the Jungian analyst Angelo Spoto, told me a story he had heard about James Hillman. At age sixty-five, Hillman had set off to visit his  85 year old father.  At this time in Hillman’s life, he was very successful, having studied with Carl Jung in Zurich, penned dozens of highly acclaimed books and founded a school of psychology.  In the story, Hillman recounts how when he begins the journey to his father’s house, he is 65 years old. As he gets closer, he becomes 55, then 45. As the miles accumulate, he regresses further to 35 and 25. When he pulls into the driveway, he is 15 and by the time his aged father answers the door, he is five years old.

     I know what this feels like – how one can be fifty-nine and nine at the same time in the presence of your family – especially a family filled with people who have never really understood you at all.  

 * * * * * * * * * *

I spent the entire last week of January inside – inside my house and inside myself, creating four mixed media collages for a collaborative exhibit by local artists at the Muse Gallery in Olde City, Philadelphia.

I am not an artist. At least I wasn’t trained as one. And I know that some artists try their entire lives to have their work exhibited in a public gallery. So I know how lucky I am. This opportunity found me. Knocked on my door like the travelling Kabbalah salesman from over a decade ago, who when I told him I had recently become curious about Jewish mysticism said with a gleam in his eye and a lilt in his voice, “When you’re ready to learn a teacher will appear.”

I bought the entire Zohar for over five hundred dollars.  

There are no coincidences.

I signed up for a four week collage course last summer at the Main Line Art Center at a time when my sense of outward identity was falling apart, causing acute disruptions on the inside. Without a plan, I brought in images of myself to use for my collages – pictures of my face from all different stages of my life.  I also brought in my photography - pictures I’d taken of trees and shadows, altered to reveal hidden images and surprising connections.  In class, I cut and pasted my photographs onto each other in varied ways – an eye here, an upside down mouth there, my shadow hanging from branches of anthropomorphic trees, two right halves of my face, glued together.

I got lost in the process. There were times when I felt myself begin to giggle in sheer delight. My teacher, Francine Shore encouraged me on this introspective and mythopoeic journey. She never made me feel as if I were strange, even though the other women in the class were making pretty things with butterflies and flowers.

That was last summer. In December, Francine emailed me and asked me if I could make four collages for a show she was curating at the Muse. Each artist was to create four images a piece, on the same 12 x 12 x 1 ½ inch canvases, leaving the edges white.  These similarities would unify the exhibit and Francine would then arrange these diverse images in an artistic way that would in itself be a collaborative work of art.

Of course, I said yes, but as the weeks wore on towards the February 1st deadline, and the canvases remained blank, I began to lose my nerve. About to back out, I went to visit Francine with some of the collages I had made in the past, hoping for direction. She looked through the different things I had brought - mosaics of pretty ladies, mixed media homages to Frida Kahlo, and the surreal images of my personal journey.

“I know you’re not an experienced artist, Marsha,” Francine began. “But you tell a provocative story with these images,” she continued, pointing to my idiosyncratic self portraits.  “These other ones are nice, but they are decorative. They aren’t art. Art invites the viewers to come closer, to get into the image, to wonder what is going on and to bring their own meaning to it.”

I listened intently, trying to see my images through others’ eyes.

“Go home and do you,” she concluded.

Of course I waited until the last possible minute, but I DID create four new pieces that were deeply personal.

I went home and I did myself.

I cut out tiny images of my life - family scenes and picture of scared rituals, like bat mitzvahs and weddings and important moments like births and family functions from my childhood and pasted them onto a mask which I placed on top of a photography of my face with nothing but the eyes peering out intently thought the cut outs.  For another, I took those same images I had used for the mask, glued them on the canvas in rows like strips of film then used cut up pictures of my face to create the masks of tragedy and comedy affixed atop the smaller pictures of my life.

It was a deep, deep internal process. The placement of each tiny picture brought up old and painful memories. What drove me to place the picture of me pregnant with my daughter ( who is herself now pregnant) next to one of my father  ( who never saw me pregnant, we were already estranged) or one of my wedding pictures next to the one of me as mother of the bride?

I relived my entire life while making these images --- all of the joy, complexities and pain during this one agonizing week.

And then I was done.

I completed the final image, a tree in the shape of a woman’s body, with my solemn face growing from the trunk, eyes masked before dark on the last day of January. The entire piece was in black and white except for an upside down image of my face, cut in the shape of a womb and affixed to the body of the trunk of the tree.

I called this piece "Insight."

                                           * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I probably should not have agreed to meet my mother, her husband, my sister and brother for dinner that night. I was too churned up and too vulnerable to see them.  But I said yes because I was struck by the reality that at eighty-two my mother was cherishing every possible opportunity to have all three of her children together and my brother was making a rare appearance in Philadelphia.

So I went.

My sister was the first to start the familiar ritual. Once everyone was seated, before we ordered dinner, she took out the advance copy of her soon to be released book – a very thorough and informative guide for parents about talking with their children about sexuality and protecting them from sexual abuse.  She was able to write this book drawing on her experiences as Director of Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey and her work in government in Child Welfare. She also announced her recent appointment to a special research and teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania.

My brother then whipped out his iPad and proceeded to show videos of himself at work as the Executive Director of Communications for the Baltimore Ravens in features the Wall Street Journal and Baltimore Sun had done about him. He was in town to be the announcer for the Big Five Basketball game between Temple and St. Joes.

Then there was me, with my retired self, my idiosyncratic images and all of the insecurities I have always felt in the company of my highly successful (and younger) siblings.

I shouldn’t have done it.

I knew better than to try to enter this arena. I knew I should never try to compete. But I was nine years old again, vying for my mother’s attention, trying so desperately to be seen, affirmed and understood.

So I took out my puny Blackberry and opened to the small images of my kooky collages and tried to pass it around the table to share with my family. My brother didn’t look, passing my phone off to my sister who said, “I"ve seen these before” ( she hadn’t – I’d just completed them that afternoon). She in turn passed it to my mother who just peered at the screen perplexed and said, “What’s this? I can’t make it out.”

On the verge of tears, I left before dessert and cried the entire ride home.

When I walked into my house, still a wreck from my week of manic creativity, it was filled with paper and glue and scissors and paint strewn everywhere. There were scraps of my face lying on the floor in every room.  I walked slowly into my office cum studio and I looked up on the shelf below the window. There I saw four completed mixed media collages each telling a piece of my story, of my inner journey towards integration and wholeness.

              I looked at up them and they looked back at me and we smiled.

             I was fifty-nine again.

             And I was okay.

            At least for the moment.

Ferlinghetti and Me: Together Again

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into,
if you don’t mind some people dying
all of the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half so bad
if it isn’t you.



These words found me again after forty years a couple of days ago when they came floating through my newsfeed on Facebook in that little side ticker that bombards you with every random post that every random friend is sharing - that scrolling annoyance that I find impossible to ignore.

I followed the words to Lew Jaffe’s page, a guy who friended me because he had gone to high school with my younger brother, and clicked on the YouTube link he’d shared on his page.

And there I heard a long forgotten familiar voice reciting words that once connected to every cell in my body.




I was 16 years old when I first heard Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I don’t remember exactly how or where, but it seems that one day A Coney Island of the Mind, with its black and white cityscape on the cover and its free verse poems inside found its way into my life. For months, I’d spend every night before falling asleep reading his poems over and over again, silently to myself if my sister was in her bed. On the nights she wasn't there, I’d read his words aloud, savoring each sound and image, while trying on hundreds of different voices.

Sometimes during eternity, some guy shows up….

I didn't get much sleep last night thinking about underwear....

Outside the leaves were falling and they cried, Too soon! Too soon!

I felt each word enter my young body. But more than that, I was taken up by the rhythm and the rise and fall of the sounds and syllables and for the first time in my life, I thought, yes. I get it. I understand poetry.

When my 11th grade Honors English teacher gave us the assignment to research a poet and recite a an example of that poet’s work to the class, there was never any question which poet I would do. And I didn’t seek Mr. Saunders’ permission. I didn’t even think to ask. Just stood there in front of 34 of my peers, wearing my torn, low-riding, hip-hugging jeans, a tightly ribbed, faded, pink poor boy T shirt, a thick black belt with a heavy silver buckle pulling down the already low waistband of my jeans (revealing my perfect navel) with strands of my frizzy black hair escaping the pony tail band which couldn't contain it all. My silver wire rimmed glasses with the blue tinted lenses obscured my eyes, as this strange,semi-suburban sheltered 16 year old Jewish girl stood there in that drab classroom arranged in neat rows on the second floor of George Washington High School in Northeast Philadelphia - and became Lawrence Ferlinghetti.


Afterwards I took my seat and only half listened as my classmates shared the words of Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg (or from the most brilliant boy in the class) Wallace Stevens ( whom I couldn’t understand at all!).

The only comment Mr. Saunders made when he gave me a B- for my presentation was that Ferlinghetti wasn’t a “real” poet at all.

But I didn’t care.

I had learned that Ferlinghetti had wanted to “rescue poetry form the ivory towers of academia and return it to the people.” And somehow I had gotten that, even as a lonely misfit of a girl.

In college, I distanced myself from that odd girl I once had been and recently, I have been paying for this - experiencing a dissociation between the girl I was and the woman I chose to become.

I changed my name.
I changed my hair.
I changed my teeth.
I changed my face.
And I moved further and further out of my body into my head.

I am working on this in therapy. Trying to re-integrate the long dormant pieces of my young self whose absence from my older self has kept me from becoming whole.

I shared this story with Angelo Spoto, my therapist, a Jungian analyst, who begins every session with the generative question, “Where’s the heat today?”

So I tell him breathlessly about dungarees and navels, wire rimmed glasses and high school and Facebook feeds and YouTube links and A Coney Island of the Mind.

"How did she even find him?" I ask Angelo, surprised to find myself in awe of the independent and inquisitive girl I once had been.

"There was no Internet. She couldn't Google him and none of her friends were into poetry,” I say incredulously.

“You didn’t find him, Marsha. Ferlinghetti found you,” Angelo says with a wink.

And he did.

Twice.

Once in 1968, most likely at the Marlo Book Store in the Roosevelt Shopping Center on Cottman Avenue where I'd go on Saturdays and spend hours running my fingers over the bindings of hundred of books, waiting for one to vibrate and move into my open hands.

And, here on Facebook in front of my computer screen, where I find myself once again standing in front of my English class in 1968 reciting the words that so moved me.

Only this time, in my own body.

Listen:




me, in 1970.

me today

Full circle. Together again.

The Etymology of Yet

If you say a word often enough, some say it loses its meaning -- that it becomes pure sound, noise really, not unlike the clang of a pipe or the churning of an engine.

Still, that doesn’t feel quite right to me - the loss of meaning through repetition. After all, theories abound that all human speech was onomatopoetic in origin, each word deriving its meaning from the shared associations early humans made with their mutually uttered sounds.

I remember the first time I thought about this – where words get their meaning along with the absurdity of sound and language.

I was ten or eleven, a small round faced girl with curly dark hair and a self conscious sprinkling of brown spots across my nose. No surprise then that after an afternoon of self scrutinizing gazing in the mirror, the first word that separated from itself was “freckle.”

Yes, freckle. Go ahead. Say it.


Again.

And again.

Try saying it as I did all those years ago, thousands and thousands of times, in every possible tone of voice, in every volume, with every inflection.

Freckle.

Freckle?

FRECKLE!!!!

At first, the syllables sounded silly. And I remember laughing with delight at the foolishness of it all.

"Freckle. Freckle. Freckle. Freckle. Frecklefrecklefrecklefrecklefrecklefrecklefrecklefreckle," I continued, running the syllables together.

Then the sounds of the word slowed and split in two – Frek. Uhl. Frek. Uhl. Frek. Uhl. Frek. Uhl "

I remember the rush I felt as the word separated from these spots that were on my face. I felt a giddiness and sense of elation for the word as it broke through the chains binding it to that arbitrary meaning and I watched in wonder as it soared into a space of infinite possibilities like a rocket ship making that final thrust past the hold of gravity.

In losing its attachment to the earthbound consensus of its “meaning” and no longer just "a small brownish spot on the skin, often turning darker or increasing in number upon exposure to the sun," freckle became a spirited particle dancing through the cosmos, a free agent in the universe of meaning, able to attract and recombine with multiple objects, ideas, feelings.

Freckle yourself to the sky.

Too many freckles a poor fellow makes.

That was a freckly good story.

The apples were freckle and full.

I freckle you always.


Funny how I became an English teacher - a keeper of the definitions of words, an enforcer of the rules of proper usage. Sometimes I think I did so to tether this wild streak of imagination in me to the concrete walls of a classroom and tame my wanton word longings with the whip of textbooks and curricula.

I became Mrs. Pincus, wearing the ill- fitting garb of every Miss Fidditch that walked through hallowed high school halls correcting youthful participles and tenses, until one day through sheer repetition, my life as a teacher lost all of its expected and agreed upon meaning and left me weightless and wandering.

Retirement for me has been a journey much like the one those scattered syllables took fifty years ago when my freckled nose faced off with the image of the girl in the mirror.

After three and a half years of free floating through this existential morass in a never- ending process of attracting, repelling and recombining, I have yet to arrive at a new definition for my life.

Yet.

Earlier today, I found myself reading about Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox and wondering. It states that before a moving object can travel a certain distance, it must travel half that distance. Before it can travel half the distance it must travel one quarter the distance, etc. This sequence goes on forever. Therefore, it seems that the original distance cannot be traveled, and motion is impossible.

Kind of hopeless.

Yet.

I find the ideas of motionless movement and terminal incompleteness both daunting and liberating.

Yet.

I take some comfort in words of Maxine Greene, an educator, philosopher, fellow traveler and a courageous nonagenarian.

"I am what I am not yet."