My scarf inhabits me

I lost my scarf somewhere between NY and Albuquerque. When I realized it was gone, it hit me hard; I've had that scarf since India 2007, wore it almost every day through CA winters, NY visits, kids’ graduations, in all my travels. I always had it by my side. It inhabited me. It was my security blanket; it kept my head in place.

my scarf holding my head on

My daughter says forget it! It's over! Maybe it's a lesson in acceptance, that it’s gone, that I can’t get it back, that I was distracted, and in that moment of looking away, it disappeared. But I can’t accept that I can’t change that outcome. I can’t move beyond wanting back what I’ve lost. But it’s gone. It’s gone. And no going back.

In NY, people walk around the city talking to themselves. I suppose in LA they’d do the same if they walked....but when you’re on the street in NY you find people staring straight ahead, gesticulating, talking to some unknown; or bobbing their head up and down to some distant music. 

This is something new, this talking and listening into thin air.  Along these lines, I noticed too that no one reads the newspaper on the subway anymore, no crossword puzzle to solve, no annoying person leaning in to read over your shoulder. Now people are looking at their phones, sitting in their bubble, bobbing and smiling to themselves.

Although the New York I once knew is not totally gone, it’s hard to find among the shiny new stores that have pushed out the mom and pops, the climbing new buildings that totter uneasily against the skyline, the fixed up parks, the swept up sidewalks, even the dirty, last-century buildings in Alphabet City have been pressure washed. Where are all the crazy drug dealers, the agile jugglers, the young, hopeful folk singers in Thompkins Square Park? Now you see families, spreading blankets, having picnics on the ground!  




I had breakfast at B&H on 2nd Ave, and am happy to report that at least there, the old is still true to itself. The challah bread is piled high on the counter, the home fries on the grill. The cook sips the soup, endlessly dipping her ladle to make sure there’s still enough salt, her hair in a net so we don’t get any strays, the big metal pot boiling up behind her. 

Young men come in on their breaks and order pancakes and chew the fat with the guys behind the counter in a language of the east shore, a tough guy vibrato, calibrated for ears that have gone soft from all the noise and the traffic.

They josh, they eat piles of potatoes and pancakes, they ask about the wife, they come to collect the rent (excuses are made), they’re there for the first time and are accepted...while I sit wondering how I can join this club. Admit it, I say to myself, you can’t join. You live in LA now, not the LES. You can't go back. 

But when I walk down 2nd Ave, my old stomping ground, oh, how happy I am to be here for awhile in the land of the everyman and everywoman, the land of the rapidly changing facade, the land where the young still go to reinvent themselves, where newcomers come lugging hope; the land that doesn’t ask much, but takes everything.

Library Sketches, Part 2

A friend of mine was in Alabama last week, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, ending in a walk with 80,000 others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I’d been thinking about her a lot while she made her pilgrimage south, so it seemed appropriate then to be at the Central Public library last week to hear Eric Foner on his new book, Gateway to Freedom: the Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, a mix of black and white faces in the crowd:

Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law Professor and a former student of Foner's, began the program by asking the question, "Why hidden?"

 






















Foner called his book a hidden history because so many of the people who formed the loose network of conductors and footmen that made up the Underground Railroad were unknown to American history. During Foner's research, he came across names he'd never heard before, accounts hidden away in library stacks, unread.

"What interests me about these underground conductors is that it was actually an interracial organization, or set of organizations. It’s an example not that common in American history, of black and white people working together for a common cause. There was tension, there were problems, but they managed to communicate with each other, [to send] people to each other and that’s what strikes me."

Kennedy brings up Louis Napoleon as one of his favorite unknowns.

Napoleon, an illiterate, free black man, worked as a porter for abolitionist and editor, Sidney Howard Gay; Napoleon did the footwork for much of Gay's abolitionist activities in and around New York City, finding fleeing slaves at the docks and train stations. Despite signing his name with an X, Napoleon managed to go to court and get writs of habeus corpus in support of fugitive slaves. In one famous case, a lawyer for a slave owner asked sarcastically, "Who is this Louis Napoleon, the Emperor of France?" and John Jay II, the lawyer representing the slave, said, "No, he’s a much better man." 

***

After the program I ran into Peggy Powell, Nancy Gilmore and Samuel Foster, docents at LA museums— Powell and Foster at the CA African American Museum, Gilmore at the Science Center and a volunteer archivist at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, which houses a large collection of African American memorabilia. 

They were eager to talk; Gilmore wished the program were twice as long. Foster found it informative. All wanted to see a continuation of the conversation.

Peggy Powell revealed a hidden family history of her own when she talked about her great, great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Lightfoot, and his journey along the Underground Railroad, from Kentucky to Ontario, led by a conductor named Henson, a story she had just discovered.

 

Which proves a point about the system we call the Underground Railroad. It was a fluid moving river, a many branched tributary, for people to help fugitive slaves along the way to freedom. I would be overly optimistic to think anything might change in the narrative that's told in our history books, due to Foner's Gateway to Freedom, but in the meanwhile, let's continue the conversation.



A podcast of this talk (and all ALOUD programs) can be found at: http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud

Poets House

POETS HOUSE

Poets House at Hudson River Park

I want to call my mother—tell her I'm in New York City. Oh, and by the way Mom, there's a Colgate Clock right across the river from the Poets House in lower Manhattan, the exact same clock that sat across from Dad's store (a warehouse actually) in Louisville, KY. My mother would take me there as a child to have lunch with my busy father, where he'd sweep us out the front door and deliver us to Akins Restaurant to have the famously good hot plates of turkey and mashed potatoes. The bridge over the Ohio River, heading towards that clock, was the only route I knew to get out of town, to get away from my parents, the same ones I recall now as I sit down to write. 

 Colgate clock in N.J.

The Colgate Clock is a dot across the river, just north of the Statue of Liberty, which is an even smaller dot through my camera, and across the river too from the Irish Hunger Memorial, which recalls the Irish potato famine of 1845, and those who made their way to America, with Billy Collins calming voice reciting verse over the loud speaker. The Memorial is just down the street from the Poets House (my destination, if I can ever get there), and on the top is a good view of the clock and a kite sailing by.

Irish Hunger Memorial

I don't know why I've been thinking about my mother on this trip, but twice— twice!—I've sat down to write and she's been right there, letting me know I forgot to tell her my plans; in fact, why haven't I called, and why didn't I let her know I was going to New York for a month, where the shopping is fabulous and the knishes oh so good? I sense it's my fault I forgot to call, but then I remember that's all wrong, she died five years ago.

A theory for my mother's presence is that I'm on the East Coast, the port of call for my family. My grandfather and grandmother came through Ellis Island from Poland in 1908, or so I assumed; but when I checked the Ellis Island database for a Jacob Hildebrand, he wasn't listed; even Tom looked last month when he was on Ellis Island. At the Tenement Museum a few days ago, I asked our friendly tour guide, an artist and second generation German immigrant named Jason Eisner, if that was normal, people passing through without being recorded, and he said Jacob should have been there... but he's not.

(By the way, the Tenement Museum opened my eyes to the true poverty immigrants had to endure on their arrival here...not so different from today.)

 

 Friendly tour guide at the Tenement Museum on the lower East Side

Did my grandparents come under an alias, or under my grandmother's maiden name, Shereshevsky? Or did my grandfather take his brother's name, the one who shot off his big toe so he wouldn't have to fight in the Russian Army? Unfortunately, no one in my family has the answer, as no one knows the Polish village where Jacob and Rosa lived or where they landed. It's all speculation on my part that they were here before they headed to Louisville. I sense them on the lower East Side when we tour the tenements, but I don't really know if that's true.

But for argument's sake, let's say they landed here: still how does that explain my mother's presence and wanting to talk to her? Inside the Poets House, which I finally enter after much procrastination, I sit down in the lovely peaceful library, with the beautiful blue couch.

The first book I pull out is a collection of poems by Grace Paley, one of my favorite NY writers. Almost immediately I find this poem, untitled, about Grace missing her mom. My socks are knocked off by the similarity:

   Some days I am lonesome    I want to talk to my mother

   And she isn't home

   Then I ask my father   Where has she been the last twenty years?

   And he answers

   Where do you think you fool as usual?

   She is asleep in Abraham's bosom

   Resting from your incessant provocation

[Let me stop for a moment: I really love this line, how Grace is an ever-present provocation to her brilliant surly father, even in her old age]

continue....

   Exhausted by infinite love of me

   Escaping from the boredom of days shortening to Christmas

   and the pain of days lengthening to Easter

   You know where she is   

   She is at ease in Zion with all the other dead Jews.

This poem gives me hope: maybe my mother is there too. 

But sadly, she's not here in NYC. This city is only for the living— for eating, shitting, making money, loving, walking the children to school, working hard at artistic pursuits, going places on the dysfunctional subway, observing hairstyles and Hasids, enjoying the cold rain, trying to catch a show, going with the flow. 

And sadly for me I'm leaving tomorrow. I will miss this city, so full of life.