Barbara Lefcowitz Poetry

MEMORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

“[Photographs are] not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement.” –Susan Sontag

THE GIRL ON THE SWING

Decades later, I can smell the ropes of that swing, feel their coarse texture as I held on tight, twisting them together so I could spin in dizzying circles, sometimes grazing the oak tree near the swing my grandfather had built with a board and ropes attached to a stout branch of that tree. My own private amusement park ride, unrecorded by any camera, but relived– albeit in a much subdued manner–thanks to the wings of my brain’s architecture responsible for evoking memories.  But I cannot speak to the girl about what she was thinking and can only imagine her shrieks of delight. In fact she doesn’t and will never know I exist, though my adult self acknowledges we share the same DNA.

What did she look like?  A five-year-old girl with a laughing face, curly hair in the Shirley Temple style favored at the time; she wears a gingham pinafore trimmed with lace, lace-cuffed anklets in immaculate white shoes.  But no, I couldn’t possibly have seen her actual face back then.  I must be imagining it, editing the memory, as it were, by splicing in data from a photo taken about the same time and in roughly the same place: my grandparents’ summer boarding house in then rural New Jersey.   In the photo I am sitting on a birch-log bench, delighted to be holding a small dog.  Maybe someone had told a particularly funny joke just before clicking the camera.

I retrieve the framed photo from the table on which it’s displayed.    Charming, but the girl is distant as any photo image and inaccessible to communication as the Girl on the Swing.   How do I even know if the Girl on the Bench is indeed myself?  Only because my parents long ago identified her as such.  Still this two-dimensional girl’s image evokes no sense beyond the visual: I cannot, even in a subdued manner, feel the dog’s fur or the bench’s birch-logs, smell the lilacs in the background, the leather of my white shoes.

Voila!  I realize that I have “stolen” the face in the photo and superimposed it on the faceless face of the Girl on the Swing.   That is, I have edited the memory.  Such editing is doubtless the case of all representations of a remembered moment.  In this particular example, I am lucky enough to have the photo on hand, easy for my unconscious mind to cut and paste part of it into the original image.

(In a sense I am absent from my own representation in both cases, the imagined scene and what the photo captures, framed off from what came before or after. Like what did I do prior to climbing onto the swing, what afterwards?  Maybe I fell off the swing and suffered from a bevy of scuffs and bruises.  And probably the photo was posed according to the wishes of the unknown photographer.  After he finished I might well have pushed away the dog, relieved to be free from her. (My semantic memory is sure the dog’s name was Blanchie, Sadie Goldstein’s pet.  On second thought, was it Roxy, a dog that belonged to another boarder,  name of Jennie?)

THE GIRL ON THE SLED

My recall of a later moment, when I was sledding next to my friend Irene in Central Park, offers another example.  I was probably 12 or 13 years old.  When this scene emerges from my personal museum of memories, I can still feel how my hands ached from grasping the sled’s gleaming handle bar and grazing the cold snow itself.  But once again I cannot see my face.  There exists no photo of me on the sled to help me fill in that blank, but I do have an old photo of Irene taken at another time and thus, with the help of my memory of her, can transpose it to the image of her on her sled.  Dark curly hair, dark eyes . . . a slim build.

Relatively minor editing.  But not so the sudden reminder of the “silver” bracelet I (presumably) lost in the snow that day, never to find it again.  The bracelet was a birthday gift from an aunt.  Probably it was not really silver but some amalgam of tin and copper; it was decorated with embossed spiral designs, but it was clunky and much too large for my wrists.  Nonetheless I did not remove it for safekeeping before mounting my sled.  Mea culpa.  How could I be so careless?   How explain the loss to my aunt?

I’ve no recollection of removing the bracelet, yet I did incorporate the loss—i.e. edit it into—my memory of the sledding moment.  For my recall of that delightful moment led to a series of associations that might have had no connection with the scene in Central Park.  Maybe I lost it on some other snowy occasion?  It’s clear, however, that the loss of the bracelet bothered me.

Contrary to the traditional view that memories, once constructed in the brain’s synapses, are consolidated and hence stable, contemporary psychiatrists and neurobiologists believe a memory is never static.  Rather it is malleable and subject to constant change–or else no one would ever learn.  More precisely, one can change

one’s perceptions of the memory through analyzing its contents at a later time thanks to a more enlightened take on past events as shaped by subsequent experience.  Given their malleability, memories are, of course, open to distortions and “corrections” –especially if another person shares the memory but adds or deletes certain details.   But photographs, too, can involve distortions of reality.  (More later when I discuss my essay “Menorah, Swastika, YouTube,”

THE WOMAN IN THE COTTAGE

The following is what Daniel Schachter would call an” observer” memory, as opposed to the previous “field memories” —those memories in which we see ourselves vs. those in which we see only what we saw.”  All three examples, however, were recollected at a time when I was experiencing more than a usual sense of loss.

For a few years, starting in 1978, my former husband and I rented a small island in Casco Bay, Maine.  It had only one wooden cottage; “no electricity, no plumbing, no neighbors,” ran the ad in the NY Review of Books.  With little else to do but gaze at the ocean and the dance-patterns of the gulls, perhaps pick some wild berries or climb the rocks in the cove searching for driftwood, shortly after arrival on the island I fell into a trance-like state, fully conscious of my surroundings but convinced—especially on the

many foggy mornings–that they were self-contained.  The rest of the world, the rest of my life, existed, of course, but only as an abstraction; even familiar faces were hard to conjure up as the small island itself became a sometimes eerie combination of the real and imagined.  Despite the tranquility of the place, each time I arrived, starting with the second visit, I felt a peculiar anxiety about time. The house was the same, down to the exact location of the white mixing bowl, red colander, old leather couch with its crackled cushions and claw feet, hurricane lamps and the pinned-up maritime maps, thanks to the fastidiousness of the owners from whom we had rented the place. But on the wall just opposite the front door, as if in mockery, there stared the same mirror, its common sense wooden frame making it seem all the more powerful.  Hello, island.  Hello, cottage. Hello, face in the mirror, one year older than the last time you were reflected in silvery exactness in that same glass.

Hence the ritual dinner.  While never consciously planned as such, the event always unfolded the same way as the

first time: we would sit at either end of the pine kitchen table; look with pleasure at the white platter on which there sat three bright red barely dead steamed lobsters; the ritual bottle of Merlot; a salad in a wooden bowl and a loaf of blueberry bread. My ex would pour the wine, I would slice the bread, and as we extracted the first flesh from the lobster claws, a fog horn would sound and out the large kitchen window we could see the Scotia Prince, the nightly ferry from Portland to Nova Scotia, cross Casco Bay in the early stages of its journey east.  The hell with the mirror, with the new face-cracks and neck-sags it revealed; the hell with the battery radio that chattered the time, weather, latest baseball scores and murders; this was the repeatable moment! And if it was repeatable, no time has passed since the last such occasion.

Or so I made myself believe in the way one at times believes and at the same time does not believe an illusion, especially such a large illusion as stopping the flow of time.   Lobster, Merlot, bread, salad, white platter:  the table itself is the focus of the memory.  I only appear in the background, my face invisible because I am turned towards the table, perhaps setting something down.  The red colander?  But surely I would not place the colander on the table. Yet in my mind’s eye, there it is, a perfectly placed red presence gleaming more than the lobsters.  The more I envision the scene the more I’m convinced that in my mind I placed the colander on the table to enhance that table aesthetically, in other words distorted the memory by adding a prop that logically did not belong there, especially since that ritual dinner never included pasta of any sort.  Most likely, I did this shortly after encoding the memory, probably the second time the dinner took place, as if I were touching up a still life painting. Or using a Photoshop of the Mind if the memory had been a photograph instead of “just” a memory.

I can find no photo of the island, let alone the kitchen table, though some might well have existed.  Probably I tossed any such photos out to reduce the pain of realizing that far as I was concerned, the island was gone.  Absence of any photos would help me forget the place or at least modify my regrets.  I am reminded of a woman who took a scissors to the face of a detested former daughter-in-law, Louisa, (not her real name), excising her forever from any scene in which she might have participated. Never mind the gaps in what she allowed to remain, whether other faces or a background waterfall.  Louisa had been eradicated, a victim of the woman’s scissors.  Such “cleansing” of her photograph album must have made her feel quite powerful at the time.  When I happened to see those excised photos, I couldn’t help laughing at the naiveté of such an obvious attempt to forget all the pain, real or imagined, Louisa’s behavior had elicited and at the same time to satisfy the woman’s need to cling to other faces, other shreds of the past. Or else she would have torn up entire photos in which Louisa appeared rather than merely perform surgery on them.

A few years later the joke was on me.  More than 20 years have passed since I set foot on the island; odds are that I’ll never see it again, let alone walk upon it.  My then husband and I parted ways in 1988 and without his boating skills I had no means of getting there. Besides, its shared nature was intrinsic to my fantasy of the ritual dinner

serving as a repeatable moment. (I doubt he would think about it in the same way if I ever asked him; he is one of those people who insist they live only in the present, never looking back.)  A neighbor who had shared the island with us on occasion continued to rent the place after 1988, as did my ex and his new woman until for health reasons they decided to vacation elsewhere. A few years ago, the neighbor told me the white platter had broken beyond repair: so the table scene was unrepeatable after all.

PHOTOGRAPHY

What I called the Photoshop of the Mind, capable of transforming memories, pales in comparison with the actual Photoshop computer programs that first became available in the late 1980’s and has gone through several different versions since that time.  The program has been used to modify images to make them more aesthetically appealing as well as to “doctor” photographs for commercial and political purposes.  A recent example of the latter as I write this are the transformed photographs of the Gulf oil spill edited to make BP less culpable.

Only minimally savvy when it comes to technology, I was delighted to discover the creative possibilities, call them distortions, of images I had uploaded, of both my own artwork and various family portraits, some very old, as well as a few travel shots (not my métier) and unusual picture postcards.  What fun!  I could place a confederate flag in the hands of Abraham Lincoln—a trick made to order for cartoonists.   When I transposed one of my abstractions by inserting images of my grandchildren, making them part of a scene that, of course, they never had and never could experience, they found the result strange, even disconcerting, much more so than any of my many traditional collages. Why? Because of the traditional misconception, even on the part of kids, that photography captures reality pure and simple.

Still more entertaining my discovery that through the use of various “filters” I could transform my own, generally abstract, paintings into textured swirls, better yet, shift their shapes radically through use of the Polar Opposites option.  I could “spherize” a round shape so it protruded from the background, creating an illusion of depth.  Two round shapes could be spherized enough to suggest eyes, thus changing the original flat image into a statement about, say, voyeurism or Big Brother who observes and controls everything.  A red area could magically become purple or chartreuse, an ordinary window-like shape could with a click become a   stained glass masterpiece.  How Dali would have exulted had he had access to such a program, but likely he would be chagrined by the all-too-simple ways of making instant Dali imitations, quickly and without much thought to the symbolic implications of a melting watch.

Which brings me to the key image of a room, located, according to the uploader in Berlin, 1937.  A menorah (specially designed Jewish 7 branched candelabrum linked with the lighting of oil lamps that is the essence of the Chanukah legend) is prominently displayed on a windowsill with all of its lit candles casting the sole source of light in the dark room.  But clearly visible outside the window is a flag with a Nazi-style swastika and a storefront with yet another swastika—not a sprayed graffiti swastika but the dominating image of an actual metal sign. Coming upon this image on YouTube, with a voiceover of the Swedish singer Zarah Leander, a known collaborator with Goebbels, inspired me to write “Menorah, Swastika, YouTube,” an essay modeled on the prose villanelle, an unusual and semi-invented form with which I have often experimented for several years.  My fleeting comments and questions about the juxtaposition of swastika and menorah form the crux of the piece.   The photographer is unnamed, but the irony led me to  assume he or she was European, with a propensity towards irony, a quality often lacking in the American consciousness.

Did the scene actually exist on a Berlin or any other street? Did anyone ever gaze from the candle-lit window at the shop front with the Nazi flag?  Maybe.  But given the almost too blatant irony, the juxtaposition of inside and outside the room suggests more than a casual snapshot.  No, there was no Photoshop at the time, but what was to prevent the photographer from deliberately setting a scene by arranging props inside the room to suit his ironic purpose, in particular the menorah which may or may not have been on the windowsill in the first place, whether the occupants of the flat were Jewish or not.  Which raises a key question about the illusory nature of a photo, which is not greatly different from the illusory nature of a memory.  The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that the video itself was a carefully crafted illusion, at best an ironic political statement. Why else the Zarah Leander song in the background?

In the essay I move back and forth between the photo of the room to comment in more depth on the significance of the menorah and the nature of YouTube, ultimately questioning my assertion that photographs are the equivalent false memories.  Rather, most memories consist of the distorted photographs pasted inside the randomly arranged scrapbooks of the brain.  They repeat the same images time after time, images subsequently open to various perceptions and interpretations.  In another sense, photos, too, are infinitely repeatable given the easy means of replication.   Both memories and photographs are illusions—albeit many illusions can serve a useful purpose.

That video’s dark photo: an accident? A double act of defiance, a set arranged and captured for eternity by the mechanistic aid of a camera and a recording of a song? If the photo were not marked Berlin, 1937, one could take its brief joining of images as a politically correct collage that juxtaposes the brute and his victim: a Klansman and a black slave, a rifle and a lilac, Milosevic and an Albanian Muslim.

But despite their similarities, a memory and a photograph can clash, even contradict each other.  Inside a gold frame, a tea-colored photograph of a long ago family Thanksgiving dinner hangs on a wall in my own dining room.  (One of many such ritual dinners in a variety of settings celebrating the familiar shared legend about America’s early history as distinguished from the Ragged Island ritual dinner, a personal memory whose hidden motive was the wish to stop time.) My parents, my maternal aunts and uncles as well as my grandparents are posed around a table in the latter’s Brooklyn three-generational house, where I myself lived for a while as a four-year-old child.  The date is November, 1939:  this I learned from my parents.  Everyone in the photograph is now dead, though I recognize their long-ago faces.  Aunt Rhea is lifting a white coffee cup, its contents never to be tasted or consumed.  My father is leaning forward at one end of the table, as if he had just told a much appreciated joke.  Uncle Sam, quietly handsome, looks as genial as I remember him from later years.

But my own face does not appear, though I clearly remember sitting at the table between my Uncle Jack and my mother, directly across from Uncle Sam. No software existed at the time that would delete me and bring my mother and Uncle Jack closer to fill in the gap.  Had I for some mysterious reason, been sent out of the room prior to the rest of the people?  Punishment for spilling something on my dress? A need to take me out of earshot of some jokes or secrets deemed inappropriate for me?  More phantasmagoric: had I been spirited away by some mysterious force?  Less dramatically, perhaps my sense of sitting at the table is a false memory.  Yet I clearly remember Uncle Jack telling about a dead body found under the Coney Island boardwalk—a verbal rather than visual memory.   But certainly disturbing.  Did I start to cry, which led to my being ushered “out of the picture” ? As in many other instances related to both memory and photography, I’ll never know.  Perhaps if I had an eidetic memory, capable of retaining perfect images after a single glance. . . The popular term for such a talent is photographic memory.  But modern research affirms that the latter is nigh onto mythical except perhaps for small children.

First, or earliest, memories are likewise prone to mythologizing.  Dating such memories is always approximate, but usually they hark back to the age of two or three.  When I recently asked my adult daughter to tell me her first memory she mentioned sitting on a table while a photographer [sic] snapped her picture.  She said she had no recall of what she looked like, since she was looking, of course, at the photographer.  In the undated picture that resulted she has a round face, large dark eyes, a slight smile and seems to be about 18 months old.  A photograph of being photographed, a meta-photograph as it were!

We have come full circle.  If only I could spin once again in that wooden swing with its pungent ropes.

***

MAX, ROOTS, WORDS: A Meditation on Genealogy

1. MAX

The subject line of my cousin’s email said “Grandpa Max”; attached was a computer-enhanced copy of a letter written in a graceful script, dated August 4, 1915.  It was addressed to Sam and signed Max, a street name in Denver added under Max’s flamboyant signature.  Contents were banal, some vague business issue, but still it was something, a shred from our long dead paternal grandfather’s life.

Or somebody’s life, a man named Max who was in business with a man named Sam and had gone to Colorado to recover from an unnamed illness.  TB?  In any case, a shred of someone’s figurative DNA.

Knowing little about my father’s family and less about Max in particular I felt a frisson of excitement.  Which quickly gave way to skepticism:  the letter was much too well written for a recent immigrant.  My skepticism was confirmed when I contacted another cousin, much older, who said Max had never been west of the Hudson River and never had any disease that would demand a stay in faraway Colorado.

Max: a slight and quiet man, whom I remember most as the dispenser of multi-colored Life Savers and, all too often,  the victim of  family mockery.  He used to hum and sing softly to himself, opera arias or Yiddish songs from the Old Country.   On his left arm he wore a small black leather box attached with a black strap.  (I later learned that such a box, worn by orthodox Jewish men, contained miniature prayer scrolls from the Torah.)  Max had emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York around 1890.  Had history been different, he would likely have been content to remain in his shtetl (small Jewish town) studying  the Talmud. In New York he owned a series of failed shops and worked most of his long life as a clothing cutter in the garment district.  He had a younger brother named Sam, whom I had never met; Sam was the successful one who made a fortune in the silk underwear business but apparently did not help Max raise his large family, much less make him a business partner.

So the letter was indeed addressed to great-uncle Sam, but from a different Max.  End of story.

Yet the email awakened my curiosity, dormant for a number of years, about not only my own skimpy knowledge of my family history, but the recent increase of interest in genealogy.  Jewish genealogy in particular—almost an oxymoron despite the plethora of books and websites.   Like most African-Americans, but for different reasons, for Jews from my Eastern European (Ashkenazi) background, the search was nigh onto futile. Jews from this large area, which at various times included Poland, western Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, then-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and present day Belarus, were only required to take surnames in the late 18^th century.  More urgently, records of our Eastern European ancestors had been destroyed by the Nazis in the Holocaust as well as by the Soviet occupiers, along with the towns (shtetls) where they once lived.  Ironically, some victims’ names only survived in Nazi concentration camp records.   Artifacts as well were demolished, some years ago I visited Vilna, home of some of my maternal ancestors, only to discover that tombstones with Hebrew lettering had been uprooted and used to pave streets and roads.

Given the historical isolation of many American Jews, the breaking up of traditional families and widespread intermarriage, the resurgence of genealogical research is no surprise.  Even a shred will do.  A faded photograph, a name on a ship manifest, like that of my great-aunt Dina who apparently died not long after immigration.

2. ROOTS

Beneath the soil’s surface along with the rocks, bones, worms, gems and artifacts there lies a hidden cosmos of roots impossible to map without exhuming them.  Layers of roots, spindly, fleshy, plump; rhizomes, tubers, corms; potatoes, carrots, beets…and, as we soon shall see, the almighty radish. In my minuscule garden, I study the spreading leaves of my sweet potato vine, which grew from an ordinary sweet potato I had placed in a jar partly filled with water and held aloft with toothpicks.   My mother had grown such plants, but I forgot how except that she lined the jars with some sort of cardboard and put them in a dark closet from which they emerged with green stalks she kept as houseplants in our dark NY apartment.  But my mother is long gone and I turned—where else—to Google for directions, of which I found few except that the jar should be placed in front of a window with southern exposure. It was deep winter, but I obeyed the rules, placed the jar by my sunniest window and made sure the water level was sufficiently high to nourish the root but not drown it.   After several weeks a tangle of thin roots emerged from the potato’s submerged point. Roots from a root! An urban person with little gardening experience, I took special delight the day I noticed a slim green thread growing from a bud near the top. Surprised by this early sign of my success, I dared to pot my treasure in soil.  More daring yet to place it outside come early spring, piling on more soil lest the squirrels had a taste for sweet potatoes.   As I write this it continues to thrive.  Will it survive the northern winter, bloom even a deeper and more intense green next year?

Mother, root. Root, mother.  At the time I could not fill in the connections further.  Maybe there was some deep-rooted psychological desire to not only emulate my mother but succeed in my own way.  Too pat, like much of pop psychology as well as much of its traditional roots  [sic] in Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalytic pioneers.   I realized I had a more immediate problem: to distinguish between a root as a cause and a root as an origin.

3. WORDS

The English word root has its own entangled roots. According to Robert Claiborne, it evolved from the Teutonic wrad, whose verbal DNA passed down into the Latin radix, radic, in turn leading to radical and the root vegetable radish. Ernest Weekly offers a different etymology: from the Anglo-Saxon rot via Old Norse, cousin of the German wort (also, curiously, the  German word for word).  A more distant cousin: the verb to root in the sense of grub or dig up, traceable to the Anglo-Saxon wrot (snout) and linked with the behavior of swine.  The family joker is the verb

rootle, from Dutch wroeten. The redoubtable W. W. Skeat notes in particular the Scandinavian, especially  Icelandic branch of the family.

4. DINA

Max the letter writer was not the right Max.  A false ancestor, as it were.  But

16 year old Dina was real enough, at least according to the ship manifest that included names from one branch of my mother’s family.  What particularly struck me as I viewed a copy of the manifest at the NY Public Library were the words “Deformity of the Spine” next to her name, which was partly crossed out; yet she, like her mother, my great-grandmother known simply as Bubby, and her siblings, was stamped “Admitted.  2/ 20/ 1904.”

No one had ever mentioned her, though I did learn that my mother, born 1909, had been named for her.  Was she sent back to Pinsk where she died young or did she die on the Lower East Side less than five years after her arrival at Ellis Island?

Impossible to learn anything more about her. So I made her up, shaped her into a fictional character with whom I exchanged a few imaginary letters.  My fantasy was eventually published in Where We Find Ourselves (State University of New York, 2009), an anthology of poems, essays, and stories subtitled “Jewish Women around the World Write About Home.”  I did braid some facts with the strings  of my narrative, which opened “Dear Dina, long dead great-aunt I never met, in my imagination you’re riding the Blue Train above the rooftops of Belarus.  I think they just called it Russia back then.  You’re riding over snowfields, that like everything else are tinged blue, even the miasmal fumes from the Pripet Marshes. “ I went on to imagine how her family in both the new and old worlds treated her disability and how she eventually ended up hiding on a wintry fire escape, which led to her fatal illness.

But Dina could not possibly have passed onto me any of her DNA (pun unintended)– not only because she presumably had no children but, more important, was not a direct maternal ancestor.  Bubby, yes, and Dina’s sister Annie, my grandmother. Both, having given birth to at least two daughters, would satisfy the theory made popular by Bryant Sykes about universal maternal lineage through women’s ability to pass on mitochondrial DNA.

Yet Bubby was stubbornly religious and I am an agnostic; she was the leader of her family and a wide circle of friends and I tend to be a loner. Annie was a splendid homemaker and cook; I can barely boil a potato.  Though both were definitely  ancestors, albeit recent ones,  it begs all logic to say that either was the source, in a causal sense, of any of my own quirks or skills. Better Dina’s legacy as source for the part of myself that is both curious and creative. to which I give full reign in the letters to her supposedly written by myself.

And maybe that’s what genealogical quests are all about, a form of self-expansion:  that 18^th century baron in the family tree of an Anglo-French acquaintance; that Mayflower passenger in the history of another, someone else’s kinship with Robert Frost. . .

5. WORDS

The most common definition, as opposed to etymology, of the word root is the subterranean part of a plant.  Given their hidden nature, Vegetable roots in particular can be mysterious.  I’ll never forget my surprise when, around age four, I discovered a slim carrot growing in the dirt beneath its leafy stem.

The word is also used in mathematics, music, and dentistry, among other contexts.  Connotatively, it can refer to a source or cause, as in, say, the root of his drug problem was abuse by his wicked stepmother and—here’s the rub—also as an indicator of origin. His drug problems originated from the time his father remarried and he had to live with his wicked stepmother.

Often the two definitions are confused.  The cause of my recent sore throat was bacteria that were passed around at a crowded meeting.  Its literal origin, or beginning, manifested itself when I woke up a couple of days after that meeting.  Simple enough.  But the bacteria also had their own ancient origin, going back four billion years to one of the earliest forms of life on the planet, probably formed in the sea and evolved over the eons into a vast array of descendants.  So its very long range cause was the primordial birth of one-celled creatures in its “eukaryotic” lineage.  In this case, the cause, the immediate cause, was more relevant, demanding the curative effect of an antibiotic or lemon lozenge.

Back to my mother’s sweet potato plants: the memory of her fondness for growing such plants appeared out of the gray, as it were, at a time when my creative energies had sputtered to a nearly complete halt, exacerbated by a series of personal losses and a particularly dreary winter.  But that accounts only for the timing of its origin; unless the term is stretched to the breaking point, if does not qualify as a cause.  For that I must dig more deeply into my psychological need to replace negative memories of my mother, who was bipolar much of her life, with more positive images.

So with genealogical information, which I now realize deals more with origins than causes.  Starting with the real Grandpa Max, my ethnic origins could—if the information were available—reveal information about my European history.   Maybe one of his great-great-grandfathers was a gifted singer, one of his great-great-great grandmothers a skilled weaver.  I have not even a trace of such skills; likewise with more recent and known information, such as the musical talents of several people on my maternal family tree.  Not that the information is worthless.  The problem comes when the information is assumed to be real without question e.g. my cousin imagining Max as a plucky pioneer with TB who rode the rails all the way from New York to Colorado early in the 20^th century instead of the quiet laborer that he indeed was.

And yet, I remember that in a bookcase in the sun parlor of the house in Brooklyn where Max lived with his family there was a shelf of books with bright yellow covers, each dealing with a famous explorer, Cortez, Pizarro, et al.  As well as books about Napoleon, allegedly his hero along with Enrico Caruso.

In the only photo I have of him he is maybe 20 years old, wearing a derby and posing with two unidentified young men.  No smile, but a touch of elegance, even pride, a passing resemblance to Charlie Chaplin.  Why do I keep it in my photo drawer since I rarely look at it?

As proof, among other such, that I didn’t just spring like Topsy,  proof

of  the  far-reaching but mysterious net of which my personal history is  but one nano-part.   And for the preservation of memory, which will disappear when I and the last of my paternal cousins pass from this world, maybe briefly known by name by another generation or two, a name like Dina or Max.

A HISTORY OF TIME IN 10 CHAPTERS

A cigar is a cigar, a rose a rose, time is time.

But unlike roses and cigars, it gives forth neither scent nor stench, meaning nor definition.  At best the mind can divide it using arithmetic and geometry, simple astronomy.

It begins  or does not begin,  ends but does not end, lacks a knowable source though in the imagination it can serve as a source itself, sometimes of consternation, sometimes of delight.

We can think forever about time but cannot touch it.  But all is notlost: we can measure it by knots, ticks and tocks; mark it by chimes, gongs, heartbeats; graph it and arrange it in rows of intricate glyphs.

Rivers flood their banks, dry up; so much for the familiar comparison between time and a river,  justified only by the latter’s one-way flow though Einstein and Hawking would dispute  such an absolute claim, as well the many believers in time as circular. Or illusory.

It cannot fly,  perch itself on hands, march,  creep, be traded like money, get lost,  take sides; despite Ovid’s claim that tempus edax rerum, time cannot devour anything, cannot  be killed or caught in a bucket,  is not a circus, a gypsy, a thief; can be neither out of joint nor “brisk and giddy-paced” (Twelfth Night), much as we would like to think so.

Abstract as space and quarks, marks of time can nonetheless be embedded in concrete matter. Ancient time carvers engraved lunar calendars on eagle bone fragments; notched calendar sticks have been discovered in places diverse as Siberia and Malaysia, the Maya and Aztecs were expert at embodying time in stone.

Long ago Father Time died, a wizened old man who had abandoned his family, taking up with a younger woman who worshipped him at first but wanted more sex, less paternalistic wisdom.  His wife, not to be confused with Mother Time, took up rhythmic dancing, his children transformed themselves to metronomes to keep her performance in line.

Mother Time, a distant relative of the Old Woman in the Shoe, constantly gives birth to low-entropy baby multiverses, according to Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest of  the Ultimate Theory of Time. She often insists on her full surname, Mother Space-Time.

The dead are likely free from time, except for the memories of the living, which rarely endure past two generations.

***

NOSTALGIA, TECHNICAL VIRGINS, THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

Patti Page

The aging Patti Page was singing her 1950 hit The Tennessee Waltz on one of those nostalgia programs that Public Television broadcasts when trying to raise money. A man in the audience, who looked to be in his late middle age, could not control his tears.  Likewise a woman I took to be his wife. Then another man, several men and women, all of a certain age. To my surprise, I. too, felt tears in my eyes, though I’d never been a great fan of popular music. of the time.  For good reason:

With few exceptions, my generation, which came of age in the 50’s, had the most saccharine, boring, and downright stupid popular songs. like Sh-boom, Sh-boom; Perry Como’s Hoop-Dee-Do Doo, one Eileen Barton’s If I Knew You Were Coming/I’d have Baked a Cake. . ./ Of course there was some decent jazz, the Third Man Theme on that haunting zither,  Pete Seeger and The Weavers (later banned from the airwaves because  the group was allegedly  “pink”) and early rock to liven things up. but the song I most remember was The Tennessee Waltz. I even recall associating it with a boy on whom I had a crush, though I’ve no idea why. Probably because my crush and the popularity of the song took place at the same time.  (As illogical as any ad hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy:  I am wearing a white shirt; it is snowing today. Yet I wept. And for a mini-second imagined I was back in the 50’s with my friends from high school and college, most of them now drifted away. many no longer alive. As the key line from the Tennessee Waltz goes I know just how much I have lost…

Nostalgia

Nostalgia: that sentimental hankering for the past, literally the ache to go back to an always idealized time or space, the blessed isles of fantasy, a golden place lacquered to shine more brightly than it ever did in its day.  Actually, this deeply conservative urge is more concerned with time than space, though the two are sometimes interchangeable, like the idealized wish to return to the womb noted in Freudian theory.  Yes, the womb, where all mammals once romped and frolicked in a warm sea, a state of being that demanded neither thought nor action –not unlike fantasized abodes of the dead.

It is the opposite of both irony and skepticism, a bastardized version of Golden Age myths, In its most extreme form, nostalgia fed the delusion that led to the suicide of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.   At its core nostalgia is the impossible craving to reverse time and return to one’s youth—or to some idealized civilization in the presumed dawn of civilization, which varies between cultures.   As Linda Hutcheon claims, nostalgia “exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near.”  [italics added]  [1] The closer the past, the more distant the future, particularly one’s inevitable death.

As architectural history and studies of interior design reveal, nostalgia for earlier styles is rampant: why else the fondness for colonial American furniture (or imitations thereof) and a recent resurgence of the French bidet: a must for the upscale American bathroom even though far removed from its original purpose.  Prominent arbiters of style like Ralph Lauren and Estee Lauder decorate their private offices with Empire and Belle Epoque furniture; computers, fax machines, and file cabinets relegated to the main or public offices.  Fads of all sorts glut the nostalgia marketplace: what consumer can resist the inevitable revival of suspenders or the micro-miniskirts of the 60’s?  As Witold Ryczynski claims, “…acute awareness of tradition is a modern phenomenon that reflects a desire for custom and routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation. “  [2] Even if the nostalgic objects and styles have to be invented.

Yet nostalgia is the sine qua non of much poetry, especially of the romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats.  Often they and their contemporaries craved a return to nature as the antidote to the rising Industrial Revolution as well as to earlier aesthetic traditions—e.g. the creator of the classical Grecian Urn in Keats’s famous Ode or the Florence of Boccaccio in Coleridge’s poem of that name.  Baudelaire links nostalgia with the search for the unknown, but insists he will resist its call: “I will not whine like Ovid/Driven out of Latin paradise” (Horreur Sympathetique), Contemporaries like Billy Collins address the subject sardonically at times:  “Even this morning would be improvement over the present,” but the prominent American poet Philip Levine devotes the vast majority of his many poems to evocations of his Detroit childhood.  More than I first realized, I myself have my stock of nostalgic references from childhood: the creek, kitchen pump and ice-box of my grandparents’ summer house, the splendor of skipping through the grass that has long ago been paved over, et al.

The 50’s

The 50’s?  While Pat Boone and Eddie Fisher were crooning banalities, sexual mores, at least in middle-class white America, were as strict as any Victorian headmaster could preach.  Pre-marital sex?  Verboten, especially for women, some of whom protected their reputations by calling themselves technical virgins—heavy petting but no penetration. To say nothing of severe limits to the ambitions of all but a few ambitious women.  To say nothing of rampant racism.  Of intense fears of communism that led to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the inquisition of suspect “reds” led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his minions.  Of the Korean War and the lead-up to Vietnam.  Rarely did anyone protest; such protest that took place was mainly aesthetic and social  (remember Hootenannies and Coffee Houses?) No wonder that at my college graduation in 1956, the speaker, poet Archibald McLeish, called us “the marshmallow generation.”

Janice

The story of my former college roommate, Janice, could only have taken place in the 1950s.  I remember visiting her at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers on Staten Island, NY, one late summer day in 1955. I had recently returned from a year of study abroad.  In mid-April she had written me a letter about her secret pregnancy: I must contact her at the Home soon as I returned. She also said she had secretly married her boyfriend, Bill, a graduate student at Yale, over Thanksgiving break.  So the pregnancy was not illegitimate.  In fact she and Bill had only had sex two or three times, as I later learned.   Her last sentence was underlined in purple ink:

God forbid if the baby comes late and I can’t arrive on time for the beginning of our senior year.  I could say I have mono, but they might suspect something else, even contact my parents.  I’ve never told them about the elopement, let alone about the baby.

I must backtrack.  Unbelievable as it might seem today, in the 1950s it was strictly against the rules for a student in our fancy women’s college to marry without the permission of the Warden, one Miss Withee, whose eyes were the color and size of raisins. Pregnancy from an unreported marriage would be a major sin, equivalent with an out of wedlock conception.  Unless one could prove she was beyond doubt a virgin, a real rather than a “technical virgin”—i.e. everything but penetration.  Abortion, of course, was illegal, the pill didn’t come along until 1960, diaphragms and condoms were hard to find in Massachusetts.

“I did what I could,” Janice said, averting her eyes as if to study the cracks

in the building’s brick porch. “Nothing worked.”

“What about Bill? Didn’t he try to help?”

“Oh, he looked for a doctor who would take care of the problem. But they all wanted lots of money.  So I planned to get rid of it myself until one of the girls here almost died from trying it with a coat hanger.”

Someone was playing a radio, The Ballad of Davy Crockett booming through an open window, loud enough to drown out our voices.

“But you were married.  Why couldn’t you have the kid and finish college later?

“Shh. The Home doesn’t know that.  It’s supposed to serve only unwed mothers.”

Before I left, Janice pleaded with me to protect her, lie, if necessary, if the college officials suspected anything if she had to show up late for fall registration.

“There’s something else that must remain secret,” she whispered. “I lied on the adoption agency’s health form and mentioned nothing about Bill’s epilepsy.

I started to walk towards the ferry. And refrained from saying how all her secrets and lies put me in a risky position.

I guess that on one level I enjoyed being the custodian of her secrets.  After all, Janice had “gone all the way” as we used to say.

CODA: She gave birth to a boy in late August and managed to return to school on time. as if it was part of a script.  We rarely talked about the baby, who had adopted by a nameless couple (that’s how things worked back then) Many years later I visited her in Chicago, where, now divorced from Bill, she lived alone and had become devoutly religious.  We chatted a bit about old times.  Finally I got up the courage to ask her about that summer of 1955.

“1955.  That was the summer I worked as a waitress in Wisconsin.”

Genuine or feigned amnesia? The latter would be the opposite of nostalgia, an act of forgetting, even if not deliberate.

The Grandfather Paradox

Shortly after that PBS program on music of the 50’s I found myself singing The Tennessee Waltz; an audio-tic or, more expressively, an earworm, as some psychologists call it.   Maybe I was far more nostalgic than I thought.  I began to read about The Grandfather Paradox: in fantasy one could travel back to the past and prevent his or her own birth by killing a grandfather or maybe a great-great—great grandfather.   That one missing piece from the genealogical chain would have a far greater effect: not only would I not have been born, but my great-greats, etc.  Mind-boggling.  And even abstractly possible argue physicists who study wormholes and cosmic strings. Maybe even infinite regress: knock that apple out of the tree before Eve could pick it. Voila! No original sin..

In earthier terms, I but the imagined effect on history of a single seemingly trivial moment, like when Tristram Shandy’s mother distracts his father just prior to the height of intercourse by asking if the man had remembered to wind the clock.  A different sperm might well have won the race to her waiting ovum.  If Hitler’s mother had a headache that night, or, for that matter, Albert Einstein’s.  What if, what if . . .

Come to think of it, The Tennessee Waltz had banal lyrics even for the 50’s, when it was number one on pop, country, and R&B charts.  Better to go back to the music of the 1930’s when despite the Depression and beginning of World War 11 swing and jazz flourished along with such tear-jerkers as Melancholy Baby. (YouTube is replete with musical nostalgia channels.)

So much for Patti Page: now I really know just how much I have lost. Not that much after all.

***

1.  Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, ” Comparative Literature 30 (2000), 189-207.

2. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (Penguin: 1987), p. 9

THE DUERR TWINS

for Carolyn and Marilyn Duerr, Wherever You Might Be These Days

–Late January, the season of loss.  Behind my back, somebody’s emptying his pockets on my dining room table.  As soon as I find these things, I toss them in the trash.

–First a scrawled note, “Don’t Walk into Kitchen.” I pay no attention, but find nothing especially  awry, the same unwashed dishes, scattered utensils, paints, fabric dye, books, crumpled papers.

The next day two sugar packets from Salonika, Greece, a city I’ve no recollection of visiting.

–Two plastic roses nobody I know would own, let alone display in glass jars that might once have been filled with peas or beans.  Certainly not with Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Syrup, which disappeared from the shelves decades ago.

–Two barrettes, each missing three of its four sequins.

–If I cannot recognize them, these cannot be things I have lost.  Right?

–Each day something new.  And to make matters worse, always doubled: just when I’d sworn off investing ordinary things with messages, arcane meanings.

–Perhaps if I stop tossing away these gifts, he’ll give up?  Yes, he.  Only a man would be so careless.  Imagine: two squirming goldfish on my table’s antique silk cloth.

–Two pairs of small shoes caked with mud right on top of my last piece of wedding china, a blue and yellow Spode platter I once liked, I forget why.

–Two disembodied braids, one blonde, the other brown.  I swear the hair is not mine, has never been mine.  Two inkwells, two wooden pens whose points still quiver, two old-fashioned notebooks with speckled black covers.

–This is getting scary but I try not to think about it.  I have no idea how the person enters; my doors and windows are all triple-bolted, there’s no broken glass, no discernible cracks in the foundation of my house.  No chimney, no dumb-waiter, no leak in the roof.

–No luck when I write a note asking the giver to desist, nor when I check for fingerprints.  I know these are not dream figments.  If they’re memories, I’ve forgotten them beyond recollection.  So why doesn’t the giver stop giving?

–If he thinks he’s being generous, he’s wrong.  I do not want these things.  I do not want the two empty picture frames he left this morning, securing each with a fork so they wouldn’t fly off in a sudden breeze…as if any breeze could enter my triple-bolted windows.

–But I’m afraid to tell anybody what’s happening.  The police will think I’m crazy and transport me at once to a hospital in a gleaming silver ambulance.  My neighbor is likely to ask to inspect the merchandise; take it for herself if she perceives any worth.  My former husband will ask what he can do to help, then slam down the phone’s receiver.

–By the way, I’m sure he is not the man who empties his pockets onto my dining room table, though he used to do so back in that other country when we were married to each other. . .shoes, spare change, gum wrappers, her lipstick, his collection of lint.

–This time the picture frames each contain a photograph, reddish brown and slightly cracked.

But the face in each has that unmistakably stiff pose of a school yearbook photograph.

–Two girls.  They do not resemble any recollections I have of myself.  Nor do they resemble each other.  The hair of each is twisted into neat braids: one light, the other dark.  Most likely one blonde, the other brown.

–As I look more closely I can hear in the distance a song popular during the War.  I think it was called “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.”  The song reminds me of an American flag with only 48 stars.  It hangs in front of a classroom, under a picture of George Washington.  Every morning the children salute the flag, placing right hand over heart.  They say the Pledge of Allegiance but do not mention any gods.  Then they sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee/ Sweet Land of Liberty,” the teacher keeping time with a ruler.

–I am beginning to get the idea.  But I haven’t saluted for years nor have I said the Pledge, sung that song.  I understand children no longer do so.  Of course, I am no longer a child, so I guess I wouldn’t qualify to skip over these matters.  I’m not sure I remember all the words, ask the boy next to me for help.  He doesn’t answer.  So I ask this girl with frizzy little curls.  She, too, does not answer.  Nor the girl behind me, the boy in front of me.  I am afraid one of them will pee on the wooden schoolroom floor and I’ll get blamed for it because the puddle will spread under my desk.  I’m sure everyone is staring at me, including the teacher, whose name I forget.

–But they are all staring at the Duerr Twins, Carolyn and Marilyn.  So am I.  How could I have forgotten the Duerr Twins, one blonde, the other brown-haired; one sharp-tongued, the other shy to the point where she seemed dumb.  .  .

–The Duerr Twins live on the other side of the Culver Line. Make that the wrong side. They are rumored to be dirty, at least by my mother and the mothers of my friends.  We are never allowed to cross to the other side of the Culver Line because that’s where the Irish people live.  As well as some Italians.  Nobody Jewish lives on the other side of the Culver Line.

– From the moment I first saw the Duerr Twins, they fascinated me.  How could they be twins if they look and act so different?  Carolyn’s the smart blonde one, Marilyn the dumb brunette.  I can’t believe they swam together in the same dark wet place before they were born.  How I’d love to see their house, to play with them after school, to see them naked so I could compare their bodies, Carolyn’s puffy little breasts,  which I imagine as matching her pale blue eyes,  Marilyn’s flat chest, her brown nipples.

–I wonder how the Duerr Twins figured out where I live now.  But I don’t bother to ask.  Each is seated at my dining room table.  Though they are dressed in identical gingham pinafores, each holds in her hand a different Dionne Quintuplet spoon: Carolyn holds Yvonne, Marilyn holds Annette.  Now that I’ve figured things out more or less I welcome them to my house.

–So many questions I want to ask them– and I know that if I don’t ask now, I’ll likely never get another chance.  Each is eating ice-cream, Carolyn green, as in pistachio, Marilyn pink, as in strawberry or maybe cherry.  Is it somebody’s birthday?  Theirs?  Mine?  There’s only one problem.  Carolyn and Marilyn are still eight years old, I am 63, going on 64.

–If I wanted these memories, I would never have forgotten them.  Right?  Besides, they no longer call it the Culver Line.  It still runs along McDonald Avenue in Brooklyn, one of the city’s few remaining elevated lines.  But it’s called by a letter or number, I forget which because I no longer live on the right side of the Culver Line, no longer live anywhere near it, anywhere near Brooklyn, for that matter.

–It occurs to me that maybe I, too, am still eight years old.  But when I see my reflection in yet another Quintuplet Spoon, I realize I’m still 63 going on 64.  The Duerr Twins and I have nothing in common.  Yet I don’t want them to vanish.  At least not yet.  Certainly I won’t toss them in the trash like all the other so-called gifts somebody emptied from his pockets onto my dining room table.

–The next day I return from work and to my great relief the Duerr Twins are still sitting there, holding the same spoons each, eating the same ice-cream.  And I notice something else: two very small bits of ribbon curled in the middle of the table.  This time I’m not tempted to toss my gifts away.  I pin one ribbon in my hair above my right ear, the other above my left ear.

–And the day after that, not only are the twins still there in the same positions as before, but I find two small change purses, each with a rusty clasp.  I do not recognize them as anything I ever possessed.  Perhaps I’ve forgotten them?  But I realize it’s possible to remember something one is not aware of ever having forgotten.  The fun is just beginning. . .

–What a lucky person I am after all.  Especially in late January, the very heart of the season of loss.

GRAY STONE, APRICOT, METAPHOR, MEMORY: Some Thoughts While Flying from Istanbul to Ankara

In my search for something unique, I picked up a small gray stone this morning outside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque.

Surely its band of black markings matched that of no other stone?

To make sure, however, I would have to test it against every stone in the world, which would not only make me miss my flight to Ankara, but, more crucially, violate the rhetoric of uniqueness: a rhetoric that bans not only comparisons and contrasts, but the words like and unlike, different and same, along with all those post-hocs, metonymies, metaphors.

Now sitting on the plane, I leap from stone to time. Surely this day is unique. Correction: every day is unique. So there must be a multiplicity of uniquenesses. Still I imagine holding this one particular day in my hand, a solitary day brave enough to break away from its vast conglomeration of kin, all those jours and tage and dias.

But the day would then become a personification, an abstraction so far removed from my hand’s capacity to feel and at the same time lacking any capacity of its own to sense my hand’s texture, degree of dampness and warmth, perhaps some fine trembling, that even a stone would be better. At least I could feel the stone’s jagged coldness, wrap my fingers around it to make a small cocoon. Also lost in abstraction, the day’s unrepeatable moments, its unique markings:

–how the sun now briefly tinges with copper the clouds below before their cobbled islands drift back into the Black Sea.

–how the woman next to me, whose long brown headscarf matches her chador, opens her Koran, then suddenly closes it, leans forward as if searching for something–

a jewel, a unicorn?–retrieves some apricots from her bag and offers me one, which I politely refuse, lest it be unwashed.

–the helical scar on the face of a man across the aisle

–the smell of Turkish coffee laced with fenugreek

Still, I want something more tangible than memories of such moments. At least a sound, a unique sound. Even if the latter is merely a syllable, a phoneme, a sound not yet uttered. Or uttered so long ago even other sounds have forgotten it, like the other small gray stones have forgotten the one I picked up.

But why would I want such a sound? Because, I have begun to realize, what I really want is something that would speak to me alone, thus ratifying my fantasy of uniqueness.

Yet is my own or anyone else’s uniqueness necessarily desirable? Yes, we like to think we’re unique– a fantasy of being the only creature in the world to merit food and comfort on demand, a fantasy that goes back to early infancy when we felt unique, at least special. Even if born an identical twin or sextuplet.

Air turbulence. The woman in the brown headscarf reopens her Koran. The man with the helical scar searches for his seat belt. But I must not let the turbulence distract me from awareness of my need to rethink the notion of uniqueness.

Identical twins, to say nothing of triplets and octuplets, jar our socially instilled notion that each person is unique, his or her spirals of DNA different from yours or mine. Prior to the use of fertility drugs, such “multiples” were considered circus freaks, plural creatures whose Evil Eyes were so precisely the same they might have been produced on an assembly line. Twins and Technology: a topic worth pondering further. But there’s a comfort in multiplicity.

The now bouncing Boeing 727 en route from Istanbul to Ankara where I write this is surely the same as any Boeing 727 produced whenever mine was, one of many, the very opposite of unique. Which makes their behavior more or less predictable. Multiplicity may become tedious, but the unique can be uniquely threatening.

I think for the first time in decades of Rebecca Horbund, a woman from my Brooklyn youth who walked around with a large protrusion that bounced from the left side of her face; it resembled a bunch of purple grapes encased in flesh. When she approached, we kids would laugh to disguise our fear that Rebecca was The Monster of Ocean Parkway who at any moment would snatch us and turn us into grapes, or perhaps cause similar protrusions to grow on our own faces. But then she would no longer have been unique.

Though each leaf, each particle of rain, each snowflake , each fingerprint and iris is indeed unique, sometimes the evidence of uniqueness can be so slight, as in each blade of grass, any particular blade might as well pass for yet another replication of one of nature’s numerous patterns. Yes, patterns. Nature, that consummate trickster, can create both uniqueness and multiplicity. We may assume that the red blood cells in our bodies and the bodies of others are similar if not alike, yet according to biologists, the anatomy of the red cells in my bloodstream differ from equivalent cells in your body; from the cells in the bloodstream of the man with the helical scar; the woman wearing the brown chador. Yet they are basically comparable, as are all bodily organs and processes, unless a mysterious and rare disease has distinguished them from the norm–that is, made them unique like poor Rebecca’s grapey face.. Otherwise there could be no remedies at all, no ways of predicting the course of any condition, no need for any medical doctors.

Which is scarier, uniqueness or multiplicity? Despite the jarring effects of identical twins, let alone octuplets, I dare say most of us prefer multiplicity no matter how

vigorous our claim to rebellion against the norm.

So why do I still at times crave my own uniqueness? Probably I confuse uniqueness with originality and the unusual. Or with an egotistical pleasure of standing out from the crowd. But that sounds too close to an absurd craving for eccentricity, a total separation from the crowd. And the more unique I might be–that is, the more removed from the cultural norms of my society, my time and place, the more literally ec-centric or outside the circle, the lonelier I am likely to be. Just as well that the craving for uniqueness–physical deformities aside– is impossible to satisfy. Even fantasies of such can create barriers between self and others, interfere with friendship, destroy love.

The woman closes her Koran, the man with the helical scar sleeps, the flight attendants resume their usual beverage service. \

Returning to my earlier expressed wish for a unique sound that would speak to me alone, I now realize that hidden behind that metaphor–a breach, of course, of the “rhetoric of uniqueness”–is the desire to be praised, recognized, appreciated for what I consider my best achievements and traits: my art, my writing, my adventurousness, my loyalty and kindness, my wit. . . Enough already! Even when that desire is sometimes satisfied, it brings on a strange sort of amnesia. Within a day or two, sometimes even within a few minutes, the nice words drop into the black hole of the forgotten.

So much for a “unique” sound that has been expressed so long ago that even other sounds have forgotten it, like the other small gray stones have “forgotten” the stone I picked up this morning and removed from its “community.”

CODA

–Memory is to the connections implied by metaphor as forgetting is to the literal, usually isolated word or phrase:

APRICOTS FOR SALE! ACCIDENT AHEAD! EAT MORE FISH!

– Memory involves connections to the past, likewise the closely linked distortion of memory known as nostalgia, which involves fantasies of of repetition, replication, multiplicities of time.

–Because memory depends on connections with the past, it may be considered part of the anti-unique, that is, the connected rather than the isolated. Forgetting, on the other hand, severs links with the past.

Does that mean that the narcissistic craving for uniqueness is after all a craving for forgetfulness in the broadest sense of that word? After all, if I want to think of myself as unique, I am really expressing a nonsensical wish to forget all those traits, anatomical, psychological and otherwise, all those experiences I share with the vast majority of my fellow human beings.

After we land, I think I’ll go stone-hunting again. Maybe in Ankara I’ll find a stone with orange and chartreuse markings, shaped like a heart. Or purple like Rebecca Horbund’s grapes. Most likely, though, the stone heart or grape will have dropped into the grass from some tourist’s necklace purchased at the Grand Bazaar.

Meanwhile I’ll take up my seatmate’s offer of an apricot, washed or unwashed. If she has any left in her bag.

***

NOSTALGIA, TECHNICAL VIRGINS, THE TENNESSEE WALTZ

Patti Page

The aging Patti Page was singing her 1950 hit The Tennessee Waltz on one of those nostalgia programs that Public Television broadcasts when trying to raise money. A man in the audience, who looked to be in his late middle age, could not control his tears.  Likewise a woman I took to be his wife. Then another man, several men and women, all of a certain age. To my surprise, I. too, felt tears in my eyes, though I’d never been a great fan of popular music. of the time.  For good reason:

With few exceptions, my generation, which came of age in the 50’s, had the most saccharine, boring, and downright stupid popular songs. like Sh-boom, Sh-boom; Perry Como’s Hoop-Dee-Do Doo, one Eileen Barton’s If I Knew You Were Coming/I’d have Baked a Cake. . ./ Of course there was some decent jazz, the Third Man Theme on that haunting zither,  Pete Seeger and The Weavers (later banned from the airwaves because  the group was allegedly  “pink”) and early rock to liven things up. but the song I most remember was The Tennessee Waltz. I even recall associating it with a boy on whom I had a crush, though I’ve no idea why. Probably because my crush and the popularity of the song took place at the same time.  (As illogical as any ad hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy:  I am wearing a white shirt; it is snowing today. Yet I wept. And for a mini-second imagined I was back in the 50’s with my friends from high school and college, most of them now drifted away. many no longer alive. As the key line from the Tennessee Waltz goes I know just how much I have lost…

Nostalgia

Nostalgia: that sentimental hankering for the past, literally the ache to go back to an always idealized time or space, the blessed isles of fantasy, a golden place lacquered to shine more brightly than it ever did in its day.  Actually, this deeply conservative urge is more concerned with time than space, though the two are sometimes interchangeable, like the idealized wish to return to the womb noted in Freudian theory.  Yes, the womb, where all mammals once romped and frolicked in a warm sea, a state of being that demanded neither thought nor action –not unlike fantasized abodes of the dead.

It is the opposite of both irony and skepticism, a bastardized version of Golden Age myths, in its most extreme form, nostalgia fed the delusion that led to the suicide of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.   At its core nostalgia is the impossible craving to reverse time and return to one’s youth—or to some idealized civilization in the presumed dawn of civilization, which varies between cultures.   As Linda Hutcheon claims, nostalgia “exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near.”  [italics added]  [1] The closer the past, the more distant the future, particularly one’s inevitable death.

As architectural history and studies of interior design reveal, nostalgia for earlier styles is rampant: why else the fondness for colonial American furniture (or imitations thereof) and a recent resurgence of the French bidet: a must for the upscale American bathroom even though far removed from its original purpose.  Prominent arbiters of style like Ralph Lauren and Estee Lauder decorate their private offices with Empire and Belle Epoque furniture; computers, fax machines, and file cabinets relegated to the main or public offices.  Fads of all sorts glut the nostalgia marketplace: what consumer can resist the inevitable revival of suspenders or the micro-miniskirts of the 60’s?  As Witold Ryczynski claims, “…acute awareness of tradition is a modern phenomenon that reflects a desire for custom and routine in a world characterized by constant change and innovation. “  [2] Even if the nostalgic objects and styles have to be invented.

Yet nostalgia is the sine qua non of much poetry, especially of the romantics Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats.  Often they and their contemporaries craved a return to nature as the antidote to the rising Industrial Revolution as well as to earlier aesthetic traditions—e.g. the creator of the classical Grecian Urn in Keats’s famous Ode or the

Florence of Boccaccio in Coleridge’s poem of that name.  Baudelaire links nostalgia with the search for the unknown, but insists he will resist its call: “I will not whine like Ovid/Driven out of Latin paradise” (Horreur Sympathetique), Contemporaries like Billy Collins address the subject sardonically at times:  “Even this morning would be improvement over the present,” but the prominent American poet Philip Levine devotes the vast majority of his many poems to evocations of his Detroit childhood.  More than I first realized, I myself have my stock of nostalgic references from childhood: the creek, kitchen pump and ice-box of my grandparents’ summer house, the splendor of skipping through the grass that has long ago been paved over, et al.

The 50’s

The 50’s?  While Pat Boone and Eddie Fisher were crooning banalities, sexual mores, at least in middle-class white America, were as strict as any Victorian headmaster could preach.  Pre-marital sex?  Verboten, especially for women, some of whom protected their reputations by calling themselves technical virgins—heavy petting but no penetration. To say nothing of severe limits to the ambitions of all but a few ambitious women.  To say nothing of rampant racism.  Of intense fears of communism that led to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the inquisition of suspect “reds” led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his minions.  Of the Korean War and the lead-up to Vietnam.  Rarely did anyone protest; such protest that took place was mainly aesthetic and social  (remember Hootenannies and Coffee Houses?) No wonder that at my college graduation in 1956, the speaker, poet Archibald McLeish, called us “the marshmallow generation.”

Janice

The story of my former college roommate, Janice, could only have taken place in the 1950s.  I remember visiting her at the Florence Crittenden Home for Unwed Mothers on Staten Island, NY, one late summer day in 1955. I had recently returned from a year of study abroad.  In mid-April she had written me a letter about her secret pregnancy: I must contact her at the Home soon as I returned. She also said she had secretly married her boyfriend, Bill, a graduate student at Yale, over Thanksgiving break.  So the pregnancy was not illegitimate.  In fact she and Bill had only had sex two or three times, as I later learned.   Her last sentence was underlined in purple ink:

God forbid if the baby comes late and I can’t arrive on time for the beginning of our senior year.  I could say I have mono, but they might suspect something else, even contact my parents.  I’ve never told them about the elopement, let alone about the baby.

I must backtrack.  Unbelievable as it might seem today, in the 1950s it was strictly against the rules for a student in our fancy women’s college to marry without the permission of the Warden, one Miss Withee, whose eyes were the color and size of raisins. Pregnancy from an unreported marriage would be a major sin, equivalent with an out of wedlock conception.  Unless one could prove she was beyond doubt a virgin, a real rather than a “technical virgin”—i.e. everything but penetration.  Abortion, of course, was illegal, the pill didn’t come along until 1960, diaphragms and condoms were hard to find in Massachusetts.

“I did what I could,” Janice said, averting her eyes as if to study the cracks

in the building’s brick porch. “Nothing worked.”

“What about Bill? Didn’t he try to help?”

“Oh, he looked for a doctor who would take care of the problem. But they all wanted lots of money.  So I planned to get rid of it myself until one of the girls here almost died from trying it with a coat hanger.”

Someone was playing a radio, The Ballad of Davy Crockett booming through an open window, loud enough to drown out our voices.

“But you were married.  Why couldn’t you have the kid and finish college later?

“Shh. The Home doesn’t know that.  It’s supposed to serve only unwed mothers.”

Before I left, Janice pleaded with me to protect her, lie, if necessary, if the college officials suspected anything if she had to show up late for fall registration.

“There’s something else that must remain secret,” she whispered. “I lied on the adoption agency’s health form and mentioned nothing about Bill’s epilepsy.

I started to walk towards the ferry. And refrained from saying how all her secrets and lies put me in a risky position.

I guess that on one level I enjoyed being the custodian of her secrets.  After all, Janice had “gone all the way” as we used to say.

CODA: She gave birth to a boy in late August and managed to return to school on time. as if it was part of a script.  We rarely talked about the baby, who had been adopted by a nameless couple (that’s how things worked back then) Many years later I visited her in Chicago, where, now divorced from Bill, she lived alone and had become devoutly religious.  We chatted a bit about old times.  Finally I got up the courage to ask her about that summer of 1955.

“1955.  That was the summer I worked as a waitress in Wisconsin,” she said in a rote manner.

Genuine or feigned amnesia? The latter the opposite of nostalgia, an act of forgetting.  Memory, albeit distorted, is to nostalgia as forgetting is to nostalgia.

The Grandfather Paradox

Shortly after that PBS program on music of the 50’s I found myself singing The Tennessee Waltz; an audio-tic or, more expressively, an earworm, as some psychologists call it.   Maybe I was far more nostalgic than I thought.  I began to read about The Grandfather Paradox: in fantasy one could travel back to the past and prevent his or her own birth by killing a grandfather or maybe a great-great—great grandfather.   That one missing piece from the genealogical chain would have a far greater effect: not only would I not have been born, but my great-greats, etc.  Mind-boggling.  And even abstractly possible argue physicists who study wormholes and cosmic strings. Maybe even infinite regress: knock that apple out of the tree before Eve could pick it. Voila! No original sin..

In earthier terms, I but the imagined effect on history of a single seemingly trivial moment, like when Tristram Shandy’s mother distracts his father just prior to the height of intercourse by asking if the man had remembered to wind the clock.  A different sperm might well have won the race to her waiting ovum.  If Hitler’s mother had a headache that night, or, for that matter, Albert Einstein’s.  What if, what if . . .

Come to think of it, The Tennessee Waltz had banal lyrics even for the 50’s, when it was number one on pop, country, and R&B charts.  Better to go back to the music of the 1930’s when despite the Depression and beginning of World War 11 swing and jazz flourished along with such tear-jerkers as Melancholy Baby. (YouTube is replete with musical nostalgia channels.)

So much for Patti Page: now I really know just how much I have lost. Not that much after all.

***

NOTES

1.  Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (Penguin: 1987), p. 9

2.  Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, ” Comparative Literature 30 (2000), 189-207.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT & THE RUBBER TREE PLANT

So any time you’re gettin’ low

‘stead of lettin’ go

Just remember that ant

Oops there goes  another rubber tree plant–from “High Hopes”; Cahn/Van Heusen, 1959

And  there was Eleanor Roosevelt  singing about a  rubber tree plant,  a deadpan smile on her face as she looked directly into an early version of a video camera.

Perhaps everyone in the world knows of  her performance of  that old Sinatra nonsense song  about a rubber tree plant,  better known as “High Hopes.”   But when I saw the film clip where she  sings,  or rather recites, the lyrics in the spirit of talking blues,  I was so astounded that I assumed someone was impersonating her. And  I laughed –along with the rest of the audience.  When  I  asked the lecturer at the Smithsonian Museum Seminar on Cabaret Music  if  Eleanor was really Eleanor, he emphatically said, yes,   that was indeed the real Eleanor.  I was convinced the other peopIe in the audience nodded in stunned unison and turned towards me as if I had just asked whether  Washington, DC was the capital of the USA.

But how could Eleanor Roosevelt do something like that?

The rest of the day and the next day as well I couldn’t stop  humming to myself  what I recalled of the ditty, sometimes singing with whatever words I could recall. A tic of some sort that I share with  others  who inexplicably start singing a particular song out of the blue–and, one hopes, not in earshot of anyone.   So to get the tune out of my head, or at least to  lower  its volume, I began to ponder several issues  raised by the film  clip:  notably  questions of authenticity and stereotyping, along with  a host of sub-issues, such as the use of  masks, costumes, drag, disguises, to say nothing about  the  significance of  late life surprises.

Why would the eloquent and high-minded ER stoop to such a level? Had she made some deal with Sinatra– of all people?   How would FDR have reacted (the performance allegedly took place in  1959, 14 years after his death).  Maybe she had some serious purpose related to her  High Hopes for America and the world?  And where did that 1959

performance take place?  In The White House?  Unlikely, given that Eisenhower was President.  Hyde Park?  Las Vegas?   Berlin?  Carnegie Hall?

I turned first, of course, to Google.  Which I imagine ER herself would have done had it been possible to google  in her  day.    All  I  could find  was a comment about the song in German: “FDR’s Witwe Eleanor Roosevelt  begrussen konnte und die alte Dame mit ihrer  beruhmten  tiefen Stimme den Originaltext von 1959 charmant rezitiert.” (FDR’S widow greeted [Sinatra] and the old woman with her distinguished deep voice charmingly recited [the song’s] original  text in 1959.)  No mention of where or when said  recitation took  place. On another site there  was some information  about a Sinatra TV show entitled  “Here’s to the Ladies,”  sponsored  by  Timex and broadcast on ABC on 2/15/1960;  his guests included, among others, not only Eleanor Roosevelt but Lena Horne and Juliet Prowse and Mary Costa.  Songs performed included  “I’ve Got you Under my Skin”; “Paper Moon” and “Get Happy” –but no song about a rubber tree plant, or Gummibaum as it’s called in German,  and no indication that ER sang or even recited any section.

Just what makes the little old ant

Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant. . .

I did  find several versions of the lyrics, but nothing whatsoever about the text’s

inner meanings, especially as the latter might demand the  attention of none less than Mrs. Roosevelt, the Queen, the  Grand Matron of the country  throughout my childhood, worshipped by my  own mother and the mothers of  everyone else I knew.

True, I recall a few nasty parodies of  ER, her oh so cultured voice, her seriousness, and a mock-syllogism that went: “I hate war.  Eleanor hates war. Therefore  I hate Eleanor.”  Scarcely funny to a kid who didn’t even know the word syllogism.    Of course few  back then so much as whispered about Eleanor’s preferences for women, though there  was some talk about  her husband’s mistresses, especially Lucy Mercer, who was present when  he died.   So much for Google: when it came to pondering the deeper  meanings of that astounding (to me) moment at the Smithsonian,  I was on my own.

Why was I so surprised, a surprise I masked by laughing?   Perhaps because the concept of  authenticity was in November, 2004  obsolete  to the  point that nothing could be taken at face value; further, that nothing was genuine, so we lived  in a world of masks and  camouflages and outright lies, a feeling much abetted by recent political events.  Or maybe the major hermeneutical message of  the text, or rather the subtext,  pertained to the dangers of  stereotyping, i.e.  my assumption that Eleanor Roosevelt would never do such a thing:  was it a sign I myself  was more prone to stereotyped thinking  than I cared to admit,  despite my conscious awareness of  how such rigid generalizations were at the heart of  the ugliest racial, sexual, and geographic biases?

Of course  some stereotypes had been confirmed by the Smithsonian lecturer’s stress on the strong gay-lesbian presence  in the world of  cabaret: e.g.,  Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward, to name the most famous,  and such contemporary performers as Elaine St. George and  Elton  John as well as  the so-called Pansy Clubs in Paris and  New York.  But such a presence was in fact but one manifestation of  the strong link between  cabaret and political protest, especially in Weimar  Germany and the America of the late 60’s, early 70’s. Also,  the cabaret world has long celebrated openness and intimacy–unlike traditional theater with its “fourth wall” between performers and audience, the  former detaching themselves  from the latter by imagining there existed a  stout  wall across the front rim of the stage.

Next time you’re found with your chin on  the ground

There’s a lot to be learned, so look around

Yet I soon realized my reaction to the film clip, if not the song itself,  had a deeper meaning  than the dangers of stereotyped thinking, a  meaning more closely and specifically linked with my own memories.  In short, the performance was a desecration of the image of  ER that  dominated my childhood well  into early adult life.  Not that there was anything evil or even crude about her singing a ditty about rubber tree plants. Though, of course, the reference to their inevitable “bursting” did have a slightly obscene connotation about another type of rubbers.   It’s just that  La Grand Dame of America doesn’t do such things, any more than one’s grandmother or great aunts, decorous ladies all,  would do a striptease in the subway or even wiggle her hips in front of the butcher or fishmonger.

Indeed there were but a few female  heroes aside from ER when I was growing up—serious heroes, not flouncy movie stars or pop singers.  But they were all dead, and foreign as well,  like Madame Curie or Queen Elizabeth the First or  Joan of Arc.

Ah, that was it:   I was, at least on a subliminal level, as much  taken aback by the tarnishing of  ER’s image, as I would have been in my youth if  someone had splashed red paint on the Statue of Liberty.  But why wasn’t anyone else  in  the  audience seemingly taken aback as well?  And how come I wasn’t aware of  her  performance before, as everyone else seemed to be?

Yes.  Just as I found cabaret music compelling, along with its performers’ flamboyant red and purple  taffeta costumes and  peacock  feather  hats,  I  found something about ER’s recitation compelling.  Like the occasional slumming we white city kids would indulge in by daring to take the subway all the way up to Harlem.  In my own case, the  source of the  lure must have been  my parents’ high, albeit rather  snobbish, standards, though neither of them was what I would consider part of the intelligentsia.  Like a few other ambitious parents whose own parents were Jewish  immigrants from Eastern Europe, they strongly discouraged me from reading comic books or  listening to soap  operas or going to silly movies.  Rarely was their  radio  tuned to any stations other than WQXR or WNYC . Thus, my  childhood radio memories go back not to “The Shadow” or “The Lone Ranger” but to “Let’s Pretend”;  “Let’s Learn Spanish”;  and “  The Quiz Kids” and–oddly enough–Jimmy Durante.  Not to forget the Dodger games announced by Red Barber and Connie Desmond–a concession from my father.   My mother preferred “ Information Please” and any  speech by either Roosevelt plus the music of  Chopin and Mozart.  Sometimes, though,  I caught her listening in the afternoon to “Make Believe Ballroom Time, “ improvising dances to the music in front of the large foyer mirror.   Sinatra?   A  pop singer from New Jersey who couldn’t even sing as well as Bing Crosby,  whose songs were occasionally tolerated to accommodate  my father’s penchant for sentimentality. “The Hit Parade” was permissible  on  Saturday nights, but in a friend’s house, not my own.   On Sundays  my  parents and maternal grandparents and I went to Carnegie Hall or listened to the NY Philharmonic on the radio, the NY Philharmonic  conducted  by Arturo Toscanini, with guest artists like Artur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz.

Oops there goes a billion kilowat  dam

. . . .

Oops there goes another problem kerplop

So if there were any deeper meanings, they concerned my conflicts over the enjoyment of  forbidden fruit, conflicts covered up by the jokes my  junior high school friends and I would make about the sex lives of our spinster teachers as we–titter, titter–imagined their liaisons with the school custodians, or somewhat later even with one  another.

I now realize  I was both acutely embarrassed by ER singing about a rubber tree plant yet at the same time  envious of her.   Not because of her eloquent speaking and

her humanitarian ideals, but because she  knew  how to let  her hair  down without actually letting her hair down:   something I have found  hard to do till this day–unless in the company of a  particular type  of person,  usually a wild  friend from adolescence or later versions thereof , on occasions enhanced by alcohol and other substances.

No absolute and  universal meaning after all.  No secret code.     But  like the ant that couldn’t move a rubber tree plant I do at times have “high hopes ” . . .  “ high apple pie in  the sky hopes.”

Even in the troubled early years of the 21st century.

A MODEST PROPOSAL TO BAN PIN NUMBERS AND PASSWORDS

–Let the ban take place at once of all those capricious codes that overload memory to the point of amnesia, supposedly to confound bands of invisible robbers, abundant as microbes, who constantly roam, ready to lift all my files.

–Why else must I cite them at once to gain entry to my own rooms?  So many numbers interspersed with syllables that I must save them, print and display in some obvious place.

–Gates, locks and chains once helped keep most thieves at bay; my name and perhaps a card sufficed to prove I was the person I claimed to be.

–Pins?  Tiny mushrooms with metal caps to keep things in place prior to needles and thread.  Brooches that clasp a collar’s wings, steel rods, cousins of clips and staples.

–Open Sesame or codewords like Barbarossa and Dragoon served well enough as passwords.  Once the ban is enforced, I don’t give a damn if hackers are out of work, any more than I care about lobbyists or racketeers. Paranoia will become extinct, like fear of the setting sun or the hysteria evoked by a wandering womb.

–Lift the windows, unlock the doors!  So what if someone makes off with that ugly vase from Aunt Helen, mildewed letters with long expired words.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ANDREA DORIA,

50 YEARS LATER

Maybe they had never been on the Andrea Doria in the first place: the two leather and ceramic vases we had bought on the Ponte Vecchio in July of 1956. So maybe they never sank to the bottom of the Atlantic with the ship after it collided with the Stockholm off Nantucket Island, its crystal chandeliers, frescoes, and mosaics from Medici salons, 46 of its passengers, countless suitcases, crates and boxes of cargo all going down with the “Pride of Italy.”

They could simply have gotten lost, misplaced in some storage shed of the shipper, American Express. Slipped from the cargo hold of another ship in the port of Naples.

Ended up broken at the Boston Post Office and subsequently discarded. When more than a year later, American Express eventually sent us a check for $50, the amount for which we had insured the vases, nothing about the Andrea Doria disaster was noted nor any other details of their disappearance.

So the whole story might be a myth of many parts, except for the fact we had purchased the vases in Florence and shipped them home. A myth that I had predicted they went down with the Andrea Doria when they failed to arrive at our Boston apartment after three months or so. Even after the $50 check arrived, I continued to have fantasies, call them mythic fragments, of the vases waiting off the coast of Nantucket to be retrieved and promptly mailed to us. Where would we put them? On the bookcase improvised from bricks and boards? A “cabinet” improvised from an old medicine cabinet? Or were they intended to be given as gifts– to grandparents now long dead, special friends?

Now here’s where the real myth, if there can be such a thing, begins. After several more months passed, my fantasy expanded to include divers in the distant future who would discover the shards of the vases, puzzle why they did not quite fit together, all those

gaps once filled with fine Florentine leather, which would certainly have corroded or rotted away by then in their watery grave. Of course I knew how relatively trivial their worth, even wrote a poem back then that included the lines:

Despite their meld of leather and clay

the vases will be able at best

to contain a little water,

a few brief flowers, some sea-cling.

To compensate for the loss, after the $50 finally arrived, we bought a small ceramics kiln and decided to create our own pottery, perhaps fusing leather and clay like the Florentine artisans. We both pounded the clay on the kitchen table. My former husband shaped the clay to greenware that I painted and glazed, usually with Picasso-like figures of women. Then we each took turns firing them in the small kiln. (We never did figure out how to work in pieces of leather.)

Maybe the dozens of objects we made didn’t all have Picassoid figures, but at least the one surviving creation has such a design, executed with surprising skill; the shape, however, is a bit lopsided. Far as I know, it has never been used, either as an ashtray or a special dish for corn –the latter my ex’s idea. But the months spent creating these objects were among our happiest: I was pregnant with our first child, he was writing a novel about the Korean War, we loved Boston and had a tangerine-striped cat whose name was Melissa. Or was it Melinda?

Somehow that one object survived inside a rarely opened drawer throughout all the moves, births, trips, jobs, fights: survived far longer, indeed, than the marriage. The bureau ended up in my post-divorce house. Once in a while I glimpsed at it, quickly returned it to where for some reason it rested between folded tablecloths and the like.

For until a recent PBS program I’d rarely thought consciously over the following decades about the Andrea Doria, the lost vases, or our little pottery workshop in Boston. Yet, somewhere in my brainfolds I needed that one object to survive, a token substitute for the lost vases, a metonymy, as it were. Because, however slim the link, the vases’ possible –make that probable– presence on the ship served as a connection between private and public history. A connection that went well beyond “Where were you when you learned re JFK’s assassination?” or “How did you first learn about 9/11?”

After the PBS program and a brief exchange of e-mails with my former husband, with whom I’d almost completely lost contact, my old fantasies returned. I doubt they had anything to do at this point with the sad history of the marriage By now I–and presumably he–are well beyond any wishes for a magical retrieval of our long but lost and broken union. So what, besides a poignant reminder of that marriage’s happier days (it was our honeymoon), do the buried vases mean?

Let’s eliminate the obvious: their connection with youth, which will, of course, never return. The lost fragments of romanticized youth that once seemed to cohere so beautifully.

Too easy, too sentimental. Lost ancestors, whose names we never knew? More recent ancestors whose names and a few memories had survived their deaths? Ah, the old resurrection myth. Lazarus in the guise of two leather and ceramic Italian vases. Too far out for a skeptical secular person like myself. I assume he would feel the same if I expressed this fantasy to him, which I decided to refrain from doing lest he resurrects one of his favorite criticisms of me: my “phantasmagoria.”

One night I dreamt they had arrived on time having been shipped on another vessel. But the vases disappointed us when we unpacked them: much smaller than we imagined, the leather/ceramic combination flimsy, even contrived. Kitsch. Euro-kitsch, no better than American kitsch, those plastic replicas of the Capitol or White House. So we broke them and tossed the shards into the trash to be buried in a landfill under what I took to be New York–before 9/11. The dream was more disturbing than other fantasies. It implied, among other possibilities, that I wanted them to exist in at least a semi-recognizable form, if for no other reason than they embodied that thin link between the public and private. So thin and fragile it was fated to be broken.

That didn’t keep me from spreading the overall myth to our young grandchildren, one of whom laughed and said the vases had become fish that swam away. I laughed as well, but realized again I wanted the vases to be inanimate, a private version of Keats’s Grecian urn. Fish move about too much and don’t live very long. No, not fish. But maybe the were caught in huge ferns that entwined them and thus protected them from ship wrecks. divers, other sea creatures. Solid but invisible. Thus free to be directed both towards and away from the peregrinations of the imagination.

Might the ashes of my mother and father, strewn in the Gulf of Mexico, float into those ferns some day, take refuge inside the vases from storms and marine life, one lost parent for each lost vase? Even if neither the vases, nor my parents, nor I had in “real life” entered the luxurious chambers, state rooms and salons, now rusted, of the once magnificent Andrea Doria.

***