“Yeah, I’ll be back,” I said. “Probably the third weekend, definitely not the weekend of September 11. I have to be in the City then.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “ I thought you’d want to be out of New York on that date. They’re threatening another attack on the anniversary.”

Actually, I hadn’t heard that but it was hardly news.

“I need to be in the City to attend the services,” I said, referring to upcoming events at my church and my yoga center. I also planned to rejoin my neighbors on the roof that morning. “Even if they did attack again, I’d want to be in the City “ I added defiantly.

I recalled friends who were out of town on that Tuesday ten years ago and they were distraught. They couldn’t wait to come back and offer assistance. I was fielding their emails as I made pit stops to my apartment from my new post on the West Side Highway. I had joined the crowds cheering the rescue workers, a job I ended up doing for month (and writing about for this site) To this day, I think my presence on the highway was one of the most meaningful acts I’ve done in my life.

If New York City got attacked again, I could not imagine being in New Jersey, my home state, watching this on television. I’d go crazy. The events of September 11th deepened my love of this incredible City I’ve called home for most of my adult life. I’ve lived her since 1975 and have never felt prouder to be a New Yorker than in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

I know my elderly mother just wants me to be safe, but I will not let a gang of sick fanatics dictate how I run my life and where I live, not even for a weekend. Yes, I will be in Manhattan on September 11, 2011. I’ll pray at my church, chant at the yoga center, and return to Point Thank You on the highway to wave my flag one more time.

I think Jesse’s fascination might be something genetic, something hard-wired into his psyche. His grandfather on his mother’s side spent years in the South Pacific fighting World War II. And for a while, Ian, Jesse’s older brother from another mother, also dabbled in the exotic when he was dating, before he got married. Ian’s girlfriend Anita wasn’t Asian, but Columbian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, or one of those other -ians from one of those South American or Central American places. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either.

I always liked Anita, an intense and passionate little brown girl with white teeth, dark flashing eyes and a good sense of humor, who didn’t seem to mind that I put all the knives away and kept checking the hubcaps on my car whenever they came to visit. But Anita, by last account, moved back to Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, or one of those other places, got married and has had several kids, none of them his, Ian assured me.

Then came Siu Lan who was definitely Asian. She was Chinese, in fact, and I am pretty sure she still is. We called her “Siu Who?” though her last name was actually Wing or Wang or Wong. We did that to differentiate Siu from Sue, my niece who isn’t Asian and spells her name differently but pronounces it the same way. I first met Siu at a party, a family gathering of the Italians at my daughter Janine’s house on Staten Island. Weeks in advance of the event, a nervous Ian had prepared everyone for the meeting of East and West in an attempt to head off any potential problems. But on the appointed day, his grandmother, my mother, made it evident by the expression on her face that she wasn’t very pleased when Ian led a foreigner into the thick of twenty-five screaming Italians all talking at the same time.

I watched the girl, head high, black hair radiating the light of Janine’s Italian crystal chandelier, as she walked fearlessly or foolishly into the middle of things. The conversations dropped to a low murmur and stopped, and in the intervening silence you could hear a steamed wonton drop.

It was my mother-in-law who barreled in and attempted to break the ice with some Asian small talk. “So tell me,” she said with an innocent smile of simplicity on her face, “how come they took Kung Fu off the air? It was one of my favorite shows.”
Siu Who blinked. She shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said without a trace of sarcasm after barely a pause. “But let me get back to my people and I’ll tell you what I find out.”

It was love at first sight, and from that second I knew Siu Who was special!

But their relationship didn’t work out because there were other problems beyond the East/West thing. And eventually Siu Lan went the way of Anita, though I don’t think she moved to South or Central America, and I assume she still lives in Brooklyn somewhere.

Soon after, Ian reconnected with Amy, his college girlfriend, the polar opposite of his previous choices, both geographically and physically. Amy was born in up-state New York, in Syracuse or Schenectady or one of those other “S” cities. She is smart, beautiful, flaxen blonde and so white she might be mistaken for alabaster. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love Amy, and that is a good thing because she is now my daughter-in-law and the mother of Hailey, who for the first three months of her life was the first blue-eyed grandchild born into this brown-eyed Italian/Sicilian family, until her eyes changed to beautiful black Sicilian olives.

The Asian bug bit Jesse somewhere around seventh grade when he met Jessica, a petite Korean with great lips, who was in the horn section of the middle school orchestra. Jesse played the same instrument. Well, they didn’t actually play the same one, but they both played trumpets. Their pairing had such possibilities. Jesse and Jessie. Two trumpets. No waiting. However, they were both so shy that neither one said a word to the other until high school graduation day, just before they went off to different colleges. And by that time it was too late.

Then along came Amy. Not Ian’s “Caucasian Amy,” but one of the Asian persuasion, a Japanese violinist Jesse met in college. When he brought her around, the family, including my mother, had grown accustomed to Asians at the gates, although they still had trouble separating them according a specific -ese. Just as the family had reduced everything from ravioli to linguini and lasagna, into generic “macaroni,” there was a tendency to lump all of Asia together - Chinese, Japanese – Portuguese? It didn’t seem to matter. And there were some who had problems telling the family’s Asians apart and thought that Asian Amy and Siu Who were the actually the same person, dating first Ian and then Jesse. Not that they looked alike, or that there was anything wrong with it if they did. But some of the confusion was mainly because Siu and Asian Amy had never been seen together. No one ever had problems telling the two Amys apart. My mother-in-law never asked Asian Amy her Kung Fu question. “Because,” she said, “I already asked her once at Janine’s and I don’t want to be a pest. Besides, I don’t want her to think that I am being rude.”

So for as long as Asian Amy was on the scene, the matter of Kung Fu’s disappearance remained a mystery.

We didn’t talk much, Asian Amy and I, when she and Jesse visited. She was shy and quiet, the very definition of inscrutable, the silent, brooding type, a person of many moods, most of them dark, like a rain cloud that she seemed to carry with her. Their breakup was a protracted and painful affair for both of them. Asian Amy was Jesse’s first real love, but in the end, after many fits and starts, they went their separate ways.

After the pain of Asian Amy subsided, it didn’t take Jesse long to hook up, first with Kat, a tattooed Filipina, and then with Kit, a cute little Chinese girl. They make a cute couple. Kit is barely five feet tall and Jesse measures in at a towering six feet four. They have a lot in common. They are both shy and quiet and have a strong affinity for sushi. But if they ever get married I know there is no hope of the union ever producing a blue-eyed baby.

Jesse has other plans after graduation. He has been studying Japanese for about a year. In June he hopes to go to Japan for a year or more to teach English there. He has submitted his JET application, one of the few things he has completed on time without coaxing from his mother or me. He is already there in Japan in his head.

“I hope you get your wish,” I told him. “It is a wonderful opportunity. But what,” I asked him while we were watching Lost In Translation for the third time, “will you do if you are not accepted?”

He looked as though he had never considered that possibility.

“And what will you and Kit do if you are accepted?”

He shrugged as he sat there with his legs crossed looking very inscrutable.

So I am making plans too, to take a trip to Japan when Jesse is there. I am fortifying myself in Asian culture by ordering lots of Chinese take out, and I am desperately trying to develop a taste for raw fish and octopus flavored ice cream.

Joseph E. Scalia grew up a shabbos goy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, turning on lights and lighting cooking stoves. He has published two novels FREAKs and Pearl, two short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. He is looking for a publisher for his latest collection of humor, Scalia vs.The Universe.
 

Because pilots make frequent landings, a special warning light is installed in many cockpits, this to remind pilots to lower the landing gear. Everyone makes mistakes that are the product of repetitive activity. Like twice a year, I forget to put on my parking break.

So I’m taking a shit, and I flashback to The Nam. 1970. The 4th Infantry, the Central Highlands. An Khe, to be exact.

I knew this guy named something with a D, Dubinsky I think. From somewhere in New York City. He was the company Shit Burner. That was his only job. Burning shit. Because it was such an onerous job, he was relieved of all other duty. It was a kind of deal he made. No guard duty. No patrols. No KP. Nothing. Except burning shit.

Everyone understood why he was high all the time, why he was always drunk, why he was friendless. It was boring, God-awful and needed to be done every day. So burn shit he did.

We had two shitters in the company area. A one-holer for sergeants and officers, and a five-holer for the proletariat. The way these shitters worked was that they looked like a standard outhouse. Except that there was no deep hole in the earth beneath them. Underneath each seat, there was half of a 55 gallon drum into which the shit and piss dropped. Once a day, Dubinsky comes with a can of gasoline, pulls out the drum from the back of the outhouse, pours in the gas, stirs, lights a match, burns the shit and piss. Every single day, 365 days, Dubinsky burning shit behind the shitter.

For this, he got no medals, no rank. And I presume no brag when asked, “What did you do in the war?”
But he’s got this story.

So Sgt. Giltner needs to take a shit. He heads for the one-holer. As does Dubinsky minutes later.

Now Dubinsky wants to make it quick. So he pulls out the shit can, throws in the gasoline, fires it up. But he does this so often that he gets his rhythm off. He inadvertently skips a step, and pushes the shit can back into its customary place in the shitter.

The way Giltner tells it, he goes to take a crap, pulls down his pants, squats, and he’s engulfed in flames from asscrack to gonad.

Burned down the entire crapper.

Gilter is OK, except for the blister and all the hair burnt off his scrotum. I don’t think he took another shit until the Carter Administration. Dubinsky gets nothing for punishment. What can they do? Send him to Nam and make him burn shit?

But it’s a life lesson nonetheless.

John Samuel Tieman's chapbook, A Concise Biography Of Original Sin, is published by BkMk Press. His poetry has appeared in The Americas Review, The Caribbean Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and River Styx. A teacher in the St. Louis Public Schools, Tieman is also a widely published essayist.

Every morning we have to leave the apartment — later on good days, early on rough ones. A time out before 8 a.m. and we’re out the door in the next fifteen minutes. Outside I can strap them in and keep them quiet and entertained — maybe even asleep. We all seem to drift off out there, Norah and Colin and I, lost in our own heads, watching the world go by. That morning we were out early and the sidewalks were crowded with city-bound commuters headed for the subway. Washed and ironed, they knew where they were headed, whereas that morning I was willing to take my babes anywhere the wind blew us.

“Doing, Mommy? Doing?” This is Norah’s favorite question these days.

“Walking,” I say, from high above her little upturned head. She wants to look at me, but the sun catches her eyes. She keeps turning away, squinting and frustrated. Then, a second attempt: “Doing?”

“I’m walking…and thinking.”

“Mommy’s thinking!” She squeals and kicks her feet in delight in the tiny space reserved for her beneath the baby’s car seat. Colin’s whole body reacts to her. He turns his head, stops sucking the pacifier, and tosses his arms up into the air. We have one of those conversation-starters: a high-tech two-seat stroller where the older kid gets the bottom seat (she could reach out her hand and drag it along the ground if she wanted to) and the baby’s car seat snaps in on the level above, facing the pusher — that’s me.

I thought, that morning, that we should leave the neighborhood. I’d already been scratched, pooped on, and yelled at, and so the idea of just taking off appealed to me. What if, instead of taking the same old right turn out the door, I took a left?

We walked away from 37th Avenue and ventured up toward Broadway as though it had never been done before. Norah continued to ask me what we were doing, apparently confused by all of the new things she could see from her spot down below: row houses, for-sale signs, a gay-pride flag, the Virgin Mary casting her welcoming gaze upon a lit red candle in the front yard. She sucked her thumb, furrowed her brow, and begged me to take her to the library. I had promised I would before we left the apartment, but really just to get her into our contraption of a stroller. There is such a small space for her down there that she has to be totally willing to get in it, which usually means I promise her cookies, “moo-cow” milk, cheerios, the park, the library — whatever it takes to keep the peace, which has been more and more difficult since Colin was born just three months ago.

Yes, the library. I found myself saying it even though I didn’t mean it. Each step was taking us farther away from the library, and I had no intention of letting her out of the stroller until I could release her back into the safety of our living room with the drooping eyelids and slurred speech of a worn-out two year old. At that point my own body would be at its breaking point and ready to flop onto the bed as well.

When we reached Broadway we were officially in the pulsing heart of Elmhurst, rushing forward in a throbbing crowd of pedestrians. There is very little English on this thoroughfare of Queens. This is a first-stop kind of place. It’s been crossed out and rewritten and we were used to seeing it through the dust-covered windows of our little Honda Fit.

“Mommy, this?” Norah points to a storefront, wanting to know what it is.

“It’s a…a phone store.”

“Mommy, this?”

“And this is a hardware store.”

“Oh mommy, look! This!”

And there, standing back from the street in the full, startling shade of oaks and sycamores, was the Elmhurst Library.

I turned us off the crowded sidewalk and found the side ramp so that we could roll in. Yay! Norah sang and clapped her hands. We were used to this kind of place, as the Elmhurst library wasn’t all that different from our Jackson Heights library, but there was something to the lighting in these rooms — it seemed to reveal more books, more silence, and perhaps more reading going on. Quickly, I rushed us toward the Cat in the Hat entrance of the children’s section before we could disturb anyone. I breathed a full sigh of relief when I found it empty, but for a few busy librarians; Norah could pull out books, climb on mini-chairs, and read out loud (“Oh, a kitty-cat! Oh, a cow!”).

We glided down the aisles, past the teen section, the pre-teen section, the early-reader section, and got settled at a small table in the back of the room next to a revolving bookshelf of bruised toddler books. Norah was beside herself with happiness as she wiggled over to the shelf and began removing the books from their proper places, exclaiming with each one, “Oh, mommy, this!”

I pretended to be as happy as she was about all of the books, while removing Colin from his comfy seat, shoving a cloth diaper under his chin, and pulling up my shirt. Colin’s mouth opened hungrily and he clung to me, looking like an old man trying to suck the air out of a balloon.

Once settled, I lifted my head and found myself in the spotlight of two dark eyes. He was a skinny, pale, teenage boy and looked as though he’d previously been quite comfortable in his spot on the floor behind the last stack of children’s books. In his hand was an open cell phone and he was held captive by it, leashed up by the ear.

Instantly, I knew he had a secret. At 11:15 AM, he should have been in school. This made him a truant, an escapee, a runaway who needed to be turned in for his own good.

I’ll walk over, whisper sternly in his ear, and send him running, I thought.

But that was the teacher in me, hidden beneath what I was at that moment — a scantily clad, partially exposed, post-partum woman with a toddler on the loose. Colin was dribbling and my shirt would be wet in spots when I stood up. A thin coat of polish was chipping off my toenails and my hair was unwashed. Norah had left the toddler section and was now taking all of the books off of the teen shelves and tossing them on the floor. Someone might think to turn me in as well.

Colin was beginning to drift off, cozy and all full up in my arms, but each time I tried to pull away he’d start to suck harder. Norah was now chasing a little boy who’d come in with his grandmother. The two of them were starting to swipe at each other over books beyond their levels of comprehension. The teenager had wandered off to a more distant corner, and began talking on his phone. He sounded like a good, responsible kid, telling a school aide that he was too sick to go in, or that he had some kind of doctor’s appointment. I imagined him afraid to go to school, to be harassed, to be lonely. The librarian called out, loud enough for all of us in the room to hear, that phone use was not allowed in the library. The kid ignored her and finished up his polite conversation. He insisted on his invisibility.

“No, no, no! Mine!” Norah was getting louder, gearing up for something. “Miiiiiiiiine!” She had a book tucked under one arm, her unhappy face on (pursed lips, chin tucked in, fierce eyebrows), and she’d begun beating her own chest — a threat to the little boy that if he got any closer she’d start beating on his chest.

“Norah! Be nice to the boy,” I called out. “Nice to the boy!”

I pulled my shirt down and dropped Colin into the stroller, rudely and without a burp. I had to turn away for a minute to make sure I was decent, and then I lunged for Norah, who had managed to intimidate both the little boy and his grandmother, neither of whom seemed to speak English. I asked Norah to say she was sorry. Nothing. I told her, I begged her, and then I gave up and said it myself.

“I’m so sorry about this! She’s going through a hard time right now, that’s all. I mean, we all are. She has a new little brother, see?”

The old lady just smiled at me demurely as she pulled the little boy behind her.

“Sorry. Sorry. Norah, say you’re sorry.”

“Mine!”

I went to pick her up, and she slapped me in the face and let out a scream that brought all reading to an abrupt halt — heads popped up over books and newspapers. “No! NO!” she began, and continued in a chant that ended in the loudest shriek this library has certainly ever heard. In an instant, she was slapping my face with two hands, curling her fingers to scratch when she could. I spun her around and grabbed her from behind, one arm around her chest and the other around her knees. She found new ways to squirm, new ways to hit. She aimed for my face even though I was behind her now.

“No mommy!” she cried. “I like daddy! I like daddy!”

She collapsed into sobs and turned into me, now for comfort, sucking her thumb, like the baby she still was. With her head tucked under my neck, her long legs hanging down the length of my body, I carried her in my left arm and pushed the stroller with my right. Okay, here we go, I whispered to her. Let’s just get to the door, let’s just get outside. She ignored me, but I knew she was listening.

As we left that children’s room, the librarian nodded to me, Norah, Colin, the contraption-of-a-stroller, the unwashed hair, the chipped nail polish, the tear-stained eyes, and the milk-stained shirt, as if to say, “You are strong.”

I let Norah slide down to her feet and held her hand as we walked down the ramp and back to the sidewalk, at which point she requested to be let back into the stroller. She climbed in easily and curled up on one side, with one hand at her mouth and the other between her knees. I pushed the stroller to the corner and, while waiting for the little walking man on the streetlight to appear, gathered up the loose wisps of her baby hair into a new tail.

Deirdre Faughey is a teacher and writer who lives in Jackson Heights with her family.

After letting E-Z Pass into my life my resistance collapsed like a house of cards, a row of dominos, a sad little wrinkled balloon and I caved completely. I gave in, forced by circumstances, the ticking clock, the sands of time running through the hourglass of life. My fingers had long ago stopped walking through the Yellow Pages, in part because arthritis had made them useless, but mostly because the off-the rack magnifying reading glasses from Wal-Mart were no longer working. All the small print, all those useless, torn and creased, unfolded road maps impossible to refold stuffed into the glove compartment of my car. My night vision, at one time almost bionic, had gradually and subtly became non-existent around the turn of the century, when all those street signs that had once marked my journey through life disappeared. And it was getting lost once too often, taking an hour and twenty minutes for a fifteen minute drive, that sent me over the edge and forced me to buy the GPS – Big Brother be damned!

“We were going to get you one for Christmas,” my daughter Janine said, “but we figured you wouldn’t use it, just like you never use your cell phone, or never replaced your rotary phone with a push button.” Which is true. I told her that I might consider getting a cell phone if they made one that had a rotary dial.

“We were going to get you one for your next birthday,” my son Ian said when I told him.

“What kind is it? A Magellan? TomTom? Garmin? And how much did you pay for it?” Ian is a bottom-line kind of person.

“The salesman steered me away from all of those and pointed me instead to one that was on sale, so I got it pretty cheap,” I said. “It’s a new brand, a model 205 wide-screen by Amelia Earhart.”

“Um, isn’t she the pilot who got lost over the Pacific and was never seen again?” he asked.

“I think it’s by the same people who make her luggage. And it’s made in China, so you know it has to be good. Besides, I don’t have any plans of ever flying over the Pacific.”

So Amelia and I started out tentatively, cautiously, with short trips around the neighborhood, routes I knew and could drive in my sleep. It was obvious from the beginning that she had a mind of her own when it came to the best way to get from here to there. While I relied on my intimate knowledge gained from having lived in the same place for thirty years, she only had pre-loaded maps.

“Recalculating,” she said in her very “proper English” accent whenever I strayed. “Recalculating,” she pronounced mincingly I passed up her right turn for a shortcut I knew would get me into the back parking lot of Sonny Fong’s Chinese Take Out faster.

“Proceed three hundred feet and then turn right…. Turn right! TURN RIGHT!” she insisted.

I figured if I just politely ignored her suggestions long enough and took Amelia on a tour of the back streets of downtown Farmingdale, she would eventually learn, adapt, abandon her preconceived notions and begin to think on her feet. Unfortunately, she never did. And by the second or third week of our relationship, I could detect a major attitude in her “Recalculating….” It wasn’t anything blatant, not then anyway, just an airy sigh that seemed to increase with each incident. And once I thought I heard her whisper a comment under her breath.

“What was that?” I asked. “I didn’t quite hear that. What did you just say?”

But Amelia kept mum and we continued on our journey to Costco without further incident.

It was on our first long voyage, a trip to the “Great White North,” New Hampshire, that the “wheels fell off the wagon,” so to speak. I was headed to pick up a new MacBook computer in the state without sales tax and visit my friends Joni and Anthony who lived in Keene. Amelia got me to the Throgs Neck Bridge without incident and we were speeding along Rte I-95 just before New Haven and the turn-off to Rte I-91 when I heard Nature calling.

Despite her frantic exhortations to “Keep left… Stay left… Left… I said left!” I moved right and pulled into the rest stop where I rushed for a restroom. Fifteen minutes later, when I started the car, relieved and sated by the quarter-pound Snickers bar I got from the vending machine, Amelia was curiously silent, even after I gently tickled her touch screen several times.

“Well?” I asked when we were back on the road trying to get her out of her brooding silence. “Where do we go now, Amelia? I put myself in your able hands.”

She gave a disapproving tut and a deep sigh, which was followed by another long silence. “Don’t patronize me,” she said finally, and I recognized the tone from my many failed marriages. “I told you before, keep left, stay left… LEFT! But did you listen? No. You knew better and you went right.”

“But I had to pee,” I said. “I pee a lot. What was I supposed to do?”

She ignored my question. “Why bother buying a GPS when you aren’t going to listen?” She sounded hurt. “You might just as well use one of those old maps in the glove compartment. Or get free directions,” she added scornfully with a snort, “from the Internet.”

The truth was that I had printed up a Google map as an emergency backup, just in case of a technical glitch, but the directions had really small print and they were crumpled up somewhere in the trunk. “But, I–”

“No ‘buts,’ buster! You can put all your buts in a sack. Your ex-wives are right about you. You never listen and you won’t take direction from anybody, especially from a woman. What’s the matter, didn’t you get enough love from your mother? I suppose you were a bottle baby?”

“You leave my mother out of it!” I pouted. “She worked and didn’t have time to breast feed me.”

“Whatever.” She snickered. “Don’t look now, mister. You’ll never get up to Keene, because you just missed your left turn.” And then her tone became business as usual. “Recalculating. Proceed to three point four miles the next exit and then turn south at the cloverleaf.”

I did what I was told.

We spent the remaining hours in relative silence. I said nothing and Amelia spoke only when it was necessary, except when I turned up the radio. “Turn that down!” she snapped and my hand shot to the volume control. “I have a headache from all the aggravation you’ve caused me. And your taste in music isn’t much better than your taste in clothes, or women. How many times were you divorced?”

She delighted in taking me the long way, making many unnecessary turns, and chuckled to herself when she got me lost in Vermont. But I didn’t complain even when I had to pee again. I didn’t dare look for a rest stop. I just jumped out quickly and went off-road. We arrived at Joni and Anthony’s after midnight. They had left the light on and a note on the table: “We waited as long as we could. There are clean sheets on the bed in the guest room. Help yourself to whatever you find in the refrigerator.” I did, and then I peed and went to bed.

The following day I visited, picked up my computer, and said good-bye to my friends after dinner. On my return trip I thought it might be nice to swing through Massachusetts just for a change of scenery. So while I was programming the new coordinates, I also fine-tuned Amelia and made her French.

“Tournez à droite,” the sexy new voice, somewhere between Edith Piaf and Eartha Kitt, purred. “Continuez pendant douze milles et puis tournez à gauche.” It was a welcome change from Amelia’s hostile English.

As the miles slid by and the darkness increased, I was hypnotized by her sweet words, taken in by her cute accent. I could feel the smile on my face and at the same time there was a tingle, a curious warmth in my legs and nether regions. And I hadn’t peed in hours.

“You know,” I said, choosing my words carefully and using my throaty bedroom voice, “I could listen to you talk all day and all night. You sound so cute and I find you very – sexy.” I thought I heard her quiver slightly, so I went on. “What do you say – we pull into the next rest stop? I’m tired from all this driving and I can use a – little break, if you know what I mean.”

I took her silence for approval and at the next opportunity I eased the car à droit and pulled into a parking spot in the darkness away from the other cars. She didn’t protest when I gently slipped her out of the cradle. She didn’t say a word when I opened the door and took her into the back seat.

“You know,” I whispered, echoing the dialogue from Casablanca, “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” I was sitting there holding her in my arms with my pants around my ankles.

That was when a Massachusetts State Trooper shined the flashlight into the back of the car, alerted, without a doubt, by the E-Z Pass that had beamed my GPS coordinates to the black helicopter circling overhead.

Joseph E. Scalia grew up a shabbos goy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, turning on lights and lighting cooking stoves. He has published two novels FREAKs and Pearl, two short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. He is looking for a publisher for his latest collection of humor, Scalia vs.The Universe.

Dad would spend hours playing Brahms, Schumann, Clementi, Chopin. At the end, he would always start playing an old Russian folk song called “Two Guitars” and stare wistfully into space. It’s my belief that this was a song that he used to play, during his childhood, as a duet with his violin-playing brother, who died an untimely death in the late ’40s.

When I was eight years old or so, Dad started teaching me to play the piano. At first, I really enjoyed it. But it soon became clear to me that I had no say in what I played – I’d have to play what he wanted me to play. And if I played something incorrectly or made an insufficient effort, he’d yell: “You idiot! You moron! Wrong! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!” By the time I was 12, I told Dad I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, although I never stopped playing, on and off. Dad tried to teach my brother too, but my brother, who was more outspoken in criticizing our parents, only lasted six months or so with Dad as a teacher.

Anyway, that same year, when I was 12, the Beatles came to America. I would often go to the piano and try to play the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, Motown. This drove my father nuts. “That’s not music! THAT’S JUST BANGING!” he’d say. He’d take to locking the piano with a key he had, just so that I wouldn’t play it when he was in the house. And the worst of it was that my father definitely didn’t believe in the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” There was only one TV in the house, and it, too, was in the living room. Many was the time that I’d have to wait what seemed like an eternity until my father finished practicing piano for the night, until I could watch one of my favorite TV programs. It’s probably thanks to him that I never really grew to like classical music, with the possible exception of Bach and Handel — and it took my wife, years later, to make me appreciate them.

I moved out of the house, then moved back, then moved out again, then moved back again, then moved out for good, but the piano was always there. The unsteady piano bench, with its wobbly legs, finally went the way of all wood, but the piano itself remained. In the early days he’d call piano tuners periodically, but when he got older, especially after my mother died, he let things go, and the piano’s sound became tinny. Still, he practiced every day.

Finally, in 2004, he died. One day, while going to Dad’s Co-op City apartment to clean up, I met a young pre-adolescent girl and her mother in the hallway. I told them Dad had died. “I knew it,” the girl said. “I haven’t hearing him playing his piano for a long time. I used to hear him every day! I knew all his songs!” I was a little thrown off – I don’t know if you can call a Bach fugue a “song” – but it soon occurred to me that he hadn’t changed these “songs” in 35 years. Once, a friend had tried to give him some new sheet music – I remember “Mussogursky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” was one of them – and Dad tried to make a go of it, but he soon fell back on the tried and true. The pieces he played regularly were likely the same ones he’d played back in the East Bronx, during his childhood in the 1930s.

My brother’s son Joseph, a rock musician in his 20s, wanted the piano. He had, my brother told me, written many of his own songs on this piano. The movers soon came, and the piano was wheeled away after 25 or so years in Marble Hill and 35 years in Co-op City, gone to a new life.

Raanan Geberer is a community newspaper editor in Brooklyn who is now in a Master of Arts in Teaching program. He grew up in the Bronx, went to SUNY and once lived in Washington Heights, although he now lives in Chelsea’s Penn South co-op with his wife Rhea and cat Celeste.

“Remember how we agreed I’d tell you when something major happens?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, beginning to smooth invisible wrinkles in his sanitized sheet, and there were no more sounds from the hallway, the intercom, the roommate or his wife, the street.

My mother, down the hallway, suffering Aunt Eva’s keening, “You’re going to tell Irwin?” no longer existed.

I spoke as if into a tin can connected by a taut string to his tin can: “That fluid Dr. Vogel just removed from your stomach is blood. He can’t do anything more.”

Parting his fingers, my father invited the son he had so generously provided for, but never shared feelings with, to join in acknowledging an end to his three-year war for life. Automatically putting my hand into his, tears obscured his eyes as he squeezed tightly, introducing me to the man I had never been permitted to meet.

The father who helped me get ready for Assembly Days at P.S. 194 when Mom was unavailable. Fingers slamming together, boulders under my chin, he’d enthusiastically struggle to knot my “special” red tie. Standing there, a soldier at attention, I’d watch his eyes. They’d move this way and that, swaying with the rhythm of his shifting weight as he’d contort his body to check his handy work. In the tiny bathroom, scented from Burmashave, his smooth, smiling face would reflect the harsh, bright light. Missing Mom’s deft, thin fingers, I’d yearn to get the process over with.

I now saw his grey eyes watching mine. He relaxed his hand, and asked, “What happens now?”

Only omitting the doctor’s summation, “He will waste away like an Auschwitz victim,” I said, “You’ll become less and less strong until you will go to sleep. There won’t be any pain. We’re going to take you home.”

As a boy, I often fell asleep to the rhythmic tapping of type hitting paper. It was the sound of my father working, always working, transcribing his stenograph strikings into English. His flying fingers danced over the IBM keyboard. One evening, I had to summon the courage to get out of bed and walk along the darkened hallway into his lighted place to disturb him. “Can I go to the bathroom?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, his fingers poised in mid-air, his body unmoving behind his monstrously large desk. “Of course.”

That desk, retired since the advent of his disease, was now collecting keepsakes and dust in his former office, which my father now requested for his “center of operations.”

Entering the once-upon-a-time workspace to position his bed, I asked, “Do you want to face the window?”

“No.”

A three twinbed-width space with a view of a doorway was to be my father’s last vision of home.

Ten days into my dad’s stay, trips to the bathroom, six paces away, demanded too much of him. Squatting over a bedpan while balancing himself between Mom and his bed became a Laurel and Hardy act, but the humor escaped from the frustration of their trying to get it “right.” Stiffening with condemnation, I’d wish my mother could, for once, understand Dad’s directions. The logic of which always seemed so clear to me.

“Hit the second dart, aim between the first and second pins,” said my father to his eleven-year-old son as we lined up my shot on the bowling alley. Standing directly behind me, we’d survey the scene, he calculating the angles, me preparing to execute the plan. To the amazement of our competitors, I’d knock down the splits, the single pin, get the strike, the spare. No sweat, no muss, he’d plan, I’d do–one aim, one soul. It was exciting, it was thrilling, it was natural. We were skinny, we were short, we were “tough” guys!

Greeting Elly, our hospice nurse, my father asked, “How… do I… die?” I girded myself for his last lesson.

“Well, let’s see,” she offered. “Completely relax, breathe deeply, close your eyes….”

“This s…ounds like a dea…th scene… from a grade-B…movie!” he interrupted jokingly.

“It is–it’s your death scene,” I responded, and we all chuckled until I bent over emitting high-pitched screeching.

After 15 seconds of quiet, my father opened his eyes. “I’m…still here!” he said, with the perfect timing and inflection of a polished comedian, tainted with disappointment.

Alone with my father, he breathed, “Thi…s is y…ours,” and rocked his wrist to indicate the timepiece I had given him for a birthday five years earlier. It was now my inheritance. His communication of “Money…wall,” was not as easily understood.

“We’ve checked a couple of times. We emptied that hiding place awhile ago,” I said. It was weeks later when my mother found little sums of money rolled into his socks, under his handkerchiefs, behind his shirts.

“Write my name! Write my name! Write my name!” clamored the kids as they clung to my father, monkeys to a tree. Perched and laughing on one of the benches in front of our building on Avenue W, he joyfully, but obediently, struck the keys of his stenotype machine. Off to the side, by the bushes, I watched each friend gape at the fulfilled wish of his name being transcribed into the unusual combinations of markings representing “Stan the Man,” “Richard,” “Scott.” Feeling proud, but left out, “How about writing my name?” only remained my thought, defending the hurt with, “we can do that anytime.”

Sitting at the dining room table with Elly and Mom, I said, “I just read people need ‘permission to die.’ Maybe Dad needs to hear this.”

“Absolutely,” purred Elly, and the three of us went to visit my father.

Holding his hand, my mother haltingly said, “I love you, and I will miss you very much, but you have my permission to leave us.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” said my father over and over and over again, the lines on his face disappearing.

The next week, as we struggled to change his sheets, “I’m…so… sick,” were the last words I heard from my dad. They were meant either to surmise his condition, or explain his not helping–I don’t know. An oxygen tank was now part of the room decor.

On the 43rd day, I called from work to check on Dad. Mom said, “This looks like it.”

An hour later: “He took off the watch!” blurted from my mother’s lips as I passed by to find Dad alone with his oxygen mask on.

His open right hand lay by his side. Sitting next to his bed, I put my hand into his. He closed his fingers around mine. We listened to La Bohème, his favorite opera, on the living room cassette deck.

We were together for maybe five minutes, when sounding a disgusted “Ah!” he turned his face away, and flung my hand free.

Dad’s eyes rolled up into his head. His breathing became guttural, possessing his entire body. My mom, now standing next to me, called Elly, who suggested turning up the oxygen, which I did while wondering, “Why did you shake my hand free?”

Hesitantly, I rested my left palm on his warm forehead. I lowered his eyelids. “Why’d you throw my hand away?!” I inquired silently.

The three of us returned to the dining room table.

“He’s now in a coma,” Elly calmly explained. “This can go on for quite awhile…days sometimes.”

Mom and I immediately returned to Dad. So did Elly. He seemed to be waiting for us…as we lined up beside his bed, the deep breaths stopped.

Thinking it would make him more comfortable, I asked Elly, “Shall I remove the mask?” and only while taking it away did I realize her assent meant he was dead. Where was my head?

“Irwin!” wailed my mother.

When I was seven, I didn’t scream or carry on as Dad applied mercurochrome to my fresh knee wound. I had been yelling “Franklin, Franklin, you be the cowboy, I can be the Indian,” as I wielded my new tomahawk, having spotted my cousin at the bottom of the steep alleyway alongside Nana’s house. My great enthusiasm sent my head just far enough forward to lift my churning feet up behind me, creating an airborne, and then concrete entangled, little boy. Whisked by Dad into the side entrance, I found myself ignoring the blood, the sting, my fright as I sat on the lowered toilet seat watching him dress the wound. I knew with Mom I’d be crying, but with Dad saying, “There’s nothing to cry about,” I shouldn’t.

I did not cry when my father died–He threw my hand away.

Death is the break of a branch, the smash of a glass, the meaning of farewell. It sobers with the fear of being alone, the loss of familiarity, the creation of a new position in life.

It is only now, nine years later, as I grieve profusely, that I again ponder my father’s last lesson to me.

Unexpressed appreciation of each other, born of the shtetl roots of fathers teaching sons with “silence,” often elicited a discomfort with which we had grown familiar once I had become a young man.

His last communication showed that our relationship had changed–he was finished teaching. His job was done, the one begun so many years ago and he now needed to face something by himself.

“Keep pedaling, keep pedaling,” my father encouraged as I traveled parallel to the bushes on the two-wheeler. Running alongside me, holding the bicycle seat, then letting go. Holding, releasing, holding, releasing, he launched me on my first solo ride without training wheels. And I was free, free, just two wheels and me, gripping the handlebars, cruising, rolling, independent, and veering left into the bushes. The harder I tried to avoid the prickly green, the nearer the leaves approached until I was suspended in the bushes, my bicycle a wounded comrade beneath me. A wave of tears beginning its ascent from my belly was quelled by my father’s cheers of “Great! You did great!” And looking up, I saw him smiling over me, hands thrown over his head, fingers reaching to the sky.

Allan B. Goldstein’s “Death and Ice Cream,” about his brother who has intellectual disabilities, appears in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood’s LOST AND FOUND, STORIES FROM NEW YORK.

On any given day at this site something totally unexpected happens, the kind of incident no one I know ever describes while we discuss our day at work over coffee. My stories rather than create mere interest, usually stimulate coffee nose tricks. After every insanity–as the honcho, or resident honchette–it falls to me to handle it. The incident, not the turd, thanks god.

So I summon Pepe, the janitor, to extricate it. I dread this, but tell myself each time I need to call him that it goes with the turf. There are whole days when Pepe doesn’t nudge a dust ball. But when bad things happen they sometimes fall into Pepe’s bailiwick. Pepe brings things back to merely abnormal. Like the time that Mr. Malatesta brought in his pit bull who killed a cat in front of the clinic ramp. Pepe had to clean that up, too.

He was new then. That was before, on a rare peek into the clinic storeroom, I discovered one entire wall plastered with semi-nude photos of Madonna, ripped from a wide variety of popular magazines. That was the start of the event I later called “The Battle of the Madonna Pinups.”

With my discovery I had to request Pepe to take them down after explaining to him that the store room, where he changes clothes and sneaks smokes, is not his office, private or otherwise, and the discovery of his crotch trove by my boss or an unannounced state auditor would create tsunamic consequences for us both.

First he whined and cadged. When I finally said, “Pepe, please stop trying to manipulate me,” he replied, “I only manipulate the women I make love to.” Did he really say that? Yes.

“Pepe, you have no right to post pictures of bare breasts in there.”

“It’s my office,” he retorted.

“No it’s not. And it’s not your garage.”

“Other workers have pictures on their walls,” he sneered.

“They’re counselors. They see patients all day and they put up reproductions of restful scenes, and inspirational sayings, not semi-nudes.”

“These are my inspirations. They give me strength!”

“Stop now. Pepe. Just hear me, please. They have to go.” I could feel myself on the edge of an abyss.

“I need them,” he added, “This is my shrine; I look at them every morning.” His voice had gotten louder and slightly mean.

“Skip the religion, please. There’s an empty locker in the hallway. Drag it in here and put them inside it if you need inspiration, but they can’t be visible whenever anyone opens the door to the storeroom. Finito.”

I started to walk back toward my office. He followed close behind.

“I have a constitutional right!” he shouted.

“Bull.” I was struggling with the door to my office. I wanted to yell, “Call a lawyer!”

Instead I said, “Pepe, I’m too angry to talk to you any more right now. We’ll talk again when I’ve cooled down. You better think about what I said in the meantime. It’s not an office, and this is a state-funded clinic and the constitution has zip to do with it. Put your pictures in the locker tomorrow and enjoy them in privacy. The end.”

“You don’t respect me.” He carped.

“Pepe, if I didn’t respect you I would have ripped them off the wall as soon as I saw them instead of speaking to you about them. I’d also write you up for insubordination for refusing to take them down. Instead you give me a hard time.” This was the first time I’ve ever raised my voice at a worker. I closed my office door behind me.

Pepe was still arguing with me when we locked the clinic and left with the Burns guards.

“Talk to Sgt. Diaz,” I told him, knowing they carpool and the Sarge would clue him in, “He won’t lie to you. Ask him if I’m being fair or if I’m asking you to do something out of line. Then tomorrow tell me what you decide.” I could tell he had already talked to the Sarge, who was nodding in agreement behind Pepe’s back.

This doody is three years later and now we get along, Pepe and I. I still don’t know if or when he’s conning me, doing a kind of Latino Stepin Fetchit, but when there’s a shit in a cabinet he knows who’s going to clean it up, even if we never learn who’s made the smelly statement.

You know, it might just be a staff person. Someone who wants to create commentary, controversy, disgust. One of the more demented ones.

My friends think they’re having a tough day when the printer gets jammed, or it takes an hour for the lunch delivery to arrive, or any one of a thousand office vagaries. I feel good when no one comes to the clinic carrying a bazooka. An anonymous poop doesn’t get me down.

Originally from southeastern Massachusetts, Marcelle Harrison lived on City Island for many years enjoying the quiet almost crime-free life in far northeastern Bronx.

It is 2004. I am 44 years old. I do not have regular income, unless you count the checks I get from our good friends at the Employment Development Department. I drive a car that was old when it was made, and I smoke cigars that linger in my beard long after they’re extinguished.

I play in a men’s softball league where my teammates get on my case about the errors I make, where I can’t hit, and where someone is always yelling at somebody about something, which is usually nothing. This is what I do for fun.

I play the game because it is the only game where I understand all the rules and most of the strategy. That and Monopoly, though to this day I don’t understand the whole thing about mortgaging properties.

I also play ball because when I’m playing ball, that’s all I think about.

At home, I am roommates with my ex-wife’s cat, a vile creature who alternates between screaming, “Why did you make Mommy go away?” and vomiting.

My age, my poverty, my car, my cigars, my athletic ineptitude, and Louise the bulimic cat lead me to believe I must change my life.

Where to start? Well, I keep the cat because I feel like she is a little part of my ex-wife I am supposed to take care of. Yes, I know it’s maudlin. Shut up.

My teammates improve my life by improving theirs. I become a part-time catcher, a position more suitable to my waning defensive prowess.

I cannot get a new car until I get out of debt and being in debt makes me nervous so I smoke. So first I will get out of debt.

By writing a musical.

On The Official List of Making It Big, “writing a musical” comes between “blacksmith” and “potato chip repairman.”

I make about a hundred dollars on the musical. I rethink my approach to Changing My Life.

For one thing, I put Changing My Life in all caps. This time, my age, my poverty, my car, my cigars, my athletic ineptitude, and Louise the bulimic cat lead me to believe I am irresistible to women.

Unfortunately, women, in general, did not get the email.

Over a short period of time, I have dates with too many women. Sometimes 4 a week. They like that I can make time for them until they find out why.

Louise the bulimic cat says, “You would not have to do this if you hadn’t made Mommy go away.”

My songwriting partner says, “Are these dates? Or are these Rondates?” I say, “What is the difference?”

He says, “A date is when interested parties do anything from have coffee to have sex. A Rondate is when you think it is a date and she thinks it is a business meeting about her one woman show, and you are too proud to admit your motive so you end up directing her one woman show.”

On The Official List of Making It Big, after musicals and potato chip repair is “directing one person shows.” I direct 7 one-woman shows. One of the women isn’t even an actress. (Read more about this in my next essay, Directing for Food.)

Happily, between one-woman shows 6 and 7, I meet Sally on the internet.

We meet. She says, “Your car seems fine to me.” She says, “You smell like chocolate.” How interesting. She has a damaged olfactory nerve telling her tobacco is chocolate.

Now there are some problems.

Problem One. She is 21 years younger than me.

I decide this is not a problem.

Honestly, in a lot of ways, she is way more grown up than me. For one thing, she has a job.

Problem Two. We can’t see each other regularly because the musical is going to open in Chicago.

I decide this is not a problem. It will solve the Poverty Problem, which is also now in caps.

Problem Three. Louise the screaming bulimic cat cannot come with me to Chicago. I decide this is definitely not a problem. I get a subletter for the summer, making it her problem.

I say goodbye to my softball team. They don’t say anything. I say goodbye to One Woman Show #8, and I tell Sally, “Maybe you can visit me in Chicago.”

Someone once said, “If a woman sees you do something impossible, you will win her heart.” The person who said this obviously saw Clint Eastwood take a bullet for the President in In the Line of Fire so Renee Russo was required by federal law to fall in love with him.

Impossibly, the musical I have written is on stage in Chicago. Impossibly, Sally sees the musical. More impossibly, I am in the musical. Even more impossibly, after the show, she and I walk down a hallway where impossibly happy audience members applaud me like I am Clint Eastwood who took a bullet for the President.

Sally loves the musical. She likes me. She goes back to LA.

A few weeks pass. I finish work on a Sunday afternoon and get on a plane. I am taking a 48-hour vacation to my own home, where Louise the bulimic cat accuses my Wiccan subletter of using her in satanic rituals.

Sally and I are getting together. Maybe we can play a board game like Monopoly, I say, though I do not understand the rule about mortgaging properties. But she says we have to go to her brother’s birthday party.

At the birthday party, I impress the family because I play catch in the backyard with the brother, who is 11, and who has no adult man in his life.

Once again I achieve the impossible. Usually, when kids see me, they think, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Child Collector. Outta here.”

Since it is a kid’s birthday party, it is over at 6:30pm, which I have not anticipated. We talk about going to a movie, but since I am merely vacationing in California, I have no idea what movie is where when.

Then I say, "Well, my softball team has a game tonight. Would you like to go to that? It is only about an hour and half long."

The girl who thinks I smell like chocolate and who thinks I have a nice car says, “Sure.” Bless her heart.

We go home. I change into my uniform. Louise screams and shows off her vomiting skill to Sally.

I have been away from the team for a while. I figure I will play catcher every other inning and get to bat a couple of times. As it turns out, the team is short-handed. Our manager, who normally plays in the outfield, is going to pitch, and he tells me, "Ron, third base."

I say, "Okay," but I haven’t played third base in this league in two years, and the last time I did, I played very, very badly.

Before the first pitch is thrown, I say aloud, "Dear God in heaven: Please don’t let me screw up in front of this girl."

We are in the field, and the top of the first passes without incident. In the bottom of first, I get up with the bases loaded and hit a single to right and get two rbis.

Now, we take the field. Because of the way our manager is pitching (or because of the way the wind is blowing) a lot of the right-handed batters are hitting the ball to me. A Lot.

I would like to be able to tell you that I field my position with aplomb, that I am the hero of the game. So that’s what I am going to tell you. Because that is what happens.

I field everything. I throw guys out at first. I start double plays. After every inning, the guys come off the field saying, "Great play, Ron West.” It is as if I have paid both teams to participate in an elaborate ruse so it appears I have done The Impossible.

At no point in the course of the game do I think, “I have to be on stage and dancing in 16 hours 2500 miles away.” Because when you’re playing ball, all you think about is playing ball.

There is a guy named Ray on the team I do not get along with. I do not know exactly why. Actually, I do. He is far more able than I am and I played poorly in some games and he was upset about it.

Ray has not talked to me in a year. He has not looked at me in two years. (It now occurs to me he heard me say, “I wrote a musical,” and he is suffering from homophobia.)

Tonight, Ray plays left field. I throw a batter out to end the fifth, and he comes off the field and Starts a Conversation. He says, "I don’t know who she is, but you have to bring her every time."

I get on base 3 times, I field almost all of the balls hit to me, I am awarded the game ball, and we win the game. Sally is delighted.

For a brief time, I am making money, I am cheered by fans, and my old car takes me home to have sex. I am a god. A minor god, but still.

The musical closes in September. Sally and I break up. The age difference which I decided was not a problem is actually a problem. I don’t get a new car and the EDD goes back to being my primary employer. I keep smoking. But then something impossible happens.

Louise the quiet little cat loves me.

Ron West lives in Los Angeles, CA. He and Phil Swann have written The People vs. Friar Laurence and other musicals.

In the documentary, these Irish girls are sent to the good sisters to atone for sins of the flesh, real or contemplated. The focus is on one of the girls who has had a baby out of wedlock. After giving birth, her infant son is taken from her and later placed in foster care. The girl is devastated. I watch the scene; I sip my chardonnay, smoke my cigarette, and weep. Black and white phantoms are doing aves in my head. Dead nuns still managing the store.

****

Of course, St. Joseph’s in Monticello was just a boarding school, not a workhouse for wayward penitents. We didn’t have to slave in a laundry like the Magdalenes; all we had to do was make our beds, clean our rooms, and on Saturday night polish our shoes for Mass the next day. Unfortunately, I had gotten shoe polish on the sleeve of my rose colored bathrobe, for which Sister quietly determined my punishment. I was to kneel with arms extended to each side and tell God I was sorry for being so thoughtless. I was in this position when my mother, who was staying at the St. Joseph’s Guest House while recovering from the operation, walked into the dormitory and saw me kneeling.

“What are you doing?”

I told her.

“Get up,” she said.

“But, Mommy. Sister said I had to kneel until she came back.”

“Get up.”

She pulled me to my feet. I was terrified of disobeying Sister. “I’ll speak to Sister,” my mother said. And she did. The following month I was sent to Ladycliff Academy on the Hudson for the rest of the school year. Mother heard the Franciscan nuns at Ladycliff were nicer than the Dominicans at St. Joseph’s.

Before St. Joseph’s and hysterectomies and nervous breakdowns, my parents and I were living in the first home I remember, at 52 Bakerhill Road in Great Neck, Long Island. I think of these first six years of my life as an idyllic time before everything crumpled into grayness. I began first grade at our parish school, St. Aloysius. Sister Mary Damien who was my first grade teacher, wanted me to learn to write with my right hand. My mother disagreed and said she didn’t believe it was good to switch. I had a huge crush on Sister Mary Damien, I would have done anything for her. If she had asked me to go the island of Molokai, the land of her name-sake, and save all the Lepers, I would have done so. The fact that my mother insisted that I continue writing with my left hand, embarrassed me. My mother won the argument. Sister Mary Damien gave in and almost seventy years later I continue to be a lefty.

After my hiatus at St. Joseph’s and later on at Ladycliff Academy, we returned to 52 Bakerhill Road and I got reacquainted with my third and fourth grade classmates in St. Aloysius. My mother was unhappy living in Great Neck, so in 1939 we moved to Bronxville in Westchester.

****

In those days, Bronxville was one square mile of Protestants. There was a smattering of Catholics and about three Jewish families living there at the time. African Americans were nonexistent, except as domestic daytrippers. There was no parochial school connected to our parish, so my parents were forced to enroll me in the public school, which happened to be one of the first progressive schools in the state. This was so exciting to me—no uniforms, no prayers, no “Yes, Sister. No Sister.” I was gung-ho to start my non-sectarian fifth grade.

At Bronxville Public School, the arts were integrated with the courses being taught. Our history class studied Peter Stuyvesant and old New Amsterdam, so we were encouraged to experience the life-style of all things colonial. This was decades before reality shows in which modern families endured the hardships of more primitive eras in history. We learned how to dip candles, weave cloth and make pewter spoons. I loved this stuff. Another godsend was an escape from math. If I found arithmetic overwhelming, I’d get permission to go to the art department to express myself. My father, upset with this curriculum, sent away to the New York Board of Education for the State Syllabus so he could coach me in the mysteries of fractions. During my year in Bronxville, I learned many things: how to make pewter spoons, dip candles, and that not all schools sang songs in Latin.

****

It’s October 15, 1940 and I’m sitting on a milk box near the side door of a bungalow we rented far away from our old house on Bakerhill Road. We moved back to Great Neck and my mother was still unhappy. Family members would say, “Aunt Mae is just feeling blue.” And she was. Many neighbors were milling about on the front lawn and an ambulance had pulled up to the curb. My father was in the house with paramedics who were trying to revive my mother who had turned on the gas and inhaled eternity. For a brief period of time, my father tried to hold things together by having himself and me, his only child, move into his sister’s home in Flatbush. My aunt was a loving, no-nonsense woman whose deeply lived Catholicism helped her endure the deaths of a husband and two children. Her remaining four sons and daughter, my father and me were in theory to live together in a family arrangement that would work for everyone. This did not happen right away. I had just turned eleven and was convinced that I was a changeling, the unacknowledged heir to the throne mistakenly left with a family of well-meaning aliens. My father, who must have been in deep despair, decided that my return to Ladycliff Academy would be best for all.

****

It’s 1997 and Schindler’s List is being re-played on TV. As I followed the little red dress weaving in and out of the gray mass of humanity, I thought of Anne Frank. Born in 1929, she would be my age today. We were adolescents together, she in her garret in Amsterdam, me in St. Agnes in Rockville Center.

That January, Jerry and I were on our way to Hamburg, Germany for the premiere of After Play, a play I had written that had been performed Off-Broadway in New York several years earlier. We decided to spend a few days in Amsterdam before the Hamburg opening. It was cold and damp and wonderful. Amsterdam, the land of Hans Brinker and legal marijuana. Our hotel was only a bridge away from the night club and coffee house area where a potpourri of herbal stimulants were available. For some reason we never took advantage of this largesse. Maybe we felt intimidated or too green to know what to ask for.

The day before we left for Hamburg, we visited Anne Frank’s House. We went up the stairs and in and out of the hidden rooms behind the bookcase, searching for echoes of Anne and her family. Anne’s room had movie stars’ pictures on the wall, similar to my bedroom in Long Island.

The secret rooms were real but mainly a re-creation of the conditions under which the Franks lived during their enforced hibernation. Did Anne love James Mason and Van Johnson as passionately as I did?

****

I’m back at Ladycliff Academy. It’s January 1941, three months after my mother’s death. By now, I was an old pro at the boarding school game. After all, I’d been out in the world a bit. I’d experienced foreign cultures like Bronxville and had an incredible working knowledge of the life and times of Peter Stuyvesant.

A new girl arrived at Ladycliff and became my roommate. She was taller than me and more athletic looking. Her Aryan hair was cropped short in what was then called a “boyish bob.” Her name was Helen Hauser. She was German and spoke English with a heavy accent. I don’t think I liked Helen Hauser. She kept to herself and tacitly let those nearby know she had boundaries. I realized this was not “best pal” material. She was at Ladycliff for about three months and then mysteriously left I say mysteriously because everything about her said verboten.

The drums of war were beating a tattoo across the Atlantic. London was already in the blitz and December 7th was not far away.

In my eleven year old imagination, I wove a sinister scenario for Helen Hauser. She is the daughter of a Nazi General who has been sent to America for safe keeping. No. Worse. She is a Nazi spy masquerading as a twelve year old. Her mission is to steal war secrets from the military and send them back to her father via coded letters.

This was not impossible. Ladycliff was in the town of Highland Falls, New York, home to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

****

So many years and so many wars ago, I’m still thinking about the enigma of Helen Hauser. Did she go back to Germany? Was her father tried for war crimes or did he escape to Long Island and start a new life under the friendly cover of neighborhood brewmeister? Is Helen Hauser even alive and if she is, does she ever think of our pre-teen contemporary Anne Frank?

On Sundays at Ladycliff, parents would sometimes visit their children. The Nun would come to the study hall or outside to the play area and tell you that you had company. I loved it when my father would make the trek up along the Hudson in his Studebaker and whisk me away from the usual parochial Sunday night supper. We would drive north of West Point to the city of Newburgh and have steak and baked potato and creamed spinach at the George Washington Hotel. Sometimes there would be a movie before this luxurious repast. I remember seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator with Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard. This wonderful reprieve would end too soon and we would drive back to Ladycliff, where the Studebaker would turn into a pumpkin and the wicked step-sisters awaited.

In my memory, I see him walking down the hill wearing a brown suit and fedora. I don’t want him to go. The path down the hill is a short cut to the parking lot. The trail is worn bare from the footsteps of parents returning to the real world after huggy, kissy, guilty visits. My Dad shrinks in the distance. At one point he turns and waves to me. I wave back.

****

“As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” That line alone would put Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the poetry hall of fame. I’m now in seventh grade in St. Agnes elementary school in Rockville Center, Long Island and my father I are living with my Aunt and cousins at 69 Hempstead Avenue, a big brown shingled, cream trim house purchased with a loan from the Federal Housing Authority.

At St. Agnes, Sister Miriam Virginia, a humorless pinched-faced nun, who years later I learned, relaxed her face and left the convent, assigned us “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” Samuel Coleridge, I discovered, had his own personal albatross, mainly a serious dope addiction. In those days, dope was an exotic thing that belonged to poets and Victorian ladies who assuaged their vapors with hefty swigs of laudanum.

****

It is 1949 and I am an apprentice in a summer stock company in Southold, Long Island. Being nineteen and actually getting to work in the theater was a recipe for a magical summer. We apprentices did everything—painted flats, worked on costumes, lights, and sound—everything necessary to get a new play mounted each week. Three or four hours sleep a night was the usual. Benzedrine tablets—Bennies—were available to keep us awake and invincible.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but that was probably my first experience with dope. The next time, I was already married for about twelve years and in L.A. with Jerry and our kids. We were visiting with dear friends who also had two children. Avery was a wonderful actor, comedian, and improvisation artist, and his wife Shelly worked actively protesting against the war in Vietnam. They included “grass” in their lives as easily as we included vodka or beer. I was one of those straights who inhale a joint and announce to everyone around me that, “I don’t think this is working…I don’t feel anything.” Then one of our friends would say something innocuous like, “Lets leave the kids with the sitter and eat dinner at Scandia.” I would immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter: “My God, that is so hilarious, the wit, the insight!” Jerry would get very Hasidic and claim he was allergic to marijuana, that it infected his gums or something. Our brief sojourn into the land of pipe dreams didn’t last long. We more or less went back to conventional drugs like wine or booze.

****

I wonder what my mother would think reading these words.

Before May Dempsey Meara married my Dad she used to teach third and fourth grade in a Brooklyn public school. She loved poetry and used to recite everything from “A Child’s Garden Of Verses” to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” while cleaning our house. She would stand over the sink or stove and invent little poems. My father would take the scribbled rhymes to his office and have them typed up.

I used to know them all by heart. No more.

She loved movies and would take me with her whenever she could. I was thrilled. We would walk down Middleneck Road to the Squire theatre. The Squire Theatre was the Enchanted Wood of Great Neck circa 1935. We’d sit together in the expectant darkness. Paul Muni and Henry Fonda were May’s favorites. My favorites too. Those silvery pretenders, they were the real deal. Then we’d emerge into the cruel sunlight that ruined everything.

I am seventy-nine as I write this. If May were alive now she would be over a hundred and something. My god, that is so surreal. One old lady wanting to talk to another old lady.

But I do.

I want to find one of those time portals and go back to 52 Bakerhill Road. I want to stand next to May as she composes poems at the sink or at the stove and tell her how much I loved Paul Muni and Henry Fonda.

Born in Brooklyn, Anne Meara is an actress and comedian who has appeared in numerous roles in theater, film, and television. She is also the author of the plays After-Play (Manhattan Theater Club) and Down the Garden Path (Off-Broadway). For many years, she and her husband Jerry Stiller worked as the comedy team Stiller and Meara.