GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (BABY JESUS IS GONE)

On the road to a lifetime of therapy, my 5th grade class at Holy Trinity 1975 with the little nun who broke us all.

She paced before us, her black orthopedic shoes screeching against the institutional black-and-white speckled tiled floor. We were four months into our nine months sentence with Sister Lawrence in the fifth grade of Holy Trinity School in Fort Lee. There was still a brutal six months ahead of us. If we survived tonight.

 “Where is it?” she commanded. Her four-foot eight-inch frame striking terror into us. “Where. Is. Baby. Jesus?” her clenched jaw deployed the lever that made her fists curl into dangerous balls. She stopped in front of Rosemary costumed in a long dress, her head veiled by a beautifully hand-embroidered sheet.

          How could Sister Lawrence be yelling at Rosemary? Rosie was the ideal Catholic! She was on the “A” string for Team Jesus! She was chosen from all the other girls to play the role of Mary in the Nativity Scene for the annual Christmas Concert, but she had forgotten her Baby Jesus, a.k.a. Tippy Tumbles, at home. We held our breath as Sister Lawrence rained insults down upon Rosie. No one could strip you of your dignity with such skilled precision like Sister Lawrence. Her meticulous dissection of the ego is still studied in some convents far, far, away.

“Did Mary forget to bring Baby Jesus to Bethlehem? NO! But YOU apparently think it’s okay to forget our Lord and Savior and deny us the pleasure of his blessed birth! Do you think that Baby Jesus grew up to die on that cross (our eyes automatically turned towards the crucifix she was pointing at) just so you could forget him at home?! Your sister didn’t forget him last year when she was the Virgin Mary!”

I felt dizzy with faint. I’m pretty sure the boy next to me wet his pants. For the last half-hour as we waited for our class to go on stage and perform for our parents, Rosie had been holding her arms to her chest as if she was cradling a baby hoping that Sister Lawrence wouldn’t find out she left Baby Jesus home. Now I could hear her sniffles and knew that Sister Lawrence had reduced her to tears. Like all my other classmates, I thanked God it was her and not me. Sister Lawrence already got her licks in with me earlier in the day.

That morning, she chose me, Mary Lutz, Helena Toledo, and Lia Bizzaro to stay behind at recess to wrap Christmas gifts for the retired nuns at Convent Station. (I always pictured Convent Station as a town with train-fuls of old nuns waiting to go to Heaven.) Feeling privileged to be hand-picked by her, she directed us on how to wrap presents. My euphoria of having been chosen quickly faded when, upon wrapping my first gift, she jerked it out of my hands and intentionally ripped the paper from the box, her face a blooming shade of apoplectic red.

“Look at this!” she bellowed. “What is this?”

I did look at it. It was a ripped open present. My sarcasm, being in its nascent stages, I kept to myself.  

“Look at all this paper you wasted to wrap this gift! You didn’t need all this paper! Are you so rich that you can afford to use all this paper on one tiny gift? Look at the size of your side-triangles! You only need enough paper to barely cover the box and no more. These nuns have NOTHING and you’re going to show them how little they have by wrapping their gift with all that paper! Go sit down. You disgust me with your waste! You’re going to grow up to be a waste!” As instructed, I sat down wondering if these wounds would ever heal enough to have scars.

Despite Sister Lawrence’s wrath, we appeared on stage and sang to an empty manger while our Mary fought back her tears.  Whenever I hear “What Child is This?” I think of 29 ten-year olds singing to an empty cradle while our parents snapped pictures capturing a moment we would spend years in therapy trying to forget.

But despite the long divide of years, each Christmas I can't help but think of Sister Lawrence and the legacy she left behind: Rosie’s anxiety attacks whenever she sees a nativity scene, my strong feelings of inadequacy whenever I see beautifully wrapped presents, and knowing that somewhere there’s a boy who just wants to wet his pants.  Merry Christmas!

JERSEY BOYS OF SUMMERS PAST

Shadows sink from the awning of the outstretched arms of the tremendous oak tree and dance at my feet as I sit in my deck chair, gin and tonic in hand, thinking and remembering. On this July afternoon, it’s those priceless summers of the ‘70’s. For you, it may be the summer of the 60’s, 50’s, 40’s, or 30’s. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that every summer of our youth called us forth to fill its empty days with possibility. In the end, we’re left with a string of bloated golden moments hemorrhaging meaning and memory.

The recognizable scent of Coppertone makes me want to do the Jersey Jig and shake the sand from my swimsuit; air perfumed by sausage and peppers summons crowds on Lower Main Street in Fort Lee feasting at the Feast of Saint Rocco. The other day I was sitting in my mother’s kitchen when the sight of her dust mop leaning against the wall conjured summer days long gone. Her threatening screams, “Did your brother take the handle of my dust mop for a stickball game?” echoed in my head.

Then the other day I was in Modell’s with my son roaming the aisles when I came upon a box with a big sign that read, “Stickball Bats.” I started to laugh thinking, “Really? They’re selling mop handles?” Then I saw the price tag and gulped. $25 for a mop handle?  Yes, $25 for a mop handle. If our moms had any foresight, they would be millionairesses now and could afford to hire someone to mop their floors.

          We never know what event can trigger memory, but for the tanned Jersey boys of summer’s past, now burdened by responsibilities they never anticipated, it’s got to be stickball. Stickball was, perhaps, the greatest of any unorganized sport. You didn’t have to try out for it, you didn’t have to wait for field time, and you didn’t have to buy any special equipment—all you needed was a mom with a mop, tape for the handle, and a pink Spaulding Hi-Bounce rubber ball from Feiler’s or County Discount. Stickball was a pick-up game that could be played pretty much anywhere.

That distinctive hollow pop of the pink rubber ball perfectly connecting with the wood of someone’s mother’s pilfered mop or broom handle; a fusion of excited voices caught midway between youth and manhood; the scraping of black converse high-tops upon the sun soaked gravel; the crack of the bat splitting the ball in half—one part dropping dead to the ground, the other hurling through the air like a spastic spaceship.

The boys from Fort Lee, Englewood Cliffs, Cliffside Park, Palisades Park, Leonia, Edgewater, Fairview, North Bergen, West New York and all towns in-between all had one thing in common (other than their paper routes)--stickball. For Jersey boys, all you needed was a wall to draw a batting box on, or a chain-link fence to string out a box, and a Spaulding. In Fort Lee there was the handball wall of Sixth Street Park, the handball wall of Holy Trinity’s field (anyone in Coytesville remember that?); the south facing red-brick wall of Madonna’s CYO Hall; Westview Park’s chain-linked fence.

In the summer of 1978, my best friend, Mary Lutz, created what was to become the great batting box mystery of Westview Park. For 32 years it’s been a cold case. Until now. In retaliation for her Frisbee interrupting Bobby Peterkin’s perfect pitch, one of the boys indiscriminately tossed it onto the roof of an elderly gentleman’s house. As cranky as he could be, he told Mary that her lousy Frisbee could rot on his shingled roof before he retrieved it for one of us hoodlums. In an act of pure vengeance, beneath the cover of night with only me by her side, Mary withdrew her pocket knife from the pocket of her Levi cut-offs and severed the ties of John Pagano’s meticulously twined batting box. The wrath of all the neighborhood boys greeted us the next day. These pious, genuflecting altar boys promised that the perpetrators of such a heinous crime would be shown no mercy. No suspects were ever charged.

So here’s to all those Jersey boys of summers past and their stickball games, especially the boys from Westview Park who waited 32 years for their case to be solved. Ah, memory…

RE-BIRTH OF A JOY-ZEE GIRL

(Continued)  August 18^th, 1980: “I can’t wait to be gone. Gone from this place; gone from this town where everyone knows everything about everyone. In this place nothing ever changes; people only die.”

I read the words of that teenage girl now from the distance of many years, and I can’t help but shudder. How could I have so thoughtlessly wished my life, and all that would ever hold any real meaning in it, away like that?

Teenagers are a funny species; they crave change while hating change. At the time I wrote those words change was happening to everyone but me. Old friendships were abandoned for new ones; friends moved away because their parents sold their houses to cash in on the real estate boom; being offered $150,000 for a triple lot seemed a once in a lifetime opportunity.  As ties began to unbind, I was beginning to feel lost at home. Finally, I was the only one still here. Leaving is always easy when you’re the last one to go.  

Eventually, I took a job in Manhattan and lost myself to the gritty intensity of midtown in the days before Mickey Mouse evicted O. Henry from Times Square. The city streets were filled with unfamiliar faces and people who knew nothing about me. Everyone came from somewhere else. And for awhile, that was intoxicating.

Then something remarkable happened. I realized that in my quest to flee everything familiar, I had surrendered all that was really meaningful. Suddenly I began to look upon my past with increasing fondness. The memories I had of growing up in that little part of town creviced themselves into a signifi­cant place in my history and became the stories I would tell.  It seems so important now—all the people and places that populated my small world back then. Sixth Street Park; Jim’s; Stanley’s candy in the back of the laundromat; Monsignor Reilly; Holy Trinity; the Palisades…all of it wished away by a young girl whose firm opinion of time was that it moved too slow.

Had I known in the summer of 1980 that my father would die in six years, I would have never left his side. Had I known that so many of the friends with whom I spent every waking moment with in the summer of 1980 would lose their lives to drugs, car accidents, cancer, murder…I would have never let the distance of time and place consign our friendships to the yearly distribution of Christmas greeting cards.   

There is a tremendous power in the past; meaning that we can only discov­er about ourselves through the passage of time and the loss of those we love, or once loved, most. It’s only when so much has been taken away that we realize how much we really had to begin with.

          I’ve returned to roam the streets I knew so well in an attempt to stir the trace remains of memory; not for the big events, but for those small subtle moments that now seem anything but ordinary. What I find instead are monstrous duplexes on tree-less streets where small shingled houses once stood; stillness where children once ran boisterously through fenceless backyards every hot summer evening while the music of ice cubes mingling in our parents gin and tonics chimed in the background; office buildings where hand-made forts and tree houses were once built.

Look­ing back to those days, those sacred days, as I so often do now, I confess that I carry within me home­sick­ness for those days, that place, all those people, and I remember events that may not, in fact, have happened as elo­quently as I now remember them. I realize with great regret that I spent the first half of my life counting down the days until I could shed my little corner of the earth from my skin only to spend the rest of my life trying to find my way back home again.

I'd like to think that some­where in the dis­tance between memory and truth those days were really as spe­cial as I remem­ber. That in the midst of memory all those people who came of age in that place called Coytesville, are still living and breathing some­where in time. 

UNCHAINED MEMORIES

Wide awake at 3 o’clock in the morning, waiting for the impending snow storm of the century, all I can think about are snow tires; more specifically those old snow tires that had chains. It seems that the further the years take me away from my primitive past, the more it re-appears to haunt me at the oddest, most inconvenient hours of the night.

          Most normal people, when they think back to their snowy youth, remember sleigh riding, hot cocoa, warm fires. I, however, think of unplowed streets, lack of traction, and my old man’s furrowed brow as seen from the rearview mirror as he ordered my little foot to “GIVE IT GAS!” while shouldering the Falcon out of an uneven snow drift as the tire spit a violent deluge of snow into his unprotected face. The roar of the revving engine drowning out the gusts of profanity emitted in puffy clouds of steam from his mouth like the winds of Poseidon.

Winter was not my old man’s season of choice. In fact, before he married he followed the sun south every winter to pre-Castro Cuba where he caddied for all the swells who treated him swell. His Havana stories always included lots of money in his pockets, midnight poker games in smoky dim-lit backrooms of bars, a colorful array of zoot suits, hand-rolled cigars, and iced rum served free to the high-rollers by hard-drinking bartenders. His stories entertained my imagination, and whenever Carmen Miranda or Ricky Ricardo came on T.V. he’d hum nostalgically along to their music while his eyes mourned the loss of those long, lazy Cuban dias of winters past.      

But to the northeast he permanently returned, never quite reconciling himself to the cold. I remember once, towards the end of his life when he was very sick but would let no one outside of his family know, there was a raging blizzard and he was late coming home from work. Worried that he might be stuck somewhere because the chained snow tires weren’t yet on his car, my mother sent me out on foot to find him. I walked north on Lemoine Avenue, the heart of the Coytesville section of Fort Lee, my head bent low to shield my face from the slash of whipping sleet. I passed Holy Trinity Church; passed the white-steepled First Reformed Church; passed the “Lunch Box”; passed “Bobanell’s Liquors.” I paused before the rectangular front window of “Randall’s Bar,” the last of the neighborhood saloons. I peered as best as my snow-blurred eyes could into the window, envying the shadows of the few bodies I saw standing around the bar.

As I surged on, something familiar struck me. “Did I see the silhouette of a pinky being raised with a shot glass?” I turned around and followed the grooved footprints of my snowboots back to the bar. I looked past my neon reflection and examined the patrons. A hand waved. It was my father’s hand.

As I crossed the entrance, the rush of intense heat magnetically pulled me towards the belly of the bar. There, regaling the neighborhood boys from Fort Lee Firehouse #2 with his incredible stories, stood my dear old man waving a shot glass of whiskey in the air as if it was a beacon light piloting lost travelers to safe harbors. He handed me the glass of amber liquor and said, “Here’s to your health!” As the whiskey travelled down my throat, tears swelled in my eyes. Not because the whiskey burned, not because I was wet and cold, not because I had expected to find him dead in the raging storm. No; tears choked me because I knew that this was the last perfect moment I would ever spend warm and safe by my father’s side. He died the following Fall, leaving this earth long before the winds of winter set in.  

           My father taught me that chains on your tires keep you gravitated to the earth when you feel like you’ve lost your footing. And it’s my memories of him that gravitate me to this earth when I feel like I’ve lost my footing and life is spinning out of control; a safe, warm harbor in the midst of raging storms.

SCENT-SATIONAL MEMORIES

Our minds make peculiar mental associations when triggered by certain scents. For instance, whenever I smell seasoned chop meat frying in a pan I’m sent back to my grandmother’s kitchen circa 1967; whenever I smell the Hudson River at low-tide I remember all those late ‘60’s/early 70’s summers swimming and crabbing off the deck of Bunty’s Dock near the base of the George Washington Bridge; whenever I’m in a car and I smell burning fuel I hear my father ordering us to run before the Falcon exploded. (My dad was Wile E. Coyote with cars—every trip, near or far, was tinged with the threat of explosion! I truly believe my old man was the inspiration behind the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters;” albeit without the benefit of safety gear or disability insurance.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, smell and memory. Recently, my daughter received a bottle of “Love’s Baby Soft;” when she unscrewed that pink cylindrical cap the scent rushed my brain back to 1976. “Love’s Baby Soft” was the “Evening in Paris” of my generation. Every school’s hallway was drenched in Love’s Baby Soft’s narcotic powdery undertones. I distinctly remember a boy leaning over and saying, “Wow, your perfume smells great,” to which I replied, “That’s not me, that’s Rosemary,” who sat on the other side of the classroom; proving that even if you failed to put your “Love” on, all you had to do was stand next to a girl who did to be infused by its contagious scent.

Which brings me to the eighth grade. I accompanied my mom to her friend’s, whose son I was madly in love with. He was a year ahead of me at Holy Trinity, but was now a freshman at Bergen Catholic. He was an altar-boy; he played basketball; he was a drummer. I had loved him since the fifth grade; he had loved my best friend since the fourth. Anyway, as I sat alone and bored on his couch watching T.V. I decided to go in search of his bedroom. He wasn’t home, but I thought if I could catch a glimpse of his room, I’d somehow know him better.  

I walked down the dimly-lit beige-carpeted hallway of his split-level house. The door to the first room I passed was slightly opened, and I caught a glimpse of his drum set. (Cue heavenly music.) I pushed the door open and crossed into the inner-sanctum of his manly boudoir. I immediately noticed that over his desk hung a cabinet whose door was slightly ajar. I had every intention of closing it, but in a last minute reversal, I opened it instead. Things, lots and lots of things, came nose-diving out in rapid succession; something large and white came hurtling into my open palm and affixed itself to my hand like a glove. It was his jock strap. I freaked.

I tried to shake it off, because there was NO WAY I was touching it, but the more I shook it, the tighter it twisted around my wrist. Of course at that moment I heard the wheels of his ten-speed Schwinn steer into the garage. “Oh. My. God!” I had to get out of his bedroom fast, so I thrust my arm inside my zippered sweatshirt and retreated like Napoleon at Waterloo to the living room where I jumped onto the couch. I tried to act nonchalant as Mike Douglas interviewed Zsa Zsa Gabor while my right hand was indelicately shoved down my sweatshirt.

Walking up the stairs from the basement, he seemed surprised to see me sitting on his couch. Just as he was about to sit down beside me his mom called him into the kitchen. Noticing my hand shoved down my shirt he asked me what was wrong. I panicked! What could I say, “Nothing, I’m just wearing your jock strap like a Speidel I.D. bracelet?” Instead my quivering thin lips released a nervous idiotic giggle that made my orthodontic retainer vibrate. Before retreating to the kitchen, he leaned over me and said, “Mmmm…Love’s Baby Soft?” I think I lost consciousness at that point.

Decades later, the scent of Love’s Baby Soft evokes memories of unrequited love, vibrating retainers, and the twisted jock straps of altar boys.