Roses in the Snow

It was my twentieth wedding anniversary a few weeks ago and my husband, Jamie, and I went out to dinner.  I went with two of his sisters to a restaurant in Manhattan and he joined his cousin and her husband at their house in Santa Monica.  He flies home every Friday night and, like a 36 hour clock precisely wound, returns to Los Angeles on Sunday evening.

Sometimes I wonder if the ceramic bride and groom on our wedding cake were accidentally placed facing opposite directions. While living in the same place at the same time has sometimes proved difficult, our marriage only became a cross-country relay event five years ago when he became the President and CEO of a production facility in Hollywood.

While living simultaneous lives on opposite coasts can be Hell, it also comes with unexpected moments of incomparable sweetness that I don’t think would be there if we were together all the time.  Sometimes these moments are simultaneous. Sometimes they involve snow.

I really only like snow from a distance, like when Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney are singing as they walk through it, arm in arm.  When I am faced with the reality of it, I hate it.  It was on my mind from the moment Jamie accepted the job on the West Coast.

“What’ll I do when it snows?”  I had asked in October as he packed linen clothes for sunny LA.

“We have that huge new snow blower. “

“I don’t know how to use it.”

“I’ll write it out.  You’ll be fine.”

One day last February, snow was forecast, a lot of snow, the kind of snowfall that made my students noses quiver with delight, as though, like rabbits they could feel it coming.  They were right because at five a. m. announced its arrival by a ringing phone. 

“Laura, it’s Pam from the snow chain.  We have a snow day today.”

I awakened a couple of hours later to a world smothered in snow. Enough snow for a day off is good, but what was piled outside my bedroom window was overkill.  And it was still coming, tiny, crispy, little crystalline flakes floating happily to the ground covering trees, bushes, and trellises.   It looked like some giant incarnation of Martha Stewart had gotten carried away with a sugar shaker.

Since staring at it dolefully wasn't making it disappear, I decided to blow it.  I didn’t want to spend the entire day and night marooned.  How hard could it be?  All manner of confidence-boosting mantras burbled in my brain as I dressed in multiple layers of sweatpants.  Then I dialed Jamie at our house in Santa Monica, the house near the beach where it doesn’t snow. I woke him. 

“It’s snowing.”

“Oh.”

“I’m going to snow blow so I don’t have to stay here all day.”

“Oh.”

“Is it hard?”

“No, it’s pretty easy.  It’s self-propelled, after all.” 

Outside, actually standing next to it, the snow blower looked a lot bigger than it had when that nice man had delivered it from the local power equipment dealer.  I pulled off the note Jamie had taped to it.  “Plug it in.  Push the orange lever forward.  Press the black button.  It’s electric start so you’ll be fine.” 

Like the diligent student I’ve always been, I followed the directions to the letter.  Vrooooom!  It roared to life.  I had planned to aim the Zamboni-sized monstrosity up the hill toward the road, but I couldn’t move it.  It weighed two tons. Thinking the self-propulsion would help, I squeezed the handle and gave it gas.  Pow!  It jumped and dragged me into the garage wall.  This was harder than I thought.  Inch by inch I turned the snow blower until it pointed mostly uphill toward the road, definitely away from the garage.  Squeezing the gas handle again and holding on tight simultaneously proved to be the key.  It chugged up the hill projectile-vomiting all the snow in its path.  It was huge, though, and heavy and despite the self-propulsion or maybe because of it, I ended up with a really crooked furrow.  Regardless of what propelled it, it still had to be pushed low to the ground and guided.  It looked like a nearsighted groundhog with faulty GPS had tried to burrow uphill in the dark.  My confidence ebbed.    One badly plowed trough in the snow wasn’t going to solve the driveway problem.  At the top of the hill, I let off the gas and, again, inched it into the correct position.  By now I was sweating profusely in my down jacket so I ripped it off and tossed it over the stone pillar that frames my driveway and continued in my sweats.  Downhill was easier (the self-propulsion, again) but since it was downhill and I am just over 100 pounds, I lost control of the machine and it thumped along with me clinging to it.  Nearing the end of the hill, and trying to hold onto it, I forgot to stop squeezing the gas lever and crashed into the garage wall again.

My spirit of adventure left as I landed on my butt in the cold, rapidly deepening snow.  My ego was completely deflated.  Obviously, I couldn’t do this.  There was too much snow, it was snowing too hard still, and I was just not big or strong enough to handle the machine.  I began to feel sorry for myself.  My rotten husband went to Los Angeles and left me here in the Arctic.  My nose started to dribble and fat, hot tears welled in my eyes.  Too stubborn to surrender, I tugged on the giant machine until it faced uphill again.  I began a new channel next to the previous one.  Suddenly it got harder to push the machine and it looked like less snow was being churned up and spewed out.  I released the gas and shoved the lever into Park.  Crouching in front of the behemoth I saw that one of the churning blades, the far left one, was spinning lazily.  I touched it.  It twirled like a Texas cheerleader’s baton.  Something had broken it.  Pushing away the caked snow I saw that a twig stuck out at a weird angle, like a dislocated arm.  I realized exactly what was wrong because it had happened before.  The rigid twig had jammed the blades causing the shear bolt to snap.

Fury crashed over me like a tidal wave.  I stumbled through the slippery mess into the garage and grabbed the extension phone.  Wiping my nose with my left sweatshirt sleeve, I dialed LA with my right hand.  Jamie answered sleepily.

“It’s broken!” I sobbed.

“What?”

“It’s broken.  The damn snow blower is broken.  The snow is so heavy it snapped a little branch from the maple tree near the well house and it’s still snowing so it got buried by the snow and I didn’t see it so I ran over it and it wedged in the blade and broke the shear bolt again and now the stupid thing’s broken and I’m stuck here in 10 inches of snow all by myself and it’s 75 degrees where you are and you left me here all alone and I want a divorce.”

Silence.  Then “I’ll call you back.”

Heaving with sobs at life’s unfairness and the relentless snow and my husband’s selfishness and, truth be told, my own incompetence, I stomped into the house, kicked off my boots and threw myself onto the kitchen window seat to cry.  After about twenty minutes I felt a bit better and decided to make a cup of tea.  I unfolded my legs to rise from the seat, and a red SUV appeared at the top of my driveway.  “Oh, great.  He’s broken down right there so even if I could get someone to plow he’d be blocking the driveway,” I mumbled.   Just as I was about to pull on my boots to go back outside I realized whose car it was.  It was Jamie’s friend Kurt.  He strode down the driveway.  The snow seemed to part in front of his 6’4’ frame. 

I opened the back door.

                  “Hey, Jamie called me from California and said you needed help with the snow blower so I brought an extra bolt from my house.  Those darn things break so easily, don’t they?”

                  Kurt fixed the snow blower and cleaned the entire driveway.  Then he had a cup of hot tea with me in the warm kitchen and drove to his own house.  I had a clean driveway and didn’t have to stay home all day if I didn’t want to.  I didn’t go anywhere, though, once the driveway was plowed.  I snuggled on the couch with the dog and watched Turner Classic Movies.  And it’s a good thing because if I had, I might not have been there to open the door when the truck arrived from The Little Flower Shoppe in Ridgewood bringing a dozen snow colored roses.  The card read “Happy Snow Day.  Your worthless husband.”

[This story appeared in a slightly different form on Narrative.com]

                 

Lost New York

If you sit through the bitter end of a movie filmed in New York City, you’ll see that the closing credits contain a little circular logo from the New York Film Commission:  it says "Made in New York" in white letters on a blue ground.  Me, too: I am a native New Yorker from a long line of native New Yorkers, people who were truly Made in New York.  

2474 Grand Avenue, Apartment 18 C, third floor, Bronx, NY 10468, halfway between Fordham Road and West 190^th Street , was my family’s home.  My grandparents moved there in 1939 remaining until the mid-1970s.  It’s where I came after leaving Fitch Sanitarium where I was born early one October morning in the late 1950s. At almost 8 pounds, with black hair and indigo eyes, I was the only girl in a nursery populated with squalling baby boys. Fitch, a private hospital founded in 1849 by Dr. Charles W. Fitch, was peculiarly placed at the intersection of West 183 Street and Sedgwick Avenue at Loring Place, within walking distance of our apartment, or taxi distance, if one happened to be in labor.  I was escorted into the world by Dr. Daniel Martuccio, with the assistance of Mary Crean, an ob-gyn OR nurse who was such a good friend to my grandmother she was practically family.  To me they were always Dr. Dan and Aunt Mary.

Immediately upon meeting me that rainy midnight, Aunt Mary tied a string of beads to my wrist: black ink on white glass spelled my entire name, the same first and middle names as my grandfather’s mother, each letter closely following the other, no spacers: the unlettered beads alternated pink and blue.  I imagine Aunt Mary squinting as she poked through the wooden box containing the letter beads, her glasses perched on the tip of her nose, the same way my glasses do now, as I have long since passed the age she was on the autumn night when she strung them. Family lore says that after Dr. Dan tied the cord, Aunt Mary wrapped me in blankets like a papoose and said, “You finish up, Dan; I got what I came for” and promptly carried me into the waiting room to meet my father and my grandparents.  My older sister, at home with my teenaged cousins, had to wait a few days to meet me.  Interestingly, she’s never complained about that.

I haven’t been back to 2474 Grand Avenue in years, not since the day in the early 1990’s when, on a pre-zoo detour, I saw that the entire front of the building was changed, added on to, blown out like a boil.  The addition paid no homage to the building’s original architectural classification; it was that ugly, more–room-inside-so-who-cares-about-outside style.

“That’s progress,” my husband shrugged, shifting the car into Drive, completely acquiescent of construction in a city that never stops rebuilding itself.

I scowled.  “Humph.  Desecration, more like.” 

“Of what?” 

“My childhood.”  What did he know?  His parents’ original Tudor house in Forest Hills Gardens remains unchanged to this day: no one has opened a tarot-card-reading shop where he used to play.

When I was little, 2474 Grand Avenue was big, not huge like buildings now, but normal-people big, like buildings in Greenwich Village.  It was a lot like every other building on the block in size and tenancy, which means it was nowhere near as grand as those on the Grand Concourse, but you could never have convinced me of that.  In reality, 2474 Grand Avenue probably wasn’t an especially large building, even when new in 1926, but it and its two identical siblings were distinct from their neighbors by the addition of roomy courtyards created by having the lobby situated several feet back from the sidewalk, bordered by stone balustrades, and up two sets of five or six steps: raised flowerbeds then framed the steps and sidewalk.  On ordinary summer days, I played Barbies and jacks in there with my sister or by myself; occasionally my cousin Carl came over and Barbie’s pink world was stretched to include olive-drab GI Joe.  On days when Joe stayed home (Carl said he was “on maneuvers”), Carl and I played Go Fish or Old Maid, sitting opposite each other at the edge of a single step and using the flowerbed wall as our card table.  Neither my mom nor our grandmother had any trouble keeping an eye on us from the windows upstairs.

When it was time for a bathroom break or a drink of water, the lobby was reached easily through heavy glass doors covered in black iron scrolled into a curly Frenchish design.  The floor was black and white marble and a pastoral mural  was painted on the back wall.  The lobby was cool and dark and had twin staircases at either side that always reminded me of our cousin Nicholas’s sticky-outty ears.  I recall climbing those stairs to 18 C many times, my little legs climbing, climbing, climbing, while clutching my mom’s hand.  At our landing, the doors stood, all alike, shiny and black.  What they lacked in individuality, however, they made up for in locks, seemingly dozens of locks, locks to be opened just in time  - or not  - when a little girl really had to potty.  On those days when I was on the inside of the door, the clinking and jangling of these locks were like Christmas bells to me, heralding the arrivals of my mom, my dad, or my grandfather. 

Besides the locks, the only other interesting thing about the front door was its proximity to the enormous coat closet.  I loved the coat closet. Its door was identical to the front door except, of course, for the absence of all those locks.  The dim interior smelled like the polish for my dad’s shoes and the traces of My Sin by Arpege clinging to my mom’s out-of-season wool coat. My grandfather’s red metal toolbox resided in the closet.  The heavy, glass seltzer bottles lived there, too, napping in their wooden crate, rousing themselves drowsily only on Fridays when Mr. Schmuckler, the seltzer man, took away the empties and left full ones in their places.

By city standards, the apartments in 2474 Grand were huge, with up to three bedrooms, a black and white tiled bathroom, and a living room that ran the entire width. Each living room on the street side had three large windows. The front window closest to my grandfather’s favorite chair had a wide sill, and like the old men in “Prufrock” or a solitary house cat, I hung out that window observing the opera of the street and looking for my sister, for my cousins, for my mom and dad, but mostly for my grandfather coming home from Grand Central Station, where he worked days as a Ventilation Cleaning Gang leader (essentially, a supervisor in charge of the crews who ensured the air quality in the station and its tunnels) or from the business he and my grandmother owned at 178 West Fordham Road, where he worked evenings repairing televisions and radios.  I sat on the sill playing with Colorforms plastic shapes and cutting paper dolls from catalogs.  Sometimes I colored or connected-the-dots.  One day I accidentally knocked my sister’s souvenir Statue of Liberty out the window from that sill, breaking her torch.  (The statue’s, I mean, not my sister’s.)  Ironically, Miss Liberty currently stands on a bedside table in a guest bedroom in my own house looking perfectly content; unlike my sister, she got over it.

The kitchen in the back was narrow but not too small; we had a table and chairs in there and we all fit at the table at the same time.  The table was placed next to another big window with another big sill, wide enough for a child to lean on and unobtrusively stack peas, while hoping for pigeons to swoop down and eat the evidence.  My grandmother, who had lost her right leg from the knee down due to a childhood playground accident - an unsecured wrought-iron school gate swung into her from behind slicing her leg and damaging it irreversibly – perched on that sill, too, while she hung laundry on a line connected to our building with a pulley.  The pulley had a companion across the way, attached to someone else’s building, just outside someone else’s window.  

Walking the five or six blocks from our apartment to my grandparents’ business with my grandmother on summer mornings brought one of my life’s enduring highlights  - approaching Shields’ Bar and Grill on the corner of Grand Avenue and Fordham Road.  On summer evenings, the air around Shields’ formed its own cumulous cloud of appetizing scents like onions and hamburgers frying: raucous laughter and jukebox music spilled through its open windows, sparking my imagination.  In the clear morning air, however, it  sat quietly, looking somewhat unkempt in the morning light, and  smelling of yeast.  Nevertheless, every day on the back step sat one of the biggest pieces of ice I had ever seen; each day the block was uniformly square, about three feet by three feet, resembling an ice cube plucked from a giant’s lemonade glass. When I asked my grandfather how that was possible – our refrigerator didn’t make anything that big - he took me to the icehouse near Yankee Stadium.  Dating from the 1920’s, it made ice for the Bronx Terminal Market and other places.  I stood on the sidewalk, amazed: who’d’ve believed there really was a place that did nothing all day and all night but make enormous ice cubes?  In my imagination, huge aluminum ice cube trays, held by six burly men, were balanced under a massive tap and filled with water.  When the flow stopped, the men staggered to a big freezer and slid the trays into position, one by one. Then, when the cubes were solid, the huge handle cranked back, popping out the cubes, ready for delivery to places like Shields’.  Daily, inches from that massive block, I’d balance on tiptoe and attempt to peer into the screened back door, searching the gloom for the sources of the smells and the mystery of who exactly used that big ice cube and for what, but the dimness inside always prevented it.  My grandmother prevented it, too, tapping my right ankle with her crutch and saying, “Come on.  There’s nothing in there for you.”  Really?  I bet there was, if only I could have finagled a way to get in and find out.

My grandparents’ business was an electronics sales and repair store called DeVoe Radio & Electric (named by my dad, after the park situated just across the street), dating from the days when people still needed specialty stores and it was cheaper to repair than buy new. My grandfather fixed small appliances, like radios, and later, televisions, in the back and my grandmother ran the front of shop and kept the books.  Although DeVoe certainly wasn’t the only electronics store in New York at the time, or even in the Bronx (an advertisement for the new General Electric vacuum cleaner placed in the May 19, 1949 edition of the New York Times lists dozens of them), it was one of only two on Fordham Road, and thus, well-known with a loyal clientele.  My grandfather ensured this by stocking cutting-edge products for his customers to try.  (Decades later, a waiter at Smith & Wollensky made me cry by telling me how he saw his first televised World Series baseball game playing through the front window of my grandparents’ store in 1947 when owning a television was uncommon.) 

On most summer mornings I sat high up on the counter and played with the receipts poked onto a little metal pole, the receipts from in-store sales or from repairs that my grandfather would pull from a leather folio when he returned from a home call.  Sometimes I’d sit on my grandmother’s lap drawing or crafting paper clip chains (lacking the fine dexterity required to braid the more difficult chewing-gum-wrapper chains that so captivated my adolescent sister and teenaged cousins) or playing Hopscotch on the sidewalk until I felt like a melting Popsicle, and dragged myself next door to Mr. Pigola’s candy store for a cherry Coke.  This was a real cherry Coke, made with two kinds of syrup, cola and sweet cherry, tapped from soda fountain optics into a clear, ice-filled glass with the word “Coke” etched onto the side in script, and stirred with a long, twisted metal spoon.  It tasted cold and sweet and fresh.

Sometimes my grandfather invited me join him on an evening repair call. He would grab his metal repair case and we’d be off, me trotting beside him on the wide sidewalk, clutching his free hand, and chattering at him about whatever things happened to interest me.  If the location were farther than a few blocks away, we’d drive in his red Chevy Impala station wagon.  When we reached our destination, I’d follow him upstairs to the apartment; I always sat quietly where directed while he slid out chasses and changed tubes.  Occasionally someone would offer me a cookie or a glass of soda.  One elderly lady gave me a pocket-sized teddy bear to keep.

My summer days passed this way: all were virtually identical, like pulling on a roll of paper towels and observing each towel’s uniformity in size and shape, with only minor variation in the color and contour of the border pattern. 

One variation involved my mom leaving her job in Manhattan early and meeting me at the store rather than allowing me to walk home with my grandmother. I never knew when she planned to do this: hearing the shop door’s bell, I would look up and see her walking in.  One such day, after re-braiding my hair and helping me pack away Barbie and Skipper, she said she and I were going for a walk.  When I asked where, she shook her head.  “Mm-mm.  It’s a surprise.” 

We exited DeVoe Radio to the left, popped into the liquor store to say hello to Mr. Jacobson, waved to Mr. Applebaum as we passed his pharmacy, and continued walking along the pavement toward Sedgwick Avenue.  We stopped at the corner and didn’t cross, even when the lights changed.  I waited with her, holding her cool, dry hand with my little, sweaty one and used the rubber toe of my left Keds to scratch a mosquito bite on the back of my right calf, a mosquito bite I had gotten “up the country” - my cousins’ and my name for my grandparents’ weekend house upstate.   I looked around – apartment houses, the Berenson’s grocery store, Louie Carbone’s fresh fruit and vegetable market, the butcher shop - all places my dad had worked as a teenaged delivery boy - Ralph Camera’s Gulf station, and long, long Fordham Road with the highway rushing at its base.  As the minutes passed I began to grow restless; I’d seen all these sights before.  Were we ever going to move?  Where were we going, anyway?  This was the wrong direction for the zoo or Aunt Fay’s house. We’d already passed the park so we weren’t going to the swings and we’d passed Piggy’s so we weren’t going to have a soda. To ride the Staten Island Ferry or see the Balto statue or the Alice clock - both in Central Park  - required traveling to Manhattan first and we were nowhere near the subway. Pretending to ignore my shifting weight and unasked questions, my mother merely gazed through her cat’s eye sunglasses at a distant point downhill, obviously somewhere so far away only a mother could see it.  Seconds passed.

                  Finally she nudged me gently and gestured with her head.  “Look. Look.” 

I turned my body slightly to the right and there was my grandfather, walking up the hill from the railroad. Before my mom had even released my hand, I burst away like a dog chasing a squirrel.  My grandfather, laughing, let his Daily News fall to the pavement and caught me just before I crashed into his knees.

             My mom had followed me; she bent to retrieve the paper, then tucked it in her big basket purse.  We walked up the hill in the fading sunshine, the three of us holding hands with me in the middle.  We stopped at Mr. Pigola’s for a packet of cherry licorice and continued along Fordham Road to meet my grandmother, just locking the front door of the store.  

The workday was sighing to a close.  My dad would be home soon, and my sister.  There were groceries to buy at Daitch on the walk back to 2474 Grand Avenue, groceries that would contain the Breyer’s chocolate ice cream so beloved by my grandfather, my dad, and me. There was chicken to roast, potatoes to mash, and peas to stack on the back windowsill.  There were saltines to poke through the bars to my grandfather’s parakeets, and finally, just before bed, scoops of ice cream to eat from clear, pressed-glass bowls while watching Perry Mason, curled in my grandfather’s lap, in my grandfather’s favorite chair as the sun set behind the water towers on the city rooftops.

Don’t take anything for granite.

We all became teachers for different reasons.  Maybe some of us were seduced by the idea of shaping young people’s lives or were enticed by the thought of holidays off, but most teachers I know came to this career out of an intense love of their subject and a desire to share that love with others.  Sounds naïve when you see it in print, doesn’t it?  It’s true, though.  You respect something so much, you think that if you can only explain to the students what the words in those books mean and the truth of that message in the larger world that they’ll value it all the same way you do.  Your eyes shine with ambition and desire. 

My first year teaching tenth grade English I was attempting to express my love for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  I wanted my students to see the characters as Steinbeck wrote them, as real people.  I wanted them to try to feel the desperation of the migrants’ situation, and evaluate what their story meant to the greater world outside the novel.  I decided to read aloud from Chapter Fifteen, the scene in the hamburger stand on Route 66, when an unnamed Okie man asks to buy bread from Mae, the waitress. She’s reluctant to sell it: she thinks that the migrants always want something for nothing and, besides, the restaurant needs the bread to make sandwiches for its paying customers.  The insistent humility of the migrant man eventually softens Mae’s heart to the point where she sells a fifteen-cent loaf for a dime.  When the man pulls the dime from his leather pouch, a penny sticks to it, and taps the counter.  Looking beneath the penny, through the glass case, the man sees peppermint sticks and asks if they’re penny candy.  He’s seen the longing on the faces of his two starving little boys, and would like to make their lives a bit better if only he can afford to.  Mae has seen the children’s frozen, dirt-smeared faces, too, so she lies and says that the candy is actually two for a penny.  My eyes began to well with tears at this point in the reading.  When I finally got to where I intended to stop, the part where one of the truckers realizes that Mae has lied about the candy’s price and teases her about it, I was snuffling loudly.  I stopped reading and gazed at my students; then I wiped away my tears and said, “The way that Steinbeck wrote this scene, the way he uses these characters to show us the need to treat our fellow humans with dignity, always makes me cry.”

A boy I'll call Alex, in the front row, looked at me with utter disgust on his face and said with the condescension that only a fifteen year old boy can muster, ‘They’re not real, you know.’

‘I know,’ I answered, ‘but they’re based on real people that Steinbeck knew and they are representative of a bigger problem in the country at the time.  What might it be?  Think about it, then write it down.’

As their pencils scratched across their notebooks, I realized that my loving literature (and liking teenagers) wasn’t enough.  Evidently Steinbeck’s voice didn’t sing to them as it did to me.  More was required here than just an understanding of the words, the author’s intent, and the state of the world when the book was written.  Merely reading the same words on the page as I was reading didn’t provide those kids with the same feelings I got, as I had mistakenly assumed that it would.   Having learned this important lesson during the first marking period at my first full-time teaching job, I have tried to impart it to every student teacher who has ever worked with me by telling them that the first lesson is - in the words of a student in the first class I ever taught over 20 years ago - life is uncertain so don’t take anything for granite.