What I Found

A crucifix and St. Anthony’s medal attached to a strand of purple beads lay in a tiny sprawl on the sidewalk near a Long Island church. I picked it up and figured it was meant to be mine, especially when I read that Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. Apart from the irony of finding a lost St. Anthony medal, this turned out to be a signal of what would be the theme of my travels: letting go of preconceptions, fear, and misguided nostalgia––and finding things I had not known were lost.

This trip had begun as a tangle of vague ideas heightened by the enthusiasm of my friend Diane and heavily seasoned with uncharacteristic spontaneity on my part. I can’t remember ever booking airline tickets so impulsively, agreeing to share a pricey Manhattan hotel room, and committing to tag along for a while in someone else’s roots and family tour. But Diane and I are both natives of this part of the world, and although my Long Island was not her Long Island (mine was further east, poorer, and too painful to visit) we have enough overlap in interest and personality to make it possibly fun. I would meet her brothers and see where she grew up, and afterwards we would have a few days in the city with her oldest (now my newest) friend Adrienne, before going our separate ways upstate and in Vermont, where our husbands awaited, and other friends, and the glorious approach of a Northeastern autumn.

I get so snagged on the complexities and tragedies of my own family of origin, but visiting my friend’s childhood house and retracing the wanderings of her adolescence turns out to be intimate and sweet, a deepening of my empathy, respect and affection for her, but nicely tempered by detachment. This is not my trauma or sadness, these are not my peculiar settings or the place from which I fled. But there is that familiar accent, a slice of local pizza, the sunlight through greener, leafier treetops, a cultural context that I recognize. Above all, I feel honored to meet my friend’s beloved brothers, Neal and Alan, the flawed, vulnerable pillars of love who kept her afloat in the bewildering aftermath of loss and dysfunction. I see how she too navigated weirdness to find an elsewhere.

Lesson One: Life isn’t easy for anyone. I recognize transcendence; I understand that there are struggles about which I know nothing. I give a nod to the ones who stood by, steadfast and encouraging.

Neal is a music aficionado--early, vernacular jazz in particular--and he takes us to a bar in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook to hear a live performance of a group called Arne and His Rhythm: bass, banjo, horns. They are terrific musicians, playful, energetic, and oddly defiant in their exuberance. It’s a balmy night and we walk to a viewpoint where the Statue of Liberty is visible in the distance, the very lady who welcomed my grandfather in 1905. In fact, I think my own father spent time here in his boyhood. Do I somehow come from this place too? My current life is pretty hoity toity, but I am decidedly descended from the hoi polloi.

Lesson Two: the story continues, branching out and turning back.

Also, keep your sunny side up.

It was raining in the city. Our base was a small hotel in Soho and our plans were fairly fluid. In the morning, I went out for a solo wander. The wind turned my umbrella inside-out so often that I finally decided it was useless, but the temperature was mild, and the streets were splashy but the weather had no sting. I was ostensibly on a quest for coffee and a hairbrush, but my walk assumed its own allure, and I went further into the village, where old brownstone buildings lined side streets of cobblestone, and shop windows glowed with foggy warmth, and lights were reflected on the wet black avenue that was named for a river and resembled one. The leaves on the trees had the yellow tinge of early autumn and sometimes they fell slowly, suspended for a moment in the air, and at one point I heard a woman’s voice from an unseen doorway singing an aria that echoed through the streets and drifted toward me, and it might have been 1960, and I might have been young. I walked a straight route and never got lost, pausing beneath the awning of a little café sipping my coffee and watching the rain, and walked back to the hotel still glistening with magic.

Lesson Three: Sometimes nothing much has to happen to achieve a state of enchantment.

I had arranged to meet my friend Bruce in the lobby later. Bruce with the rainbow umbrella, the striped blazer, and kind eyes behind round glasses. He and I went to the same high school, class of ‘68, in a Long Island town he describes as being “as far from the water as you could get in any direction, and whose chief business was a mental hospital.” That about sums it up. Bruce and I were among those who believed that the primary objective was to get out of there, and we had not seen each other in fifty-five years. How do you explain the instant rapport, the easy laughter, the detailed recollections? I remembered the small, pale red-haired boy, discreetly gay, though I would have had no awareness of that. He recalled the reserved, dark-haired girl who was smart enough and pretty enough to come across as fine, both of us from families where dysfunction reigned, neither of us in sync with the mainstream. We are so fragile, I thought, looking at Bruce in the light of this unlikely moment, so vulnerable, but so resilient. “I never yearn for the past,” he said as we reminisced. “Being young was terrible.”

Bruce was just one of several people I connected with on this trip and felt immediately comfortable with. Diane’s best friend Adrienne was chief among them, a tall woman with an unstoppable mass of curly hair, a generous laugh, and a remarkably kind and welcoming demeanor. She hugged me and brought me into the fold of old friendships and I never felt that I did not belong. There was the brainy couple, Andy and Matthew, of the Inkwell Singers, both retired from impressive professional lives, tenderly and conspicuously in love, appropriately outraged by the state of democracy but unwilling to ever give up. Like doting parents, they gave us careful subway directions to Brooklyn, spoken like a litany…take A or C, downtown, four stops to Jay street, transfer to F toward Queens and Coney Island, nine stops to Ditmas….and they walked us to the subway entrance. I felt so cared about, and such comforting commonality with these good citizens who see clearly what is happening, the tribe of those who try.

Lesson Four: The circle widens.

Onward to Brooklyn, bravely navigating the subways, emerging at the station on Church and McDonald, where my grandfather’s pizzeria was in the 1950s, the particular storefront now a mystery to me, and indistinguishable from the jangle of take-out eateries, cleaners, barber shops, and drug stores. I walk with Diane and Adrienne to my old school, P.S. 179, and then to Coney Island Avenue, the street of my childhood, where very few vestiges of the old days remain. It’s an avenue of auto shops and gas stations where storefronts are shuttered and the buildings are spray painted with graffiti, and I strain to find anything beautiful. I push open the metal door of my old building at 624, a heavy silver portal that shines in all its dissonance like an empty promise. The tilework on the floor of the vestibule is entirely gone, the wooden stairs are now an industrial steel staircase, the hallway is enclosed with stark partitions. Everything seems alien and prison-like.

We walk to the more upscale neighborhood of Ditmas Park, with its grand Victorian houses, and we enter Holy Innocents, the Catholic church, which is clearly still lovingly tended. As we wander in the sanctuary, looking at the statues and stained glass windows, a man at the altar plays a fragment of a hymn for us, and we are moved to tears. We stand there hugging and crying, not really sure why.

Lesson Five: There are, as Wendell Berry said, no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

Also, the embrace of a friend is a holy space.

The next day, we walk to the World Trade Center, pausing at the memorial where names carved in black granite are beaded with raindrops, and there is a sense of aspiration mingled with the sorrow. We enter the Oculus, a cavernous shopping mall, glaringly new and bright, where the gods of commerce prevail, and we are left yearning for a different form of victory and defiance, but this is the American way.

Then we navigate to Chinatown, where we meet Diane’s brothers and her Chinese sister-in-law Rose, who orders our meal decisively, speaking Mandarin. It is Yom Kippur, but we are not fasting. “Why do we need a special holiday?” says Alan. “I feel fear, shame, and guilt every day of my life.” He talks about religion as a kind of descent, starting with inspiration, followed by dissemination, doctrine, empty ritual, and dogma. Like every living entity, he says, it becomes a caricature of itself.

But I cannot think about any of this. All I know is that the room is noisy, and my religious beliefs have grown pretty sketchy, but the food is delicious and I’d like more tea.

Afterwards, we take a detour through Little Italy, where the Feast of San Gennaro is being celebrated, and some old guy is crooning a Frank Sinatra song into a microphone, and Adrienne and Neal do a spontaneous dance in the rainy street, and I am filled with wonder and delight, a caricature of myself, but it feels real.

Lesson Six: The city is an organism that keeps changing, and much is irredeemably lost, but there are many ways of seeing, and many forms of prayer.

Up North…

I boarded the train to Saratoga at Moynihan Train Hall, remembering the young girl I once was who rode Greyhound and Trailways buses, as well as occasional trains, sometimes from the Port Authority or the old Penn Station across the street from here. In those days, I would have been carrying books and a backpack and a bunch of goodbyes, leaving disapproval in my wake and looking ahead with anxiety. This time, my old friend Barbara would be waiting at the station, and a little later, Monte would be joining me, and I could not help but contemplate how far I have come, and how much I prefer my seventies to my twenties.

Barbara is the friend I met in Albany while I was wrapping up a degree at the university and we both happened to be renting studio apartments in an old brownstone building on Albany’s Madison Avenue. I laughingly refer to these as the Days of Whine and Roaches, another segment in a dismal period of my youth, and my friendship with Barbara was a shining light. We often listened to records together at the end of the day…I remember Jackson Browne in particular, and Bach’s Brandenburg concerti, which I liked to turn up loud, so the music would rise to the ceiling and elevate my spirits and remind me there was more to life than this, although I could never have believed how much better things would get.

The train ride is an easy three-hour journey upstate along the Hudson River, which has been sliding along at my side for much of our New York City wanderings, shimmering black and silver. When I arrive at the station, I see Barbara waiting for me, and there is something instantly dear and familiar about her, and this feeling never goes away. We stay with her and her husband Andy at their home, and later at Lake George, and now, back in California just a few days later, these memories already seem like a dream. We sit at a table in dappled sunlight, breakfasting for hours, or maybe it is lunch, thoroughly enjoying dolce far niente, and Andy takes us for a pleasure cruise on the lake, but first I am sealed into the thickest, snuggest life jacket imaginable, which feels a lot like being hugged, and once secure, I begin to appreciate the appeal of being on a boat. Barb and Monte both go swimming, because even though it is October, it’s warm, perhaps alarmingly warm, but this is not the time to fret about that. Green wooded shores loom ahead, darkly beckoning, and there are houses both humble and fancy sprouting here and there like various manifestations of dreams, some painted brightly, some featuring American flags lest we forget where we are. The mountains in the distance are just beginning to try on red and yellow hues.

At night, we go back to Saratoga and walk the downtown streets where dignified-looking buildings stand in proud testimony to civic vitality and spiritual tradition, and shops whose windows display nothing we would care to purchase are lit in the warm amber glow of street lamps, and we are a just a quartet of aging friends strolling along, happy to bear witness, intensely aware of our good fortune.

Another lesson. (Is this Seven?) Things do get better, or at least they can. And the continuity of friendship is no small miracle.

Baruch Hashem. It’s a phrase I have learned. It comes up often.

But this trip has a Vermont segment also, and it’s crucial, not only because Vermont is picturesque and charming, but I will be meeting up with two dear teachers: Larry and Mort, as well as Mort’s wife Roma. It’s a long story, and one I would like to write about someday, but Larry and Mort became my friends and mentors thirty years ago when they came to our little Gaviota school to launch a program called Paradise Project, and it was crazy and daring, but as Larry says, “Sometimes a hand moves me in a direction other than what I intended, but then, it turns out to be exactly what I needed.”

Larry is one of the kindest, gentlest people I know. He was seen and saved by a teacher as a boy, and one day, when he tried to express his appreciation, that teacher said, “You don’t say thank you. You have to DO a thank you.” Larry’s entire life since has been a thank you.

Larry is a storyteller with a rich radio voice, and Mort is the humorist, the pied piper of the duo, a guitar-playing adventurer with a spark of mischief in his eye. “‘I’ll sell you swampland in Florida,” he says, “and Larry will make you glad you got it.”

Mort’s wife is a farmer's daughter, a poet, and something of a sylph, emerging quietly and vanishing, but not before tending to whatever needs doing. On one of those “I-love-my-life” evenings, she and Mort treat us to an impromptu pre-bedtime concert in their living room, both in plaid flannel pajamas. They offer tender renditions of songs like “Let It Be Me”, and “Forever Young”, and Roma’s voice is as sweet as an angel’s when she harmonizes, and I find it incredibly touching.

Larry has driven from Pawcatuck, Connecticut to be here, but later he tells me how glad he was to do so. “You thought I was your mentor, and you counted on me,” he says, “but what you didn’t know is that I was counting on you too. It was a difficult time, and you helped me survive. And I didn’t know if I would ever see you again.”

The lessons are crowding together here. I’ll go with this one: DO your thank yous.

Also, you never know how much you matter to someone. Go with the impulse of love. Go out of your way.

It’s okay to be effusive, as long as it’s sincere.

So much lost, so much found. Many things I remembered are gone or changed, but they live in the stories, and the stories continue, and may the stories we write be imbued with hope and thanks and love.

I bought an old-fashioned printing press sign in a little shop in Vermont, and this is what it says: