SPRING

SPRING

Tearing home from school my spirits and adrenalin bouyed by the balmy breezes of May, I knew this was exactly the right time to say it. Not tomorrow, not yesterday, but today. "Mamma can I change into my shorts?" was my clarion call that harkened in the new season. The vernal equinox, a time for total change from the short, grey days to long hours of freedom, rose bushes, lilacs and playing outside after dinner.
The transformation was complete, not just a cleansing of the spirit but of the house as well. Rugs were rolled up and beaten to death by hand. Splipcovers – I can still smell and feel the garish flowered fabric – dresssed all the plush furniture, prompting my brother,s annual quip, "So, when do they come off? When the Queeen comes to visit?" The biggest change was in to the diet. There were berries with sour cream, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries. Everything was drowning in sour cream. So rich and sweet. They don't make it like that anymore. O, where is the sour cream of yesteryear!.And there was that inimitable borscht that my mother used to make with cucumbers, cold potatoes and, of course, sour cream

The games we played in May were diffferent from our indoor pastimes. I can still smell the lilacs and see the irises and hollyhocks. (A friend who is much more botanically aware then I tells me that this is a false memory, that hollyhocks bloom in the fall not the spring. Memory is a powerful force; and I often wonder if we remember actual events or our last memory of those events. At any rate, my playtime memories will always feature hollyhocks.) And did we play! Tag through all the backyards under canopioes of oak and maple trees, One game was called "Sailing around the Rock of Gibralter."I had a chance to see this backyard Gibralter recently, and it is all of four feet square. One of my favorite games was called "Hospital."Not only were all the dolls patients, but my ten-year-old Tom Cat,a victim of Stokholm syndrome, allowed us to strap him into a carriage with his paws and tail swaddled in bandages.Not only was he willing but he licked us in gratitude
The only thing that drove us indoors were the radio programs. There was "Jack Armstrong, All American Boy," "Tom Mix" and, of course, "Little Orphan Annie," responsible for all the unused packages of Ovaltine on the shelves sent for because a Little Orphan Annie decoder badge was the premium.

Whose the little chatterbox
The one with pretty auburn locks.
Who could it be?
It's Little Orphan Annie.

She and Sandy make a pair
They never seem to have a care
Cute little, she
It's Little Orphan Annie
Arf! Arf!

The most astonishing thing about childhood summers is how long they lasted. Long, lazy and – toward September – languishing. Today, I never languish. I loll and linger and join my ancestral chorus lamenting, "O how quickly the days fly by."

Netflix Rules

Netflix Rules

Netfix has got to be the most benevolent, parental company on this planet. It's amazing how their consumer affairs people know how to appeal to the Inner Child in all of us. First of all, your new movie, which you can watch at your leisure with "no late fees" comes in a bright red package- distinguishable form all the grey, dingy bills and catalogues – just like a Christmas gift. Like yuletide presents– if you're like me and keep changing and adding to your "queue" - you don"t know what you're going to get in the Postage-free, Self-addressed, Easy to pop-in-the-mail- Return package. It will be a surprise, just like Christmas.

It's all done for you, and in such a loving way. In their promotion, Netflix tells those of us who are growing more and more forgetful like this septuagenarian: "Lose the sleeve on the disc? Not to worry, just pop the disc back into the Postage-free, Self-addressed, Easy-to-pop-in-mail Return Envelope..Or, "Lose the PSER Envelope? No big deal. Just put the disc in with your next DVD at no extra charge." .I'm telling you, they're better than hot oatmeal with lots of cream and brown sugar on a cold winter morning.

So, what's next for Netflix? I predict one of those busy PR folks sitting around the brain-storming table will say: "How about we tell our consumers: Too busy to get dinner? Don't despair. Just go to your queue and pick out your meal from one of our 67,000 delicious, ethnic selections – Chinese, Thai, Italian –whatever you like; and our Netflix representative will deliver it to you in l5 minutes.

You be able to recognize him right away. He's the guy in the bright, red sweatshirt with Netflix in big, bold letters.

My Blue Heaven

In the years preceding my birth, Sonia and Matt had a two-year-old son and great joy and innocent hope about their future in the land of milk and honey. It's strange to think of two children of Russian-Jewish immigrants as being part of the "Jazz Age," - the phrase usually brings to mind Gatsby and his very waspy entourage in the Hamptons looking at Daisy's little green light across the bay.- but this is how I remember my parents.
Whenever I hear the sad little, tinny sounds of My Blue Heaven or Bye, Bye Blackbird I'm struck with the gaity and hope of those years despite the despair that was to come.Even a song like Brother Can You Spare a Dime has at its roots a certain generosity, a certain love for all mankind.. Then there's Tomatoes Are Cheaper./ Potatoes Are Cheaper Now's the time to fall in love. My parents were truly part of the "Lost Generation," but perhaps not in the way that Fitzgerald meant. I was to experience many of these losses, but I have to believe I was conceived in love.
You were pretty jazzy then, Mom and Dad. Do you remember, Dad, you had a V-neck sweater and – yes – played tennis. (It doesn’t seem possible that the bitter, lame old man you became, is in any way related to that spry, young tennis player.) Remember the time you and Mom staged a murder scene for the snoopy old lady next door who was always peering at us from behind her curtains? You chased Mom from room to room with a carving knife and we kids collapsed with laughter. Every morning. Every evening. Ain't we got fun
And, Mom, how your eyes shone. And when you went out in the evening in your backless, gold lame, flapper gown, hair newly bobbed, I thought you were the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. And all those coats you had – velvet, fur, brocade. Toni Morrison in her novel, "Jazz," says that womens' coats in the twenties, held together only by a fist clutched in front were " like sleepwear for the streeet." No wonder I have always found Erte ladies so sensuous, slinking from bed to the bar. Where somebody waits for me/sugar sweet/ so is she/ Bye, Bye blackbird.
On Sunday evenings, like so many families in the early thirties, we sat around a huge console actually watching the disembodied voices on the radio, with more wonderment, I believe, than the next generation would watch real TV images. That was the night my father made us all three-decker sandwiches and we would hoot and howl when Jack Benny said, "Jello, again." To this day, I cannot understand why we were so mesmerized by Edgar Beergen putting words in Charlie McCarthy's mouth on radio. These evenings always ended with Rudy Valee's nasal rendition of I love to spend each Sunday with you/ And at the end/I'm sorry it's through.
It's hard to say when it was all over. Only in retrospect , do I undertstand that it was not some silly game we played on freezing winter nights, the four of us huddled in one bed laughing and singing. It seems food won over coal in our hierarchy of needs. Then the quarrels began; harsh words, screaming retributions, and a few indelible times, physical violence. Terrified, I would pray to a God now lost to me, "Please, dear God, make Mommy and Daddy stop fighting," as words turned to blows and crockery shattered like broken promises.
The sadness and fury did finally give way to a painful resignation and a reluctant truce. At the end, why did they become those two old people living in the same house, sitting in the same room, staring at each other and speaking only when necessary, Why couldn't they keep their dreams alive? Why couldn't their romantic love turn into a mature respect rather than a narcissistic yearning for youth?. Why did the music go out of ther lives?
These questions will remain unanswered. I only know that for my parents their eyes never shone the same way when the music stopped.. Yet despite all of that, they have given me the priceless gift of their memories, which in the retelling have become my memories to alter idealize and reconstitute. Always changing, always shifting , but always the same verities – love, joy, loss, anger – the story of a family.
And I like to believe that no matter how it ended in real time, in another dimension they are still those jazzy people I remember and somewhere it is always: Three o'clock in the morning and they've danced the whole night through.

Why Jane Can't Write

Have you ever noticed how many more women than men suffer from writer's block, or at least kvetch about it more. If you ask me, it's all about pantyhose

Anyone who has writtten anything at all knows all about procrastination and the wily ways writers employ to get down to the task. I, for example, begin to clean my closets (I'd even clean your closets} when I have a deadline to meet. I've been known to arrange all the food on the shelves by size and then by a more primitive arrangement - like paper, tin and glass - when an assignment is due. I simply am compelled to do everything on my list before I start writing.

The point is that always at the end of my list of what must be done before I can begin is "sort pantyhose." Now, as any woman can tell you, this is not an easy job. It's really not a job at all, It's a happening that goes on and on.

And as technology improves, it gets worse. It used to be that you could sort by basic color -tan, beige off-black or nurses white. Now, you're dealing with Tawny Taupe, Moonlight Mist and Midnight Black. To further confound things, manufacturers have come up with a myriad of styles: Reinforced Toe and Heel, Sandalfoot, Control Top and every permutation thereof. And to make matters worse, you must first decide whether you want knee length, thigh or full-length Then there's texture: Just try sorting stockings by Opaque, Herringbone, Can Can Polka Dots and Simmering Silver and see how far you get.

In addition to the pantyhose affliction, women writers seem to be deprived of those Svengali-like taskmasters, secretly in love with them, the way concert painists do - at least in the movies. We just don't have any James Masons rapping us over the knuckles shouting "type, type." We only have ourselves and our feeble token awards like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia when we finish ten pages.

It's true, Lillian Hellman had her Daschiell Hammet, waiting with endless bottles of booze and little sandwiches, as she pounded out her masterpieces by the roar of the Pacific at their seaside retreat. But we only know this through Jason Robard's brooding interpretation. And, if you ask me, old Daschiell was so far into the sauce himself, at that point, he couldn't tell a Little Fox from a gopher.

But getting back to the gender thing, sure, men have socks too, but they don't seem to be programmed to sort them compulsively. And, as far as cleaning the garage goes, when it's done it's done. Furthermore, it's hard to picture John Updike ,Walt Whitman and Fyador Dostoevksi sorting cravats.

Surely, you don't think Emily Dickenson would have amounted to much if she had to worry about pantyhose, do you?