Excerpt from Letter to my therapist, (Actual names are changed)
.... After three years living here in Portland OreGONE (New York accent) yearning for the bark of sea lions off the Santa Cruz dock, I sometimes feel at home with puddles.
I am in the midst of a small hiatus at the moment. Lola my daughter and my grandson are gone for a few... driving her new boyfriend and his 9 year old daughter home after dinner here of a tasty concoction mad from a pack of barley noodles I got us at the local Korean Mall while waiting for our table at the Korean restaurant two doors down with my old old friends, Brice and Barbara and their beautiful 27 year old son who I saw being born via traumatic C Section despite Lamaze. In other words, I'm out and see friends, a nice improvement from before. Taking your suggestion, I investigated setting up or locating writers' groups. But that was before I sunk into agoraphobia inside the walls of these constant gray skies.
So last summer - I went to Poland.
Well. there's this book I am writing. It began when I attended the U of Iowa summer writing workshops (three years worth). A short in class story about “Lucy,” a paleontologist with an obsession for finding the perfect Trilobite. I’m thinking maybe this is a book. Book? I’m mid 70 and might contract dementia anyway now. Maybe I should do 2 in 1, double up with a memoir to save on time. A book my children can read without being afraid of stumbling on some embarrassing personal revelation about their mother. A wider history, perhaps. History of my time, everyone’s last century.
I have a personal tradition about that....
After Pearl Harbor I drew on the walls and on pages of books to stop WWII, time after time. I drew bombs dropping from airplanes, with pencil. I couldn’t get the fire on the ground right. My mother, frustrated she couldn’t stop me from destroying the rental house walls, tied my hands behind my back with rags. She sent me to day care that way. But I continued. Who else was stopping the war, the smashing of houses and making five year olds dead? I saw it inside my father’s Life Magazine. The bombing perhaps of us who lived on Mile Square Road in Yonkers by Germans waiting for when we least suspected in submarines under New York City’s harbor, even though the top half of car lights were blacked out, we knew how to hide in doorways, and air raid wardens who put on white helmets to look out for the shapes of German bombers in the skies?
Traveling forward in recall, I remember my friend high school friend, Maria, a displaced person from Latvia. She told me little about it. Her nice mother spoke little English; On Saturday she made us lunch of Spam and canned peas, an exotic dish I never in a million years had at home. I met other DPs my age from Sicily, Greece, Germany. My best friend Helga’s parents immigrated from Bremen with a simple son who liked to catch Helga by her breasts. All trying to be American and not where they came from. What are they forgetting? My first real boyfriend’s father was Polish – Stephen Brosczko Jr.. Stephen Brosczko Sr. subscribed to the New York Times. I learned about Rome from a novel, “Woman of Rome” because my mother threw it in in the garbage all the time, but was more influenced by a bio of Marie Curry – Marie Skłodowska.
To be part of the whole story - I felt I was Polish.
But what is the whole story the biggest story of the 20th century? I search and find, it’s the one that’s most denied. The Holocaust... in the awful context of WWII, an old mans’ war - fought and resisted by children.
Actually my book started with you. Remember I looked up Kahane and found you are from a long line of Ashkenazi kings? I recalled my father being threatened “You will never have a job again.” by HUAC witch hunters, who showed up at his office at the Donut Corporation of America Food Industries Incorporated, because he refused to “name” his Jewish employers as communists. At the dinner table, my father expressed a deep respect for the humanitarian and intellectual qualities of Jews, a on going topic. “They believed that learning was their greatest wealth because everything else was denied them.” My father’s admiration for Jews seemed out of context. He was Scottish or Welch, some Swedish, he said, a black haired brown eyed phase. His religious background was snippets of Southern tent revival. My mother was D.A.R. Episcopalian. They went to church once when I was 17. My sister had just died. Years later, my father now living with my mother above Watsonville, dropped that - he thinks his mother’s step father was a Baltimore thespian who was possibly Jewish. Possibly what? Just a glimpse before he slipped back to that reticance I found hard so to mine, (especially since he was in the last phases of Parkinson’s’)
I felt I was Jewish.
So my book: A history book on two continents, a novel about Trilobites and the obsessions of youth, a poetry book because that’s what I can’t help but do, and about Displaced Persons of all kinds. I call my novel SEVENTEEN/ Children of Time.
So... Thank you!
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.... After three years living here in Portland OreGONE (New York accent) yearning for the bark of sea lions off the Santa Cruz dock, I sometimes feel at home with puddles.
I am in the midst of a small hiatus at the moment. Lola my daughter and my grandson are gone for a few... driving her new boyfriend and his 9 year old daughter home after dinner here of a tasty concoction mad from a pack of barley noodles I got us at the local Korean Mall while waiting for our table at the Korean restaurant two doors down with my old old friends, Brice and Barbara and their beautiful 27 year old son who I saw being born via traumatic C Section despite Lamaze. In other words, I'm out and see friends, a nice improvement from before. Taking your suggestion, I investigated setting up or locating writers' groups. But that was before I sunk into agoraphobia inside the walls of these constant gray skies.
So last summer - I went to Poland.
Well. there's this book I am writing. It began when I attended the U of Iowa summer writing workshops (three years worth). A short in class story about “Lucy,” a paleontologist with an obsession for finding the perfect Trilobite. I’m thinking maybe this is a book. Book? I’m mid 70 and might contract dementia anyway now. Maybe I should do 2 in 1, double up with a memoir to save on time. A book my children can read without being afraid of stumbling on some embarrassing personal revelation about their mother. A wider history, perhaps. History of my time, everyone’s last century.
I have a personal tradition about that....
After Pearl Harbor I drew on the walls and on pages of books to stop WWII, time after time. I drew bombs dropping from airplanes, with pencil. I couldn’t get the fire on the ground right. My mother, frustrated she couldn’t stop me from destroying the rental house walls, tied my hands behind my back with rags. She sent me to day care that way. But I continued. Who else was stopping the war, the smashing of houses and making five year olds dead? I saw it inside my father’s Life Magazine. The bombing perhaps of us who lived on Mile Square Road in Yonkers by Germans waiting for when we least suspected in submarines under New York City’s harbor, even though the top half of car lights were blacked out, we knew how to hide in doorways, and air raid wardens who put on white helmets to look out for the shapes of German bombers in the skies?
Traveling forward in recall, I remember my friend high school friend, Maria, a displaced person from Latvia. She told me little about it. Her nice mother spoke little English; On Saturday she made us lunch of Spam and canned peas, an exotic dish I never in a million years had at home. I met other DPs my age from Sicily, Greece, Germany. My best friend Helga’s parents immigrated from Bremen with a simple son who liked to catch Helga by her breasts. All trying to be American and not where they came from. What are they forgetting? My first real boyfriend’s father was Polish – Stephen Brosczko Jr.. Stephen Brosczko Sr. subscribed to the New York Times. I learned about Rome from a novel, “Woman of Rome” because my mother threw it in in the garbage all the time, but was more influenced by a bio of Marie Curry – Marie Skłodowska.
To be part of the whole story - I felt I was Polish.
But what is the whole story the biggest story of the 20th century? I search and find, it’s the one that’s most denied. The Holocaust... in the awful context of WWII, an old mans’ war - fought and resisted by children.
Actually my book started with you. Remember I looked up Kahane and found you are from a long line of Ashkenazi kings? I recalled my father being threatened “You will never have a job again.” by HUAC witch hunters, who showed up at his office at the Donut Corporation of America Food Industries Incorporated, because he refused to “name” his Jewish employers as communists. At the dinner table, my father expressed a deep respect for the humanitarian and intellectual qualities of Jews, a on going topic. “They believed that learning was their greatest wealth because everything else was denied them.” My father’s admiration for Jews seemed out of context. He was Scottish or Welch, some Swedish, he said, a black haired brown eyed phase. His religious background was snippets of Southern tent revival. My mother was D.A.R. Episcopalian. They went to church once when I was 17. My sister had just died. Years later, my father now living with my mother above Watsonville, dropped that - he thinks his mother’s step father was a Baltimore thespian who was possibly Jewish. Possibly what? Just a glimpse before he slipped back to that reticance I found hard so to mine, (especially since he was in the last phases of Parkinson’s’)
I felt I was Jewish.
So my book: A history book on two continents, a novel about Trilobites and the obsessions of youth, a poetry book because that’s what I can’t help but do, and about Displaced Persons of all kinds. I call my novel SEVENTEEN/ Children of Time.
So... Thank you!
Start blogging by creating a new post. You can edit or delete me by clicking under the comments. You can also customize your sidebar by dragging in elements from the top bar.
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