Living on a Boat

That is what my wife, Ann, and I do during the summers. Live on a boat. Hence, my entries will be few as computer time on board is sporadic. I’ll be writing this entry episodically and probably post it in stages, but I might as well start at the beginning, as life on the water is something that has significantly defined who we are.

My introduction to boating began in Sag Harbor near the end of Long Island where my family rented a cottage each year in a little section of cottages called Pine Neck, a block from the Noyac Bay, between the twin forks. As a kid, I thought this was the most exotic place in the entire world and to some degree, now nearly sixty years later, I still sometimes feel that is where I would like to live.

Sag Harbor itself was (and still is) a quaint, seaside New England town, an old whaling village, although now, it is also part of the upscale Hamptons, but the great attraction for us in the early to mid 1950’s was the Bay itself, going to the little beach on Long Beach Road each day. There was a food shack there where we could get greasy fries and a hot dog, listening to Teresa Brewer belt out I Don't Want a Ricochet Romance on the juke box, the refrains of “I can't live on ricochet romance, no, no not me; If you're gonna ricochet, baby, I'm gonna set you free” lingering in my mind long after the song ended.

At night we would go into the town of Sag Harbor itself to the one movie house (here Ann and Jonathan stand in front of the theatre when we visited Sag, some thirty years after I last saw a movie there) and maybe get some ice cream. What could be more heavenly for a kid? For me, it was to have a boat, one with an engine that I could use to explore the Bay. Shelter Island was not far away but I knew that if I could inveigle my father into renting a boat that destination would probably be off limits.

Postponing the rental of my childhood dream yacht (a row boat with a small outboard engine) was the appearance of Hurricane Carol that made landfall on Long Island on August 30, 1954 as it was nearing peak intensity, and close to high tide. Although our cottage was slightly elevated and a few hundred yards from the Bay, the first floor was deluged with water. As a kid it seemed exciting but it foreshadowed other hurricanes, Gloria in 1985, and others that would more seriously impact us Floridians later in our lives, Francis and Jean in 2005, and Wilma in 2006. Between those and some notable Nor’easters we’ve endured, I sometimes wonder why we still persist in living on the water itself.

Sag Harbor was my first introduction to boating on my own, my father finally allowing me to rent that little wooden rowboat with a tired Johnson outboard engine which seemed to break down as often as it ran. The boat reeked of fish, gasoline and oil. Many years later in our boating lives Ann and I revisited Sag, and found that same marina, and the same food shack.

With my father along to show me the ropes, it soon became apparent that an outboard engine was as foreign to him as it was to me. Once we got it started after repeated pulls of the cord, with the exhaust hanging around us in the heavy air, the thought also went through his mind that we might adventure over to Shelter Island, clearly visible in the bay but, in the slight chop, oh so far away that we had to finally turn back. After a few warnings about staying close to shore, I was allowed to take the boat out by myself, the thrill of which probably lay dormant, awaiting my adult life when it kicked in with a vengeance.

But Sag Harbor wasn’t my only initiation to boating. My father’s younger cousin, Bill, had, what at the time was considered the Cadillac of small boats, a 28 foot Chris Craft. The boat was berthed in New Rochelle and he and his wife invited our family out several times. This was high adventure to me, leaving the New Rochelle harbor and anchoring off of Sands Point, which is just across the Long Island Sound. We would swim off the boat and sometimes train our binoculars on Perry Como’s house at the point, hoping to see the crooner. There are some ironies to the experiences with Bill’s boat. He bought his boat at Rex Marine which is a short walk from the marina where we now dock our floating summer-home and where I am presently writing this entry. We coincidentally now own a Chris Craft ourselves, a 1987 Commander with a hull built by Uniflite (the firm that built the hull for WW II PT boats). Even our home in Florida is not far from Perry Como’s in Jupiter before he died a few years ago.

Because of Cousin Bill’s boat, my father thought that he, too, could become a sea captain and quite uncharacteristically, he impulsively bought an old 35’ Owens, not fully realizing the work it would demand and of course the expertise that is required to handle such a boat. His temperament was not well suited to boating and even worse, my mother hated the work. A Captain without a cooperative, even enthusiastic mate, is doomed to boat alone or very little.

Many years later at Block Island I found a sister ship, pictured here in the background.

Nonetheless, we had that boat for about two years, and my parents named it after my sister and myself, ‘BobaLynne’ which I thought was kind of clever. Here I can be seen pulling on a stern line when we were anchored off a beach. In the foreground, but very blurred, is my mother’s hand holding her cigarette. Both my parents smoked, incessantly. No wonder I took up smoking when I was 16, eventually quitting when I was 33.

The high/low point of the BobaLynne was an ambitious cruise up the Hudson River to Poughkeepsie. My Uncle Phil had a summer home nearby so the idea was for my father and me to bring the boat there while my mother and sister drove up the car. We would stay at my Uncle’s home and explore the Hudson. Dad and I made it down the Sound through Hell’s Gate and stayed overnight at a marina at the base of the Tappan Zee bridge, that was still under construction. After leaving the marina, one of the old Ford truck engines in the Owens broke down and we struggled on one engine to Poughkeepsie. The boat was out of commission for the rest of our vacation and I no longer remember how we got it home. Suffice it to say, the boat was soon sold after that extremely frustrating experience.

The following year, as I remember, we returned to Sag Harbor, for the last time. Again, I was allowed to rent a boat during those last two weeks of August. My sister attended a camp nearby and here we are standing in front of her “Nisimaha” cabin, me with my crew cut.

To replace our Sag Harbor rental, we returned over the next few years to Uncle Phil’s summer home in Stanfordville, New York, an out of the way country place not far from Millbrook. I loved it there too, mainly because, I had my Remington slide action 22 caliber rifle which I was allowed to use to shoot targets in the valley below, until one of the bullets ricocheted off a rock and landed in someone’s living room a mile away. To this day I can’t understand how the bullet travelled so far, but that was the end of my shooting days.

Other activities there included a nearby lake (alas, no boating allowed), the pool in Millbrook, a walk to the general store in the broiling heat, a drive by Jimmy Cagney’s home, and the local movie theatre. I remember seeing The King and I there. Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I was on the Washington Eastern Airlines shuttle and found myself seated next to Yul Brunner, the one and only King, no matter how many times the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical might be revived. He was reading Playboy but we struck up a conversation, mostly about the film version I had seen as a kid.

However, until my adult life, I was out of boating and I haven’t even begun the story of living on the boat which I’ll continue later.

Wanderlust

Our younger son, Jonathan, is a traveler, while our older son’s avocation is that of a writer (see Chris’ Why am I a Writer at the end of http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2008/03/words-do-this.html).

It is hard to believe Jonathan is now 31 and Chris is 43 as it seems like mere moments have passed between these two photographs, the first Jonathan looking up in admiration of his older brother in the early 1980’s and the other of me flanked by them just this last Xmas holiday.

This summer, between jobs in private equity, Jonathan decided to take a trip he's always dreamed about. Last week he flew to Brussels and then was on his way to Egypt, Giza and the Pyramids, Cairo, Jordan, Petra, Lebanon, Syria (Damascus), through Israel, Bulgaria, Turkey, onto Greece where he is boarding a boat for a cruise of the Greek Islands, then to India, Delhi, to Kathmandu in Nepal, and two weeks traveling by boat, bus, jeep, and yak all throughout the northern cities of India, Agra, etc., ultimately hiking through the Himalayas. Whew! Most of his travel is being done with frequent flyer miles, a backpack and, except for parts of India, on his own. Talk about Wanderlust!

I suppose this is indeed the time to undertake such an ambitious trip before the responsibilities of a new job and perhaps marriage and family intercede. I never had those options, although my work entailed a number of international trips and contacts. In fact, on some of those trips I would bring my wife, Ann, and Jonathan. One I think he found especially impressionable was a trip to Japan when he was only twelve. The Japanese library market sought our professional and scholarly books and so my travels occasionally brought me there and I became close to the Japanese booksellers, particularly our distributor. My Japanese host and the head of the distribution company, Mitsuo, admired Jonathan’s inquisitiveness and took him under his wing. We travelled with Mitsuo and his wife to a spa hotel northwest of Tokyo where Naruhito, the Crown Prince of Japan, had stayed. There on the eve of the 1990 New Year, we were treated to a special weekend where we were the only Westerners, sleeping on handcrafted tatami mats, eating traditional Japanese food. My host challenged me to guess the identity of the dinner appetizer – something that tasted like steak tartar to me. He laughed when he told me it was raw horsemeat, a delicacy in the region. Luckily, I had sufficient Sake to wash it down. Not so at breakfast that consisted of seafood, rice, and fermented foods. Jonathan ate adventurously.

The high point of the weekend was the spa. First indoors we had to bathe sitting on a small stool, using a bucket with water, soaking and scrubbing ourselves until clean. Then, with nothing but a bathrobe, we walked outside into the cold night air, with snow on the ground, disrobed, and plunged ourselves in the hot springs. A bamboo curtain separated the ladies from the men. We could talk to our wives but not peek. Jonathan took to this so naturally while I had to be coaxed into the hot pool, simply because the temperature difference was so great.

In fact in two short weeks, Jonathan was beginning to find himself around Tokyo with little difficulty, using public transportation, and we let him explore a little. Ann and I remember sitting in our hotel room at the New Otani Tokyo, after he had left to go to the Ginza to see the latest electronics, watching him from our 30th floor window, a little speck on the street, crossing a bridge to the underground. Amazing we thought (perhaps as much surprised by our permissiveness as by his courage).

So it is no wonder that as a student at Bates College, Jonathan choose to spend his junior year abroad, living in Kyoto with a host family, attending Doshisha University, immersing himself in Japanese. We visited him there and were favorably impressed by his rapidly developing language skills as he took us to Temples and local restaurants. Today he has a good working knowledge of the Japanese language and of course the culture. Immediately after college he again returned to Japan, initially with the thought of job searching there, but, having mastered Japanese, Jonathan was intent on learning more about Asia, particularly China, so he choose to teach English in Guanjo, China and in so doing, developed conversational abilities in Mandarin. Several years later he returned to China to complete his MBA, finishing his last semester at Beijing University. By this time, his Mandarin was as fluent as his Japanese.

While working at a major financial firm for several years, he planned his vacations for other points in the Far East, including Viet Nam and Cambodia, always choosing the more challenging trips to the leisurely ones. So it is no wonder that given this new two month window, he has planned a demanding itinerary.

A little more than ten years ago he turned 21. At that time I wrote him a letter which I still stand by today. It almost sounds prophetic.

Dear Jonathan,

Today you are 21. There were other watershed years, your 13th, your 18th, but, for some reason, this is the really big one -- at least from my perspective. Why? Maybe, symbolically, it marks the true demarcation between dependency and non-dependency and, therefore, has as much meaning to Mom and me as it does to you -- as you move away from our lives and into your own. In other words, your 21st is also a reflection on us and the roles we have played while you were growing up.

I feel a deep sense of sadness in one respect. I could have been a better parent, maybe had a better relationship with you. In my defense, though, the time, which I thought, was so timeless, suddenly disappeared and here we are at this moment. In my next life, maybe, I will be more conscious of time and how fleetingly, even suddenly, it passes. I held you in my arms one minute and the next we touch mostly in cyberspace.

But, enough about my perspective as the best thing about turning 21 is something you might not think about much: the future. In many respects I wish I could skip ahead for one moment and see your life when you are my age. The possibilities, the possibilities.... And, it's all about choices -- you'll have many more than we had but, still, you have to make the choices. These relate to not only career tracks but also ethical, behavioral, and life style choices. I am not going to sit here and say anything about what you should do but I will note that these choices are being made every day by you whether you are aware of them or not. The Gestalt of those choices is the person you will become and the life you will lead. May it be a happy and productive one.

It is only fitting, I think, that you are going off to Japan in a few days. What a start to becoming 21. Leaving the cocoon of your childhood and going out into the world. But, your Mom and I will always be there for you -- even after we are not there. May you always feel that love. I gave you a poem, once, by Robert Mazzacco. No doubt you read it quickly and it became one of those victims of the moment. I'll close this note quoting that poem. I could never say it any better and I admire the ability to say something so profound is such small space:

Dynasty
Family voices; you still can hear them,
ever so dimly, there in your own voice:
your father's voice, even your mother's voice.

The older we get
the more you'll hear them,
though no one else does.
Just as you still can see them, all over
your body, though, of course, no one else must:
family scars and family kisses.

- Robert Mazzacco

National Catastrophe Fund

When we relocated to the West Palm Beach area from Connecticut, it was with the knowledge that while the area was vulnerable to hurricanes, they didn’t seem to be more frequent than what we had been accustomed to in the northeast. (The last one to hit the West Palm Beach area before we moved was Hurricane David in 1979. Hurricane Gloria in 1985 was a worse storm in Connecticut.)

So with this false sense of security we retired to a home within a mile of the coast and were able to get relatively reasonably priced insurance. Since then our overall insurance costs have tripled, mostly because of the obsolete boundaries that determine the windstorm component, such as homes east of I95 being exponentially more vulnerable than those a stone’s throw to the west. While Hurricanes Charley and Wilma surely dispelled that myth, these artificial guidelines persist.

The recent tragic flooding in Iowa, not to mention the torrid tornado season, and wildfires in the west, underscore the need for a national catastrophe fund to more effectively deal with the economic consequences of these disasters, ones that seem to be more frequent, perhaps the consequence of global warming.

Such a fund combined with tax breaks, similar to the ones that were granted to victims of Katrina and Wilma, might mitigate unrestrained insurance costs, and the expenses that will surely do in victims of national disasters. Had we not poured more than a half a trillion dollars into an unnecessary war in Iraq, we could be a long way towards creating a national catastrophe fund, not to mention saving American lives.

Texture

And I use the word “texture” in photographs in its broadest sense, extending to composition. Light, shadows, contrasting gradations in scenes, sometimes provide the illusion of a three dimensional picture, or the passage of time, things wearing away, a rusty object or an abandoned place, the shape of flowers in the light of the day, glaciers receding to bedrock, things just evolving. Look at these long enough and they seem to take on a life of their own, even though they are merely two dimensional and fixed.

The 469 mile long Blue Ridge Parkway is probably one of the most scenic roads in America. Striking mountain views are to be seen from its various rest stops.

Mile after mile there are the metamorphic rock formations, including this one, which could pass for a Bonsai plant, nature “imitating” art.

Also, from the Carolina’s are these two photographs, one from the first School of Forestry, a minimalist photograph of the shingle structure, the stark door and simple steps. The other is the Historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville, built from the granite boulders of Sunset Mountain.

When we were in Alaska we helicoptered to the Denver Glacier, and hiked on this magnificent but receding bulwark. As we were hovering a few dozen feet over our landing site, it felt as if we could have been in a lunar landing vehicle.

When glaciers recede, new bedrock is exposed.

Glaciers are constantly moving and calving, the colors and textures mesmerizing.

Also “moon-like” is a scene from Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park

These flowers were photographed at the Butchart Gardens in Greater Victoria on Vancouver Island and the Botanical Gardens at Asheville, NC.

Note the bee in the upper right corner of this photograph.

Green iguanas are now considered an invasive species in South Florida. One visited our dock, the sun highlighting the texture of its row of spines along its back, its finger/claws, and powerful body.

From the vertical lines of a rusty cleat on an old barge that is now a breakwater for a marina on the Hudson River, to the disarray of an old service office at a marina, things wearing away.

A Chihuly glass sculpture and the mosaic of the inside of a hot air balloon display an array of colors.

We are the Enemy

On that unspeakable day of September 11, 2001 we were in Connecticut, packing for an overseas trip. While the horror unfolded we could see the smoke from the Twin Towers more than fifty miles away across the Long Island Sound against the clear blue sky. I had thought we were confronting the worst of all possible enemies, one that cared not at all about its own life – in fact reveled in martyrdom – one that shared none of our moral values and would be content to wage war guerrilla style with no time constraints.

But, since then, we seem to be waging the battle for them. They no longer have to hijack planes to fly into our buildings as we have hijacked our own economy and can now be held hostage by any dictatorship du jour.

Here’s what we’ve done since that horrific day:
■ Wage an unnecessary war in Iraq that has cost more than one half trillion dollars to date, or $341 million each day. http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home
■ Consume more than 20 million barrels of oil each day of which we produce only about a quarter, meaning we have to send about $2 billion abroad each day a majority of which finds its way to the Middle East, Russia, and South America. http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html
■ Increase our unfunded Social Security and Medicare programs by $33 trillion (yes, trillion) since 2000 to a total of $53 trillion at the end of last year – a liability of about $455,000 for every American household http://www.gao.gov/cghome/d08371cg.pdf

There is a litany of others that could be added to this list, but suffice it to say, our national debt is increasing at $1.59 billion per day. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/. No wonder the dollar continues to sink which just increases the cost of our imported oil and leaves us even a greater debtor to other countries.

In other postings I’ve cited the work of Bill Gross, the talented bond manager at PIMCO, and John Hussman an economist who runs his own mutual fund. Their two most recent articles touch upon our inability to fess up to the reality, how we continue to report chimerical inflation statistics http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Featured+Market+Commentary/IO/2008/IO+June+2008.htm and focus on monetary policy when our fiscal policy is rotten to the core http://hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc080609.htm.

If we cannot even acknowledge these economic truths, there can be no national plan to deal with the dire consequences. Then we will not only lose the war, but also be the architect of our own defeat.

College Years

As mentioned before in these pages, I was totally unprepared for college, having squandered most of my time in high school, and lacking the encouragement of my parents. They did not want to see me go out of state and so I was accepted on probation by Long Island University. To make matters worse, that first year I lived at home and had more than a one-hour subway commute to Brooklyn from Queens. (http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2008/01/before-consciousness.html).

But with my sophomore year I achieved my objective of living on campus, settling into my new life in the dormitory. I also switched my major from advertising/business to psychology rationalizing that motivational research is best learned from that perspective. I was persuaded to make the switch because Gustave Gilbert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Gilbert was then Chairman of the department and as a psychology major I would be able to take his popular course the The Psychology of Dictatorship. Later in my career I reprinted his book of the same title. Gilbert was the author of the Nuremberg Diary and was the American Military Chief Psychologist at the trials.

However, thanks to the influence of my friend, Bruce, I again switched my major to literature during my junior year (http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2008/02/old-friends.html). This is where my heart took me. That same year I became a dormitory counselor, which provided free room and board, and at that time I met Carol, who was to become my first wife.

I think we were drawn together because we were both lost souls (although at the time I did not see that). She too came from an emotionally “broken” home. We adopted one another and my mother saw in her a “daughter,” whom she hoped to mold and influence. Before long, we were planning our marriage. We dove into that commitment without any doubts, especially me as I saw an opportunity to “teach” my parents how to have a marriage and it was a permanent ticket out of my home.

So, in June 1963 we were married in the Church in the Gardens in Forest Hills. Only a few people attended the wedding, my immediate family, my Uncle Phil, and my friends Bud and Ed. Even her mother did not go to the wedding.

That day started ominously. Carol was staying with my family in Queens and I was in our new apartment in Brooklyn. I decided to cook myself some bacon and eggs that morning before getting on the subway. We had one frying pan in which I first cooked the bacon and when that was finished I nonchalantly discarded the grease into a wax water cup that promptly melted around my thumb. The Brooklyn Hospital was across the street and I rushed there, trying to get someone’s attention in the emergency room. My story of having to make my own wedding in a few hours was met with, “Oh, yeah.” Finally, between a couple of gunshot wound victims I was seen, treated for 2rd degree burns and my right thumb was bandaged so it was twice it’s size. Nice “touch” for the wedding night I thought.

That summer we moved into the section of the dormitory for faculty and married students and we both worked full time. The following year we maintained part time jobs to support ourselves while we finished our senior years, me at the university library and she in a variety of jobs.

By this time I was taking mostly English courses and had several with Prof. Martin Tucker who is still my friend to this day. Martin was more than a teacher. He was a mentor who gave me confidence in my abilities. And, today, more than 40 years later, I work with him as executive director of Confrontation Press. He just turned 80 and is still going strong, as a poet, as a playwright, and as the Editor of the literary journal, Confrontation, that has just published its 100th issue. About twenty years ago he asked me to write a piece about my LIU student experience for a special issue of Confrontation, "Brooklyn and the World." This was intended to be more of an evocative portrayal than a history, and I include the essay below.

When the time came for graduation, I found I lacked the necessary credits, with too many credits from too many majors (Business, Psychology, English) and too many minors (Education and Music), but not enough required courses. So during the summer of 1964 I had to take those courses to graduate while Carol worked for Dell Publishing. Upon graduation, she became pregnant, thus changing my thought of going to graduate school, either to pursue teaching or library science.

So life had other plans for me and I began my working career, but that is another story.

L.I.U.-My World in the Early'60s

Downtown Brooklyn sandwiched between the placid decade of the 50s and the Vietnam War was not unlike other communities in having a sense of optimism about its future. A thriving commercial center for small merchants, it had major islands in the same sea: the New York Telephone Company headquarters, the Brooklyn Hospital, Abraham and Straus department store, the Fox and Paramount movie theatres, the Board of Education, Fort Greene Park, and Long Island University.

It was September 1960 when I emerged from the DeKalb Avenue subway stop and made my way for the first time to L.I.U. Standing at the comer of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue, waiting for the light to change, Junior's and the Dime Savings Bank behind me, I faced a drab office building rising above the ornate but faded Brooklyn Paramount movie palace.

Farther behind me was a middle-class Queens community, my universe until this moment: a community of hard-working people imbued with the conviction that all things were possible in this society if one tried hard enough; it was with this sense I was going to college to learn business. But this seeming past eternity of punch ball; the Bungalow Bar man; picture-card trading; piano and guitar lessons; grammar school report cards that included grades for penmanship, neatness and posture; the Bunny Hop, Elvis ("a-wop-bom-a-lu-bop ... "); Ike; and high school (" ... if you don't take Latin, you won't be able to get into college .. ") was possibly fading, for I stood on the border between two lives, two cultures: was my background going to be my future, could I emerge out of this bland and benign landscape into myself? Brooklyn would have much to do with the answer.

Sitting in my first class on the 8th floor, becoming a regular occupant of that same seat, I could see the digital clock on top of the Dime Savings Bank blinking at me. This and another clock on top of the Williamsburg Savings Bank farther up Flatbush Avenue became lighthouses in my Brooklyn experience. When, the following year, I lived in the dormitory, returning late in the evening from a night in Manhattan in a blinding snowstorm, I sensed these silent timepieces watching me scurrying home.

In later years I lived in downtown Brooklyn, worked in Manhattan for a publishing firm, and regularly flew to the mid-west. Coming into LaGuardia Airport, we would sweep over Brooklyn and see the downtown area reaching out to Prospect Park while the fingers of the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges bound Brooklyn to Manhattan. Below was the beacon of the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock. Then, as now, I am drawn to that unique community I once called home.

I remember the student union on the ground floor of the small building adjacent to the Paramount building. Smoke hung in the stagnant air, bodies slumped on worn lounge chairs and elbows rested on Formica tables. Nixon versus Kennedy was the subject of heated discussion. These students, mostly from Brooklyn, seemed confident in their belief that politics could remake society. Eventually I found myself caught up in political causes as my apathy of the past waned.

With John F. Kennedy our new President-elect, the campus had a new vibrancy. A professor, delayed by listening to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony in his office, entered the classroom gesticulating those glorious rhythms. One professor challenged us to an exam: think of a question and answer it, the grade being as dependent on the nature of the question as on the answer. Another accepted a twisted pretzel from a student on the school quadrangle and published a poem on the experience.

Meanwhile I moved into the dormitory, severing remaining ties with a prior somnambulistic life. My room faced the front of the campus, with the monolithic slab of a factory that would become the shell of the architecturally renowned Humanities Building to be constructed a short time later. Behind the factory stood downtown Brooklyn, my microcosm of the real world.

The lack of classroom space mandated that the university rent space at Brooklyn Polytechnic, a neighboring institution where some of my classes were held. We made our way there along Myrtle Avenue, the elevator line rumbling over our heads, past furniture stores and shells of buildings. Decay was evident, but it was defiant decay: people stubbornly made their homes and pursued their lives here.

The return trip was frequently along Fulton Street, connecting the City Hall area with Flatbush Avenue and downtown Brooklyn. There, the cacophony of tiny record stores blurted out" ... baby, baby, baby, baby don't you leave me ... " merging with" ... be-bop-a-lu-la, she's my baby ... " The Chinese restaurant on the second floor beckoned, but I moved on toward the Dime Savings Bank, past shoe, appliance, fabric and other stores.

Across from the Dime Savings Bank was McCrory's, which embodied most of the merchant's downtown Brooklyn expectations. Here I was greeted at the door by the aroma of newly manufactured goods mixed with those of different foods cooking in various sections of the store. In the basement was a grocery where we bought food to supplement the fare in the dormitory. Shoppers would scrutinize the merchandise with almost-total seriousness as the IND subway loudspeaker announced, through corridors connecting to McCrory's, a train's arrival.

Opposite Junior's restaurant, then as now the neighborhood's most famous food emporium, was another restaurant, Soloway's, a luncheonette run by a Greek family. Hamburgers sizzled in grease while french fries were bathing in deep fat. Students gathered around most of the tables and at the counter while strains of "Run Around Sue" thumped from the jukebox.

Junior's itself was reserved for special occasions when only the most obscene dessert would suffice. Also, late at night, when we could study no more, some of us went across to Junior's bar to chat with Pete, the bartender, who offered a different education: would Maris hit 60 home runs? Mickey Mantle was the better ballplayer, Pete opined. Pete had a thick neck with a trim gray crew cut. He was a kindly father to us, probably not realizing the important role he played in our student lives.

Manhattan was a short shuttle over the Manhattan Bridge via the BMT, and occasionally we went there. Perhaps on a date, sitting at the back of St. Patrick's Cathedral until dawn to beat the curfew for female residents of the dorm; or to Greenwich Village for a Black Russian or to see a production at Cafe LaMama or on the second floor of Max's Kansas City restaurant, where the Theatre of the Absurd played; but Brooklyn seemed to be all the world we generally needed and that was where we usually stayed. We sat on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, and took in the vista of the Brooklyn Bridge, downtown Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and further up, the spire of the Empire State.

During club hours we crowded into the auditorium to hear Malcolm X speak. Or we listened to local political candidates, heated debate overflowing the classroom after the speaker left.

The Cuban Missile crisis brought us back to days when, as schoolchildren, shades were lowered, lights turned out, and we were instructed to get down on our knees below our desks and cover our heads. Our mortality, and civilization's could be ended by design or by caprice. We frantically darted about the dormitory, discussing whether we might soon be drafted.

I remember other areas I did not know until those days in Brooklyn. Working as a receptionist at the Brooklyn Tuberculosis Center several evenings a week, I participated in a too-common side of Brooklyn life: poverty. Sick, helpless people came, seeking assistance. I processed forms and offered reassurance, but felt ineffectual.

As a dormitory counselor I sometime had to accompany students to the emergency room at the Brooklyn Hospital behind the university. I spent a week there myself, with pleurisy, in a ward. The squalor and the human tragedy I witnessed are echoed in the works of Theodore Dreiser which I read in the hospital for a term paper, seeing Frank Cowperwood's lobster and squid locked in deadly combat as symbolic of our struggle with life in this land of Brooklyn.

Next to the hospital was a prison. There, from the upper floors of the dormitory, the prisoners could be seen endlessly marching in circles. The prison was later destroyed to make room for a bigger hospital, the demolition ball pounding the 19th-century slabs into rubble, crushing the infinitely trodden steps in the courtyard.

Walking past the Admissions Office one Friday afternoon, a friend came running toward me. "Did you hear, Kennedy was shot?" Incredulous, I rushed to my dorm to listen to the radio. It was true.

I had tickets for a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that night, one of the few cultural events in New York City that was not cancelled. An unrehearsed version of Beethoven's Egmont Overture was performed rather than the regular program. We filed out, silent, stunned, weeping openly. In quick succession Oswald was apprehended, and while we watched it on TV, Jack Ruby assassinated him.

With the advent of these acts, in particular as the Vietnam War encroached on all our lives, I knew the life I had known in Brooklyn could not remain the same. What changed, some years later, was often for the better for me. But whatever the benefits and the sad moments, I shall remember Brooklyn most as the place that allowed me to change into myself.

Memorial Day

It’s already started: media advertising inundation announcing Memorial Day sales. It is bad enough that every holiday is turned into a shopping opportunity, but converting Memorial Day to a quick buck is especially disturbing. How many of us will stop to remember, pay homage to the millions who have given life or limb, or have made extraordinary sacrifices to establish our freedoms and protect them? Instead, we head off to the malls or the beach and hardly give a thought to the true meaning of the day. “Lennar Homes announces a Sell-a-thon Memorial Day Weekend Savings!!!”

I think of my father, just a “regular Joe” as he described himself, newly married and having a young son (me), who like so many others went off to WWII. It was not something he wanted to do, and he was ill prepared for the experience. As he said at the conclusion of the war with many soldiers being held in Europe for possible police action, “my desire is so strong, the urge so great to be able to come home again.” But he made those sacrifices.

He never talked much about the war. Maybe that was because he had seen atrocities filming one of the concentration camps at the war’s end as a Signal Corps photographer. Stars and Stripes featured a photograph OF him in one of its pages: “Signal Corps cameraman T/4 Robert Hagelstein, assigned to Ninth Army, ignores the German warning, ‘photography forbidden,’ to shoot movies of activities along the Rhine River March 5, 1945.”
http://www.gordon.army.mil/ocos/ac/Edition,%20Fall/Fall%2001/images/NONO.JPG

Thanks to some of his letters I know how he felt about making the sacrifices of those years: http://lacunaemusing.blogspot.com/2007/11/ikey-lubins-and-letters-from-past.html

I, on the other hand, through a number of coincidences, never served in the armed forces. I was married before the VietNam conflict escalated and although I had planned to go into the US Army Reserve, President Kennedy then declared married men “3A” so I did not enlist. By the time they were calling up married men, I already had a son, and continued to be deferred from the draft. Truthfully, I was greatly relieved at the time. But friends of mine were called, and today I feel a sense of self-reproach about not having been among them.

This heightens my great respect for those who served and I think we as a nation owe more to them than just a tip of the hat and a Sell-a-thon. And, I think it behooves us to reflect on the ideals and freedoms our founding fathers so valiantly and brilliantly struggled to establish. David McCullough’s magnificent biography of John Adams provides a behind the scenes view of the birth of our nation and those sacrifices.

“Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” -- John Adams