The Covid 19 crisis has kept people home and forced our hands at becoming creative in different ways.
Online ensemble shares where one musicians plays a part and sends it along to the next player etc. to be finally edited to look cohesive as if we had been playing together.
There are front porch 6 feet apart neighborhood concerts, hundreds of hours of Zoom teaching sessions, and Zoom family reunions, and Zoom cocktail parties.
I'm so grateful for access to other human beings through my devices but I must confess I'm screen timed out.
Since my mother's passing away in April I have lit many candles for her trying to find some closure around her passing away while I was on the other side of the continent.
I created my closure project from a collection of matches struck over the past months.
I've also started bartering with a wonderful writing teacher named Charity Hume. She takes online voice classes with me and I take creative writing classes with her.
It's one of the silver linings in this new strange reality I'm living as of late.
Here is a story I wrote in my last class with Charity.
The assignment was to write about a lost object. My silver pin came to mind.
Thanks for visiting my Blog and stay healthy and safe!
Creatively Yours,
Suzi
SILVER PIN
When we got back from the cemetery there were 7 men sitting in mom's living room dovenning. 7 men no one knew.
Dad's younger brother, uncle Sam was a rabbi. His family were the only serious Jews in the family. He arranged to have these guys come over and sit shiva which is customary. We all believed that dad would have wanted to make his brother happy even though he was hardly a practicing Jew, so we went along with it.
Uncle Sammy was a sweet man. He was a brilliant savant-ish math scholar as well as a rabbi. My parents would often have him stop by the house to tutor me in middle school math, which was not a good idea because middle school math was much too basic for his brilliant brain and he would unconsciously launch into algebraic equations to find the solution to a simple division problem. I’d watch his pencil wildly scribbling numbers and figures onto a piece of paper and then pronounce,
“there you go...the answer is 224.”
He lived in a completely different world from the one we lived in. For several years he and aunt Miriam lived in the brick house across the street from us. We would hide the Christmas tree in the back bedroom every December so Sam and his family couldn’t see it through our front window...we didn’t want to offend him...or maybe it was so we wouldn’t embarrass my father, I’m not sure.
Mom converted when she married my father but a few traditions remained from her former life as a pseudo Christian of some sort. We always had big Christmas Eve and Christmas dinners, a tree, Easter baskets that were filled with chocolates, decorated eggs and small pastel colored plastic toys that she would hide and we would find...it was magical, and even more magical were those holidays spent in New Hampshire occasionally with Grandmother Grace because we could come unglued without concerns about relatives from my father’s side of the family voicing any opinions on the schizophrenic nature of our upbringing.
Sitting on chairs set up in circle, the bearded pious men rocked and swayed while reading from small manuscripts on their laps. Their lips were moving and the almost inaudible Hebrew words tumbled onto the floor as these seven professional mourners emulated grief and filled the room with an unfamiliar air of orthodoxy.
I could tell that mom felt like her house had been invaded.
I felt the same way, so when Alan asked if I wanted to take a ride to the K Mart I jumped at the chance to get out of there.
I grabbed my tweed jacket with the silver serpent pin on the lapel that dad had given me.
Seeing the pin brought me back to El Interior in Austin. I had been admiring the coiling silver snake with an elaborate design etched on his back in the jewelry case and when we left the shop and got into the car dad handed me a small box.
“Here you go Suri! I saw you looking at this!”
I can’t remember what Alan was shopping for at the K Mart but I think he needed to pick up a few things for the crowd forming back at the house.
The fluorescent lit, stale popcorn smelling, primary colored bright plastic packaged KMart seemed like a weird comical contrast to the anachronistic circle of men we just left.
As soon as we got back home I was unloading bags and I noticed the pin was missing from my coat collar.
“I need to borrow the car and head back to the store. My silver pin fell off somewhere on that KMart expedition so I’d like to retrace my steps.”
Searching the parking lot, I looked under muddy car wheels and empty shopping carts. My eyes scanned the cracked black asphalt with detritus from years of litter that had been fused into the surface. Old receipts, soda can zip tops, juice box straws, flatterend candy and gum wrappers. My eyes settled on a flash of silver on the ground and my heart did a flip...just the foil from a stick of Wrigley's.
After 45 minutes of exploring every square inch of the parking lot I gave up and headed home.
Kugel…Lois Malek always makes kugel at funerals.
I’m sure she has a stock pile of noodles and raisins in her cupboard just in case.
She was always domineering and impatient with me.
Earlier that day she took me firmly by the shoulders and told me to stop crying.
“Be strong for your mother.”
How dare she tell me not to cry.
That morning at the cemetery I watched her mouth moving as she was giving me instructions on how to be a better daughter.
I turned off the sound of her voice and I was standing in Lois Malek’s back hallway with my sister Sharon.
I was 8 years old. Sharon was 11.
Sharon’s best friend was Mrs. Malek’s oldest child and they played together all the time. I would follow Sharon everywhere so we were standing in the hallway together, feet wet from melting snow.
Lois scanned the two girls standing there and pointing to my sister declared,
“You can come in….but you..”
pointing at me,
“You need to wait in the hall because you’re dirty...your feet are dripping white shoe polish all over my clean floor!”
I looked down at my feet. The go go boots mom bought for us at Hengerer's downtown last month were sure enough dripping white Buster Brown shoe polish all over Lois Malek’s clean floor. How was this strange occurrence possible? Sharons white go go boots were wet but only trailed a bit of clean water from melting snow on the hall floor?
I had a sad realization that Sharon's boots were much better than mine.
Hers were flawless white patent leather with zippers up the inside and mine were a cheaper grade of white faux leather that pulled on gapping at my skinny calves and required frequent Buster Brown white shoe polish rescue. Like the whiteout used on a page of typing errors this shoe polish came in a small bottle with a sponge applicator and I used it frequently to cover up scuffs and scrapes that I acquired from a day of proper play. The label on the polish had a little boy with a red barrette on his head and a blue ribbon around his neck winking and smiling and his dog who looked rabid was beside him smiling as well.
I stood there for what seemed like an hour waiting for Sharon to come back out.
It was most likely only 5 minutes before I turned around and walked out of Mrs. Malek’s side door to head home in the snow leaving the remains of my white shoe polish on her once pristine linoleum hall floor.
She never did like me.
Her kugel is great though.
Who are these 7 men in the living room? What’s their story? This is something I’d like to get to the bottom of.
They had a long list of things one is not to do while in mourning.
Music was one of those things. No music? No singing? No piano playing?
Dad was a professional jazz musician...his friends were all guys from his bands...cool old Italian guys. In the middle of the living room were the 7 professional mourners praying and swaying and mumbling in Hebrew under their breath while dad's friends were sitting around the grand piano at the far side of the living room softly chatting, scotch in hands and cigarette smoke coiling around their heads.
Then something strange happened which broke the hum of voices in the room.
The piano seemed to jump off the ground, at least a quarter of an inch up into the air then slam down again with a loud thump that stopped everyone in the room into a moment of complete silence…the dovenning stopped and the Jewish guys looked up from their prayers wide eyed…the chatting around the piano stopped and Dick Reiderer looking scared took a swig of his scotch...everyone seemed completely dumbfounded.
“What the hell was that?!!”
Dick who played trumpet in dads orchestra said,
“Must be Harry saying hello! That’s definitely something Harry would do!”
The musicians all laughed.
The Jews went back to praying.
Alan and I went into the basement to see if the foundation of the house underneath the place where the piano sat may have shifted?
No answers. Just a curious wonderful sense that perhaps Harry really was saying hello.
Another thing on uncle Sam’s “in mourning you don’t do” list was leaving the house, but Mom who had always been a rebel had an escape plan.
Making aunt Norma an accomplice she assigned her the task of lying to guests who continually streamed in and out of the house, telling them that the family was resting and would come say hello in an hour or two.
We all quietly followed mom out the back door...brother Alan, sisters Trudy and Sharon and their husbands snuck out into the yard carrying instruments, shot glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniels Black label, and piled into the car
We headed back to Forest Lawn to visit dad on our terms this time.
Paul played sax, mom sang "I’m just wild about Harry” Alan read a poem that he wrote then pressed the folded up paper deep into the freshly dug soil of a new grave. We stood in a circle, singing and laughing and toasted to the man who loved to party and make music and poured Jack Daniels on his grave because dad loved Jack Daniels.
Back home more people had arrived along with more Kugel and several lasagnas. A veritable smorgasbord of carbohydrates.
No one had missed us on our secret trip to Forest Lawn.
No more visitations that moved pianos or other heavy objects.
On automatic my hand went up to my collar and I felt the empty space where the pin should be.
