This is both what I want and have in my life. It’s not everything, but it’s been a full life. I’m old enough to have attained the things most important to me. And not. It depends on how one looks at it. The difference between success and failure, contentment or emptiness can be your attitude. This is not to say that there are no real losses. Of course there are. Deaths, partings, endings are inevitable, but they don’t define our life, however painful they are. Nor are we defined by the worst things that have happened to us.
I’ve done most of the stuff I wanted to do, been most places I wanted to go. I took chances. Sometimes the risks paid off. Other times, the results were unfortunate. I regret the chances I never took far more than those I took that didn’t work out.
Look at your life, see good times and happy memories — or focus on failure and losses. Life is never all joy or entirely miserable. There are good times and bad. We all fail. We all succeed. Life is like a baseball season, made up of wins and losses.
We have ultimate freedom to choose which is more important and how we evaluate the balance. In this one thing, we answer only to ourselves.
American mythology declares them to be the backbone of business.
Mom and Pop. The symbol of our nation’s best. How lovely dealing with neighbors and friends rather than faceless corporate giants. Oh, wait. Our friends and neighbors work for those corporations. So aren’t we dealing with them anyhow? Just asking.
Every day, it gets a bit harder to find Mom and Pop businesses. You could blame it all on corporate greed pushing out small businesses. So nice to have a bad guy to blame. Too bad it’s not true.
The world keeps changing as does what people want for themselves and their children. The labor intensive small retail businesses that have long been the bulwark of America’s Main Street are not appealing to today’s computer-savvy kids. They are much more likely to want a shot at the boardroom of one of those aforementioned faceless corporations.
Who does want to run those little businesses? Immigrants. The people we are so determined to get keep out or get rid of. They see long hours and hard work as an opportunity. American kids see it as a dead-end. They are both right. It’s all a matter of how you look at it. Most of our small general stores, if they haven’t already been knocked down to make way for a CVS or Stop & Shop, are being run by newcomers from India and Asia. They do fine.
It’s easy to understand.
Mom and Pop got old. Their kids never wanted to work at the family deli, restaurant or ice cream shop, so as soon as a better offer was available, they took it. Mom and Pop didn’t send the kids to college so they could slave their lives away like they had, so they’re onboard. That was always the plan.
One by one, the family run businesses are closing. Young Americans don’t want to work that many hours for such small returns and the old Americans agree. You and me may want to support them, but they prefer to retire. If they can’t find a buyer who wants the business, they sell the land at a tidy profit to the highest bidder.
It’s not unreasonable to want profit from years of sweat and labor. Everyone knows small retail businesses — unless they find a niche market that doesn’t put them in head-to-head competition with corporate franchises — barely survive, even with enthusiastic community support.
I’d gladly support local small businesses, but who? One by one, our restaurants, delis, gift shops, independent groceries, book stores are going away. There is only one independent bookstore in the Valley now. There never were many, but now, one.
Independent drug stores? Gone. Small clothing shops? Nope. We still have delis, a few restaurants, lots of hair dressers and fingernail shops. A couple of tattoo parlors. One big lumber yard cum hardware store. Everyone else sold and moved away.
Around here, we are grateful to have a Walmart. Without it we’d have no place to shop for anything without driving 25 miles to the mall. Someplace to buy dish towels, paper goods and bathmats. The place to go if the microwave suddenly dies or I break another coffee carafe. Walmart did not displace local businesses. We never had them. Maybe a hundred years ago, but not in the last 50 or more years.
Good bye, Mom. Good bye, Pop. We miss you, but I understand. You worked hard. You want some time off now and an easier life for your kids.
When Garry and I were growing up in New York, the old Channel 11 (WPIX, I think it was) used to have a show called “Million Dollar Movie.” The theme for the show was “Tara’s Theme” from Gone With the Wind. I had never seen GWTW, so when I saw it for the first time, I said “Hey, that’s the theme for Million Dollar Movie.”
I wasn’t allowed to watch TV on school nights and only for a very limited period of time even on weekends. But, if I was home sick, I got to watch all the television I wanted, and better yet, I got to watch upstairs in my parents bedroom. It was black and white, as were all the televisions then. I don’t know if color TVs had been invented yet, but if they had been, no one I knew had one.
Million Dollar Movie played one movie per week, all day, every day, for however long they were on the air. So if I was home sick — usually for tonsilitis — whatever was playing, I saw it a lot. They also didn’t have a very large repertoire so the odds were pretty good if you got sick twice, you’d see the same movie again for another week.
Thus “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the great James Cagney docu-musical was engraved in my brain. I believe that during at least three occurrences of my nemesis, those nasty tonsils, I watched it over and over again until I knew every word, every move, every song … with frequent commercial interruptions.
Now of course, we own the DVD and we never tire of watching it. No one danced like Cagney. No one had that kind of energy! Believe it or not, I never saw any other of his movies until I saw “One, Two, Three” in the movies when I was older.
We just watched it again and we watched James Cagney dance down the steps in the White House five times. I’ve included it here so you can watch it as many times as you want. What a great movie it is.
I thought he was a song and dance man and comic actor. I was very surprised to discover he used to play gangsters. Million Dollar Movie didn’t play those films.
Only one questions remains unanswered through all these years. How come they didn’t make it in color? Does anyone have a sensible answer to that?
Today, tell us about the most unconventional love in your life. Photographers, share a photo that says unconventional.
Pandora’s box had nothing on this one. Wow. Sizzle. Smoke. Hot, hot, hot!!
Okay, this is a G-rated site, so I won’t go there. Instead, I’ll tell you a story and leave you free to fill in the details from your own rich imaginings.
At 18 I married my first husband. I was already in my senior year of college. Jeff ran the college radio station as Station Manager. My now and forever husband was Jeff’s second-in-command, that is to say Garry was the Program Director. The two men were best friends. Together with most of the people I still count as friends, we had a great deal of fun. Not just the usual college stuff. We were creative. Just our Fall of Sauron Day parties — scripted, costumed, with special effects — were the stuff of lifetime memories. And, because we were young and healthy, we could party all night and go the work the next day looking none the worse for wear. Try that nowadays!
I married Jeff in August 1965. I spent the next year finishing my B.A. and having my spine remodeled, so it was a few years before I got on with life. My son was born in May 1969. We named him Owen Garry, Garry being his godfather and all.
Fast forward through a non-acrimonious divorce. I later realized if you just give up everything and walk away, it’s easy to be amicable. It’s also a big mistake you will come to regret sooner or later.
Off to Israel with the kid. Not too long thereafter, a marriage in Israel about which I won’t talk, even under torture. One visit from the ex and current husband – exactly in time for the war in Lebanon. It ruined our plans to see the Hermon and the Galilee, but created great anecdotes for another post. I have one picture that says it all: me, Jeff and Garry arm-in-arm by the Dead Sea. The picture taken by husband number 2.
Photo: Debbie Stone
August 1987. Back to the USA. Garry and I are an item. Subsequent to finalizing my long-distance divorce from husband number 2, we are wed. It’s the right marriage to the right guy. I declined to have my first ex-husband be best man at my third wedding. We did, however, have the “real” reception at his house. There was the official one at the church, but the fun was over at the old house.
Garry and I will celebrate our 23 anniversary in September.
It occurred to me one day I really needed to see the spine doctor. When you have chronic pain, you learn to ignore it most of the time. Unless you want to wind up a pill addict, it’s the only option. It’s not being brave. It’s an entirely practical decision. Do I want to keep living? Walking? Participating? Then I have to deal with what I have to deal with. That’s the way it goes. Oh well.
Sometime, when I was in my mid-twenties, I was doing my mother’s hair. I liked fixing her hair. It was easy to style, thick, silver and just a bit wavy. I asked her to turn her head to the right, and she did. When I asked her to turn the other way, she said “I can’t.”
“You can’t? Why not?”
“Because my head won’t turn that way.”
That seemed a curious answer. “What do you mean by that?”
“My neck is stiff.”
“Um, mom? How long has it been like this?”
She thought for a while. “Fifteen years? Something like that.”
That stopped me. Fifteen years? “Have you seen anyone about it?”
“No,” she said. “I figured I was just getting old.”
At the time, I thought this was totally bizarre. It turned out, she had entirely treatable (but advanced) tendonitis and it got better. She hated doctors.
Time has marched on and I’m older than my mother was then. I totally relate to her response. When I called the doctor for an appointment, I discovered the last time I saw him was six years ago. To be fair, I’ve had a few medical crises since then and I got distracted. Besides, I know what’s wrong with my back. It isn’t going to get better or go away. It isn’t going to kill me either. I’ve lived with it most of my life. I’m used to it and generally ignore it. Recently, though I’m having trouble walking, even on flat surfaces and going up and down stairs is hard. My legs don’t seem to want to support me. It crossed my mind that there might be something that could be done to improve it without major reconstruction.
My doctor is wonderful. The best. The only doctor who can look at my spine, not gasp with horror and immediately decide I need to be rebuilt with screws, pins, and bolts. He’s a minimalist, medically speaking and I like that.
So I made an appointment and I got lucky, because there was a cancellation in December. It usually takes five or six months to get in to see him. He’s the king of spines in Boston, maybe in the entire country. I would have willingly waited the six months if I had to. Of course, as soon as I made the appointment, I had to make another appointment because I need new films of my spine. I also haven’t had a CT scan or MRI in six years and he isn’t going to be able to do much without new films.
I wondered how come I hadn’t processed the fact I can’t walk properly? I suppose I wasn’t paying attention. Too busy ignoring the pain. I don’t always know I’m doing it, but I was being my mother.
She taught me to be stalwart, a Spartan. She told me she didn’t use Novocaine when she got her teeth worked on. I asked her why not and she said “Pain is good for your character.” She meant it. I grew up believing showing pain or giving in to it was a sign of weakness. To a degree it serves me well, but sometimes it’s dangerous. If you ignore the wrong stuff, they can kill you. One needs a sense of balance, but it isn’t so easy to find.
Watching the documentary on Ethel Kennedy last night reminded me of my mother. Mom was an athlete and I’m sure she always wondered how she have wound up with such a klutzy daughter. She had been a good tennis player. She rode horses, she played ice hockey. She went bob sledding. She painted, sculpted, designed and made her own clothing. She also never got past seventh grade, so she made up for it by reading everything. She had a truly voracious appetite for life and knowledge.
After a radical mastectomy, she couldn’t play tennis anymore, so she played a ferocious game of ping-pong.
She played savagely. She served so hard it was more like a bullet than a ping-pong ball. As a family, we vacationed in dinky little resorts in the Catskills where there was no entertainment. The one thing they always had was a ping-pong table. So I played against my mother.
She didn’t believe in any of that “let the kid win” stuff. She was a competitor. You won or you lost. Trying hard was irrelevant because she expected nothing less. She slaughtered me. As I got older, I played better and but she always beat me. She told me she was giving me an advantage by playing with her left hand. I knew she wrote with her right hand, so I assumed that she was a rightie. Until the day my father told me she had always played tennis with her left hand. My mother was psyching me out. Her own daughter.
I still never beat her, but I beat everyone else.
From her, I got a gritty determination to never give up, to do everything as well as it could be done, or at least as well as I could do it. It turns out winning isn’t everything, but I didn’t learn that until I’d already missed a lot. Late in life, I realized I don’t have to be the best. Playing the game because you enjoy it is worth something too. Another lesson learned a bit too late.
The older I get, the more I remind me of my mother.
We all miss so many things. Some intentionally, others accidentally. Sometimes, I miss things accidentally because I’m avoiding other things intentionally. One thing leads to the other.
I wonder what else I’m missing? I know, on this Mother’s day, that I’m definitely missing Mom. I have so much to tell her.
The modern commercialized celebration of gifts, flowers and candy, bears little resemblance to Julia Ward Howe‘s original idea. Here is the Proclamation that explains, in her own powerful words, the goals of the original Mother’s Day in the United States…
Portrait drawing of poet, antislavery activist and suffragette Julia Ward Howe.
- – -
Arise then…women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace…
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
- – -
To all mothers and children of mothers, wishes of strength, peace and hope for this Mother’s Day.
Pixel Hall Press, Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) Members’ Titles 314 pages, Publication Date: May 6, 2013
It would be hard enough growing up any different kind of kid in a small rural community. Growing up the only Jew in a poverty-stricken mountain town would be significantly harder. So what would it be like growing up a brown-skinned Jewish girl — the only Jew, the only person of color and the only foreigner — in an inbred narrow-minded fundamentalist Christian town with a strong skinhead militia contingent and longstanding prejudices against anyone who is at all different?
Add it together and it goes far beyond difficult and moves into the realm of nearly impossible.
Judith Ormand spent her early life in Paris, France, the daughter of a Black man and a converted-to-Judaism white mother. After her mother dies of causes never clearly explained, she ends up being raised by her Moravian German grandparents in a small insular Pennsylvania mountain village.
Her growing up years were punctuated by racial attacks, by violence, hatred and fear. Her only protector? Joe Anderson, a handsome blond football player, son of a drunken father and a skinhead, drug-dealer brother. When Joe — her beloved best friend — turns against her, her world is shattered. She vows, encouraged by her grandmother, to never under any circumstances return to Black Bear, Pennsylvania.
But Gramma and Grampa are gone and despite any promises she made, Judith — Jo — must return and face the nightmare of her growing up years and uncover the truth about the people she loved and lost.
The book is a compelling psychological drama and Judith Ormand is a fascinating character, a perfect target for bigoted small town residents. I found the story gripping and honest …. until it approached the end.
All of a sudden, the book went into overdrive, as if the author had reached her page limit and now had to quickly tie up all the loose ends and somehow give this sad story a happy ending. I didn’t believe the ending. I didn’t find it emotionally honest and didn’t think it made sense based on everything that had gone before. After such a very promising start, it was a big disappointment.
For all that, the book is worth the read. The misery of a child who is so very different trying to find happiness in a frightening and hostile environment is heart-wrenching. I wish the author had stayed the course and written the ending with the same integrity she gave to the story’s beginning and middle.
Jo Joe is available as a hardcover from Amazon. It will be available in paperback and on Kindle in June 2013.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
