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?
I have acquired a goodly number of sweaters over the years. This is New England. Winters are long. Heating oil is expensive. Sweaters fill the gap.
This morning I noticed most of my sweaters are purple. I’ve got a few in black, a couple in red. But over all, purple dominates. The sweater collection used to be mostly black. I’m from New York where women wear black. It’s a thing. A co-worker in Israel once told me I dressed like a nun. I could never wear the bright colors she wore. I’d feel like I was dressed in a neon sign and I’d have to wear sunglasses all the time.
The purpling of my wardrobe occurred gradually while I wasn’t paying attention, one sweater at a time … a lavender cashmere here, a dark purple merino there. The seasons passed until my wardrobe was awash in purple.
If you surmise from this that I love purple, you’d be wrong. While I have nothing against the color, the plethora of clothing in purple signifies only that purple is a color frequently remaindered at clearance time … and it is the most acceptable (to me) of the frequently left over hues.
Purple sweaters scream “final mark-down.” One of the perils of waiting until the end of the season is the selection of colors and sizes is limited. As a habitue of end-of-the-season sales, I know what to expect. Lots of purple, white, orange and some nasty shades of green in which no one looks healthy.
Leftovers also will include whatever “specialty colors” designers were sure would be the next big things. These colors are inevitably named after fruits or veggies. They never sell well, so there are plenty of whatever it was in the clearance aisle. All the normal, neutral colors are gone, but you’ll find fruit salad: cantaloupe , mango, kiwi, aubergine, honeydew, sugarplum, pumpkin, mocha and vanilla bean are among many recent attempts to boost the popularity of familiar colors by giving them fruity new names. The problem is, we all knew they were tan, and orange and coral and lavender, so people who like those colors bought them. New names did not make any old color the next big anything.
I’m a big fan of neutral colors. In addition to being essentially conservative where color is concerned, I spent many decades working and commuting. If I wanted to have a life outside of work, dressing had to be fast, mindless.
Neutral colors are the backbone of a working woman’s wardrobe. If almost all of your clothing is black, grey, off-white, taupe, brown, or khaki, putting together an outfit is a piece of cake. Grab a top, grab a bottom, attach earrings to lobes and voilà. It’s a go-anywhere wardrobe for the fashion-challenged. In other words, me.
The years rolled on. I stopped working and I didn’t have much money to spend on clothing. The percentage of purple and orange in my wardrobe rose accordingly. All of this goes to explain the orange dress in my closet. I’ve had it for almost a year but the tags are still attached. It was a 2011 leftover bought the spring of 2012. It’s still waiting to be worn as the spring of 2013 approaches. My problem? It’s not black. I’m not sure I’ve ever worn a winter dress that wasn’t black.
So this lovely garment — a nice soft color, not one of the putrid glowing ones — is still in the closet waiting for its first public appearance. I suppose I could have worn it to one of the parties I went to in December, but I wound up, as usual, wearing black. I fit right in. Boston women wear almost as much black as New York women. It must be a Right Coast thing.
Although a shortage of money has elevated and honed my bargain hunting skills, I have always been a bargain shopper. As far back as I can remember, I’ve looked for final sales and closeouts, even when I wasn’t strapped for funds.
It’s a family tradition. My mother raised me to hold fast to one unyielding principle: Never pay full price.
I have always taken pride in scoring a really great buy. You aren’t supposed to brag about how much you pay. You’re supposed to brag about how much you didn’t pay. The less you pay, the greater your bragging rights.
I was astonished to discover that some people are proud of paying a lot for something they could have gotten for half off if they’d waited a couple of days. That’s weird, don’t you think? Okay, they might have had to get it in purple or orange, but think of all the money they’d save!
Would I have different attitude towards shopping if I were rich? Maybe, but mostly, I don’t think I’d change much.
To put it in perspective, back in the early 1990s, I got into a tug of war with Carly Simon for possession of a 70% off clearance sale silk blouse in a very chi-chi shop in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. The blouse was orange.
I won. It was a fantastic blouse.
Bargain hunting is not just for people on a tight budget. For some of us, it’s a contact sport.
From the ancient glaciers to slavery, Carl Ballenas knows Queens. Born in Brooklyn, Ballenas moved to Queens as a toddler in 1965 and never left. “Everything in Queens fascinated me,” he says. A history teacher at the Immaculate Conception School in Jamaica Estates, he has written several books on local history, even involving his students in the research and fact-finding.
P.S. 48, one of the segregated Colored school in Queens, New York. And yes, there was segregation and slavery in the north.
Through Arcadia Publishing’s “Images In America” series, Ballenas has published books on the adjacent Southeast Queens neighborhoods of Richmond Hill, Kew Gardens (and its famed cemetery, Maple Grove), Jamaica and Jamaica Estates. Although these places now look very different—Kew Gardens is mostly co-ops and high rises, while Jamaica Estates is home to large, Victorian mansions—they were originally part of one community, Jamaica. The process of how land was acquired from local Native American tribes and then parceled out to various developers is something Ballenas and his students in the Thomas Aquinas Honor Society explore in their books on Jamaica and Jamaica Estates.
I caught up with Ballenas after he visited York College this month for a lecture. I asked him about the Richmond Hill and Jamaica history that hides in plain view–in Queens’ topography, its architecture and the names we use everyday.
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OC: What was the first historical project you researched?
CB: The first project was about the history of St. Benedict Joseph Church in Richmond Hill. I was told it was the only parish with that name. While researching, I kept coming across “Morris Park.” I was like why? This is Richmond Hill. I found out there were other towns—like Morris Park—that eventually got absorbed by Richmond Hill.
OC: Let’s start way back. What do geologists tell us about this area?
CB: The hills that make up the backbone of Long Island, north of Hillside Avenue–hence named–were created 10,000 years ago by a glacier, which moved huge boulders and large amounts of soil. When it eventually stopped, it deposited all those things. So from Hillside Avenue south to Jamaica Bay is level, because those things flattened everything out. In the 1870s, when people started settling in this area, the ocean breezes and cooling temperatures in the flat area were part of the area’s attraction.
OC: What is the most interesting architectural find in this area?
CB: We’ve found the Lefferts Farmhouse. The Lefferts family sold their farm to Mr. Albon Platt Man, the founder of Richmond Hill. The farmhouse may date all the way back to the 1830s, and it wasn’t in the same location–that was one of the most amazing things we found–people used to move houses!
And we also found the Captain Briggs farmhouse. Briggs was a veteran of the War of 1812, who retired to Richmond Hill to become a gentleman farmer. He won many awards for his pear orchards. You find these little remnants of the past poking out at you.
I also like correcting the mistakes that have been written about this place. Sometimes we would find references to “Richmond Hill lakes.” The truth is, when it rained there were temporary lakes caused by the lack of a sewer system, and some people believed there were really lakes!
OC: Was there slavery here?
CB: Oh yes. It wasn’t as abundant as in the south, where the weather meant there was planting all year around. In the north, it was difficult to grow crops and feed a large number of slaves during the winter. Northern slaves would take care of horses and do housekeeping.
In the town archives there are lists of some slave uprisings in the late 1600s. There were gallows next to Beaver Pond, in the town center, and there were some executions.
OC: How did Jamaica get its name?
CB: According to research, it came from the word “Jameco” from the Native American Canarsie tribe, who lived by the Jamaica Bay area. It means “Land of the Beaver.” The area was inhabited by beavers, and one pond that no longer exists anymore was called Beaver Pond.
OC: In your talk, you spoke about commemorating George Washington’s visit to Jamaica.
CB: There are so many avenues one can go down. The students were shocked to learn about the separation between the colored schools and the white schools in Jamaica in the early 1900s and the ongoing fight for desegregation. Another direction is that we came across a newspaper article on a hotel being torn down in 1906, and people were reminiscing, saying that George Washington had stayed there. It turns out that in 1791, on an official presidential tour of Long Island, George Washington had written about the hotel in his diary. He said it was decent hotel, and he liked it. We figured out that the hotel was at the site of the current Social Security building in Queens. The students and I would like to place a historical plaque there–it’s been two years since we proposed it.
Hotel where George Washington slept located on Jamaica Ave. and what is now Parsons Blvd. (and formerly Flushing Ave.) in Queens.
OC: Were there any fossils dug up around here?
CB: I came across a newspaper article from 1880s about the discovery of the remains of a wooly mammoth during a dig near Baisley Pond in South Jamaica. They were working on the water system. I’d love to find out what happened to those remains.
OC: Let’s jump far forward. How many Native American or indigenous tribes were there in this area?
CB: On Long Island, there were 12 groups, and some of them have lent their names to contemporary towns: Massapequa, Canarsie, Montauk, Seatauket, Shinnecock, Rockaway and Manhasset are some. Jamaica Avenue is really part of an ancient Indian trail that extended all across Long Island down to Ohio.
OC: What is the procedure for getting young students involved in historical research?
CB: It all started with a walk around our school to look at the cornerstones. Two of the dates on the stones were different, which puzzled them. We learned that the school was built in two stages. But how can you study the history of the parish without studying the history of the town?
So we went to the library and we looked at the maps. We found names, and looked up those names in the newspaper. I would highlight names, like the businessman and the architect, and assign students to go on the internet and find out what they did.
One of the men involved in a key 1907 Jamaica land deal was Micheal Degnon, who was in construction. He had a great quote: “You can be wrong 75% of the time in Manhattan real estate and still make money.” As we were researching this, the students realized we were standing on part of the 16 acres of land he had purchased.
OC: This area of Queens has changed tremendously. Do you think this generation will keep good records for the future?
CB: I’m not too worried. Every kid has a cell phone and is capable of keeping records. Cameras are everywhere. But what do you do with all this information? The kids have to have an appreciation for it. It’s not just a photograph—it’s also the caption. What good is a photograph without a caption? Family photographs with no remarks are a lost record.
OC: What are some of the unanswered questions that you are interested in?
CB: There are a couple of things I’d like to work on. I would love to do a mock-trial based on the school war in Jamaica, Queens to end segregation in New York City. That led to Teddy Roosevelt signing a law ending segregation in New York State.
There was something else. I once found a sentence in a newspaper that was almost a gossip column. It’d read: “The grass in the colored cemetery on Rockaway Avenue was cut neatly.” But I’ve never seen or heard anything else about a colored cemetery in that area. Where is it? I’d like to find out.
Marilyn Armstrong‘s insight:
Everything you didn’t necessarily want to know about Queens, New York. I knew about the glaciers, but I just love the gallows by Beaver Pond … adjacent to Jamaica High School, my alma mater. They sure did pick the el primo location for the school, eh?
With the big day coming up — the 50th high school reunion to which I am not going — I’m getting deluged with emails from The Reunion Group. I no longer read all of them, but every once in a while, I open one up and I’m always sorry I did. The primary area of discussion has moved on from each person telling the story of his or her way better-than-mine life to reminiscing about the school song, almost the definition of “from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
We never sang that song. Not at assemblies, not in chorus, not at all. Almost no one knew the words. I knew the words because they were so funny to me, given the real school and who we were, that I memorized the words for kicks and was usually the only kid who knew all three verses.
Here’s to her the school we love,
Jamaica, tried and true – oo,
Source of all our dearest aims,
Dear School of Red and Blue.
Red and Blue
Red and Blue
School of Red and Blue!
In love our hearts go out to her,
Dear school of Red and Blue!
-
If that doesn’t make you cry, you have no soul. It makes me laugh, so what does that make me?
What compels otherwise sane folks to transform a mixed experience rich with the good, the bad and a big dollop of indifferent, into “the best years of our lives?” It wasn’t. Not for anyone. They cancelled the Senior Prom due to lack of interest. I know because I actually had a date for the prom, but he and I were the only two people to sign up, so they cancelled it. What does that say about reality versus memory?
A few people go way back. We didn’t merely attend high school together. We also went to elementary school and junior high school in one big batch. We got to know each other a lot better than we wanted, a huge dose of too much information. By junior high, I was too miserable to remember much of anything and was being actively bullied by the same mean girls I swear are still hanging around hallways and school yards today. Maybe they are clones of the same girls.
Thank God for the special program that got me through three years of junior high in two years. At least the misery was shortened by a year. Pity about never learning fractions and all. It certainly didn’t improve my shaky math skills.
So all of these people are singing (literally in some cases) the praises of the school and the school system. It was a better than average school academically, but fantastic? It was huge, crowded and if you didn’t measure up and get yourself into the “brainiac college-bound” group, you got nothing from the school except a place to sit in class. The school was academically better than most, but otherwise was no better than every other overcrowded New York city high school. I had some interesting teachers. I had a few really good teachers, and at least one that seriously influenced my future. There were also one or two memorable ones, though not always in a good way.
With current planning involving all these aging nerds and geeks singing the school song, I cannot begin to imagine myself standing around (probably sitting since my arthritis is pretty bad) howling a school song no one ever sang while we were going to school. I think I’d collapse from laughter, genuine ROFLMAO stuff.
What urge makes people cast a rosy glow over a time that wasn’t rosy for them? So many of my classmates seem intent on reliving a past that didn’t happen at all. Is it because we are getting old and want our youth to have been much happier than it was?
Life was what it was. I am not a fan of revisionist history. I occasionally get an email from someone who has found my blog or my Facebook page. They want to renew our friendship. But we weren’t friends. Ever. Some of them are from that group of “mean girls” who turned my life in elementary school and junior high into a small personal hell. Now they want to be my pal? Really? Why? Have they actually forgotten the way it was? Why does no one ever talk about the one really cool thing we had: a gorgeous Olympic-sized swimming pool. Maybe I was the only one who always chose swimming instead of gym. I didn’t mind getting my hair wet, but apparently I was unique that way.
Is this whole collective stumble down memory lane a bizarre form of self-hypnosis whereby we erase real memories and replace them with stuff that never happened? Are we that old and out of touch?
I remember. Many of us suffered from, as did I, difficult home lives. We did a lot of acting out, each in our own way. I buried myself in books and didn’t emerge until college. Fortunately, that turned out to be a lot less destructive than other possible coping mechanisms. I’m watching my granddaughter do her own version of self-destruction for reasons painfully similar to mine, minus the abusive parents, but adding in social ostracism impossible until computers and cell phones. I have serious doubts about the human race and supposed social progress.
But here I go waxing philosophical again. Hell, I’m still trying to figure out exactly what point God was making when he took Job, beat him to a pulp, then told him he had no right to question why it was happening to him. That’s my very favorite Bible story. Life in a nutshell. Shut up Marilyn. Apparently everyone but me has been highly successful and had insanely perfect lives. It’s just possible that I didn’t live the past half century on the same planet as they did. It doesn’t sound like my planet. Does it sound like yours?
This is far too weird for me though it makes good fodder for writing. And inserting lots of question marks in my tired old brain.
There’s no way around it. I was not good with money, so in retirement I am not exactly where I wanted or hoped to be. That doesn’t mean I’m unhappy with my life. I’ve had a lot of fun, adventure and a pretty good career. Both life and career were different than anything I imagined. I became a writer — which I did plan and wanted — then fell into technical writing because, against all logic and reason, I am good at it. For a kid who could barely pass basic high school math courses, elementary physics, or any other hard science, winding up in the high-tech arena was a surprise. That I liked it was even more of a surprise.
It turns out that I could learn anything, including math and science, if it was explained in such a way that I could see its purpose. What I couldn’t do was manipulate numbers or concepts in a vacuum, which is pretty much how math and science were taught back in my day. I suspect they aren’t taught much better now as I watch my granddaughter struggling with the same stuff with which I struggled 50 years ago.
The thing is, that my high school’s 50th reunion has come around. No, I am not going. It’s too expensive in view of the fact that I don’t remember anyone from high school. I recognize some of the names, but we weren’t friends. We didn’t hang out. We have no shared memories except those shared by everyone who went to Jamaica High School during those years. I wasn’t friendless. I had some good friends, but we haven’t kept in touch and none of them are attending this reunion. There’s no reason for me to go.
Jamaica High School is huge. Was huge and over-crowded too. My graduating class was slightly more than 1200, in which I was something around 280 or so. The entire school (10th through 12th grades) was just shy of 4,000 students shoe-horned into a building meant to handle 1300. We were packed solid.
For all that, it was a better school than most and more forward-thinking than most schools of the period. Possibly more forward-thinking than many schools right now. Academically, girls and boys were treated equally. No girl was told not to aim for medical school or an engineering career because it was for boys. If we had the will and ability, there was support.
I was not a super achiever nor overly ambitious. I was an educational minimalist, an under-achiever par excellence. I did exactly enough to get by unless I was particularly interested in a subject or it was one of those so easy for me I could have aced it in my sleep. I never bothered to study for English or history (Social Studies, back then). Math and science were my nemeses and I was glad if I could merely pass. Languages were also difficult for me. I don’t have an ear for languages, something that I proved conclusively by living in Israel for 9 years and never mastering Hebrew.
I graduated with a B+ average, got an early acceptance (11th grade) to Hofstra University (then Hofstra College). I had no passion for higher education, but I just knew if I didn’t go to college, I couldn’t go to Heaven. Can’t get through those pearly gates without showing your diploma. Besides, I was barely 16 when I graduated high school, so what else was I going to do? I had managed to score a couple of scholarships based on competitive tests, which made the choice easier. I always tested well, probably because I didn’t much care. I just assumed I’d do okay and for the most part, I did.
I wanted to be a writer. Or a musician. Or an artist. As soon as I learned to read, I started writing. I’d been playing the piano and studying music from age four. And I had a good eye, could draw and paint pretty well, an itch that has been well scratched by photography. In the end, writing was the thing I did best and came naturally to me, so that’s what I did. Tech writing was a sideways drift, but turned out to be a good fit. I’ve had a long, if somewhat peripatetic career that apparently isn’t quite over yet.
I thought I’d done pretty well until this reunion thing came up.
In the movies, people go back to their high school reunions. They were nerds and social outcasts in high school, but now are successful, attractive and get to feel superior to their former classmates. There are so many movies with this plot that one might think this is a typical reunion experience. Not me. Mind you, I’m not going to be there, but I have not escaped unscathed. The organizer of the event has sent us all a questionnaire, a ”what have you been doing for the last 50 years?” thing. So I filled it out. Why not? I’ve had an interesting life and a long career. I got to be a player in the birthing of technology that now rules the world.
Then I started getting other people’s filled-in questionnaires. With each email, my ego has gotten thumped.
This is not, for obvious reasons, a reunion of the entire graduating class of 1963. These people are a subset of the class, the group into which I fell by virtue of winning a Westinghouse Scholarship (proving I actually knew more science than I realized) and having a high IQ. I was counted as a brainiac, but I wasn’t really one of them. I had brains. Theoretically I still do though there are days when I wonder. What I lacked — something apparently everyone else had — was ambition and drive. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I never aspired to be a professor. I wanted to be me, whatever that was, and one of my goals was to find me. I wanted adventure. I was going to write novels, do exciting, creative stuff. I was more into living than studying.
As far as I can tell, the small percentage of my “group” that are not medical doctors, have doctorates in chemistry, physics and so on. No more than a handful of humanity or arts degrees in the crowd. No one has less than a masters, except me. And as far as I can tell, everyone went to Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Albert Einstein, Harvard. If not Ivy League, than at least prestigious. Everyone but me seems to be having a comfortable retirement, if they aren’t a professor or still practicing medicine. The one or two people who went into the arts have multiple best sellers or are managing editors of major publications. It’s demoralizing. The one other woman who went to Israel married a diamond cutter and is apparently wealthy beyond my imaginings … and even she’s got a masters.
Every time another filled-in questionnaire arrives in email, I swear I will not further torture myself by reading it, but a certain morbid curiosity forces me to open it despite myself. Oh, I forgot to mention that everyone has beautiful and extremely successful children.
I am glad I’m not going to the reunion. I don’t think my ego can take much more of a drubbing. If I needed humbling, I’ve gotten it. What is success anyhow? Do you gauge it by financial well-being? By awards won? Personal satisfaction? Experience? Friends? Fame? I think this will be the last reunion, so I’m safe from having to again calculate the value of a life richly enjoyed, but somewhat lacking in material wealth … otherwise known as money. I think I’ll go take some pretty pictures now.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Holliswood, Queens. For those unfamiliar with New York, it is divided into 5 boroughs, each of which has its own character and history. Most people, when they think of New York, think of Manhattan. This is the island on which you will find Wall Street, the Empire State Building and other signature buildings that symbolize the city of New York.
Most of New York is not Manhattan, and even Manhattan isn’t just skyscrapers and Fifth Avenue. It too has its neighborhoods where people make homes. Greenwich Village, at the lower end of the island, is nothing like Wall Street. Harlem bears little resemblance to Park Avenue which has a character utterly different than the Lower East Side. Fort Tryon Park — home of the Cloisters — is a different world from Broadway. Manhattan is small, but there’s a lot of stuff going on. From the carousel in the park to the open air markets near Rivington Street, to Tiffany and the canyons of the financial district, there’s something to fascinate everyone, all crammed into a very small space.
Which is how come most people don’t live in Manhattan. Real estate prices are out of sight, so most of the life of the city happens in the other four boroughs.
Brooklyn and Queens are where most people live, in the many neighborhoods. I grew up in Queens in Holliswood. It was big old houses, woods and fields when I lived there, though I suppose that has changed. Despite being less than a mile from major subway lines and downtown Jamaica , we were surrounded by small truck farms. People raised garden crops, even corn. There were ducks, geese and chickens. Donkeys, too. The city had grown around Holliswood, but had not yet consumed it.
Brooklyn went through similar changes, although Brooklyn was, until recently, more populous and urban than Queens. The biggest changes in my lifetime have taken place as rundown areas gentrified and became “classy” and expensive. I understand Staten Island is no longer the suburban-exurban area it was, but I haven’t been there in a long time so all I can do is pass on rumors. The same is true of the Bronx. I never really spent any time in the Bronx, but I hear that it’s beginning to pull out of its many decades long slump.
Gentrification is changing the face of cities all across the U.S. People are coming back to the cities.
I needed to provide this background because when I say I grew up in New York City, people get the wrong idea. I really didn’t grow up on the mean streets. I grew up in a rambling old house surrounded by trees, not unlike where I live now … except I took a subway to school and had access to all the stuff that New York offers. It was, from a teenager’s point of view, about as good as it gets. Life in a country setting with cheap, easy access to the city of New York.
The first time I really lived in a city was Jerusalem. Although Jerusalem is definitely urban, it’s not urban like Chicago, Los Angeles or Boston. It’s unique. Special and very ancient. It is full of ghosts and thousands of years of history hang heavy on its stone walls. Definitely not your average urban area. After I moved back to the U.S., I settled in Boston, which was my first American urban living experience. I liked it. Mostly, I liked the restaurants.
I didn’t like the dirt, the parking problems, the traffic, the noise, or the constant construction and gridlock. Not to mention the petty crime that’s an inescapable part of city life and from which no neighborhood is exempt. It doesn’t matter where you live or how much you pay. People will break into your car, burglarize your house if they can and sometimes, hold you up to take anything you’ve got worth taking. I never got mugged, but an awful lot of people I knew did. I had a couple of cars stolen and vandalized. That must count for something.
And then … after ten years in Roxbury, which was, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, a wonderful neighborhood, we got out of Boston and moved to … where did you say? Uxbridge? Where is Uxbridge? No, not Oxford. South central Massachusetts down by the Rhode Island border. Due south of Worcester. The Blackstone Valley. Yes, that’s in Massachusetts. It’s off the Mass Pike.
We settled into living in a very small town with few changes to our life style. It turned out neighbors are neighbors. They were friendlier in Roxbury and certainly nosier, probably because we lived so tightly packed together … but rumors fly thick and fast in the country, too.
I have lived, as you can tell, in many places and I have found many things are universally true wherever you live. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big city or a tiny village, everyone knows your business. You don’t have to tell them. They hear it through the walls, they pick it up in the grocery store, in church, from your kids and friends and family.
People talk. If you are doing anything interesting, they will talk about you. Even if you aren’t doing anything interesting, they will talk about you because people talk about each other. It’s a people thing.
Uxbridge is not exactly exciting. There isn’t much crime and not many organized activities, though the churches do their best to fill the gap. No public transportation, so teenagers have a hard time until they can get a license to drive. Mostly, life is people spending time with people. Hanging out with friends. Watching a movie together. Shopping in a group. Celebrating holidays and birthdays. Barbeques in the back yard in the summer. Trick or treating on Halloween.
If Uxbridge had coffee houses, lots of shops and museums, how often would we go there? How often did we go to such places when we lived near them? I lived in Boston for 15 years and I only went to the Museum of Science after moving to Uxbridge because I wanted my granddaughter to see it.
I grew up in New York and never visited the Statue of Liberty. I did spend time in museums while I was growing up, but my family didn’t take me there. I was interested in history, so I took myself. Famous sights? The Empire State Building? Never been to the top. Never visited the World Trade Center. Never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge or visited Ellis Island. This is true of most New Yorkers. Tourists go those places. New Yorkers only go if they are entertaining out-of-town guests or work in the building.
No matter where you live, life is about people and relationships, not places. City and country are not all that different except for scenery. People are people. Suburb, city, or middle of nowhere, it’s your friends and family who are your world, not your town, city, or state. Where you live is a state of mind, not of the union.
When I was first married, we lived in an apartment on the second floor of a building at the end of a long hallway. It was in one of two identical buildings. We lived in apartment 2Q, a corner apartment. It had better ventilation than the apartments in the middle of the building. It was also quieter being farther away from the elevator.
One day, having taken a bus home from downtown, I went in through the front and walked all the way down the corridor to our apartment. As I started to put my key in the door, I realized that there was a nameplate on the door. It said “2Q, Kincaid.”
My name was not then and is not now Kincaid, but the sign on the door said 2Q. It was the correct unit, but apparently I didn’t live there. I took a deep breath, walked back to the elevator then went back to the flat. It still said “Kincaid.”
I immediately realized what had happened. I had slipped through into a parallel universe. I was in another dimension where I didn’t exist. I’d been replaced by someone named Kincaid.
It took me a while, standing there and staring at the door before it occurred to me that I was in the wrong building. The two buildings were the same and I hadn’t been paying attention.
What’s interesting is not that I went into the wrong building but that I immediately assumed I’d slipped into the Twilight Zone. Would most people, finding themselves in that situation, conclude they’d slipped into a parallel universe? Or would think they had maybe walked into the wrong building? Which would you do?
I suspect off-center thinking is part of creativity and certainly part of being a writer. A little piece of my brain is always busy recording events as future fodder for writing. Often, even in the middle of what could be a serious — even dangerous — situation, I have a little voice reminding me what a terrific story I’ll get out of it.
The problem with seeing everything as a potential story is that there is a tendency to hold oneself a bit apart, to be more concerned with watching than living. For almost ten years, I stopped taking pictures because I thought taking pictures was preventing me from truly seeing. I felt I was missing the party. Eventually, I went back to taking pictures and photography is the way I deal with the visual elements of life. I can’t stop seeing pictures framed into photographs, so I might as well carry a camera.
Nonetheless, I believe I was partially right. When you see life through a lens or are constantly planning how to write this thing that’s happening, you are not fully engaged in whatever is going on. Is that bad? Perhaps it’s just how I am, who I am. I can’t make myself not see pictures, not hear stories. It’s just how I relate to the world.
Today is my birthday. It’s also the anniversary of the biggest, baddest blizzard to ever hit the east coast of the United States. This year, it snowed just the other day. There’s talk of more snow next week. The early part of March is frequently stormy. Blizzards are relatively common, though usually when the sun is this high in the sky, the snow melts pretty quickly. But not always.
2012 was a mild, snowless winter. This year has given us a couple of serious storms, though it could have been worse. It has been worse.
I appear to have been karmically destined for snowy climes. This is not only the story of a storm, but a cautionary tale to never forget winter isn’t over until the daffodils are in bloom. You can never overestimate how dangerous weather in this region can be, especially this time of year when wind patterns become unstable with the upcoming change of seasons.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 11. There had been a blizzard a few days before, but apparently it wasn’t a problem because I was safely born in Brooklyn Women’s Hospital. Nonetheless, throughout my childhood, no one in my family ever neglected to mention the blizzard that had hit the area just before I was born.
Early March is a fine time for big snowstorms in the northeast. March 11, 1888 brought the biggest winter storm to ever hit the region. Known locally as the Brooklyn Blizzard of 1888 and up and down the east coast as the Great White Hurricane, it is my birthday blizzard, a foretaste of Marilyn to come. Or something like that.
It was the worst blizzard to ever hit New York city and broke records from Virginia to Maine. It remains one of the worst — and most famous — storms in United States history. Accumulations of 40 to 50 inches were recorded. It’s hard to picture how much snow that is unless you’ve been through a few really big snowstorms. The deepest snow from one storm in my life so far was 28 inches. That’s only a bit more than half the amount of the 1888 blizzard. Despite all the changes and improvements to technology and infrastructure, that volume of snow would still paralyze us today. It’s more snow than any infrastructure can handle.
Did I mention snow is heavy? 50 inches on a standard roof will cause it to cave in. It would crush us.
It wasn’t merely a snow storm. The super storm included sub-zero temperatures and gale force winds. It was one of those occasions when people get put in their place, forcibly reminded of how strong Mother Nature is.
The storm blanketed areas of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. It carried with it sustained winds of more than 45 miles per hour. It produced drifts in excess of 50 feet. My house, at its peak, is about 40 feet, so so we are talking about drifts as high as a three-story building.
All forms of transportation were stopped. Roads and railroads were unusable. People were trapped in their houses for up to a week.
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The Great White Hurricane paralyzed the U.S. East Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to Maine. The storm extended all the way up into the Atlantic provinces of Canada. The telegraph went down, leaving major cities including Montreal, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and Boston without communication for days to weeks. Because of the storm, New York began putting its telegraph and telephone wiring underground to protect it from future disasters.
Grand Street in New Britain, Connecticut, published by F. W. Allderige in 1888.
The seas and coastlines were not spared. In total, from the Virginia coast to New England, more than 200 ships were grounded or wrecked and more than 100 seamen died.
125 years later, no winter storm has topped the big one of 1888.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
