318 Days Until the Big Five-0

Who was/is Mackenzie Phllips mother? It bothered me during the entire interview on Oprah and on all subsequent interviews that no one ask Mackenzie “Where was your biological mother?” We heard about her Step mothers (at least two of them). As a young child why was Mackenzie Phillips allowed to spend all that time with her father? Was her mother living a similar life style? Even though during the Oprah interview Mackenzie said “a father is supposed to protect”, I kept thinking so is a mother. Where is her anger and disappointment concerning the other adult who was suppose to raise, care for and protect her?

319 Days Until the Big Five-0

BRUUUUUCE Part III

On September 20, 2009 I took my 13 year old son to see his first Rock Concert. I set the bar pretty high by making his first concert Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I am confident he will never see another concert this great, but that is “The Price You Pay” for having a way cool mom. For my son, his first Rock Concert will be the best ever. Nothing will ever compare to it again no matter how long he lives. That is one thing I am sure of. It will be my 27 or 28th Bruce Concert, but I am afraid I lost count and was not smart enough to hold on to all the ticket stubs. But Bruce was not my first Rock Concert.

I was 14 years old when I went to my first concert. I went to see Jethro Tull. It was good. I was a little put off by the smell of marijuana whiffing through the stadium but I got use to it by the end of the night. Eventually, it would become the aroma of my youth along with L’Air Du Temps, and Anais Anais. The only two songs I knew going into the concert were Skating Away and Aqualung.

I was 17 when I first saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I immediately became addicted. It was the River Tour and my friend Melinda had to drive because I still did not have a license. I almost did not get tickets. In my naiveté I thought I was simply going to show up and buy tickets when they went on sale. HAHAHAH. They sold out in 15 minutes and I was shocked and angry. I had no idea I was part of a fanatical cult. It turned out Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had the most neurotically devoted fans known to man kind. I had joined the cult and not even known it. By time I drank the lemonade it was too late. I had been spending hundreds of hours listening to his albums over and over again in the sanctuary of my brother’s bedroom while my big brother went to work after school. I would come home from my routine high school day and gently slide Born to Run down that tiny silver stick on the turn table. I laid back with Princess Leah Head Phones as big black sound barriers covering my ears so I could actually be Mary dancing on that “porch as the radio plays, Roy Orbison singing for the lonely” But in reality I am a dorky looking Jewish Girl who knows Jews do NOT name their daughters Mary. They name them the Jewish version of Mary, Marla. And I could not even manage to get close in the name category or to that front porch. Our neighborhood was filled with apartment buildings and bungalows. Yet, I still yearn for a house with a big front porch. I listened over and over again to that album but also collected his previous work knowing it had to be as wonderful, and I was right.

Perhaps I could be Rosalita, I did manage to get a Spanish name, a name I always resented for making me stick out, just like the crooked teeth, the stringy hair, the big stomach. But inside those headphones, I could go from being Mary to “She’s the One” to Wendy to Rosalita to Sandy on the Fourth of July all in one hour of total bliss before my brother got home from work. Actually, Rosalita was the first song I ever heard by Bruce Springsteen. I was laying out on a green and white plastic lounge chair in the parking lot behind our building. The dark blue lot drew the sun’s heat like a laser beam and I always thought I would get a better tan there than if I positioned the chair on the small plot of grass masquerading as a backyard between the building and the parking lot. Next to me, I had a boom box, bottle of baby oil mixed with iodine, and a pack of Benson and Hedges Menthol with a lighter neatly tucked between the cellophane and the package holding the cigarettes. I would channel surf and day dream and leave that parking lot in the alley to accept my many academy awards, or hang out with Starsky and Hutch or John Travolta. The radio channel was tuned to WXRT, a classic rock station when this song came on and suddenly I was wide awake and feeling a source of energy surge through me. I waited and waited and waited for the song to end praying the DJ would be announcing who was singing this awesome rocking thrilling music. This song seemed longer than the average rock song. My patience paid off. That was Bruce Springsteen and Rosalita.

After becoming sufficiently dark, I went into our apartment and started looking through my brother’s albums. I did not own any albums because I did not own a stereo. My brother who is five years older and started working was able to save and buy all sorts of cool things. I was old enough to work, but for some reason I did not feel the need. He was always more industrious than I was and still is. There were so many albums, Simon and Garfunkle, Bob Dylan, The Beatles and many more I cannot recall, but luckily in the thick pile I found a white album with a scruffy looking guy leaning on a big black dude with a Saxaphone in his hand. I opened it and saw the words. I held the album open while I listened to it playing through the headphones. I read each word as he sang. I was amazed at the stories and words and the pictures they were able to create out of thin air. The music was exhilarating and energizing in a way I had never heard before. When I was done listening to the album I got on my bike and tried to burn off some of excess energy. What “was this new thing I found”? Why did I feel so addicted? I had no idea at the time that I was just one of millions who were becoming part of this “cult”.

Not long after that first exposure, I heard Bruce Springsteen was going to be at the Uptown Theatre. The tickets sold out quicker than you could sing even just one of his songs. I was devastated. Then it was Rosh Shoshana and it was the ONLY time my mother’s brother Birney, the rich one in the family, came to our house for dinner. Somehow I started talking about being upset at not being able to go see Bruce Springsteen and my Uncle Birney got to be a hero, which I am sure he loved. He said in his authoritative voice “where is he playing? I have a good friend at the Country Club, his son owns Jam Productions. Do you know who that is?” I didn’t even know what Jam Productions was! I just wanted concert tickets. “How many tickets do you need” my uncle asked. I needed two, one for me and one for whoever I could find to drive me. The next day my Uncle Birney called me and told me I had two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen. It was going to be a good New Year (remember we are on the Jewish calendar here). Melinda was a little nervous about driving her car into this crazy neighborhood but when we got to the Uptown Theatre there was the longest line of people I had ever seen wrapped around the block. Melinda and I went to the end and waited and got increasingly excited. We were sitting on the main floor. I even had an aisle seat. By the end of the show when he was singing Rosalita the entire main floor had left their seats and stood in front of the stage. I was within inches of my new Idol and he was pouring sweat, and singing his heart out. The concert ended on such a high note, I felt like I was on the top of a mountain.

But what surprised me even more than the energy and the 3 encores was something else. Rosalita lit up the theatre, but that was not the highlight for me. The highlight was when he sang the title song off the River Album. I felt I had discovered the poet of the century. His words were what locked me in what would become for me a life long passion for all things Springsteen. I loved the music and I could feel the music, but I don’t understand how to make music. I am challenged in that way. I am baffled by how music is created.

I was horribly depressed when I learned I did not have any musical talent. As a young child I loved singing for my father. I would entertain the family with my own version of 6 year old Kareoke. I sang and danced to records spinning on a little beige plastic record player my father put on our dining room table. “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “Downtown”, “Que Sera Sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, Que Sera Sera….” My father had a magnificent singing voice. He sang me to sleep each night with Polish Lullabys (at the time, I thought he was making them up) and “How Much is that Doggy in the Window”. I loved his deep voice. On the High Holidays in the Synagogue he would chant along with the Cantor and although I did not understand Hebrew, I would hold on to the strings of his Talis and I felt the melodies running through my finger tips and into my young soul.

When I first started Sunday School, I learned the Synagogue had a choir where the children would sing with a pianist and a Director, who was actually the Rabbi’s wife. But when I tried out, the Director told me I should just “mouth” the words because I couldn’t sing but I could still be part of the choir. I remember feeling ashamed and wondering why anyone would want to stand there just mouthing the words. Then the same thing happened to me in grammar school. We were practicing for an assembly and I remember the teacher walking back and forth tilting her ear down toward each sitting child. Finally, she gazed at me and pointed. “It’s you. I knew someone was off key. Maybe you should just mouth the words.” Again, there was that word “mouth”. Eventually I got the reputation for being a “big” mouth, a “smart” mouth and a “loud” mouth but that was because I took up being funny when I realized I was never going to sing like Petula Clark. Originally I was shy around everyone but my family. The shyness slowly disappeared after my dad died when I was in fourth grade. I did not feel like singing after he passed away, and no one was interested in listening to me sing and dance anymore anyway. With my one fan gone, I looked for other ways to express myself and picked up my number two pencil and a tiny spiral notebook.

I missed my father’s voice. The older I get the more the memories fade, my father holding the back of my bicycle seat and running along side me as I struggled to balance, watching my father paint pictures of mountains in the make shift art studio/basement or his steady hands running masking tape along the walls of our building’s hallways to paint perfectly straight lines along the stairwells, seeing him smile at me while I danced and sang “I Want To Hold Your Hand” as I reached out to grab his paint speckled fingers, listening to him singing in Polish as I drifted off to sleep. But his voice, his accent, his singing all died with him. It was the one thing I could not reproduce in my day dreams or in the dreams that came when I slept. I stopped singing for him and he stopped singing forever. I thought I would never sing again, until I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

You see, at a Bruce concert EVERYONE sings! No one notices if I am off key (I still don’t really know or understand what that means) or if I screw up the lyrics cause no one is listening to me. They are all singing with Bruce. I felt alive again as I shouted “Hey you’re alright and that’s alright with me. I even thought Hey, I’m alright and that’s alright with Bruce!!!

So, I will be a writer I thought. I once dreamt of becoming a singer, but that was a foolish dream…now I had other things to contemplate and it was all because of one line from “the River” that haunted me after that first Bruce Springsteen concert….

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse? “

320 Days Until the Big Five-0

Bruuuuuuuuce Part II

I have always been behind schedule on everything. I needed to go to summer school in order to finish college and get my degree. My “career” took so long to evolve I thought I was an amphibian. I spent more time being underemployed than I did being an undergrad. I knew I should have gone to graduate school, but that would have required some prompt action on my part. I married late. I had kids late in life. I did not move out of my childhood home/apartment building until my own child was a year old, making me 37 when I finally left home. But as the saying goes, “time waits for no one.” It marched on and I trailed along behind listening to Bruce Springsteen the whole way from High School to college to trolling bars on Rush Street, to lonely nights and bad blind dates to wedded bliss and baby blues.

Just last June we celebrated my son’s Bar Mitzvah. It is traditional (if you were born after 1980) to show a Video Montage of the Bar Mitzvah Boy, his family and friends all set to music. It is a mini movie production adventure. I loved picking out the music to go with the pictures. It started with “Glory Days”. I had to put a Bruce song in there. The party featured even more Bruce music. When the Disc Jockey put on “Dancing In the Dark” I wheeled my 90 year old mother out on the dance floor while my girl friends and I surrounded her. She clapped and Bruce sang as we took turns twirling her around in her wheel chair . After all, we had gotten her to the Promised Land. On the day my son was born I looked at my mother who, only 78 back then, was still able to get around using a walker even though her face had more lines than a Texaco Road Map. She laughed and said from “your mouth to G=d’s ears”. Thirteen years later, I am strutting in front of my mom, who is now physically confined to a wheel chair, yet smiling and filled with joy. It was obvious she was being lifted up spiritually just like the thousands of fans at your average Bruce concert. See, I knew the good Lord was a Springsteen fan! He did hear me that day my son was born! He must have known what music I would be playing at the Bar Mitzvah.

321 Days Until the Big Five-0

BRUUUUUUCE Part 1

He is so big and so important it will take multiple blog entries.

Springsteen vs. Rosh Shoshanna

Why does it cost more to buy a seat for Rosh Shoshanna Services than it does to get a ticket for a Bruce Springsteen Concert? They are both religious events, well at least for me and probably for all true blue Bruce fans. Actually, I feel far more redeemed as I scream with thousands of strangers the words to Bad Lands, “You got to live’em everyday” than I do when I am responding to the Rabbi along with a different and much smaller group of strangers. Regardless of which group I am with, I am sharing a religion of sorts. I hope I don’t burn in hell for writing this, but if I do, I bet it will be with a lot of really good rock music in the background. Rosh Shoshanna 2009 arrives the day before Bruce Springsteen arrives in Chicago for an historic concert where he will sing every song from the Born To Run Album. Two days that will be forever linked in my memory.

Our Cantor has a magnificent voice, as do most Cantors. It is the sole purpose of the job, to fill the synagogue with a beautiful sound and to lead the congregants in song when necessary. When I grew up my mother belonged to a conservative synagogue where the Cantor looked to be about 110 years old. Yet his voice stayed as strong as an Oak Tree from beginning to end of the long services. Everything was in Hebrew. I would have to sit there for at least 4 hours. I appreciated the Service, but I cannot say I enjoyed it. At our reformed synagogue, the services are only 2 hours and the Cantor plays an acoustic guitar. Whenever my mother would go to a reformed synagogue and sees a guitar playing Cantor she would make a sour face. “It’s wrong” she mumbled to herself while the Cantor strummed the strings. Oh, those guitars, instruments of rebellion whether in the hands of teen age rocker in a leather jacket or a middle aged Cantor wrapped in a Talis. All day, on Saturday (oy vey it was Sabbath too) September 19, 2009 as I prayed I thought “this is going to be a good year, I will be singing along with Bruce tomorrow at the United Center”.

As I appreciated our Cantor’s deep baritone and his guitar playing I had another thought, was our Cantor good enough to join the E Street Band? Bruce has always been so innovative and willing to stretch his musical horizons. It is part of what I love so much, the endless risk taking and experimenting whether it is Nebraska, The Seeger Sessions, or coming back to the roots of rock while “Working on a Dream”. Maybe there will be room for a Cantor someday? I remember when I first discovered Bruce. I was convinced he had to be Jewish. I know I should not say this, but he did “look” the part. And he was obviously heir apparent to Bob Dylan. Oh well, at least the E Street Band’s drummer is Jewish…. I bet he could add a lot of oomph to our Services. Maybe someday we could trade our guitar playing Cantor for Mighty Max Weinberg. Nah, won’t work, the E Street Band needs Max’s magical hands. And even a reformed synagogue would be pushing it if they added a drum set to the bima.

322 Days Until the Big Five-O

"They're Coming to America" is a song I love by Neil Diamond. It is hokey, but I still love it. I have always tried to reconcile my musical tastes. How could I like Springsteen and John Denver? How could I like the Rolling Stones and Neil Diamond? How could I like Simon and Garfunkle and Michael Jackson? How could I like Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band and Donny Osmond? (I would much rather have sex with Donny than Bob, but musically speaking they both appeal to me). Music does that. It crosses invisible bridges. I started thinking about the old Neil Diamond song when I heard it on the radio a couple of days ago. And then today I went with my son's 8th Grade Class to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center. My first and all time favorite cousin Doris was our Docent. It will be the second time I have been part of a tour of the museum with her as my fearless leader. She does a great job.

Doris and I are Americans because her mother had the strength to survive and the willingness to start over. Her mother and my father were brother and sister. They had to come to America. There was nothing left of their family or home in Poland where they were born. The song has a joyous tone to it, the offer of hope and a safe haven. So why was I thinking of the ship St. Louis and that song at the same time today in the Museum? I am still so baffled and disturbed by the story of how the United States (as well as many other countries) turned those refugees away and back to their deaths at the hands of the Nazis. How? When did we run out of room in our hearts that we could not make room in this wide open land for the people who were being tossed and turned on the ocean like so many dead fish? Which reminds me of one of my other favorite songs... "This Land is your Land". Sometimes songs just appear silently in our heads and we can hear them in the hallways of our conscious mind while no one else does. What songs ran through the minds of the passengers on the St. Louis as they drifted back and forth between life and death? I know what song was running through my mind as I stared at the black and white photo on the wall of a woman looking out of one of the ships portals.

323 Days Until the Big Five-O

Random Thoughts (are there other kinds? Not for me)

Am I a failure. I am not managing this Blog the way I had envisioned. I thought I would be able to post an entry every day. I find myself back peddling to catch up and pretend I am tricking time if I just label the entry according to when I "wished" I had put it in. I try and trick time all the time. I set clocks around the house at various times. In my bedroom the digitial clock is 20 minutes ahead so I will think it is 7:30 a.m. when it really is only 7:10 a.m. I am trying to avoid being late in the mornings. The Kitchen Clock is 10 minutes ahead so I will not let my daughter miss the bus for school each morning. My wrist watch is about five minutes ahead. I guess I am pushing time forward without even realizing it. What would the TAO say? Am I simply refusing to live in the moment?

324 Days Until the Big Five-0

Shadow Vision:

Inspired by Prompt Number 6 from the book Branches by Nancy Beckett.
"Tell the story of somebody you met or knew who was blind or deaf."


I only had one grandparent. Actually, I had four, but what I meant to say is I only knew one of my grandparents. Yet, I always said it the first way for as long as I can remember. It is not even biologically possible to have one grandparent. When you have only one of something, whether it is a parent, a car, a dog, a house, then that one exponentially gathers so much emotional and spiritual weight in your life it is like an eclipse blocking out the big black holes left by the absence of all the other people and things in one’s life.

I called my grandmother, Bubbie. It is a Yiddish word. My mother and my bubbie spoke Yiddish to each other all the time. I only learned a few words. My mother was much older when I was born and she was the youngest of my Bubbie’s five children. My Bubbie lived in a old people’s home about 6 or 7 blocks from our apartment. We would go to see her everyday. She was usually in the lobby in the front when you first walked in sitting on one of the turquoise couches with her big wooden cane in front of her. She wore a hearing aid in each ear and very thick black framed glasses. My Bubbie was blind. So why was she wearing glasses I once asked. My mother told me my bubbie had Shadow Vision. She could see shadows, the difference between dark and light but no details.

“Why is Bubbie Blind?” I remembered asking. “She has glaucoma” my mother told me. It was a curable disease if caught early but they did not catch it early enough in her case and by time the doctors found it, it had progressed too far for the medicine to help. It is also hereditary so you can only get it if someone in your genetic pool passes it on. It does not usually show up until middle age or later. So I knew I would not have to worry about going blind anytime soon, but it did enter my young mind as a distant possibility somewhere in my future. Would I ever become blind? That is how young minds work, they bring everything back into their own existence. It is a necessary survival instinct bread into the species over thousands of years. How will this effect me?

According to my mother when my bubbie noticed her vision was decreasing she never told anyone. She simply found ways to cope by asking strangers for help in the grocery store while shopping or moving her hands over things to distinguish what they were. When her vision had gotten so bad she could no longer hide the fact that she was going blind she had to tell my Aunt who lived with her in an apartment across the street from us. My Aunt had to go to work every day and Bubbie could no longer be left alone. There was no room in our little two bedroom apartment so it was off to the neighborhood old people’s home for Bubbie.

I liked the old people’s home and I loved Bubbie. She would gently rub my back and put her hand on my knee to feel me as I sat next to her. She was one of the few people I let touch me. Kids don’t like being touched and handled a lot, but there are always exceptions to every rule. And even though I did not speak Yiddish, she would insert enough English to allow me to understand her when she spoke to me. Those daily visits to my bubbie brought a kind of peace to my life that I never found anywhere else then or now.

When I was growing up we did not have a lot of things to entertain us. We entertained ourselves by riding bikes, playing in the alley, or playing make believe with dolls and stuffed animals. Make Believe, you are a princess and the dolls are your ladies in waiting, or make believe you are the kind teacher that does not exist in your own school and your dolls are the well behaved children who love learning. Make Believe your father’s painitings of blue mountains are real places you can climb and find caves filled with treasures, make believe your father is not screaming at your brother and chasing him with a belt, make believe your mother likes the smell of Lysol as she bends over the floor on her hands and knees so everything is perfectly clean, make believe your brother does not hate you deep down because you’re the only one in the family your father seems to love, make believe you live in a castle where you do not have to share a bedroom with your parents, make believe your family gets along . Make Believe your father’s parents, the grandparents you never knew, did not go up in smoke along with the rest of his family except his baby sister.

At night in our two bedroom apartment when my brothers and I were bored we would go into a bedroom, turn off the ceiling light and hold a flashlight up to the wall so we could make shadowy figures come to life, Alligators, men with curly hair, dogs and a variety of abstract creatures. We could entertain ourselves for hours with these shadows. And when we were done there would be no toys to store away, all we had to do was turn on the ceiling light and everything real would return while the shadows disappeared into thin air. When I would have to leave my Bubbie and go home to the apartment I would spend my time walking down Devon Avenue looking at my reflection in the store windows while pretending I was a shadow that would never disappear from my Bubbie’s eyes.

32Five Days until the big Five-0

What to Write?


Many years ago I went to Lakeside Writing Studio where I learned about the fine art of writing from Nancy Beckett. I have maintained contact with Nancy because she is simply the best teacher I have ever known. Recently Nancy has published a book based on her teaching method of using examples from literature, current and classic, to demonstrate a variety of lessons. Nancy then gives her students prompts to help stimulate and encourage their own writing. I received the book, Branches as a gift from another great teacher and inspiration in my life, my sister-in-law Denise. Denise became one of Nancy’s prize students. There are 70 prompts in the book accompanied with the source they were based on. I have decided to take them down one at a time in my Blog to see where they will lead me. Perhaps I will fall down the Rabbit Hole and who knows what I will encounter…. Remember, there may be rules for writing but content and imagination have no boundaries

Page One from Branches by Nancy Beckett with Molly Connolly

“Tell the story of a long, long car trip. Describe the interior of the car and the seating arrangements, games, food, scenery, clothing and all the insipid details of the conversation and weather.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor


I love that this prompt came from a lesson taken from one of my favorite writers and one of the first short stories I remember reading. I simply went to my book shelf and pulled the Flannery O’Connor The Complete Stories out from its place and re-read this masterpiece. I am not sure I understand all the deeper meanings of what this story is trying to tell me but it sure made for a great read. I was inspired to write a story about a car trip with my mother and my fiance.

My first trip to Pennsylvania was over Thanksgiving in 1992. My boyfriend Marc was bringing me home to meet his family for the first time. I was nervous and excited. I was ready to settle down and had been searching far and wide for a single Jewish male to make all my dreams come true. I felt Marc’s invitation meant something. He thought “we” were going somewhere both literally and figuratively. Marc and I traveled well together. A year later, we would be taking my mother on the same trip so she could meet her future in-laws. And that car trip will live in my memory for ever.

Marc had just bought a new red Honda Accord and he could not have been happier. Marc was a typical male when it came to cars, he loved them. My mother loved to travel. She did a lot of traveling with her best friend Bernice. They took a trip to Europe. They would take Bus Tours to places like Mackinac, Michigan and Branson, Missouri. They went to Canada and Boston. As they got older their traveling days dwindled and eventually disappeared. My mother was thrilled when we offered to drive her to Pennsylvania. She loved long rides. She was used to having to take Buses so this would be an entirely new experience for her. I had to sit in the back while she got to sit up front with her future son-in-law. The Honda Accord is roomy and the back seat would have been perfect in my High School Days for extracurricular activities, but on this occasion I simply stretched out and relaxed with a good book while my mother talked Marc’s right ear completely off his head. He was a good sport about it. I knew “A Good Man Was Hard to Find” because I had been diligently looking for one for more than a decade. I finally found my good man. I was just hoping my mother didn’t scare him off.

When we got to Pennsylvania my mother fell in love with the Mountains. She got to meet everyone, Aunt Bert, Aunt Bea, Uncle Don, Marc’s mom Sue and his Step Dad Lou, baby brother Adam and miscellaneous neighbors and friends. We only stayed 3 days and then it was time to turn around and go home. The ride home is always hardest. By the return trip of a long car ride people are tired and ready to get out of each other’s company as well as the car. My mom performed okay, but on the way home I am afraid I was running out of patience. I freaked every time we had to stop and my mother ate some horrid fried food at a greasy fast food joint. I have always had issues about my mother’s weight (she is obese) and have tried desperately (the only way I know how to try whether looking for a husband or monitoring my mother’s food intake) to get her to lose weight. By the time we had reached Indiana I think I was ready to get out and walk the rest of the way home to Chicago. I casually looked out the window at one point to see exactly where we were and said something about our location. My mother was already going a little deaf at the time. I am not sure what she thought she heard me say but out of nowhere she yelled at me “You’re in LaPorte.” It sounded like I had just been condemned to death by a judge. What the hell was she so angry about? Marc and I started laughing our asses off. I screamed back at her “You’re in LaPorte!” To this day Marc and I scream that out loud for no reason. “You’re in LaPorte!”

We got home, unloaded Becky (my mother) and our suitcases. I would end up making that trip dozens and dozens of times more, but that was Becky’s one and only long car trip. She loved it. She just turned 90 and she still remembers the time she drove to Pittsburgh with me and Marc.

326 Days Until the Big Five-0

Old Stuff

They want my stuff. There are so many charities out there looking to collect old toys, household items, and clothing. I think I remember an expose on one of them from a few years ago. The charity was not actually receiving the items. The collections were being taken by a private company that then donated a portion of the profits they made from re-selling everything. I don’t know if that is such a bad thing. I mean I still get motivated to clean out my closets and if some entrepreneur finds a way to become rich even if he is employing/exploiting low wage workers I guess it beats unemployment for them, and some charity is still getting a little something in exchange for the use of their good name.

So they send out post cards and constantly call in search of my discards. Here, take this pot, take this tired Monopoly Game missing $1,200 in fake money, and several Chance Cards, take this shirt I bought and never wore but was too lazy to return to the store, take this bicycle with the rusty handle bars and the broken basket. Make use of the useless. That goal is noble, as noble as the goal of giving a couple bucks to some charity. The United States needs to embrace waste reduction. Perhaps some day we could turn that into another kind of Waist Reduction. We need to find a way to help an overflowing, overstuffed America. You would think the recent economic crisis would have solved some problems along with the ones it created. But it appears are insatiable appetites have found a way around our economic woes. Give us your tired, your poor, your refuse and we will turn it into something useful somehow. .

327 Days Until the Big Five-0

There is a famous saying when we want something someone has said to come true:

“From your mouth to G-d’s ears.”

But with the internet wouldn’t it be faster if we simply sent him an email. Does he have a laptop? Does he have a lap? Did he ever have ears? When we send emails they travel through time and space so why not through other dimensions? I was just wondering. So, I hope G-d is one of my blog readers. That would make it all worth it, especially if he was a regular.

.

328 Days Until the Big Five-0

The Blonde Factor

I have a scientific theory. If I had the time, I could prove it. All families are really a collection of dysfunctional people with one normal person caught in the wacky web the rest of the family is weaving. I call this theory the Blonde Factor based on the old television show “The Munsters”. You ring the bell to their mansion and you see Herman, Lily, Grandpa and a host of strange things, and then suddenly Marilyn appears. It is the normal one, the regular person, who looks out of place simply because they are normal. No one seems to notice or mind. Life goes on as it usually does for all of us. It does not matter if one of our siblings looks like a little Vampire, one of our parents resembles Frankenstein and best yet, who ever is reading this thinks they are the “blonde” in the bunch. Well, I know I am the blonde in my family, even if it is highlighted hair. I never said, natural blond!

329 Days Until the Big Five-0

HOARDING? WHY OF COURSE!

Over 5 years ago I took on the daunting task of moving my elderly mother out of the building she had lived in for over 40 years. I now consider hoarding a genetic defect, and I obviously got the “hoarding” gene from my mother. After all, my father, a European immigrant packed all his belongs in one small leather suitcase, which of course I still have. He understood the minimalist approach to life. My mother on the other hand would qualify for the Gold Medal of hoarding. Was it a mutation that occurred in the genes when the poor woman lived through the Great Depression and had gone without so much? What I found particularly interesting was her choice of things to which she needed to amass a huge quantity. What did I find? It would be less time consuming to talk about what I did not find. However, it would not be nearly as interesting.

First, I found her collection of wishbones sitting in a kitchen drawer. All that chicken she ate could not go to complete waste. This bag of wishbones kept her and I busy for about 20 minutes as we took them one by one and pulled them apart while making our silent wishes. Do people still believe in “wish bones”? When I was growing up my mother made fried chicken every Friday. When one of us found the wishbone we would jump for joy. As a child I was always wishing for things like albums and jewelry. I suspect my mom was wishing for a safe journey through life for all three of her kids. That day in the same kitchen more than 3 decades later, we sat pulling apart the wish bones and silently making out wishes. While I gazed at her crooked wrinkled hands wrapped around the tiny bony my wishes were always for her to have a happy and really really long life.

Each afternoon played out like another scene in our own “Moving My Mother” movie. My mother also loved collecting entire sets of dishes from every relative who ever died in our family. One afternoon I found a total of 6 full sets of dishes in large boxes. Each dish, cup, saucer and serving piece was individually wrapped in old newspaper for safe keeping. I opened each box and unwrapped a sample dish to examine the pattern.

My mother would quickly ask me

“Now whose dishes were those?”

“I have no idea. How would I know?” Then I examined the newspaper it had been wrapped in “Wait a minute. I know how we can solve this mystery” I exclaimed! “Who in our family died in 1968?”

“Aunt Ruth” she shouted like a happy contestant on Family Feud.
As my mother’s face lit up with memories of her beloved sister I cracked open the next box and begun unwrapping one of the coffee cups.

“Who died in 1983?” I asked.

“Oh that was Aunt Minnette.” She says wistfully while taking the cup into her hand. Her brother Mikey’s wife was one of her best friends.

A box of black and white photographs found in brown paper bags provided endless trips down memory lane and my mother easily recalled details including old addresses, phone numbers, and names of friends from factories where she worked during World War II. She never forgets anything. There is no irony that she also collects figurines of elephants. They are her favorite animal, and one that is known for having an excellent memory. There are elephant figurines on every window sill in the house and on all the coffee tables. A herd of elephants that could populate a small country managed to find room in my mother’s apartment.

But of all the collections, the one that belongs in the Guinness Book of Records is the dreaded Bag Collection. They were everywhere, drawers, cabinets, sheds, closets, under stairwells, behind appliances, inside other bags. There were bags made of plastic, and paper (with and without handles), and canvas and nylon with names from companies that had gone out of business long ago like Lyttons and Woolworths and Pint Size. There were too many bags to count. There wasn’t enough time. We had to be out in a year.

Our biggest fights were over the bags. “NO don’t throw that one out, it is strong and has handles.” She would scream. The inherent value of these bags was astronomical to my poor old mother. I offered to sell them on EBAY but she did not get the joke. I had to explain to her what EBAY was and after I did she became distraught. “You want my bags to go to strangers?” “Don’t worry I told her I will do back ground checks to make sure they find a good home.” “Don’t’ be so funny, we can use those bags” she always responded. It made no sense. She had not used them in 40 years. What was she waiting for? In her mind the potential for “use” far outweighed all other possibilities, especially disposal.

Thus, I got wise. While my poor mom who could barely walk, would sit from a chair giving me orders every afternoon I devised a plan to distract her. One day I went into her bedroom and opened a dresser drawer and found bags of necklaces from all those dead aunts who were kind enough to leave us their dinnerware. The plastic colorful beads were exactly as I had left them from days of playing dress up with my dolls. They were all tangled. I gave my mother a project! Now even she would be useful and she could do it while sitting. I asked her to untangle the necklaces. If they were untangled I could give them to my daughter to play with just as I had.

“Useful” it hit me like a thunderbolt. My mother hoarded, but was willing to give away anything to anybody if the thing would be “used”. My mother needed to feel useful and more importantly she needed all those things she had saved over the many years, the things she could never have had enough money for or the room to store them in during her impoverished childhood, to be “used”.

So on one of my many moving dates with my mom I watched her sitting at our kitchen table untangling the 50 or so necklaces she had accumulated while she mumbled about how much my daughter was going to love having the multi colored plastic beads that were the height of fashion in the 50’s. “You know your Aunt Ruth loved jewelry. She had to put a different necklace on for each outfit.” My mother lovingly talked to me about my many dead Aunts as if the necklaces she was untangling had brought them back to life in her mind. She never lifted her eyes from the task at hand. And while she stayed focus with her new found purpose, I secretly went back and forth throwing out all those bags in the dumpster sitting in the alley.

Towards the end of our packing odyssey, I found treasures only my family could appreciate like the collection of coin purses from my grandmother. Moving my mom was a lot of work, but finding space in my house for all those things I made fun of her for saving was even harder.