Sunday, October 25, 2009

Hidden Treasure


Often, if we rummage through old books and folders, or a shoe box that belonged to our parents, we find something we haven't seen or read in decades. What treasure when we lift open the lid to peer inside.

I found a battered book we read each night that I received as a gift in 1970. That was fifteen years ago. I know it is in a box waiting to be discovered yet again. Then quite by chance two nights ago I found a sheet I had typed in 1976 with part of a poem I loved dearly from this book. Here it is in part …


Day Is Done

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and hearfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like a benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Falling off the edge,
I am,
fOIS

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Old friends …


I think I'll make the stories and pictures of Sunset Park a blog series. We lived below and above and around the park for my entire childhood, my teen years and a good part of my adult life. The neighborhoods around the park have changed, different groups settling in, other groups leaving. The big pool was originally a lake.

So much of the old ways are gone. Yet thanks to people like Peter Allen, Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis and other brave souls, some of our landmarks will remain. We will continue to enjoy the spectacle of The Radio City Music Hall and the splendor of Grand Central Station.

I watched in horror the day the wrecking ball took its first hit on the old Metroplitan Opera building in mid-town.

Time it was
and what a time it was,
A time of innocence,
A time of confidences,
Long ago it must be,
I have a photograph,
Preserve your memories,
There all thats left you...
Paul Simon
If you are lucky, you can dig through your mother's, grandmother's or some other older relative's trunk, find a shoe box tied with faded ribbon and you can find some of the past.
fOIS

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Retro ...



My kids believe I began writing when people used this model Royal.

I might be technologically challenged, but I am learning to fly solo through cyber space and it's amazing!

Wherever you are on your journey with the "word" ... take heart there are thousands of others on the trip. Tap, tap, tap ...

I recommend taking a look at some of the author and industry blogs I am beginning to collect. If, like myself, you have made this madness your life, you will find solace, information and solid direction as to where it's all going.

Some believe publishing is going straight to hell and being unpublished in our industry today is akin to being a full time member of Actor's Guild and waitressing to pay the rent.

I quote:

There's a word for a writer who never gives up... published.
Joe Konrath ... A Newsbie's Guide to Publishing

You'll find me at the edge,

fOIS

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Stories you think you remember …

Having children
is like
having a bowling alley
installed inyour brain.
Martin Mull
You want to write about your family, but you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. So you mask it in another town or city, you change their names and you think you're safe. Maybe.

According to family lore, I was the unexpected, late arrival, accident of my family. The two who had been around for years weren't sure if they were thrilled by this surprise event.

The story goes something like this …


My poor mother while seven months pregnant with me, journeyed in the sweltering heat, long and arduous hours from Brooklyn to the Shrine of St. Ann in Quebec, Canada.

There she said the stations to the cross and several Rosaries, on her knees, while seven months pregnant, in the sweltering heat. She purchased special Holy Water and crushed rose petals for insurance and to place in front of her statue at home.

St. Ann is the Patron Saint of Mothers, and mine wanted her last and most “unexpected” pregnancy to be a girl child. For as she told my brothers many times, a girl child is the only real comfort a mother can ever expect to have.

I can never be sure if these family stories are true.
I might have made them up.
Recollections from the edge,
fOIS

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Don't get fresh with me girlie …

Sometimes I wonder
whether the world
is being run
by smart people
who are putting us on
or by imbeciles
who really mean it.
Mark Twain
There is that four letter
word
we dare not utter
in mixed company

mutter to yourself
remember self-control
when
faced with traffic jams
long lines in supermarkets

doors slamming
in your face …

don't lose control
fall victim to
poverty of language
hold the phone
listen to canned music
get transferred for the third time
wait fifteen minutes
the person on the other end
can't get past
pronouncing your name

no politically incorrect adjectives
for the cute customer service rep
speaking to you from beautiful
downtown Mumbai

there are worst things
in the world
the four letter word
pales
by comparison

To the dreaded
three letter word ... old?
Watch your tongue, young lady!

Ah, the injustice
to find me
a post menopausal
fired up old teenager
what it was like
to be ... young?

Does she smile back
from the old photo album?

I see her
each morning
looking back at me
and bark, “Who the hell are you
and what are you doing
in my bathroom mirror?”

She snaps, "Get over it !"

I am Mad you know
mad as a hatter or a dog
or a woman
gone past 30 something
past “middle age”
damn
gone past menopause


Stressing at the edge ...
fOIS

Friday, October 9, 2009

A gift …


This piece of prose is a memory from 1952, written as a gift in 1975, kept and used again recently …



It was late and she was tired. The sticky August heat and the buzz of a mosquito kept her awake. She sat up waving her arms to ward off the attack. Exhausted, she fell back on her pillow and watched the shadows on her ceiling, worried the shadows would suddenly change and become demons.

Then slowly the sounds, soft and low, began to float through the air and into her room. The sounds of Andrew’s harmonica as he sat in the big parlor chair and played. Often Andrew would wait until the family was sleeping and the lights were out. Wait until only the rays of the streetlights lit the room, streaming through the tiny panes of the living room window, small, square like prisms catching the yellow light and bouncing it back against the parlor walls in a brilliant splash of color.

In the background she heard the faint rumble of a freight train, its whistle long and mournful as it sped through the night. She heard a tug boat out in the bay, its horn on and off in the summer fog, the sounds of a slow summer night, the clang of a trolley car passing by and the sounds of his soulful tune. The sweet liquid sounds of Andrew’s harmonica.

Andrew’s music filled the room like smoke and fragrance and imaginings of catching a freight train to faraway places, sailing off into the horizon to find mystery and adventure.

Carefully, Antoinette went to the foot of her bed and peaked around the corner of the open doorway to watch him, holding her breath for fear he would see her and break the spell. Andrew’s eyes were closed and his head pushed back into the chair, fingers and palms wrapped around the bright silver instrument, the low moan of the harmonica filled the room. Slowly she slipped back into her bed smiling as he made another dark night pass without shadows or fears.

Whenever Antoinette heard the sound of a harmonica she thought of freight trains to faraway places and sailing off into the horizon, of mystery and adventure and hot sticky summer nights. The buzz of a mosquito and young girls wide-awake watching shadows dancing on the ceiling, and feeling safe. Antoinette was indeed content to have her family around her, but it was Andrew that made her feel safe. When he was away the house was too quiet.

fOIS

She is my alter-ego ...

The secret of life
is honesty and fair dealing.
If you can fake that,
you've got it made.
Groucho Marx
I am the street urchin ...
first generation Italian child of an illegal alien.

For years as I plodded back and forth on busses and subways to school or work I would become lost with the movement and begin a story in my head. During this time I created an imaginary character to whom I gave my own middle name.

Once, I spent three years, on the Sea Beach Express, doing a soap opera in which she was the heroine who ended up in a coma, got kidnapped by dastardly villains, was shipwrecked on a deserted island with a handsome sailor, made ravenous love to countless men, married four times and recovered from an endless chain of deceases and injuries.

I collect the stories in my head, like a child collecting wild flowers in an open field. Soon, the child is joined by another or on the way back home she meets a stranger.

Frequently faces are called forward by the sound of music playing in the back of a room, the song on the radio on the way to work, or the album covers collecting dust in my closet. Each day as I walked along the streets, the back of a head, the scent of an after shave or perfume, the sound of someone laughing on the other side of a restaurant; each night shadows of images appear in a half dream.

We all do it.

We collect their images in photographs, save tattered cards or letters that remind us of one of them. We touch and stroke an old doll, a battered fire engine or the lovely vase they left behind. We dare not empty the trunk in the attic, the box wrapped with worn twine in the basement, the bags stuffed in the back of a closet.

Planning a plot or sub-plot, at least for me, doesn't work well. My stories usually begin with a line, an image or a sound, either remembered from a time in my life, or "stolen" from other sounds and images.
You know the ones?

Your parents walked ten miles in the snow to get to a one room classroom. It went up hill, both ways. They ate dirt and were grateful to have it. They sacraficed so you could waste your time with loud music and boys.

These are a few choice phrases from my parent's generation ...


"A nickel is a nickel,"
they would say,
and they said it every chance they got.
“A penny earned is a penny saved,”
“Money doesn’t grow on trees,”
and the grandfather of them all,
“Waste not, want not.”


They didn’t waste anything, turned lights off because we were not “Married to Con Edison,” used old bread for bread crumbs or for toast dunked in the morning coffee.

Every left over was consumed, made into creative omelets, or turned up in a lunch bag. In a kitchen draw they stuffed rubber bands, neat squares of washed wax paper or foil to be used again. And paper, especially brown paper bags of every size, were used to wrap packages going to “the other side,” to cover school books or to drain fried foods.

Everything was used again, and then again. They were the great-grandparents of recycling!



Backing into the edge …
fOIS

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Say Cheese!

Home
is having a large,
loving close-knit
family
in another city.
George Burns
The big one had a homemade dark room in our parent’s bedroom. He would disappear behind the screened wall with a makeshift red light, actually an old Christmas light on the end of an extension, but his signal never-the-less. Enter at your own peril.

Our mother. “I have to hang the laundry for the love of heaven. Aren’t you done yet?”

The big one moaning. “How can anyone ever get anything done around here?”

It was my ninth birthday party and my two best friends and one cousin sat on the floor in front of the sofa.

The middle one, fourteen, sat on the sofa, deep into his James Dean persona, pretending to be disinterested in such nonsense as birthdays, birthday cakes, candy or presents, caught forever on film with a candy bar clenched in his fist.

The big one, a good immitation of James Garner, sat next to James Dean, with an early Romona the Pest, that was me, balancing on his knee, my eyes crossed, reaching back with my free hand to make devil horns on the top of the big one's head.

Our mother barked. “You stop that foolishness and don't cross your eyes. One of these days you’re going to remain like that.”

She tried again. “I can’t get this darn thing. Honey (our father), can you do this? I think I hear the pot boiling over.”

She handed him the brownie. Without looking, honey snapped the picture the way we were.

And wouldn’t you know it? She was right. Even to this day when I look at that picture, my eyes are crossed!

Good Lord sometimes they were more fun than Lewis and Martin!

Look at those old photos. You know the ones? The ones where your ears stick out like the flag on a taxi? That wonderful, painful and most comical stage when you were all legs and arms and your face had not grown big enough to fit the big nose in the middle of it?

Use them to fill in the landscape of the cursed black page.

Free falling off the edge.
fOIS

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Sunset Park, Brooklyn

The banner on the page is a photograph of Sunset Park in Brooklyn. I never stopped missing Brooklyn, though I think I got over living inside Bush Terminal.

I might do the unthinkable and reprint pieces of what has become a series of stories with the same name, Sunset Park and another series of stories about a small town in Duchess County.

I might use other pieces of the people and things I enjoy writing about. I've lived in some crazy places and intend to have fun with at least two of them. I began my life in a factory district, skirting the Brooklyn docks and ended the New York City part of my life in a crazy place called Washington Heights in Manhattan. I've met dozens of eclectic and marvelous characters, fodder so rich, how could I avoid using them?

I think of the disclaimer on The Naked City and Dragnet in the early days of television drama … the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

If you look on the copyright page of most fiction books you will see a similar statement. No resemblance to anyone living or dead I have ever known, now or ever, never, I do so swear.

Better leave them alone completely and write about someone else's family. It's safer and it prevents law suits or death threats.

If any of those persons, living or dead, see themselves in any of my characters, now and until the hour of my death, amen ... get over it.




My first homage is to Brooklyn ...


Sunset Park from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, from Forty-First Street to Forty-Fourth Street with its handball courts, huge pools and sloping hills. It was here that Toni loved to come for the namesake of the park, to watch the sun setting over the rooftops of the houses, the factories, heading down the long hills into the waters of the Narrows.

To the kids who grew up there with me ...

Sunset Park is where the kids grew up. Had they grown up in small towns or villages with funny sounding names like their parents, the kids might have known they came from the wrong side of the tracks. The families in the surrounding neighborhoods knew.

These kids lived on the wrong side, below the park and heading down to the Brooklyn docks, destined to find out later in life they were underprivileged.



Thanks for being here with me at the edge ...
fOIS

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Characterizations …

Listen to her and tell me if, given the right circumstances, she could fit into a host of funny, maybe not so funny stories:

“So tell me, Miss Smart-aleck, did we struggle day and night to make you a better world
so you could throw perfectly good food in the garbage?
Did your poor father walk seven miles each way to earn ten cents an hour
from the WPA so you could make faces?
You should thank God.”
With this she made the sign of the cross
and looked up to the heavens.
“Now don’t get up until you eat every last bite!”

No Jewish mother could hold a candle to her when she got on a roll. When they researched eating disorders, they neglected to study the Italian/Jewish matriarch’s hold on a leg of chicken, a loaf of bread, a pot of stick-to-your-ribs stew or pasta fagioli.

Characters ...

Around and around they run in the hamster's wheel, stuffed into a trunk from the Belasco or the Majestic. Depression musicals, old black and white melodrama or the innovative and hilarious humor of comics and variety shows from fifties and sixties television.

Listen to them at lunch counters. Watch a husband and a wife, mid-seventy to eighty argue in a supermarket. "All right already, Ethel, get the damn brisket."

Hear that annoying couple as you stand on line at the movies. (Woody Allen's, Annie Hall)

From books you read, newspapers or magazines, a news flash or broadcast journals, early HBO Comedy shows, adult animation, early animation, the antics of Bugs Bunny or Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Bull Winkle or Natasha.

You're a kid, so no one listens to your opinion. What do you do? You zone out. I must have zoned out for about fifteen or twenty years.

The best part of being a neurotic is it's all in there. Like computer chips, the sounds and images never go away.

Characters are amalgams of all the people you've known, heard or saw somewhere. When the time is right, dig into the trunk, dust off the old costumes and have fun playing dress up.

Go naked to the edge.

fOIS

How I got here …

My daughter decided to drag me into cyber space and create a page for me on Facebook and My Space.

This was, for a time, an interesting way for me to become a voyeur, peeking at those cute little graphics, those marvelous family photos and the endless threads of conversation.

Actually, reading the internet on any given day will give one the impression there is not a single soul on planet earth, including our new president, who does not wish to render themselves splayed out for public consumption.

It impressed some of the generation X kids that wandered through our rooms during the eighties. When a girl from my kindergarden class requested to be in my network, I realized my daughter had unleashed a beast I was not about to battle.

Who wants to hear from the kid whose braids you stuck in the ink well?How did you get here and why have you made the effort?


Threads end at the edge.
fOIS

Friday, October 2, 2009

Ce su ches la rufiana?

In the history of the world and all of its civilizations, I have a hard time believing Italians somehow cornered the market on crime. Some fifty-million plus Italian-Americans were not all spawned from five families in Sicily.

Today, I'd like to set the record straight. I have no idea how to find anything that fell off a truck and I am not sure how one could go about setting up a "hit" on ones enemies.

The family name Fois is not French and it is not pronounced "Fwa" … it is pronounced "voice" with an "f" … see didn't I tell you we would be better off spelling phonetically. I am Foice.

My father was from Sardinia, an Island off the Southern coast of Italy which volleyed between France and Italy for decades. Unlike Corsica, which is predominantly French in language and customs, the main island of Sardinia, is the resort place for wealthy Italians.

My mother's family was from Naples and her name Fieore, a name that sounds a bit more Italian. I was told by teachers and friends that my name cannot be Italian because it does not end in a vowel. Trust me, my dad was Italian and enjoyed being an anomaly, in name and in everything else.

The men and women of our childhood were dark and robust and hearty seaman and fierce women who came to find a dream. They infected us with the belief, this was the land to which people came to realize those dreams.

He told us often we were not a product of the huddled masses, but of an illegal alien who left his merchant ship one weekend and failed to return.

At the table we toast to La famiglia. I drink to them at the edge.

fOIS