Growing up

Could You

TV on the Radio – Could You

For New Year’s Eve, I took the kids down to Brooklyn because my sister was having a party. Two of my other sisters would be there and my nieces and nephew, so there would be lots of family hang time, even if it was a big, noisy party that went on until 4 a.m.

My nieces were having their friends over as well so there was a pretty good sized teenage contingent at the party. Some of the kids were the children of my sister’s friends and in some cases both the kids and the parents are friends. One of my niece’s friends, a 13-year-old boy I’ll call Joe, arrived with his parents and quickly disappeared with my niece and her other friends. My sister had been telling us that just before school let out for the Christmas break, Joe had come out to his parents and his friends. It seems like they all suspected as much already and having it out in the open was a relief. The big news was that he had also let another guy in their class know, and told him that he was interested in him. Much to everyone’s great delight, the other boy had written YES on a sign and was waiting outside of school for Joe at the end of the day.

My daughter (also 13) said that at midnight, Joe got a text from his new boyfriend and everyone was so happy for him. I spent some time talking with Joe’s parents that night and started 2015 off feeling good about people and about the next generation. No one would have been open about being gay when I was in eighth grade. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was someone’s beard for about two weeks back then. Here, not only was Joe confident and comfortable about coming out, it was practically just a formality, and the one relationship that changed because he did so, was one that changed in his favor.

I know this is far from everyone’s reality. I’m just glad for Joe that it is his. And I’m glad to be a part of a community with people like Joe’s parents and my niece and my sister and her other friends. I’m glad that my kids are growing up among people who are accepting of differences and that they are modeling that behavior themselves.

One of my Christmas presents from my mother was a gift card to the record store where I once worked after college. I picked up Seeds by TV on the Radio and it’s been in heavy rotation ever since. I highly recommend the whole album.

Synchronicity II

http://vimeo.com/62530159#t=9s

The Police – Synchronicity II

For Christmas, my younger sister put out a request for some music for her 14-year-old son. You see, though she was exposed to a wide variety of music as a young child and tween, by the time she hit high school, the rest of us were all out of the house. She played the piano and she liked to sing and she was good at both so my mother got her involved in the youth orchestra and some choral groups. I would make her tapes to try to keep her informed about new music that wouldn’t get air play on the local radio but the pull of her everyday music was strong. She spent so much time practicing that she didn’t have much time to listen to other stuff. By the time she got to college she was an early music voice major and it was all over. She met her future husband at the Gilbert & Sullivan society on campus and that was about as modern as her music collection got. Those grade school years spent singing along to I Wanna Be Sedated were all but forgotten.

As a toddler, my nephew could identify all the classical composers that were in constant rotation in their house. And I do mean constant. They have one of those multi-disc players and from the moment my brother-in-law comes down in the morning until they go up to bed at night, some kind of (usually choral) classical music is playing.

As her kids have gotten older, they’ve expressed an interest in listening to the top 40 stations in the car and she’s obliged. I think she’s hoping to make sure they fit in with their peers but it’s not usually music she completely endorses. And especially for a 14-year-old boy, she knows there’s better stuff out there, she just doesn’t know what it is. So she appealed to her older siblings to help out. She was thinking about what was playing in the house when she was young; David Bowie, The Police, Talking Heads but modern stuff was fine too.

I split the difference. I ordered a Kishi Bashi CD, thinking that might interest my cello playing nephew who has been immersed in classical music his entire life, since he puts a new twist on what you expect from a classically trained violinist. Then I made him a CD with a couple of Ramones songs, some Clash, The Police, Talking Heads, and Elvis Costello. I have to say, it’s pretty good. It’s skimming the surface to be sure but I tried to keep my quirky nephew in mind and picked songs that I think he might like. It has the bonus feature of being all songs my little sister will instantly recognize and shock her kids by being able to sing along, and, dare I say it, rock out? If my nephew doesn’t like it, I think she will at least.

Blur the Line

The Meeting Places – Blur the Line

We are not Black Friday shoppers. For one thing, we’re not morning people. Being in line at 6am to go shopping sounds like a nightmare to me. It’s also pretty rare that I’m in the market for anything that might be on one of those big sales. Plus the crowds, the short tempers, really, there’s just no appeal.

I know the day after Thanksgiving has long been the unofficial start of the Christmas season, or at least the shopping season, but I don’t like the way it’s been creeping in sooner every year. I noticed several stores that made a point of opening at 6pm on Thanksgiving day. How shitty would that be for the people working there? I guess they would at least get paid double time but I would sure feel cheated if it were me.

When I was growing up we would all go to my grandparents’ in Connecticut for Thanksgiving. My mom’s from a big family too and there would be lots of uncles and aunts and cousins. I remember years when we had the grown-ups table, the kids table, and the spill-over table when there wasn’t enough room at either to fit everyone. The day after was always time to hang with the family members you didn’t see often and play with the weird old toys at grandma’s house.

Perhaps if we’d stayed home for Thanksgiving, and the day after was just us in our own house, shopping would have become something that made sense when you had a day off anyway. But that was never our custom and I like having a little buffer between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I like taking the time to just enjoy it before rushing onto the next holiday.

Cuyahoga

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TBXsxBDHSg

R.E.M. – Cuyahoga

I didn’t post yesterday. I had been thinking of a post in my head during the day but by the time I got home from work, we’d put the kids to bed, I talked with my mother about Thanksgiving travel plans, and I finally could get a chance to write, I felt I had nothing to say. I was disgusted by the grand jury decision in Missouri yet anything I thought of to write felt like too little too late. I stayed up late reading articles and watching Twitter and kept coming up short when I tried to find the right words.

The post I had been mulling over during the day yesterday came to me courtesy of driving my daughter to school again. It was raining heavily and I decided I could just as easily drop her off and spare her the wait for the school bus in the rain. She started telling me about a project they are doing in school. They have been divvied up into groups and each group has to start its own country. It’s an interdisciplinary project so all of her classes were taking part. In math they discussed different monetary and economic systems, in science they had debates about the impacts of genetic modification and from there, whether or not the countries they were building should allow it. In social studies they discussed different forms of government, laws, and rights.

I started singing this song then said they should use it for their country. No, she said, they had to write their own anthem, both the music and the lyrics, for the music part of the project. I wondered to myself if the social studies teacher, who organized this whole assignment, is an R.E.M. fan. In any case, I feel like congratulating him. We don’t really get to start a new country up but getting the kids to put their heads together and think about it, and understand how many different elements there are, what the ramifications of different decisions will be, I hope it will be a lesson they can take with them.

It could be a lesson for us as well. It’s clear that our system is not just flawed but skewed heavily in favor of those in power remaining in power. By any means necessary, it sometimes seems. Is this a government of the people, for the people, by the people? A police force so heavily armed it looks like it belongs on a battlefield instead of a city street?

When I was a kid we had School House Rock on Saturday mornings in between cartoons. I grew up absorbing those little history and civics lessons to catchy tunes and believing that’s how our country really worked. I can recite (or sing) the preamble to the Constitution because of it. Sing along. “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility…” Where is the justice? How can the police insure domestic tranquility when they are dressed for war?

So I go back to we the people, in order to form a more perfect union. I know it sounds sappy and simplistic but if we are ever going to achieve justice, it is going to be a lot of hard work. A lot of putting our heads together and thinking about the end results. There are no quick fixes. We need to work on the more perfect. A union that incorporates the view points of those who were left out of it when our father’s father’s father tried would be a good start. This can’t just be something we tell our kids to do for a school project. It has to be what engaged citizens just do because this land is the land of ours.

Holidays in the Sun

Sex Pistols – Holidays in the Sun

Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember being absolutely glued to the tv during the weeks and days leading up to that moment. It was something I never thought would happen in my lifetime and there it was unfolding in front of our eyes.

I was a history major and geography minor in college. Only a year or two before the Wall was cracked open, I’d taken a class called Divided Germany Since 1945 and there were no signs of anything changing. I’d taken German language classes up through Advanced Conversation and Composition. This was a subject I knew a lot about and it was personal.

My grandfather’s family had emigrated from a small town in central Germany back in the late 1800s. There were enough German immigrants in Brooklyn that they still spoke German at home and their name didn’t become anglicized. Once my grandfather’s oldest sister started school, that all changed and by the time my grandfather was born in the early 1900s, the only thing that remained of their German heritage was the name.

Fast forward 70 years, one of my uncles received a letter out of the blue from someone in East Germany. My uncle had written an article in a scientific journal and it had been read by a science teacher living in Karl-Marx-Stadt with the same last name. It’s a very rare name even in Germany. The science teacher figured they must be related and he sent a letter saying his family had come from the same dinky hamlet in what had become East Germany after World War II. Letters were exchanged and indeed, they were cousins separated by a few generations.

My grandfather was involved in international sports and even though most westerners weren’t allowed behind the Iron Curtain, exceptions were made now and then for people working on behalf of institutions like his. On a trip to West Germany, he and my grandmother were granted permission to travel to East Germany to meet this long lost cousin in the dinky little town near the East/West border. They rode around in a Trabi and showed my grandparents the sights and the places where the family had come from.

When my grandparents returned from their trip, my grandmother asked me to be a pen-pal with the cousin’s oldest daughter who was learning English in school. We corresponded for several years. Her life was very different from mine and her opportunities were very limited. I always assumed I would never meet her. I found several of her letters in the boxes that were in my mother’s attic, with their DDR stamps and return address of Karl-Marx-Stadt.

As I sat in front of the tv watching the Wall being chipped at and climbed upon and eventually toppled, I thought of her and wondered what she might be feeling and might she be there? What was going to happen? Even though it was clear people were going to be allowed to travel, it didn’t seem like the DDR would be gone in less than a year. The pace at which things crumbled is staggering when you think about it, even in hindsight.

In February of 1994, I went to Europe for the first time. I flew into Berlin and stayed with a friend who had been an intern at the museum I worked at in DC. We went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum and I insisted on going to the eastern part of Berlin, to see what was left of the Wall, to see what it looked like for myself. Even 4 1/4 years after the Wall came down, the eastern half of the city still looked depressed and bore the scars of isolation. We went to an art performance/party in a building that looked like it had been bombed in 1945 and no one had ever cleaned it up.

After a week in Berlin I took the train down to Chemnitz, the name the town of Karl-Marx-Stadt had reclaimed after the DDR fell apart and stayed with “the East German cousins” for a few days. My pen-pal cousin had moved to Stuttgart but she came home to be able to meet me. My German was pretty rusty but their English was better and we talked and looked at old pictures. She had been very active in the demonstrations that occurred throughout East Germany, not just in Berlin. One of her younger sisters escaped to one of the embassies that were taking people in, as those who’d made it onto embassy property were going to be allowed to travel to the west. We went to Dresden and they showed me the places where they’d gathered to protest the government. The whole trip boggled my mind; here I was in East Germany, meeting the cousins I’d always assumed I’d only know through letters.

There’s a lot of stuff out there today commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. This one had some pretty interesting map graphs and two videos showing places today where the wall had been. My husband and I were talking about the 25th anniversary and remembering it all. My daughter heard us and was asking questions. It was unbelievable to her that the Wall had ever existed and everything we told her sounded like a movie plot to her and not like it really could have happened. I’ll never forget it.

Losing My Edge

LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge

Friday was my birthday. It was a beautiful day outside and I didn’t have to think about dinner which is a present in and of itself. I don’t like making a big deal of my birthday anyway, especially when it’s not a milestone number.

Befitting a low-key birthday, we watched the last two episodes of the series we’ve been binge-watching on Netflix. That might not have been the best idea. It had an open ending and I found myself awake at some dark hour wondering what would have happened next? It took me at least an hour to fall asleep again. My husband said he’d had weird dreams all night that were influenced by the show.

The combination of marking another year and finishing a tv show, yes, even something as trivial as a tv show, left me feeling pensive. What’s next? What do I do now? It isn’t that I need a new show to watch (though, suggestions are welcome*) but rather, that unanswered question at the end of the series got me thinking about the static nature of my life here at 47.

My kids are now 9 and 13 and I have more wiggle room at home because they’re more independent. But this treading water I’ve been doing, the steady job, the sensible shoes, the shows I didn’t see because it was an hour away on a school night, has meant I’ve drifted a little with the current. I haven’t looked up to see where I should be going. I have a long way to go still and I probably ought to start thinking about how to get to someplace that isn’t here. Where and what that is and how I can get there are questions I don’t have the answers for but the world is not waiting for me to figure it out. “The kids are coming up from behind.”

I’m losing my edge
But I was there

* We don’t have regular tv service, just a Roku box with Netflix, Hulu Plus, etc. I hardly ever watch tv since we stopped getting cable but now and then, having something to watch that isn’t a full-length movie really hits the spot.

Thirteen

Big Star – Thirteen

Tomorrow my daughter turns thirteen. Thirteen! An actual teenager. My mother has long maintained that thirteen is the pits of life. She raised six of us so I think she speaks from a position of authority.

I know what it is. You’re no longer a child, not even a kid, but you’re still too young to do things the older teenagers do. There’s a whole world out there that’s just starting to be revealed to you, and it’s exciting and intimidating at the same time. You want in, but it’s a little scary.

I can’t say that I enjoyed thirteen much myself. I remember on my thirteenth birthday, my older sister and her best friend decided something ought to be done to welcome me to teenager-hood so they took me out to the street corner and pelted me with water balloons. That sort of sums up thirteen to me. Sure, I was hanging with the older teenagers, but I was most definitely not one of them. More like the butt of their jokes.

I wish I could spare my daughter the pain, the fear, the uncertainty, the second-guessing, but that would come at the expense of her experiencing the joy, the exhilaration, the burgeoning confidence of figuring out who you are and what your place is in this new world.

In my book, there is no better manifestation of this than Big Star’s Thirteen. It’s all there: the hope, the beginning of independence, a crush, a little bravado, a sweetness, a smile, and for me, always, a few tears.

Who knows what this year will bring. I have a feeling that at least I will be listening to this song on a pretty regular rotation, maybe I’ll even be able to turn her on to it too.

Ages of You

R.E.M. – Ages of You

Today I found out about the Amtrak Residencies for writers. I can’t tell you how perfect that is. I might cry. Right now I am listening to the train tape I made in college (the digital edition on my iPod) and I can see the backyards of America in my head, obscured now and then by the blur of greenery; interrupted by the occasional overpass. I always thought that would make an excellent anthropology thesis, America’s Backyards as Seen from the Train. That’s where the truth hangs out. The discarded bicycles, rusted red wagons, trampolines, and clotheslines.

Close by the cities, the scenery is much more industrial. Warehouses. Graffiti covered brick buildings and cement walls. Trenton Makes The World Takes. The cities give way to the suburbs, where the backyards and cemeteries make up the scenery. Depending on what train you’re taking, you might get far enough away from the built up areas to see more traditionally scenic views. I always try to sit on the right side of the train in a window seat. If you always sit on the right, you’ll see what’s on the left on your way back.

I love everything about train travel. I love the big, beautiful, historic stations. I love the smells of the engine, some kind of weird mix of diesel and electric, hot and metallic. I love the rhythm of the train swaying gently as it clatters along the tracks. I love the tracks! I have two rusted and discarded old railroad spikes saved in a bin. I have several Amtrak train ticket stubs saved alongside concert tickets. I love leaning my head against the window and trying to find a spot to put your feet that gives you just the right amount of ‘please don’t talk to me’ body language or trying to sit in such a way as to invite a little conversation. I love watching my fellow passengers, listening to them chat with their seatmate or talk with their children about what’s passing by the window. I like to sneak a peak at the book they’re reading. Watching as people meet them when they get off the train, and others saying goodbye as someone gets on.

I have taken the train as far north as Montreal, as far south as Georgia. The Adirondack. Southern Crescent. Overnight trains. Commuter trains. Sightseeing trains. Subways. I’ve been to Zoo Station. Paddington Station. Two of my proudest foreign language moments were giving directions to Salzburg’s train station in German and confirming in Czech that someone was waiting for the correct subway train in Prague. The only Czech words I can still remember are the words for beer and ‘next stop’ which is what they would announce as the subway pulled into every station.

It is hands down my favorite mode of travel. It’s not the fastest, there are usually delays on the line somewhere, but when I take the train, at least half the reason is just being on the train. It’s not the most convenient, being at the mercy of someone else’s schedule. A few years ago, Amtrak started running a train up to Maine, the Downeaster. I am dying to take that train. In order to get the train from my house to my mother’s house up in Maine would involve me getting on a train when it’s still dark in the morning and switching stations in Boston. It would take more time than driving but I’m actually contemplating buying a used car up near my mother just so I have an excuse to make that trip.

There is just something about the train that brings up all kinds of emotions for me. It’s like I feel a tiny shred of what everyone else in my car is feeling. Some people are excited, some are sad, some are hopeful, some are worried, some are exhausted, some can’t sit still. I know all those feelings and have, at different times in my life, been one of those people sitting there. So now I look around and see me on my first solo train trip, me going to visit a sister or a friend, me with my best friend on an adventure, me trying to hold it together when things aren’t working out, me on my way to a job interview, me seeing new places and remembering all my old favorite haunts. I don’t get that from any other form of travel.

This is the fourth song on the train tape. My vinyl copy of this song has a longer finger-snapping intro. I really wanted to use this version but I couldn’t get it to only play the first part.

A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfxiHxJheuc

De La Soul – A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’

I am halfway through my downloads from De La Soul, who are giving away all their albums for free today. Happy Valentine’s Day!

I used to be a roller skating fiend when I was in junior high. My best friend lived up the street and we would get home from school and lace up our skates and hit the street. We took a boom box outside and made up skating routines to our favorite songs (I can still remember parts of the one that we did to Blondie’s The Tide is High). It was because of us that the local Gristede’s instituted a No Roller Skating policy inside the store.

My skates were the sneaker style, bright yellow with rainbow stripes on the side like a pair of fake Adidas with bright yellow wheels and a matching yellow stopper. I loved those skates. They were sitting in my mother’s basement until just a few years ago when I allowed her to give them to Goodwill.

There’s a roller rink still very much alive not far from me. Our schools have skating parties to raise money for the PTO and it’s a popular birthday party spot. My daughter was first invited to a roller rink party four years ago but she didn’t know how to skate. Luckily we had a lot of lead time so I took her to the rink every weekend before the party to teach her how to skate. Once she mastered it, she loved it. We had her birthday party there later that year and bought her a pair of roller skates for her birthday that year.

It’s such a time warp in there. They bust out the old disco tunes towards the end of the skate session so you could almost think you’re back in the day with the Village People and Michael Jackson playing on the sound system. Next time maybe I’ll put in a request for this song.

The Main Event

#WhereILivedWednesday: 440 9th St.

This post is part of #WhereILivedWednesday, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants, and as such is a slight departure from my usual video first format. The song is below and you’d better press play, it’s so worth it.

In the summer of 1979, my parents sent my older sister and me to stay with my Aunt Linda for a few weeks. They had arranged for us to go to a day camp at a private girls’ school in her town, where I could do gymnastics and my sister, tennis, in addition to your usual camp activities like batik, pottery, swimming, and the like. I wasn’t quite 12 years old yet so I didn’t realize that they were actually trying to get us out of the way while their marriage was falling apart.

We loved Aunt Linda. She was my father’s only sibling and we didn’t see her that often since she lived three hours upstate from our house. My dad was pretty stressed out and yelled a lot but my aunt Linda never yelled, she mostly laughed. She was so much fun and staying with her was going to rule. We had our own room in the old tower part of the house that even had its own sink.

Of course, all the bedrooms had their own sink since it was a convent. I don’t know about you but every convent I’ve been in has sinks in the bedrooms, and as I had another aunt who used to be a nun, plus my Aunt Linda, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in convents. The convent was an old house on a dead-end one-way street (I swear I’m not making that up) that had had renovations (for all the sinks!) and additions built onto it over the years. We had to go up these almost circular stairs, past a larger than life-sized Infant Jesus of Prague statue to get to our room but it was cool because it was kind of our own little hangout.

The Sisters also ran a day camp for younger kids, right there on the grounds of the convent. When we got home from our day camp, we were allowed to hang out with the campers who hadn’t been picked up yet, swim in the pool, play ball or jump rope on the black top. The other nuns were just as good at arts and crafts as my Aunt Linda so we got to make whatever things they had done that day, or learn fun camp songs (they weren’t even religious!). There was also another building with a teen rec room that had a juke box and a foosball table and even a soda machine! This was living!

The secret to all of the fun wasn’t just the amenities, however. These women were a riot. If no one had told you that they were all nuns, you would never have guessed it. Well, except for Sister Josephine who was kind of old and crotchety and still wore a habit (the only one who did), even indoors when she would shush us all because she couldn’t hear the Merv Griffin show despite the tv volume being turned all the way up. My sister and I didn’t have to go into their prayer session in the evening after dinner, we were free to hit the rec room or watch something besides Merv on tv. It was a pretty sweet set up.

They had a PA system at the camp so they could announce when it was time for the groups to switch to a new activity or come into the main camp building for lunch. One time at the end of the day, when we were already back from our camp, my Aunt Linda was getting ready to make an announcement only she didn’t realize the PA was already on. It must have been a long day and they were a little punchy. The big movie that had just been released that summer was The Main Event, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal and the theme song was getting a lot of airplay on the radio. My Aunt Linda grabbed the mike and did her best Barbra Streisand imitation of that song, getting all the way through the slow-burn intro before someone had managed to clue her in that she was belting out a mildly racy disco hit to the whole camp.
Press play, you won’t regret it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yEbTEla5Uc

That was one of the last times we stayed up at the camp/convent with my Aunt Linda. My dad moved out at the end of the summer and Aunt Linda and some of the other nuns moved to the midwest about a year later. But my sister and I have our memories of that great summer of ’79 at 440 9th St.