John Is Born — The Prequel

It is inconceivable to me that my baby brother is turning 60 this year. Of course, this is because it means I am staring at starting my 8th decade on earth next year. INCONCEIVABLE.
There are eight years and one day short of nine months between me and John. My story has to do with what I know happened, and with what probably happened, three days short of nine months before John was born.

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY AND THE ACCIDENT

My eighth birthday fell on Thanksgiving Day, November 22nd, 1962. This meant my birthday party was not going to happen on my birthday. Instead, the party was set for the afternoon of Saturday the 24th of November. The usual neighborhood kids were invited– Marian Mastruzzo and John Morra from down the block, Carol and Spyro Phillippas from across the street, Lily Sevastos from next door, Gail and Donna Jones from the second floor front apartment of our house. The only person who had to come by car was Annmarie Spiciarich, my Catholic godparents’ daughter.
And therein lies the tale.

Since her dad Vinnie drove her to my party, my dad agreed to drive her back home to Astoria. After the party, Annmarie and my sister Janet and I piled into the back seat of our old Plymouth (named Pinhead by my dad– our last car that would bear a name of its own). We dropped Annmarie off at her house and left for home.
It gets dark really early in New York in late November. We could have been on the road in the middle of the night, it was that dark. Somewhere on 34th Avenue in Woodside, we were t-boned by a car running a stop sign. I was sitting behind Dad, and Janet was on my right. The car smashed into the front driver’s side of our car, totalling it. This is long before seatbelts were standard, and I don’t know how Daddy wasn’t badly hurt or killed. I remember so clearly him turning around to check on us. My face had gone into the back of the driver’s seat.
“Claud, you okay? Jannie? Are ya hurt?” Janet was crying but fine, I was sobbing because I was so scared, but not badly hurt.
I don’t remember much about what happened right after the accident, whether there was an ambulance, or were we taken to the hospital, but I do remember policemen, and Dad, Janet, and I coming back home and Mom meeting us at the door, in tears.“Next time, let Vinnie pick up his own daughter and drive her home!!”

Had my dad been killed that night, my mother would have been widowed with four daughters under 8 years old and a six family house that she wasn’t yet the co-owner of (that wouldn’t happen until 1984) to run. I think Mom’s relief at Dad returning home at all, much less in one piece and under his own power, and Dad’s foretaste of his own mortality, directly led to John’s birth three days short of nine months after the car accident.

Maybe it happened that way, and maybe it didn’t, but I think it did.

EPILOGUE

I am grateful for that accident, if it is the proximate cause of John’s existence. It was wonderful to FINALLY have a boy in our family. He was such a sweet baby. And smart and funny and good–all qualities he still has. Because I was the eldest, I was Mother’s Helper, and I had learned to help change and bathe babies by the time we had John. He revealed BOYS to me. I still remember the pale yellow parabola of pee arcing back into the bathwater when Mom and I bathed months-old him in the tabletop tub. And giggling at it.

He was the only one of my siblings that I never overlapped with in school. I was already in high school when he entered first grade at Our Lady of Sorrows. When I was in grade school, I had watched ST:TOS’s original broadcasts: he caught up years later, when it was in heavy rotation on Channel 11. We bonded on the Horta episode (Spock, in mind meld with Mama Horta: “PAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaIIIIiiiiNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnn…..). Sometime much later, Frank and I took John to see a double feature of Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. We three still share a mutual love of sci-fi, but especially of all things Star Trek (Best captain? PICARD, of course!!).

I attended John’s high school graduation from Newtown Prep (Junior Air Force ROTC!); a couple of years later visited him in his dorm at MIT (which he attended on a full-ride ROTC scholarship). Frank and I still have the baby blue ginger jar lamp he and Barbara gave us for our wedding. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard his message on my answering service that he had become a father (I was delivering a Thanksgiving illustration to Guideposts Magazine–Thanksgiving is a theme in this story!).

For Dad’s eightieth birthday, he set up a professional photo session to mark the occasion—it was the first time in twelve years all of us (Mom and Dad, Frank and me, Janet and Wally, Nancy and Chris and Grant, Barbara and George and Alyssa, and John and Cheryl and Lily) had been under the same roof at the same time.

I remember how he came to stay with Dad when Mom was in the hospital, for the entire last month of her life. I remember him crying in the hallway of the ICU where she would die later that same day.

I remember calling him while he was on vacation in New Orleans when Dad went missing in June 2010.
“Claud, should I come up to Jersey?”
“No, there’s not much that you can do right now. We may need you later in the week though.” And we did.
He and Cheryl and Janet spent the summer after Dad’s death getting the house ready for sale. If I had had to do it, the house would still be unsold, because I would still be going through the tons of paperwork and other things our folks left behind.

Last October, when my husband fell again, and I was going off the deep end with exhaustion, he and Wally tag-teamed by phone for months, to offer help, support, and love. And just to make sure I was as okay as I could be.

John isn’t just an amazing person, he is a wonderful, loving, empathic brother; close enough to listen and hear what isn’t being said, giving space when and where it’s needed, and being a safety net when that is called for.

If the car accident on November 24th, 1962 did in fact lead to John being born, I hope it happened in every timeline in the multiverse, because he makes ALL of the worlds better.
I love you, John, and I am proud of you, and I hope the rest of your days (and may they be MANY) are filled with love, light, joy, and good health.

Mom Is 100

Today would have been my mother’s 100^th birthday. She was the second of two daughters, born only fourteen months after her sister Catherine. She passed away at the age of 82 after a brutal, harrowing month in hospital, in July 2005. The last words she said to me were “I love you. You’re my prize.”

I wasn’t always her prize, but I was cast in the same mold she was. She was independent-minded, scrappy, opinionated, and not at all shy about sharing her opinions. She was one of the stubbornest people I have ever known (as was my father). She was Greek, and he was Croatian, so they were both of Balkan heritage. You know why they call those mountains the Balkans? Because the people who live there balk at EVERYTHING.

Mom’s tough, can-do character was formed by her childhood experiences; her father abandoned their family during the Great Depression. My mother’s mother, my Yaya, had to find some way to survive. At one point, with an empty cupboard and icebox and two hungry girls to feed, she went to the Catholic church around the corner to ask the pastor for help. She spoke very broken English, but Father McCaffrey of Holy Cross understood her problem, and helped her. He gave her food, he helped keep a roof over their heads, and he accepted Mom and Cathy into Holy Cross School. His kindness saved their lives, and to this day, every one of us, me and my siblings, supports our local food pantries to pass along the blessings we received.

Yaya found a job in the garment district, at first as a simple seamstress, but honed her skills enough to be doing elaborate beadwork by the time her working life ended.  She worked very hard to support her girls; she made sure they got a good education, encouraged them in their jobs after high school, and was very, very strict about their dating. Neither one of the girls wanted to date Greek boys (probably because of their father’s faithlessness), but eventually, Cathy met the man she would marry and spend her life with; she introduced Mom to his first cousin and the rest is history. That is why all the kids in my generation, Cathy’s and Matt’s and Mom’s and Dad’s, all bore the last name Karabaic.

Mom was extremely close to her mother. My earliest childhood memories include their daily 8AM phone conversations in Greek. “Kalimera, tikanis?”

Yaya had her first heart attack when she was sixty years old. She lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building in Astoria (“Never let anyone live over your head”, she said) right next to the elevated train line. One day, she couldn’t make it up the stairs, and ended up in Boulevard Hospital. Mom sneaked me and my sister Janet up the back stairs of the hospital to visit Yaya (you had to be 8 years old to visit “legally”, and I wasn’t yet 6.) I don’t think Yaya ever went back to work after the heart attack.

We always visited Yaya on Sunday afternoons, after church and Sunday dinner. There were five of us, with only nine years between me and the youngest, my brother, so we were quite the rambunctious lot. I remember Mom helping Yaya with various things while my sisters and I would put on “shows” in the living room. Sometimes Dad would take us all down to the playground or out for a walk (probably to give both Yaya and Mom a break from our noise and chaos).

Yaya’s health and memory faded significantly over time; by the time I was in high school, it was touch and go as to whether she could still live alone. For a time, I lived in her apartment with her, because it was so close to school (4 subway stops!). I shopped for us and learned how to cook. But that was not a sustainable solution, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that Yaya was alone all day while I was in school.

Then for a time, Yaya came to stay in our five-room apartment. There were already seven of us living there (five of us between the ages of nine and eighteen), and only one bathroom. Yaya slept on a convertible love seat in the living room. Since that was also where one of the two televisions was, that turned out not to be a sustainable solution either, because of the child (and adult) traffic back and forth through the apartment.

Yaya went to live in Cathy and Matt’s home in New Jersey, very briefly. That wasn’t sustainable because Matt worked fulltime in the city (he was chief electrician of the Empire State Building), Cathy worked full time at Scholastic in Englewood Cliffs, and Matt Jr. and Stephanie were both in school all day.

In the spring semester of my first year at Parsons School of Design, I volunteered to give Yaya my bed at home in exchange for her bed in her apartment. What made this a good temporary solution was all the time I was spending in studio at school on weekends, and working on my assignments well into the wee hours in my little basement studio at home. Yaya’s apartment was about a half hour from school via one subway line. My folks moved my drawing board into Yaya’s living room, and Yaya moved into my bed. This worked out well for me but didn’t really resolve the problem at home. Yaya needed more care and more attention. Mom had been working part-time in the evenings at Gertz in Flushing since I was in 6^th grade (she persuaded my father of the value of this by invoking the 25% employee discount). Dad would get home from his job at Queens Midtown Tunnel in time to drive Mom to work in Flushing. I had had the responsibility of warming up (or sometimes making) dinner, making sure everyone ate, and cleanup, but now I was in Astoria. What had been a Rube Goldberg machine of relatively good efficiency was breaking down; it was stressful for everyone, but especially for Mom. There was really no good solution for her.

In late 1973, Mom and Dad (and I guess Cathy and Matt) decided it was time to move Yaya into a nursing home. Everyone thought that the consistency of care would be better in an environment that was structured for that kind of care.

 I knew it broke my mother’s heart to do this. She faced the impossible task of choosing between prioritizing the care of her beloved mother and her husband and children. Everyone needed her, but there was only so much “her” to go around.

I went with Mom the day she took Yaya and her suitcase to Flushing Manor Nursing Home. I went because I didn’t want her to face it alone.

I don’t remember how we got there—I guess we took a cab, because Dad wouldn’t have been home from work yet. It was sometime in the late fall. I remember Mom taking Yaya to a counter with nurses, and then behind the closed doors of an office, and waiting for what seemed like a very long time for her to come back out into the anteroom where I waited. She didn’t say much when she came back out and neither did I.  Her face said everything that needed to be said. We walked down Northern Boulevard, turned left on to Main Street, and as we approached the subway I asked her, “Do you want to go for a drink?” She was not a drinker at all, but she nodded, and we walked up Main Street to Jahn’s. We sat at a pretty little table right by the window, and I ordered us Seven and Sevens. We sat there, sipping slowly, not talking much at all, and watching the crowds of people coming home from work. We had a second drink, and I got the check, paid it, left a tip, and we walked down to the subway and went home.

Yaya would last almost a year in the nursing home. I never went back to see her, something I truly regret now. I told myself I was busy with school, which I was, but I should have made time. Mom never asked me to go, and never asked me why I didn’t. She went regularly and my recollection is that sometimes my younger siblings or Dad would accompany her.

At about one in the morning one October night, the phone rang. My bed was closest to the kitchen; I answered it quickly so it wouldn’t wake my parents. It was the nursing home. Yaya had had a stroke and passed away. I could see no reason to wake up my mother to tell her this news; it could wait until morning.

When I heard her stirring in the kitchen several hours later, I got out of bed to tell my mother that her mother was dead. There were tears, lots of them, and some yelling that I should have woken her up. I told her she needed the rest more than she needed to know right then, and I stand by that to this day.

There was a wake in Astoria, and a funeral at St. Demetrios, and a burial at Cypress Hills Cemetery next to the husband who had abandoned her so many years earlier. Her name is on the gravestone below his. Yaya was buried wearing her wedding ring, which she had never taken off.

Years later, when Mom was in her last month of life in Union Hospital, our whole family was trying to figure out what her best next steps would be. Should she go to a real rehab hospital, like Kessler in West Orange (which would be hard for Dad to get to without someone to drive him), or should she opt for the local place, just a five minute walk from their home, that her doctor described as a place where you get parked. She wanted to just go home, but for that to work, there would have to be some major alterations to the ground floor. Then she said, no, just put me in a nursing home, I don’t want anyone to have to bother about me. My brother and I, in consultation with the social worker, agreed that the best result would likely come from doing her rehab at Kessler. The social worker promised to give us 24 hours notice before any transfer. That didn’t happen; the transfer to Kessler East Orange was rushed and horribly botched, and led to my mother dying from sepsis three days later.

It was my decision to okay the transfer. In retrospect, I should not have done so, because it was all so rushed, and to a different facility, but my mother and father both trusted their doctor, who said it was the right thing to do. Mom told me, “Whatever you do will be the right thing. I love you, you’re my prize.”

It is a decision I still carry, to this day. Every time I have decide about care for someone I love, I remember how this turned out. I follow my own North Star now, my own instincts, and try to stay as free of the medical-industrial complex as I possibly can.

There is no substitute for love. Love is the North Star.

I love you, Mom, and I am proud to be the daughter and granddaughter of stubborn, scrappy, willful, opinionated women who loved fiercely and always did the best they could. I am trying really hard to follow in your footsteps and do the right things for the people I love the most.

###

The Way We Were/The Way We Are

1.

Today is our 45^th wedding anniversary. Last August 5^th was the 50^th anniversary of the day we met. There were five years, seven months, and six days between the day we met and the day we married. A lot of things happened during that elapsed time, but the most important thing happened at the very beginning: I knew we would marry the day I met Frank. I knew right after he kissed me for the first time, on the first landing of the stairway down to the Fifth Avenue station of the 7 train on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 42^nd Street. When I got home, I told my mom I had met the man I was going to marry.

“You’re always meeting the man you’re going to marry,” she said.

“No, Mom, this is THE ONE. I know,” said I.

The second most important thing that happened to us, and only time I ever doubted what I knew in my heart and blood and bone, was when I ran into Frank and his first wife in the Main Street station of the 7 train, about a year and a half after we broke up.

I hadn’t seen him at all during that time, though I had called him at work many times during that first summer, just to keep myself a presence in his head and heart. When I saw him standing there, alone, by the token booth, it was just like in the movies—everything in my peripheral vision disappeared, and all I saw was HIM. I ran right up to him and threw my arms around his neck, and started babbling about how wonderful it was to see him, and did he have time to grab a cup of coffee or a drink somewhere? I’d LOVE to catch up.

A woman approached him but I didn’t really see her until he said:
“Claudia, this is my wife.”

“Oh,” I said.

They were in a hurry to go somewhere, and like a fool, I let them get away. But just for a minute or two … while I was on the stairway up to the street, I said to myself, “WIFE?? WIFE?????” and went back down, through the turnstile, found them in the train, and sat across from them.

“So, how long have you been married?”

“About a year,” said he. She said nothing. She just looked very unhappy.

I don’t remember anything else about the conversation. I got off at my stop, which was only three stops after we got on, so about five minutes total elapsed time. When I got home, only my sister Nancy was there, and I sobbed out everything that had just happened.

At some point, I told my parents and the rest of my sibs and forbade everyone from ever mentioning Frank’s name to me again. I did not understand how he could have married someone else less than six months after we broke up. He had asked me to move in with him; I said no, because if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be able to go home again, because my folks would have disowned me. I would have no place to live and no way to pay for school (I was in my second year at Parsons School of Design). Also, my plan was to live on my own and support myself with freelance illustration, in between graduating and eventually marrying. I didn’t want to go from my parents’ home to my husband’s home. I wanted to stand on my own two feet, to see if I could. I wanted to use my talent to support myself.
But six months after I said “No” to him (and I guessed he heard “No, never” when what I meant was “No, not now”), he marries someone else?
My heart was broken, as only a nineteen-year-old girl’s heart can be, when she has forever lost the man she was going to marry.

The third most important thing was when we got back together. In retrospect, this may actually be THE most important thing, but we couldn’t get back together if we hadn’t (1) met and (2) broken up, so that’s why it’s number 3.

A little more than a year later, I was sitting at my drawing board in my studio apartment on East 28^th Street in Manhattan, into which I had moved the previous March, working on a freelance illustration job that wasn’t going particularly well. It was about 5 in the afternoon, and my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Claudia. This is Frank.”

“What the fuck do YOU want?”

“I want to apologize for hurting you.”

“I’m listening…”

Five hours later, we were done talking for the night.

But really, we have never stopped talking at all.

So, a year and half after that conversation, we got married at St. Demetrios Church in Astoria, the same church where my parents had been married twenty-four years, ten months, and twenty-seven days before. My sister Nancy was my maid of honor.
Frank’s divorce was finalized just six weeks earlier, after a year’s legal separation, and we still didn’t have the papers, but we were married.
As I always knew we would be.

2.

The ensuing forty-five years have been with filled with love, with tears (of joy and of grief), with happy times, with terrifying times, with infrequent fights (though some were pretty intense), and with not one night where we didn’t end the day saying “I love you.”

We’ve been through career changes (some voluntary, others by necessity), job losses, financial disasters, cancer scares (but not cancer), one years-long period of disability for Frank that resolved, and one which hasn’t (and is ongoing), the deaths of three out of four parents (both of mine, and his dad, five weeks after my mom passed). His mother is ninety-six now, and my greatest fear for her is that she will outlive us. It’s a possibility since she is the only one of the three of us that doesn’t have to concern herself with anything at all, so her life is stress-free and her physical health is good. Her memory is spotty at best, though she still knows who I am, but she never remembers to ask after Frank, her only child. I stop by her place to care for her two days a week, to give her blessed HHA a well-deserved break. I care for Frank every day, and have for the last three and a half years.

Six months before COVID hit, Frank became homebound, after progressively losing his mobility over a period of about a year. It was a recurrence of the neuropathies that had cost him most of his forties, but from which he had very slowly recovered. It’s harder to recover from such things in your seventies, harder still when you fall using your walker and end up living in your bedroom, only able to take a few walker-dependent steps from bed to desk chair to commode and back. He fell during a transfer from chair to bed last October, and I had to ask our super to help get him back up off the floor because I couldn’t do it. The first time he fell, in October 2021, he fell three times over the space of two hours, his right leg going out from under him, despite the walker. I was able to get him righted each time, but that was when his confinement to the bedroom began.

When you live through something like this, as a caregiver to the person you love most in the world, something funny happens with time, and with memory. You are living in the moment all the time, even in your sleep. You are always on alert for your beloved calling your name, for an odd thump, for the sound of the bedroom lamp being turned on, for the light in the hallway. Living on constant alert puts your past at the wrong end of a telescope. It is untouchable, unreachable, and your life in the Before Time takes on the character of being a movie you saw a long, long time ago. It feels like someone else’s life.

Something else that changes is intimacy. Caregiving is physically very intimate, but it is not romantic. It is a different kind of closeness, in that it is physically necessary for the health and well-being of the person being cared for. The person being cared for is vulnerable and open—physically, emotionally, spiritually—to the caregiver. The caregiver’s loving ministrations are essential in every sense of the word. For someone who needs to be needed, like me, it is natural and good and a way to show love, but it is a different form of physical love with different emotional overtones.

I am often emotionally and physically exhausted; not every day, but often enough. I’m not just caring for Frank; I’m handling all of his mother’s affairs as well. I resent that she is mobile at her age, and he is not. Sometimes my fury is so great, I feel my entire body vibrating from the inside out. I talk to myself out loud, because sometimes I am the only person who really listens to me. Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will understand when I say I feel like Beverly Crusher in the shrinking Enterprise, except there’s no Wesley and no Traveler to bring me back into the real world/the Before Time. The episode is called Remember Me. That seems to be a little too close to home sometimes. And yet…

I had a dream where my father told me he was proud of me for doing what I am trying so hard to do. In real life, he would have been. When my mother’s health was failing, he would carry her on his back down the stairs of their home. He would understand me and why I do what I do. The nuns who taught me at Our Lady of Sorrows would be satisfied that I took their lessons on the corporal works of mercy to heart.

One of the regrets I have is that I didn’t really take time for myself when I was younger. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so cheated out of my retirement had I taken time off back then. I once went for 22 years (1988-2010) without going away on a vacation. We went to Washington, DC in 1988 for our 10^th wedding anniversary, and had a wonderful time; we went to Greenport, Long Island in late 2010 because I wanted to go all the way out east to mourn my father after his death earlier that year. Our last vacation together was in 2014.
I was never good at vacation, I guess. Too late now.

One real advantage of the life I am living now is that weight loss is effortless because I never stop moving. I’ve lost almost 80 pounds in the last three years, about one-third of my body weight. While it has won me many compliments, I cannot recommend this weight loss program to anyone else.

The emotional and spiritual toll of this has been heavy for both of us. It’s hard for Frank to see me so tired. It’s hard for me to be so tired. It has caused me to doubt the existence of God. I follow the commandments because they make sense to me. I take Jesus’ words very much to heart, because he outlines a good way to live among others, God or no God.  I am still a deeply spiritual person, because I feel trying to do good in the world is a better way to live. But my doubt, which is fairly recent, troubles me. If all there is at the end of life is death, what does life mean? I don’t know. But I will keep bringing fresh flowers into the bedroom for Frank, and I will keep his favorite ice cream stocked in the freezer, because they are little kindnesses that make his world better, and his world is even smaller than mine, so it counts more.

It’s not all pain and woe; we still laugh every day, we enjoy the meals I make, we watch good movies and series. We love watching the bears at Katmai National Park. We’ve become fans and then supporters of the Orphaned Wildlife Center (starring a troop of rescued Syrian bears). We sent them twenty-two pounds of honey for Christmas because we enjoy them so much. What I try to do is live minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. When someone who hasn’t seen me for awhile asks me how I am, I say “Today is a good day” or I tell the truth if it’s been rough.

The way we were is not the way we are. All I can do, all we can do, all anyone can do, is keep putting one foot in front of the other, and hope for the best.

Happy anniversary to us. Forty-five years, still together, still trying our best, still saying “I love you” before going to sleep.
And I do. I love him, and always will.

Today is a good day.

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Dad Is 100

Tags

family, father, love, Missing Dad

Dad, around 1940

Today would have been my dad’s 100th birthday. He passed away in 2010, at the age of 88. At the end of his life, I think I loved him just as much as he loved me at the beginning of my life.

I am his firstborn. There are five of us, the four girls and then, finally, our brother. The happiest I ever saw my father was the night John was born, when Dad arrived back home from the hospital that steamy August night in the old black Rambler and started handing out blue-wrapped cigars to the men of the neighborhood who had gathered to celebrate my baby brother’s birth. Dad was aglow with joy and pride.

My dad worked hard all his life, worked with his hands, tough, heavy, dirty jobs. He could fix anything and he taught me to fix things too. With 5 kids in 9 years, someone had to be his assistant in maintaining the 6-family apartment house he owned. I was the assistant. I learned to fix a running tank toilet when I was 8. I helped him hang window screens every summer and take them down every fall. I loved helping him. It was our special time together.

My dad came to this country from the new nation of Yugoslavia when he was 14 years old. His father was already here, living in what is now Chelsea, working as a longshoreman, a proud union man. Dad sailed here with his godmother, leaving his mother and sister in Punat on the island of Krk. He would never see either of them again. He went to high school in Harlem, walked up from Chelsea every morning and  back down to Chelsea every afternoon. He learned English in school and from reading the New York Daily News. He joined the longshoreman’s union after graduation, worked with his dad, and later became a machinist in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was working on the USS Constellation when it burned, leaving 50 coworkers dead.

When the Navy Yard was closed by Robert McNamara (his name was anathema in our home), he went to work at the Army Pictorial Center. When that closed, he worked in the Queens Midtown Tunnel for the TBTA. He was a union man through and through. His hard work earned him a good retirement, brought on early when he was hit by a car and broke his leg in 3 places. He was in traction for 12 weeks. I don’t know how he stood it, but he hardly complained at all.

When our mother died after an awful, wrenching, excruciating month in the hospital (of sepsis after a badly botched transfer to a rehab center), he was bereft. But he had his job, driving our youngest sister’s daughter to school each morning and picking her up every afternoon. I credit that with keeping him going for 5 years after Mom passed. He adored Alyssa and her friends, and his love was reciprocated. When he died, he was wearing a brand-new jacket given him by the mother of one of Alyssa’s friends as a thank-you present.

His death was harder on us than it probably was for him. He disappeared one beautiful June morning, and after 4 days of endless searching, was found by the Essex County Canine unit, deep in the woods, by a fallen tree, about 50 yards from Union’s Galloping Hill Road, just a 5 minute walk from his home. The coroner said he probably died the first day, which was a comfort to know after the fact.

My father was a hard worker, a devoted family man, a good friend and neighbor, a believer in God and an afterlife. I loved him with all my heart by the end of his life, and I miss him and love him still. A lot of the things about me that drive the people who love me crazy are things I got from him: stubbornness, nearly-psychotic self-reliance, a passion for argument, and a foul mouth. A lot of the things about me that the people who love me value most about me also come from him: my steadfastness, my empathy, my sense of fairness.

Dad, I thank you for all your gifts to me, and especially the gift of life. Happy birthday where you are, and if you can, try to look in on us and give us a smile. Love you always and forever.

I’m a Met fan, and I have something to say about what Javy said.

Tags

Boobirds, Boos, Javy Baez, Mets

Javy Baez, I have something to say about what YOU said.
Your idea of “struggle” is NOT your fans’ REALITY of struggle. You want to see struggle? Visit Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church Corona NY, just a long walk or a 2 minute ride from Citifield. Last year, 100 people who go to that church died of COVID. Our Lady of Sorrows was the center of the epicenter of COVID in the WORLD at that point in time– only a year ago. Lots of children–your children’s age– lost parents and grandparents.
When you speak of struggle, please understand that you are speaking from a position of enormous privilege. You earned it with natural talent and hard work– but it is ultimately the fans who are responsible for you having the job you have. Where was baseball last year without its fans? This year, when you were once again allowed to play before a limited audience, and then a full stadium, all the players said how much it meant to have the fans back.
You are all essentially entertainers. You do not have paying work in your chosen field without fans who buy tickets, television packages, baseball merchandise. Don’t forget that while baseball is your job, for a lot of us, it’s an expensive luxury and an indulgence. If we REALLY withdrew our support, what do you think would happen to baseball?
I grew up in Corona. I watched Shea Stadium being built from my 4th grade classroom in Our Lady of Sorrows. My mother took the 5 of us to day games in the summers of 1966 and onward (once I was old enough to help guide us on our walks under the el, from 103rd Street to Shea). In those days, general admission seats were $1.85– the same as the minimum hourly wage for my first job (in Corona, at the 5&10). We brought our own snacks to the stadium. In those days you could take a family of one adult and 5 kids to a professional ballgame for less than $20 and watch Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and John Matlack pitch. These days, you can’t even park at Citifield for $20.
Understand that your career is a gift from the fans. We have the right to boo if you are swinging at the first pitch and popping up without ever having seen that pitcher in a game. We have the right to boo if you aren’t running out every single ball you hit. We have the right to boo if you are looking lazy and distracted in the field and that missed chance loses a game. WE have the right, and you have the responsibility to take it, as long as it isn’t abusive or dangerous to you.
I’ve been a Mets fan since 1964. I was at Game 7 in 1986 (Section 47, Row U–my ticket cost $50). I suffered through the Bamberger years to get to the Davey Johnson years. I am not the only one.Respect your fans (including your owner, Steve Cohen, who is probably not too happy with you right now). You owe us all an apology. You already have what we owe you– our attention, and our fandom. But it’s an easy thing to lose.

Eight Years, Today

Tags

aging, bloodhound, caregiving, children, elderly parents, Essex County Canine Unit, Essex County Police Department, faith, family, love, patience, Salem Road, search, search dogs, UCPD, Union County Police Department, Union NJ, walk, walking

Today is eight years since my father took his last walk.
This is my imagining of his last day.

The brightening sky is clear; the birds sing. It’s too early. He doesn’t sleep the way he used to. Slowly, carefully, in the dark, he feels his way down the stairs. He shuffles through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen; he turns on the light, the radio. He gets his plastic glass, his cereal bowl, a spoon, his box of Cheerios. He looks at the empty fruit bowl. Bananas. He ate the last mushy brown one yesterday. That’s the problem with bananas; you buy a bunch and they’re green, and you have to wait a few days until you can eat them. Then, they all turn ripe at once. At least one will be almost black by the time you eat it.

Bananas. It’s not too early for the 7-11 at Salem and Chestnut. They’re always open.

He turns off the radio and goes into the dining room. He takes off his pajamas and drapes them over a chair. His clothes from yesterday, and from the day before, are on the other chairs. He picks up the clothes he wore the day before yesterday. He already has on a short-sleeve undershirt, boxers, socks. He puts on a long-sleeve thermal undershirt that is yellow with age. On top of that, his lined flannel shirt. He puts on his pants­­ and his belt (to which he’s added a few holes), and buckles it in the last hole. He puts on his new windbreaker, a gift from one of his granddaughter’s friends. He puts on his shoes, his watch, takes his wallet and a handkerchief. He puts on his old tan hat. He takes his keys, locks both doors, walks down the steps and down the driveway, past his car. It hasn’t worked for months. The battery is dead. His kids won’t let him replace it. His kids won’t let him drive any more.

Yesterday had been so strange—people in and out of his house all day. His youngest daughter had come in the morning and brought her friend, that nice lady, the nurse—what was her name? The nurse helped him with his physical therapy exercises, made sure he took his pills. She said she was coming again today.
As the girls were going, his son-in-law’s best friend stopped by. They talked for hours about things he forgot he remembered, about the old country, about his job in the shipyard during the war.
Later, the doorbell rang—it was the Meals-on-Wheels girl. His visitor tried to get him to eat the food she had brought while it was hot, but the food from the day before was still in the refrigerator. He ate that instead. It’s a sin to waste food.

Then, his visitor left. Alone in his home for the first time all day, he stretched out in his recliner and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was time for bed. He undressed, put on his pajamas, went upstairs.
Strange day.

Oh.
Bananas.
He walks down his street to the corner, turns left, and goes down to the shortcut path through the woods to Salem Road, where the 7-11 is. He will get the bananas, go back home, eat his breakfast.

He hears something: a woman? Is she calling him? He follows her voice, veers off the path into the woods. He used to walk here with his granddaughter, when she was little. Now, there are brambles, branches, tangles of vines and weeds. The more he walks, the more mixed up he gets.

He hears her again: “Tony…Tony?”

He looks up, down, all around; no one is there. He walks some more. He’s deep in the woods now. He knows these woods end in a grassy half-circle on Galloping Hill Road, across from the hospital, a block away from the 7-11. There’s a playground, a small basketball court, a bench facing the brightly colored slide. He could sit there for a bit, then walk down to the 7-11. If he keeps going, he should come out on the other side.
Ahead, in the middle of a thicket of vines and brush, he sees a log, a fallen tree, lying on the ground. Hasn’t he seen that tree before? It’s all beginning to look the same. Maybe he should take a little rest.
He makes his way to it, sits, and thinks: Why is it so hard to get out of here? It’s not a big forest. There are streets and houses on all four sides, the playground at the end, the hospital across the street. He used to walk here all the time.
His head is swimming. His feet really hurt. He unties his shoes, takes them off, places them next to the log, in arm’s reach. He is breathing hard; he tries to catch his breath. God, his head hurts. His chest hurts. Everything hurts. He is so thirsty that if there was a puddle, he would drink from it. A little dirty water wouldn’t hurt him. You should have seen the stuff they had to eat back in Europe, back when times were bad.
He’s going to take a little rest now, then put his shoes back on, and he’ll find his way out. He shakes his head, tries to focus on the dial of his watch. It says 12:15 and 25 seconds, but the second hand isn’t moving any more.
It was so bright when he left the house, but it…it looks so dark now. How long has he been walking? He can’t tell if it’s still daylight. He is so tired. He takes off his hat and lies down.

Four days later, the bloodhound from the Essex County Police Department will find him by the fallen tree, fifty yards from the grassy half-circle edging the suburban forest, his untied shoes still in arm’s reach.

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Fighting Back

Tags

#NeverTrump, Donald Trump, Duty, Elections, fearlessness, Greed, Injustice Boycott, persistence, politics, responsibility, strength, stubbornness, trust

It’s not any easier the second morning. Seeing the cover picture of the NYT today…reading words I never thought I’d see ~ “President-elect Trump”… reading that it was WHITE WOMEN that turned this election over to Trump, not the forgotten, angry, unemployed, under-educated, over-medicated, working class, suicidal white men….

I am bereft, unmoored.

This feels to me like the days right after 9/11. When I walked down Northern Blvd. to the Y yesterday for my swim, it was ghostly quiet. The corners where the day laborers hang out were empty. A few years ago, when trying to find a safe corner to traverse after an ice storm, it was two Latino day laborers who picked me up and set me right when I nearly fell into traffic. The women wearing hijabs, with their children in tow, looked at me and looked away when I smiled at them.
I want to tell every one of them that I AM NOT ONE OF THE WHITE WOMEN WHO CAUSED THIS.
I am in grief.

But I want to fight back. Here’s a tool:
Since our nation’s new ethos is pure materialism, the best way to fight back the forces of evil is financial. The new lingua franca of America is pure greed.
If we hit back the forces of evil in their greedy pockets, perhaps our voices will be heard.

Join the Injustice Boycott.
PLEASE sign up, and please share this information.  Help this boycott go coast to coast.

And if you think what happened on Tuesday was good, or right, or a proper result for this country, I cordially invite you to drop your subscription to this blog. If we were friends, we aren’t any more.

Nothing less than the future of the world is at stake.

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Six Years Ago Today…

Tags

aging, bloodhound, caregiving, children, elderly parents, Essex County Canine Unit, Essex County Police Department, faith, family, love, patience, Salem Road, search, search dogs, UCPD, Union County Police Department, Union NJ, walk, walking

Six years ago today, my 88 year-old father went for a walk in the early morning and did not return. This is my imagining of what happened that day, June 11, 2010.

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From Missing Dad: John Is Born

Tags

birth, birthday, blessings, brother, celebrate, Christine Marie, cigars, communities, Corona, family, family life, gratitude, heart, home, hope, John Steven, joy, love, mother, motherhood, my brother John, Newtown Field, patience, persistence, Playschool, responsibility, siblings, sister, sisters, Vacation Day Camp

Today is the anniversary of my brother John’s birth. This is a story I tell him about that day every year… and it’s also the story I told about my father at his post-funeral repast.

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After four girls, we were all sure that John would be a girl, too. We decided that our new baby would be named Christine Marie. I drew a picture of my baby sister-to-be on the last day of third grade in Mrs. Gumpers’ class at Our Lady of Sorrows.
Every summer, we went to Playschool – the free vacation day camps that the New York City public school system ran in the neighborhood school buildings from early July through the end of August. At the end of the season, there would be a huge gathering of all the schools in the district at Newtown High School’s athletic field, and each school would put on a little musical show. We’d make costumes out of crepe paper, do the Charleston, sing Oklahoma!, things like that. It was great fun, and parents were encouraged to attend and cheer for their offspring.

It was in the high 90s and humid the day of our pageant. My parents attended anyway — my father brought folding beach chairs, and he and my enormously pregnant mother watched and cheered and sweated in the boiling sun as class after class did their song and dance routine. It was over by about half past four. We piled into the car, went home, had dinner.

Mom’s labor pains began, and Dad took her to the hospital at around half past six. Our Yaya (Mom’s mother) was already at our house (probably watching Barbara, who would have been too small to sit still and watch the pageant at Newtown Field).

We waited and waited and waited for the call that our new sister, Christine Marie, had arrived.

The phone rang, and Yaya picked up, listened for a minute, and made some uncharacteristically loud sounds. Somehow, Janet and I gathered that we had a brother. We jumped up and down, and ran down the three flights of stairs, yelling. “IT’S A BOY! IT’S A BOY!!”

We took it to the street, running up and down 42nd Avenue, from 99th Street to National Street, the full length of our block, yelling yelling YELLING “IT’S A BOY! IT’S A BOY!!”

The neighbors came out, everybody was out. If it hadn’t been August, it’d have been a Christmas miracle.

Everyone was so happy, so excited that we finally had a brother. When my dad came home, and handed out the first-ever blue cellophane wrapped cigars, the look on his face said everything. I had never before, and never since, seen such a look of pure and absolute joy on his face.

And that was how Christine Marie, now named John Steven, was welcomed to the world.

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Five Years On ~ Missing Dad: Day 5 ~ FOUND

Tags

blessings, caregiving, communities, doggedness, Duty, elderly parents, faith, family, father, friends, God, gratitude, grief, home, hope, loss, love, mercy, Missing Dad, missing persons, patience, persistence, prayer, responsibility, siblings, trust

Tuesday,  June 15th, 2010

That day is a blur; it was supposed to be my day of rest, after going out to Union to search for Dad on Saturday, Sunday, Monday. I had set Wednesday as my return to work, if we didn’t find him. I had very mixed feelings about going back to work. I couldn’t stay out indefinitely; what if we never find him? Sometimes, people who go missing are never, ever found. They just disappear without a trace. How does a person just disappear? The laws of physics tell us that matter cannot be created or destroyed in a closed system; therefore, he can’t just be gone. He is somewhere in the Escheresque universe in which I’ve been living since 8:40 Friday morning; I just can’t find my way to him. The angles are all wrong, they are impossible, incomprehensible.

I’ve been saying: “My dad is missing”. I could just as easily say: “I’m missing my Dad” and mean it in all its double-entendred glory; he’s missing; I miss him; oops, have I missed him? What am I missing?

When someone goes missing, what happens to the people who are missing them? What do they do? Do they return to their jobs? Do they shop for groceries on the way home from work? Do they still buy Metrocards, and make sure that there’s milk in the refrigerator for breakfast the next morning? Do they plan their meals for the coming week? What about the laundry? Do they carry on, do they do all of these things, all the while waiting for a call from the police or the FBI or a hospital or a morgue that their loved one or their loved one’s body has been found?
Or do they simply sit still? Do they wait by the telephone, or stake out a spot in front of the computer, searching, researching, unable to move? Do they take their cellphones into the shower? Do they take showers? Whatever I am doing, I feel like I should be doing something else instead. What if I’m doing the wrong things, and that’s why I can’t find the right angle? Is my approach all wrong?
I don’t know how to do this. If we don’t find him, I don’t know what we will do.
I’ve never known anyone else who had this happen. I have no experts to consult. I need a roadmap for this terra incognita where we are marooned.

My plan for Tuesday was to talk to the detectives in the morning and get them to set the bloodhounds looking for my father. We were in Day 5; Dad had been missing for ninety-six hours (I had decided that, when we got to one hundred hours, I would switch to counting days). Frank and I awoke to the alarm, took our showers, ate our breakfast, drank our coffee, shared the New York Times, watched Weather Channel, just like we do every day. It was all so nice and normal.
I turned on my computer to check email. I had messages from my friend Janice asking if there’d been any word (no); from my friend Peg, who pointed out how easily the elderly become invisible to the rest of us, allowing as how if Dad had gone out in his pajamas, someone might remember having seen him (he had done that already, the week before); from Nancy, letting us know that she, Chris and Grant would be in New Jersey by around 2 that afternoon. She added that Chris suggested that one way to get Dad back would be to buy and install an air conditioner in his dining room (Dad was legendarily spartan about heating and cooling).
The detectives called me while I was still at my computer, sometime after 9AM.
Det. Moutis confirmed to me that today was the day that the bloodhounds would search the woods while the helicopters flew over.

Today was the day that Dad would be found, but I didn’t know that yet.

The search had become its own creature, apart from Dad; Dad and the search for Dad were two separate beings. There had been moments when I felt we were searching just for the sake of doing something. It wasn’t that I thought our efforts were useless or hopeless; there was a small (and shrinking) part of me that thought we might yet find him, and find him alive. Surely there was a reasonable explanation for him being missing; the Laws of the Conservation of Matter decreed that he was still somewhere in the known universe.

What I would say, or do, if I saw my father sitting on a park bench, or walking down a side street?
Would I run up to him, hug him and kiss him and ask him if he was hungry, thirsty, tired?
Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
Would I just stand there, mouth agape, unable to speak?
Would I even believe my own eyes?
Would I yell at him for putting us through this living hell for almost five days?
Or would the stress of all of it, combined with the shock of seeing him again, cause my body to crumble into a pile of dust and blow away on the wind?
I do not know how to do this.

Since Friday, I had been dealing with the unknowingness of my situation by trying to control those things I could. To be effective, to move forward, I had to be dispassionate about the alternatives that lay before us. I had to be on task, I had to manage time well, I had to ruthlessly prioritize. It was like managing the store (people/product/operations), except this really was life and death. I wasn’t alone; I had lots of help, all the help I could ask for; my husband, my siblings and sibs-in-law, their children, our friends were living through this with me; but I felt so terribly alone.

These were the things I could control at this moment: I could check email and respond; I could talk to people on the phone; I was home this day, so I could do research online to find something, anything; there had to be something, and I was just missing it.
I had promised Frank I would try to rest, just this one day; I planned to take a nap at some point, lie on the couch with the windows open (the weather had been so gorgeous since Friday) and let myself drift…
But first… I had to…
Okay, so the detectives would have dogs and helicopters … Det. Moutis said that we should register for a Silver Alert. I said I’d set it up if he sent me a link.
As soon as we got off the phone, I followed up with him by email, confirming the details of their plan for the day, and copying my sibs; I asked if the police had issued a general press release yet, because some news outlets would do nothing without something from the police.

Monday night, when I got home from New Jersey, before we had dinner, Frank and I were talking about places that George and Barbara and Alyssa and Kevin and Glenn and the neighbors and I couldn’t get into to search on our own. Frank had made a list of the kinds of places that should be searched; abandoned buildings within a reasonable radius; houses that had been foreclosed upon, and were vacant; garages, sheds, outbuildings, even on occupied properties—we’d had a cat years ago who had gotten locked in a neighbor’s garage by accident, and he’d been missing for three days before the neighbor returned, opened the garage, and out came our Patch. Maybe Dad crawled into or under an abandoned car in a foreclosed garage and has been unable to get out and come home. Maybe he fell through a rotted floor in a vacant, derelict house. Maybe he got lost again, and went into a house that he thought was his, except it was empty, and now he thought we had sold all of his things or that he had lost the house to taxes. When we had his income taxes done earlier that spring, he got confused, and thought the new accountant was there to take his house away. Maybe he was looking for Mom.

I asked Det. Moutis if anyone had searched abandoned buildings in the area, homes that were vacant due to foreclosures, sheds, outbuildings, anywhere where someone who was tired, lost, and scared might crawl in to get some rest.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

I asked Det. Moutis if we should hire a private detective. Would that help or hinder the police effort?
I told Det. Moutis that Nancy and her family were coming in that afternoon, that John would be arriving Thursday, and that my siblings and I had decided that I would be the point of contact in order to streamline our communications.
My email to Det. Moutis crossed with his email to me giving me the web address for setting up a Silver Alert. I should have guessed it—www.silveralert.org – and I can’t remember now why I couldn’t. I registered my dad for the Silver Alert and uploaded the picture that we’d used on his flyers. I emailed the link to Det. Moutis and all my sibs with the login and password. For some reason—and I don’t know if it still works this way—the login and password were only good for an hour, and I had to re-log-in and re-upload his picture once the hour was up.

How do people who really are alone in their search for their missing loved one manage the logistics? You have to be at least three people at the same time to do everything that needs to be done; one to be out in the world, searching, one to be researching new places to search, and one to be the operations point person coordinating the searches and eliminating time-wasting redundancies and duplications of effort.

It helped me to try to think of all of this as a management problem, which could be broken down into small, discrete components, and thus be solved.

I called my contact at Union’s Channel 12 to give her Dad’s information and the Facebook page URLs so she could do a screengrab of the flyer. I promised to follow up with a flyer by email, in case the screengrab wasn’t sufficiently clear. Lexi promised to get the information on the air that day.

Janet and Wally were at Dad’s, getting ready to leave for Maryland, since Nancy was coming up. Someone had to be in Maryland to take care of the total of five cats and one dog between the two households, so Janet and Nancy tag-teamed. I think that George and Barbara were both back at work—it’s so hard to remember now, and my cell phone and text records aren’t clear. Alyssa had finals coming up, so she was back in school. John was planning to arrive on Thursday. Maybe we’d find Dad by then.

At the same time we were searching for Dad, we each had to consider the possibility of needing to take time off from our jobs to plan and hold a funeral.

We had arranged for Glenn to be at the house to meet the detectives and the canine unit, so that the dogs could start the search and (we hoped) find Dad. I texted Glenn to let me know when the police arrived.

Done with email, done with the phone, I turned up the ringer on the answering machine in the studio, left my computer, turned on the television to a channel that only played New Age relaxation music, and I lay down on the couch.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

I drifted in and out, aware of the music and the traffic noise from Northern Boulevard, coming and going.

The phone rang: it was Glenn.
The detectives had arrived, with the bloodhound and his handler from the Essex County Canine Unit. It was mid-day. They’d had to wait for the bloodhound to come from the next county, because Union County didn’t have one of their own.

This is what Glenn told me:
The handler needed a scent article for the dog. They used the pajamas that Dad had left on the dining room chairs.
The handler, wearing latex gloves, took my father’s old worn pajamas outside, and spread the top and bottom out on the lawn in front of Dad’s house. (The image I conjured for myself of my father’s nightclothes spread out on the lush grass is indelibly imprinted on my mind’s eye.) The handler wears gloves so that he doesn’t transfer his own scent particles to the scent article.
The dog sniffs and paws at my father’s garments on the grass not too far from the huge oak tree; the dog gets Dad’s scent.
After a minute or two, the leashed bloodhound pulls back from the pajamas, excited, hyper, panting, wanting to go. His handler settles him, looks the dog square in the eyes.
“Do you wanna go find him, do you wanna go find him?”
The bloodhound—his nose to the ground—and his handler quickly turn and head down Huntington to the corner of Livingston; they turn left, and go down the incline (it is not quite a hill).

(Glenn didn’t see this next part. He will recount this to me in our next conversation, after he speaks with the detective by the park:
The dog and handler crossed Forest Drive, and approached the shortcut path that cuts through the woods to Salem Road.
The dog veered left at the head of the path, into the woods, without hesitation.)

Glenn stays at my father’s house. He is waiting.
I am in my living room. I am waiting, too. I text Glenn (not wanting to tie up the phone); he has heard nothing, and is getting anxious. They have not been gone long.

Sometime, not too much later, one of my father’s neighbors, a woman, tells Glenn that there is a police car and an ambulance at the little park across the street from Union Hospital.
Glenn thinks he knows what that is about, and he drives down to see. He meets the detective where the park’s grassy half-circle meets the woods.
They have found a body deep in the woods. Glenn wants to go, but the detective shakes his head, tells him he won’t be able to identify him.

The bloodhound veered left at the head of the path, into the woods, without hesitation. They went deep, deeper, following my father’s scent, over brambles, and weeds, and thickets of vines, into the heavy brush. They found him lying on the ground.

Glenn comes back to Dad’s and calls me and tells me what he saw and heard.
I thank him.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

I don’t remember the details exactly. I think at some point, not too long after, Det. Moutis called me.
They found the body of an elderly man, a man they believed was my father, in the woods, about fifty yards from where the grassy half-circle of park begins.
He said it would have been impossible to find him without the bloodhound. The brush and tangles of vines and weeds were more than two feet high; Dad had sat down on a log, taken off his shoes, and either lay down or fell back. He was on the ground, his glasses and tan hat were off to the side, his watch still on his wrist. He was clothed except for his shoes, which were on the ground next to the log.
They would have to confirm his identity with dental records. He had been out in the elements for more than one hundred hours. The coroner would later say that he had almost certainly died the first day. That would account for the lack of sightings, I thought to myself.

Nancy, Chris, and Grant arrived at Dad’s house at about the time that the detectives were calling me. I must have called Janet and Walter, John and Cheryl, Barbara and George, but I don’t remember doing so. Frank came home sometime in the late afternoon and I told him. I am sure I was crying, but I don’t remember. I texted my friends. I called the store and told Emery that they had probably found my father, and I wouldn’t be coming in on Wednesday after all.

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

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