Guest Columnist Alicia Sokol: “If Words Could Kill”

Alicia Sokol, a photographer and writer, lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Andy, and their two sons, Matthew, 7, and Gabriel, 4. Alicia writes the cooking blog, Weekly Greens (www.weeklygreens.com), which she developed to help busy families take the guesswork out of planning and creating fresh, seasonal weeknight meals.

Dear Matthew and Gabriel,

When I was three years old, I told my mom “I wish you were dead.” (Can you imagine me saying such a thing to your sweet grandma?) No one remembers what injustice she had inflicted on to me to elicit such a response.

Stung by my words, she told my father about the incident later that day. “Alicia told me she wished I were dead,” she said.

“Well, that makes two of us,” he replied.

My mother was shocked, interpreting his words to mean he also wished she were dead. She began to rethink her life. Why was she married to someone who wished her dead? Why stay in a house with people who wanted her gone?

So she grabbed her coat and purse and headed to the mall.

“Just pretend I’m dead!” she said as she pulled the door closed behind her, leaving my father to care for my younger brother, your Uncle Tony, and me.

She milled about the mall as she turned the caustic words over and over in her mind. Finally, she returned home, still quite upset. She found my father seated in an armchair with a child on each knee.

“She arose!” he said, daring to make light of her dramatic exit just hours before.

In response to his joke, her anger grew hotter. And yet there she let the matter lay, carrying on with life and motherhood.

Several weeks later, though, my mother brought up the incident. At first my father had no idea what she was talking about.

“You said you wished I were dead,” my mother reminded him.

“What? I never said such a thing,” he said, confused by her accusation. “Of course I don’t wish you dead. How could you believe I’d say something like that?”

“I told you Alicia said she wished I were dead and you said you did, too,” she shot back.

“That’s not what I said. I said, ‘That makes two of us,’ meaning that she’d told me the very same thing earlier that day,” he explained.

“Really? That’s what you meant?” my mother stood before him slack-jawed and stunned. “I misinterpreted your words and then I was mad about it for days! That’s why I went to the mall that afternoon. And I was furious when I returned and you made a joke of it!”

She had endured needless suffering over a few misinterpreted words.

“Did you really think I wished you were dead?” my father said. “I love you. I would never say such a thing.”

They laughed about it and vowed to communicate more openly going forward.

I was reminded of this story just last week. You, Gabriel, wanted something — a toy, a treat, five more minutes to play, I forget exactly what. And I said “no.”

And then you, frustrated at being denied something to which you felt entitled, objected. Angrily, you said, “I want a new mama.”

Ouch.

Now, I know that you no more meant you wanted a new mother than I meant I wished my own mother dead. I never truly believed anyone would love me more and take better care of me than my mother, just as I hope you realize the same about me.

But that’s how it sometimes goes between parents and children. We say stuff. We disagree with each other, we get disappointed in each other, we misunderstand each other. And someone gets hurt. And nobody really wants to hurt anyone.

All this illustrates an important lesson. We have to talk with each other and share our feelings. We’ll all feel so much better if we do. After all, it never pays to assume anything, least of all that each of us always means exactly what we say. Let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes we’re actually trying to say something else.

Here’s what I want you to remember most of all. I’m imperfect, same as my mother, and only human. I always try my best, just as my mother did. You’re loved no matter what, just as I was loved no matter what. I always have your best interests at heart, guided purely by my desire to protect you.

I love you even when you’re naughty — and yes, even when you say you want me replaced.

Guest Columnist Vincent DeNigris: The Mom You Lost

Vincent DeNigris, who lives in Hancock, New York with Samuel, his partner of 24 years, and his English bulldog Bella, is the father of Vincent, 35. He is a retired New York City police officer who worked the same streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn where he grew up. He was on duty on September 11, 2001 and lost 23 of his friends that day.  He has raised pigeons as a hobby for 42 years – learning how from the old Italians and Jews in his neighborhood – and is now widely known as a master breeder of English carrier pigeons.

Dear Vincent,

I met your mother, Barbara, on Devoe Street, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her grandparents lived around the corner on Humboldt Street, and her Aunt Nettie and  cousin Elvira lived two houses over from there. Barbara and I became childhood friends.

Your mother was funny and bright, and none too bad on the eyes. She loved music and loved to dance (you’re so much like her in that respect). We always enjoyed being together.

After you were born, everything just started to fall apart. I was holding down three jobs. I was a stationary engineer for the Minkskoff Theater family, a part-time stagehand on 44th Street and Broadway, and superintendent of our apartment building in Kew Gardens. While I was out making a living so that we could buy a house close to Uncle Nick and Aunt Marilyn in Bethpage, your mother started to do hardcore drugs.

The rent we collected for the landlord, your mother would take and spend on heroin.

She always told me she used that money because she was running short, and that I was bringing home too little money for us to survive. She did a good job of covering up.

I would be up for work and out of the house at 6 a.m. every day, and your mother would give you breakfast, take the bus back to Williamsburg, drop you off with your grandmother Carmela, and go do drugs with her friend Irene.

I finally caught on to her and we got divorced. I could no longer live with myself knowing you were living with her while she spiraled out of control. I got full custody of you when you were three years old.

Because I always loved your grandmother Carmela, I would let you go to her apartment to visit your mother there. I would bring you there on a Friday night with the promise you were going to see your mother, you were always so happy and excited about that.

Sometimes your mother would show up to see you.

But more often she failed to make an appearance.

Carmela would always plead with me to let you stay a little longer so that your mother could see you. At first I did that for the both of you. But your mother had a habit of showing up to see you just when I was about to take you home. Depending on my mood, I would either let you stay a couple of hours more, or I would just take you home because most of the time she showed up, she showed up high. This went on untill you were nine years old.

During all that time, my heart would just tear apart for you. When you were sick and cried for your mother, it was my face that you would see hovering over your bed. When you woke up screaming from a nightmare, it was either me or your grandmother, (my mother Maria) who picked you up and comforted you. Your first day of school, you proudly waited for your mother to show up at our house to see you off. She never came.

Your mother died when you were only nine years old. I waited three days before I could get up the courage to tell you. She died from AIDS-related complications brought on by intravenous drug use. It still kills me to remember how badly you took that news.

I know you have gone through hell, my son, and I wish I could just take away all your pain. I wish I could have been a mother to you. No matter how much a father does, a child wants and needs a good mother.

Neither of us care to acknowledge Mother’s Day. Your Mom is still a very hard topic for us both.

And so, my son, I did the best I could for you with what I had.

Love,

Dad

Guest Columnist Francine Brevetti: My Pantyhose Confessions

Francine Brevetti, a longtime journalist, writes clients’ biographies and conducts workshops teaching people how to write their own. She calls her business Legend Crafter, www.legendcrafter.com. A San Francisco native, she worked as a reporter for newspapers and magazines around the world and is the author of “The Fabulous Fior — over 100 Years in an Italian Kitchen,” the history of America’s oldest Italian restaurant (http://www.fabulousfior.com/book/, available on Amazon.com).  Here she pays tribute to her mother, Tecla Brevetti, formerly Puccetti, who died in 2011 at the age of 99.

On the morning we would bury my mother’s ashes – I had slept badly the night before and awakened  depressed, sure I would lose control of my emotions at her grave – the pantyhose I picked to wear looked unfamiliar and somehow went on too easily.

By the time I met my cousin Linda at her office, the pantyhose were sliding down to my buttocks. I had to hitch them up several times. I actually had to pull up my skirt and rearrange them over my nether parts.

Only then did I realize that they were mamma’s pantyhose. I had taken them when I cleaned out her nightstand the day she died.

We drove to the office of the Italian Cemetery in Colma and found cousins Stanley and Bob waiting for us. Before we walked out to the cemetery, I ducked into the ladies room so I could pull the hose back over my behind.

Italian Cemetery is a lovely place with broad paths, expressive statuary and dignified mausoleums. The sun was shining, a welcome event after several days of cold. The trees that line the paths are sculpted into halos so the sun casts intriguing shadows of the branches onto the ground.

Linda, Stanley, Bob, my dog Lola and I walked towards the lot housing my grandparents’ crypt. The damned hose kept wiggling and slipping, making me extremely uncomfortable.

I then told everyone my little secret, whispering, and they roared with laughter.

“Why don’t you just take them off?” Linda asked.

“I don’t wear panties underneath,” I said.

“Too much information!” someone said.

Every few steps I gripped my skirt and hoisted my hose up under it, staggering all the while like Quasimodo or Frankenstein’s Igor. What could’ve been a solemn occasion – and perhaps should have been – was instead slapstick

My grandparents’ grave was open. We looked down a shaft of some eight feet leading to a flat surface. Underneath that were the caskets of my grandparents and their two infant children, Albertina and Albertino.

Mamma’s ashes lay in a white plastic container about the size of a microwave oven, her name, “Tecla Brevetti,” emblazoned on top.

A worker standing by at the grave descended the ladder and took mamma’s remains down to the floor of the crypt. Stanley and Bob had brought a bouquet of flowers — something I had forgotten to do — and Stanley extracted the one red rose. He had remembered that Tecla’s favorite color was red. He threw the red rose down into the crypt and, luckily enough, it landed right on mother’s box of ashes.

“Tecla is running the show today,” Stanley said.

We all looked at each other and wondered what we should say or do now because I had decided we would have no ritual prepared.

“Should we sing something?” Linda asked.

We sang two lines of the Italian song “Mamma.”

Mamma, la canzone la piu’ bella sei tu/
Sei tu la vita e per la vita non ti lascio mai piu’.

Yes, we sang the son in Italian. Translated, the lyrics mean: “Mamma, the most beautiful song is you/You are life and for life I shall never leave you.”

And that was that.

And we returned to the cemetery office with me still staggering from wearing my mother’s ill-fitting pantyhose.

Later I wondered about the reason behind this little misadventure. Maybe my mother had somehow guided my hand that morning to her pantyhose. Maybe, in the end, she wished for us to bury her with a laugh rather than a sob.

Flying The Coop: A Story Of Life And Death

Dear Michael and Caroline,

The day after a recent Christmas, I discovered a trespasser on our terrace. A pigeon. But it was no mere intruder. It was also a captive.

Our terrace is enclosed with a wire-mesh screen. We made this home improvement expressly to keep pigeons out. For years they had visited unannounced, warbling ad nauseum and depositing souvenirs.

But now a scruffy gray pigeon had gotten in. It squeezed through a gap only a few inches wide. And now it was trapped. It tried to get out, flapping its wings, darting high and low.

My first instinct was to save it, though more to rid a nuisance than out of mercy, and I commenced eviction proceedings forthwith.

Unfortunately, I had no pigeon removal experience. I could try to drive the pigeon toward the gap it had entered. Or try to coax it into our living room, adjacent to the terrace, and enable it to fly through its open windows.

So out onto the terrace I stepped, a plastic outdoor table held in front of my torso as a shield. The pigeon saw me moving in and took to the air. It veered over and around me, wheeling right, then left, clearly in a panic. So much for that.

Nor was I now going to risk letting the pigeon into our living room. I imagined it going berserk, smashing mirrors and lamps, even pecking at my skull. Neither was I about to summon our building superintendant or the city health department. I needed a quick, easy solution.

Then I decided to leave the pigeon be. It would starve out there. Eventually it would die.

Now, I was never a friend to the pigeon population. I never fed one, for example. But neither was I an enemy of the species. I never flung a rock at one. Rather, I adopted a United Nations neutrality, wishing pigeons neither well nor ill.

Still, when it came to murder, I had a clean record. So my decision left me feeling guilty, even ashamed. This pigeon had done nothing wrong except gotten trapped by accident.

When you and Mom came home that night, I explained everything.

“So you’re just going to let it die out there?” Caroline asked.

The pigeon perched on the bedroom windowsill and stared at me. The next day the temperature dropped below freezing, and the pigeon huddled shivering under the table. Every few hours it roused itself from stillness to try to liberate itself. Round and round it flew, rustling in a frenzy, hysteria setting in.

Over the next few days, as the pigeon repeated this routine to no avail, I learned to live with my decision. After all, pigeons were technically vermin, in the same class as rats, carrying germs and potential infection. They marred statues and benches and buildings with filthy deposits, serving no productive purpose.

Then, one day, the pigeon was gone. As it faced death, starved and freezing and weak, it somehow turned its entrance into an exit and escaped its prison.

In cheating death, that willful pigeon took me off the hook. It granted me a reprieve from my role as executioner and spared my conscience. It saved its life and taught me a lesson about mine. Oh, I knew what I had done. Make no mistake about that. But I also knew I would never do it again.

If I’m lucky, someday I’ll get a chance to prove it.

Hooked On Motown: How Your Dad Once Got Funky: part 5

 

 Dear Michael and Caroline, 

 

 In May of 1994, 24 years after the talent show, thanks to the kind of serendipity that might happen but once in a lifetime, an incident brought me full circle back to Motown. I was at Ellis Island, in the Great Hall, attending a dinner ceremony for the Ellis Island Medal Of Honor. An organization called the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, or NECO, originally formed to recognize and preserve diversity in America, sponsored the event to pay homage to the immigrant experience. Over the years, NECO had conferred its award on hundreds of Americans, including six U.S. presidents and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, not to mention Bob Hope, Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger and Frank Sinatra.  

 

 I was on duty there – in a black tux, no less – as a newly hired vice president of Howard J. Rubenstein Associates, the influential New York public relations firm. My job that night was essentially to escort Norman Brokaw, chairman of the William Morris Agency, a client who happened to be an honoree. Brokaw, who had started his career in the agency’s storied mailroom, wound up representing the likes of Marilyn Monroe, whom he reputedly discovered, as well as Barbara Stanwyck and Clint Eastwood.  

 

 I ate dinner in my usual anxious state over the vagaries of client satisfaction. My boss, the formidable public relations impresario Howard Rubenstein himself, was on hand making the rounds. Indeed, Howard kept glancing at a seating chart he clutched in his hand and making a beeline to buttonhole whichever bold-face name occupied a given table. It was as vivid a lesson in the art of high-powered networking as I had ever witnessed. 

 

 About halfway through dinner I took the liberty of leaving our table to reacquaint myself with the concept of personal freedom and catch a breather taking a stroll around the premises. I turned a corner to go down a long corridor and there, coming toward me, flanked by associates, was none other than Berry Gordy, Jr. I recognized him right away – the baby face that carried a hint of bulldog pugnacity. Now, I could have done what I often do when encountering the well-known by chance and followed the protocol most New Yorkers follow: acted as if he were in fact as mortal as everyone else and just let him be.  

But no, no chance. This was Berry Gordy, Jr., a k a Mr. Motown. Berry Gordy, Jr. had founded Motown Records in 1959. Berry Gordy, Jr. had discovered Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. Berry Gordy Jr. had gone on to sign Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson Five and, yes, the mighty Temptations. He was the entrepreneur who had engineered Hitsville, USA, the mastermind behind the music that had kept me high from boyhood on. And now I was in a public place all of 10 feet away from him.   

“Hello, Mr. Gordy,” I said with an upbeat lilt, putting my hand out with a smile. “Hello,” he replied, all business, and shook my hand. “You’re responsible for a lot of great music,” I said enthusiastically. “Thank you,” he responded. He, too, now smiled, even bowing his head slightly in courtly acknowledgment and appreciation, almost, I dare say, as if he were hearing such a compliment for the very first time in his life and, accordingly, delighted. 

I could have said much more, of course. In fact, you can be sure I wanted to say more. I could have taken another minute to tell Berry Gordy, Jr. about our talent show at Fair Lawn High School back in 1970. And how Larry and Eric and I had, improbably enough, simulated The Temptations performing “Cloud Nine.” And how we had just wanted to be cool, and how I for one had never quite cracked the code for cool. And how it was a peak experience for us, and how we had meant it as a tribute, and how I was supposed to be Eddie Hendricks, by then dead only 18 months, stricken with lung cancer, 30 years of smoking forcing the removal of one of his lungs, that creamy tenor falsetto forever stilled. And how my little solo for some reason drew a big laugh.  

I could have told him, too, how deeply I loved the music of Motown, all of it, how much soul music had meant to me and how much it spoke to me and how much I loved to listen to it and, most of all, dance to it, dancing out on our terrace in Forest Hills, Queens and while going up and down the stairwell in our apartment building, getting high on its fumes. I could have told Berry Gordy, Jr. all that.   

But somewhere along the line, my infrequently deployed capacity for common sense kicked in, and I thought better of it. I had gotten a privileged opportunity to say my piece and pay my respects to Berry Gordy, Jr., and had therefore alighted briefly on my own version of cloud nine, and realized I should leave it at that. Why push my luck? What I had told him – that he was responsible for a lot of great music — he no doubt already knew. Then again, everything I left unsaid I suspect he somehow already knew, too.  

P.S. — Here’s the version of this piece that appeared in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/the-motown-sound-revisited-my-five-minutes-as-a-temptation/266328/

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hooked On Motown: How Your Dad Once Got Funky: part 4

 

Dear Michael and Caroline,

Only years later, as it turned out, would I come to understand certain underlying details about our performance as the Temptations on that night so long ago. For starters, back then we remained quite clueless about the meaning of the lyrics we mouthed to “Cloud Nine.” We had the idea that the song was basically about feeling good. Example: “I’m doing fine/Up here on cloud nine/Listen one more time/I’m doing fine/Up here on cloud nine.”

Eventually, though, someone pointed out to me in passing, and I immediately recognized its truth, that “Cloud Nine” was actually a strong dose of social commentary, a warning about drug addiction, presumably heroin in particular. After all, the song is about a man who left home looking for a job he never found and wound up “depressed and downhearted” and then “took” to cloud nine. That’s where he found himself, all but miraculously, without any responsibility to bear and “riding high” and “free as a bird” and “a million miles from reality,” in a “world of love and harmony.” The song we once naively considered so joyous and celebratory was actually profoundly sad, a cry of ecstatic anguish. And it was this anti-drug message we unwittingly delivered that night to a white suburban audience most likely as ignorant as we. Sometimes, I suppose, you just hear what you want to hear.

Only years later, too, would I see that talent show in any sort of real context. In 1970, race relations in America still qualified as incendiary. We performed our act only two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., only four years after the founding of the Black Panthers, and only five years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act into law, the riots in Watts and Newark likewise still fresh in memory. Angela Davis was arrested in 1970. Only that year would the Miss America pageant have its first black contestant. Our country was still right in the thick of the civil rights movement.

Our suburban town of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, 11 miles from the George Washington Bridge that connected us with New York City, was an altogether Caucasian enclave, increasingly made up of mostly of the children of European immigrants — Jews, Italians, Germans, Poles, Czechs – many of whom had migrated from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Virtually no blacks lived there, much less attended our high school. The only black person I knew as a child was a sweet woman named Marie Esposito, our maid, who came to our house once a week by bus from the predominantly black neighboring town of Paterson, just across the Passaic River, to scrub our floors, dust our furniture and babysit me and my sister.

Against this backdrop, then, Larry and Eric and I had performed in our high school talent show pretending to be black entertainers. Why is easy to explain. We three white upper-middle-class Jewish boys suffered then from what could readily be diagnosed as a mild to moderate form of black envy. To us, certain blacks had a certain kind of cool – talked cool, walked cool, acted cool, sang cool, danced cool. And we, too, wanted with all our hearts to be cool. And so dancing to the rhythm and blues of Motown was our humble attempt at cool. More, it was a symbolic act of support and solidarity – it was how we sought, at least within the safe suburban cocoon that we occupied, to get down with the brothers.

An iffy endeavor, to put it charitably, for we had little familiarity with tough times. We had never lived in a cardboard shack without running water in some backwater boondocks. Oh, granted, I occasionally got detention for flicking spitballs in class, and our front lawn might have experienced some crabgrass, and my SAT scores came in below average, and our basement often flooded in a heavy rain. But in terms of struggle, that was about it. We had clean streets and pretty much no crime and good schools and both our parents around for the long haul and fireworks at the municipal pool on the Fourth of July. My idea of The Man, against whom the oppressed back then invariably found themselves pitted, was the junior high school principal who once suspended me from class for a day for talking too much in homeroom.

And yet in retrospect, I realize that our enactment of this mimicry could easily be interpreted, at least on the face of it, as mockery. In that still-volatile racial atmosphere of May, 1970, it’s entirely conceivable that what we had intended as innocent tribute could perhaps be misunderstood as satire, and that certain extreme activists could have seen the stunt we pulled masquerading as The Temptations as downright insulting.

No, you could never have exactly characterized us as crusaders. But we had a general idea of what we were doing that night. We had a kind of case to make. We three white kids fancied ourselves, more or less, as honorary blacks – forerunners, if you will, of the generation of white boy wannabes who would come along about 30 years later, likewise afflicted with a strain of black envy, going all ghetto to propel the musical phenomena that are rap and hiphop.

And maybe that’s why the audience laughed so hard at my little solo turn. Maybe it was because the sight of a skinny white bespectacled upper-middle-class suburban Jewish teenager, complete with frizzy “Jewfro,” my face and dance moves so earnest, looking to channel the spirit of a broken-hearted young black man from the housing projects of the Detroit ghetto, trying so very hard to palm myself off as the most soulful dude the planet had ever known, all while lip-syncing a voice so flamboyantly falsetto, so flamingly, stratospherically castrato – well, maybe it somehow came off as inherently absurd. And yes, utterly laughable. At least that’s one theory anyway.

P.S. – Please see part 5 tomorrow.

Hooked On Motown: How Your Dad Once Got Funky: part 3

Dear Michael and Caroline,

I love the music of Motown no less today than I did on that Saturday night 42 years ago. It still speaks to me, maybe more clearly than ever. I’ve never stopped listening to it, more the music than the lyrics, and have never, for that matter, stopped dancing to it. I own an eight-CD set with all the greatest hits, but play those tunes, as a rule, only if I’m already on my feet. I’ll put on the headset of my Sony Walkman, probably among the last people clinically alive who still listens to music on anything other than an IPod, and go onto the terrace of our apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, overlooking the fountain in our courtyard – it could be hottest summer or coldest winter; it makes no difference – and re-enact the same dance moves my friends and I attempted at the talent show.

The music we loved as teenagers tends to stay with us forever. Early enthusiasms seldom dim, certain melodies and rhythms carving a groove in our neural pathways. In that respect, Motown remains for me a kind of cloud nine. For the last 26 years now, I’ve relied on Motown to get me through my exercise routine during New York winters. I listen to Motown tunes as I repeatedly walk up and down the stairwell in our 22-story building, typically for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, my footfall tied to the tempos. I stop on the landings every 10 floors or so, sweating and panting, expressly to dance. On occasion, fellow tenants who are navigating the stairwell purely for transportation purposes will spot me doing my stuff and wonder what’s what and whether to call security. But hey, it’s just me, a harmless bald 60-year-old father of two still getting high on Motown.

P.S. – Please see part 4 tomorrow.