Hashtag throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me with my father. We are on the east side of Buffalo, New York. Based on my father’s shoes (which, if I remember correctly, were his work shoes, but which he also wore when he wasn’t at work to the great consternation of my mother) I want to say this was 1973. This was clearly during the time of gas shortages, anger, and fear in America. I was a wide-eyed child, constantly observing, though prone to seeing inaccurately, which would later be mostly corrected by a visit to an ophthalmologist who would fit with me the glasses that would bring everything into focus. It was the actual seeing that I continued to have trouble with though. But this is a photograph of my father and me. It is summer and it is a song. Winter is forever a month away. He is on his day off. My father was a car salesman, and the oil crisis with its gas shortages, wasn’t good for business, but still he went in day after and day and stayed until the evening and then came home. Maybe it was due to the fact that my vision was blurry, but looking back, I find it hard to remember a moment when the fear and anger that was so prevalent then found its way into his heart. He put on his shoes and suit and talked and talked and joked and joshed and sometimes he sold something and sometimes he didn’t. He never let the days he didn't differ from the days he did. They were all good. Each day. On this day, he has allowed me to help him replace the radiator in a Chevy Malibu he bought from an old woman who drove it two miles to the grocery store once a week for five years before she decided she could walk. The car was practically brand new but needed a radiator and so my father replaced it. It was a beautiful car and you knew it was beautiful by the way it shone in my father’s eyes. He had bought the car for my sister who drove it for one year before she decided she didn’t like old things and bought a new car and so the Malibu would be passed on to my brother. In my inaccurate seeing, I saw the car being passed on, in turn, from brother to brother to brother to me. It was a beautiful blue car. My help consisted of holding the flashlight and asking a million questions which he didn’t know the answers to and told me so. It was sunlight, sweat and the sweetness of swearing that little ears shouldn’t have heard but was made okay with his wink and conspiratorial smile. In my mind the car was mine. While he worked, he impressed on me the way the old woman had taken care of the car. It was a good car. Well built. Good things that were well built were meant to be taken care of, but so were other things. His shoes were cheap, but he shined them before work anyways. He replaced the radiator. He took a rag and wiped the grease away. We drove it around the block. We rolled the windows down and the air rushed in and rolled over him. The car had a big well-built engine. It was passed on to my brother who smashed that car to pieces. My brother was well built and good and my parents took care of him and the car that my father loved, that we had replaced the radiator in, was the footnote to the story. The real story is that in that summer of the gas shortages and anger and fear, my father never gave in. He took care of the things that were well built and he took care of the things that weren’t. His son, who could barely see and didn’t know it, was the apprentice mechanic he took under his wing. That summer was the sun. He was the waves that curled and fell on the shores of Lake Erie and then slipped into the vastness to come back again, over and over, cool and unrelenting.
Hashtag throwback Thursday. When I last visited Buffalo I came across some old notes in a box in my father’s basement. Old handwritten grade school notes that were surely passed to me through intermediaries in a snowy parking lot at recess or stealthily, from hand to hand, while a teacher wrote in loops on a chalkboard, until it reached me. That former me, the eight-year-old me in a navy shirt and navy pants. My hair blonde and new. I was full of love and curiosity and imagination. I was Wayne Gretzky and Gilbert Perreault. While my brothers poured gasoline on Big Wheels on the train tracks by my grandmother’s house, I read old books from the library and leafed through the old photographs of my parents. Of that time before me. There they were strong in the sunlight of the Alleghany Mountains. I am getting ahead of myself, I should slow down so as not to forget any of it. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood in a corner of our classroom with her palms outturned in mute appeal. The note folded and then folded again and then passed to me and unfolded and saved and forgotten until now. It occurs to me, all these years later, in light of Paris and San Bernardino, in light of cancer, and old age, how quickly we are here and then gone. How we try and try to hold on to the moments which keep slipping away. The edges of those memories blurring like old photographs. We live and then we disappear, we come from somewhere and then we go somewhere. In that parking lot youth of our hockey games, our sticks scraped in chops along the snow, our yells and shouts echoed off of the red wall of the school and faded as we rushed back and forth beneath a gray sky that to us was golden. The school itself, where our brothers and sisters went, and where our parents went, is closed for good now. What was the first to go? The hardware store? The bakery? The grocery store? Which building was the first to be boarded up? In those moments, the note, that had been passed to me, carried with it a monumental significance. It carried with it, not only the love of the girl who lived on Roebling Avenue, but of her existence and in turn mine too. I kept them all in a shoebox and hid them from my brothers who surely would have used them to burn bonfires on the tracks against the snow that fell and would continue to fall. I stowed them away, carefully, and then forgot about them. And then the children of that time scattered to New York, and Charlotte, and Dallas. They are in New Orleans, and Boulder, and Seattle. They are holding the hands of their mother in a hospital. They are visiting with their father in a room in Buffalo on an unseasonably warm and bright day before a holiday. In the photographs in our family albums, with notes and dates written by my mother on the back, I find my brothers again. I find my sister again. There they are as they used to be, and I can smell the gasoline on them. There is the school with the Fallout Shelter sign above the door that recessed back into the building, a perfect spot where my brothers bent to kiss the girls of their youth. Where they passed bottles of Genesee Cream Ale stolen from the refrigerators of their friends fathers, and here I am holding a cup of pop in the sunlight, and here again in the folded note of a girl whose eyes shone like wet stones. In the sweetness of a note I am reminded again of myself and that time. Of skating parties and holding the sweaty hand of a girl who wrote a note and passed it to that former me. I am reminded of that period where everything was opening and nothing was closing. Before I realized that after everything is gone, the photographs remain, the writing remains, the words remain and with them, in some small way, we remain.
Hashtag throwback Thursday. I was leafing through the old photographs again last night. This is what happens when you get old, you wake up in the middle of the night and think about the past. The moonlight comes in through the window and settles in a trapezoid across your body, bathing you in its quietness. It’s easy in these moments to feel pangs of sadness about the people in your life who are only photographs now. It’s easy in these moments to feel the weight of passing time. The way, for instance, the moonlight moves across you and up the wall and then fades with the coming of the day’s light. You forget the moonlight and the way it was a neat box on your wall as the daylight erases it. But within that quiet, away from the day and its screens, comes a contemplative moment that lifts the fog that is your life and brings into focus the things that matter, and the things that you had thought you had forgotten. I want to talk about the architecture of the east side of Buffalo, New York. I want to talk about it in a roundabout way. I want to convey what it was about the close set houses, the bent chain link fences, and the laundry on the line that stays with me and has somehow informed me and made me who I am today. I want to talk about the density that was the east side of Buffalo, New York before deindustrialization and economic despair destroyed the vibrancy of the place and left it empty and rotting. The low chain link fences invited conversation. The neighbor’s laundry swayed with the breeze like a country’s flag and you watched it, noticing the way the line was tied to the pole that was painted gunship gray. Their yard a foreign country with rock plants and roses. A whiffle ball fouled into their yard lay still until their dog went inside and you could hop the fence and race to rescue it, thrilled with the foreignness of your surroundings. The sidewalks and streets were our playground, where the flirting and shoving and the talking and loitering was conducted carefully because the windows were eyes. The neighbor watering his driveway knew us. The old woman rocking on her porch who never looked up at us, knew who we were, so we had to build our fires on the train tracks. From behind curtains we were noted, so girls and boys pushed each other into deep door wells at the school after it was out, finding their own sacred spaces to kiss and touch. The neighborhood allowed us to travel without ever having been anywhere. The old people conversed in Polish or Italian over the counter at the bakery. A bocce game was played on a lawn. Pinochle and Euchre were words that carried smoke and the smell of stale beer. It’s hard to imagine, if you were to walk through east side of Buffalo, New York, today to imagine its vibrancy. To smell the bakery, to feel the cool dark of the corner bar or the pungent floral smell of the flower shop with its talking Mynah bird. It would be hard to imagine the blue of the milk machine, or the streams of people walking the sidewalks. The stream of dresses and squeak of shoes out of the church. You would not be able to imagine the hardware store, that pile of metal fittings and pipes and screws and doorknobs that packed the place. You would not be able to see the little handmade signs that read screws 5 for 5 cents. You would not hear the bells from the church tower. You would see nothing much, boarded up houses, a decommissioned church and an empty school yard. There is a vacant lot where Ray and Theresa’s Clam shack stood. The little white chalked box we drew on the side of the brick wall of the school where we played a version of baseball called Strikeout is faded to be almost imperceptible, but if you look close you can see it. In the middle of the night, when I am thinking about the past, I see it again, and as the light shifts and moves and disappears I keep it within me. I keep it within me, the hardware store and its hand lettered signs, the smell of the bread, the Mynah bird, the cool dark of the bar, the bent chain link fences, the narrow driveways, the laundry on the line, and it slips out of me as I move into the day and if you listen and look closely, you’ll see it. You’ll feel the old time hello of the neighbor and see the way the white sheet lifts on the line and wafts on a breeze before hanging limply like a white flag.
Hashtag throwback Thursday. Listen y'all, I want you to know something about me that you might not know because isn't that the real reason we throw it back on Thursdays? I have forgotten the reason we throw it back on thursday. Namely because I am constantly throwing back, I throw it back on Sunday and Tuesday. I throw it back on Monday, but anyways, I want to tell you something about myself. During the four and half months of late spring and summer after I graduated from high school and went to college I worked in a steel plant. I started out just doing labor, you know, whatever they wanted. Sweeping. Painting. I started on the second shift and moved to the third pretty quickly. I would have lunch in the lunch room with some of the old timers. Guys who had worked at Bethlehem Steel or Republic for 18, 19 years. They had battered lunch boxes and drank from theromoses. They swore a lot and talked a lot of shit. They were relentless to each other, and then they turned their wit on me. I mostly kept my head down, but after a bit they opened up to me. I noticed their lunches were packed lovingly by their wives and they appreciated it, you could tell by the way their eyes shined when they opened their boxes. This was the type of place where there was a giant furnace where they would process sheets of steel into coils, I think it was used in automobiles or office furniture. It was a really clean operation. Processing was different than manufacturing. Anyways. After a month of sweeping and painting, I got put on the line, shadowing an old thin guy who worked the banding machine. He showed me how it all worked. Told me what went on before and where the steel went after it left us. Mostly we sat silently in the racket of the machinery, watching the steel pass along the conveyor belt. I asked him one night about what he did before this. What he did in the other plant he worked in before it closed, and this is what I want to tell you about myself. I want to tell you what this old time steelworker told me in the middle of the night in Buffalo, New York one summer before I left Buffalo to go to college, and though I didn’t know it then, the last summer I would spend in my hometown.
He said: I worked in the chip shop, when the work was steel. When the blast furnaces billowed smoke that turned snow black. He said, the poured ingot molds don’t come out too perfect,
so a back leaned into a nine, ten pound hammer and chisel to chip and smooth them until they come like they ought to be.
He said: you work days, evenings, and midnight. Swinging.like 7 to 3, 3 to 11, & 11 to 7. I liked midnight, the big wheels wasn’t around then, and well, jeez, just starting out everybody are not talkers and everybody are not open, so you do what you do, you find the ones that you could talk to, that are drawn to you and in the end they will be the ones that clear the way for you
and show you how it’s done.
That’s the one thing.
He said: the guy who showed me to chip, real nice guy. We called him Squeege. He said, you can do this chip in two ways, you can just push and push hard on that hammer like all these guys do or you can sharpen your chisel.
another thing,
don’t cut no more than you can cut.
you do it right
you ain’t going to be aching harder
than anybody else.
a day’s work won’t hurt at all.
This is what he said to me over the machinery, he said: I come to call myself a good chipper. They come down, the boss and them, the big wheels, and the boss said, I got this for you to do and I got that for you to do, and that made me happy. I figured I must be able to do it, like maybe I was one of the good chippers and maybe I come out like I ought to.
(this appeared in slightly different form in New World Writing in 2014.)
Hashtag throwback Thursday. This is not a photograph of me. It is a photograph of my father’s father who we called Poppy. He died when I was very young and I only have a few recollections of him, mostly from the time just before he died when he came to live with us. Imagine that. My parents had a three bedroom house with five young children and made a room out of the foyer for him. I remember him slight and stooped with creased trousers and a white shirt. He was short. It was summer. My father set up a lawn chair for him in the backyard and he sat there eating a piece of a fruit and looking at the leggy flowers. I remember him quiet and looking, his hands on the arms of the chair. I knew nothing about him, only that he was my Poppy and that he was old and sweet to me and that he held my hand in his big soft hand. I don’t remember his funeral, though I am sure I was there. My brothers and my sister, each in turn, as it is with age, have more memories than the next. It is through the photographs in our family album, and the stories, both theirs and my parents’, associated with those photographs, that I came to know him. I won’t go into the whole story, but the short of it is that when he was young in northern Italy, he broke his back carrying bricks up a ladder to his father who was a stonemason. When he healed, his father sent him to France to become a pastry chef. When I was older, I found his name on an Ellis Island ship manifest from 1912. He settled on the east side of Buffalo, New York and worked in a hotel downtown as their pastry chef. He saved his money and brought his wife over. My sister recalls that he had a beautiful garden, that he made wine. He had my father who had me. After he died, a go-to Halloween costume when we were young was his chef’s hat and white coat. It seems like every year one of my brother’s was a chef and then I was a chef. I had no idea why we had that hat and coat as he was long retired by the time I knew him briefly, but I liked being a chef. The whiteness of the funny coat, the tall poof of the hat. My mother would throw some flower on our faces and give us a bowl. I wonder if my parents saw a piece of him in us every Halloween. I like to think they did. I like to think that by becoming him once a year, we honored him and in turn the essence of who he was somehow became enmeshed with who we would become. His sense of adventure and resolve to be better, his kindness and love, his ability to make things, to watch things grow and be patient in difficult times. Last week in a phone call to my father we got to talking about death and he told me again the story about his mother’s death. It is a simple story and one of my favorites, and I think it is one of his too. I never knew my grandmother because she died before I was born, so I ask about her a lot because there might be something of her in me too. Anyways, this is the story. She went to lie down in bed because she wasn’t feeling well. She called out to her husband, to the person who was my Poppy. She said to him, I’m dying and I want you to hold my hand and he did. He held her hand in his delicate hands that had shaped and molded the doughs of puff pastries, canelés, cannoli’s, and croissants. The hand that later held my hand. He kissed her and she breathed her last breath and he held her hand.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me lifting my brother’s weights in the summer of 1979. The east side of the Buffalo, New York of my later youth was much changed from the place where my parents had grown up. The clean streets grew dingy. The once mighty and robust Buffalo economy that built the teeming neighborhoods of first and second generation immigrants reeled from manufacturing job loss and the energy crisis. Businesses shuttered. People moved away. The corner bars were covered in the elbows of those who used to make things with their hands. The deindustrialization of the northeast was occurring around us but our reality was not the same as our parents. For them, the hulking hull of the giant Bethlehem Steel plant that lay empty on the shore of Lake Erie was a harbinger of hard times. A billboard read, “Will the last worker out of Western New York Please Turn out the Light.” This was during the time of the end of the career of Muhammed Ali and the rise of Leon Spinks, Roberto Duran, and Sugar Ray Leonard. The floating of the butterfly succumbed to the missing front teeth from a brick to the mouth of Spinks, to the hands of stone of Duran. In much the same way this was occurring in our neighborhood. The beauty was replaced with an ugliness. My brothers were on the train tracks with balled fists. The hardness of the time was all around us. In our street hockey games, the cars would come down and the game would be suspended, the nets moved, to let the car pass. The exhaust darkening the snow. The white turning charcoal. The oil trucks tumbled down the street and stopped. The beleaguered operator in oily overalls would pull the hose to deliver the heating oil through the hookup on the side of the house to the furnace. The home owners coming out and saying with their hands in their empty pockets, just half, just half, hoping it would last if they conserved. If they pinched and saved or if the winter wasn’t too harsh, but it always was. We would pull the nets back into the street and resume the game until we dropped the gloves and fought like hockey players should. In the summer we lifted weights in our yards. We went shirtless and took on a new, tough language. We swore and spit and made many small fires. We were erasing and erasing and erasing instead of creating. We mocked the Polish accents of the elderly and smoked stolen cigarettes. The light of summer highlighted the emptiness and then the wind shifted from the north and it snowed and we put on our tired jackets and pulled the nets into the street. Our sticks scraped through the thin snow and clicked and scratched along the concrete. Bodies clashed in checks, bone on bone, hardness and anger and desperation in every hit. But within it. In the hopelessness of the loss of jobs for those who use to make things, in the shuttered businesses and bloodied knuckles, there was still that old sense of things. That through the harshness comes something smoother and easier. It was in those moments, when we were all bone and sinew, that we became Wayne Gretzky. For long moments we stopped erasing and created instead. We became adept at dodging checks and anticipating where the puck would be and executing the right move at the right time, and in that way we became graceful again. We moved and looked and saw. We moved through the dinginess and saw in it our own beauty. The men coming home from the bars, still unemployed, stopped and watched, and saw it too. Maybe even saw themselves in a group of kids who yelled car and stopped and moved the net to let the intrusion pass before going back to the game. To the perfect pass and a stick handle and score. The harshness tinged with kindness and grace. The strength of who were, where we came from, and where we would go.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. As I recount my youth on the east side of Buffalo, New York, I am trying to understand what it was then that somehow stays with me and makes me see the world in the way that I do today. I have touched on this before but only peripherally so I want to be clear. I want to make sure you understand that it was the emotional and physical strength of the women in my neighborhood that had a profound effect on me. Of course, at the time, my thinking was the complete opposite. Instead, the women of that neighborhood, my mother, grandmother, aunts, nuns, and the mothers of my friends were as rigid at the statue of Mary that graced every backyard. Their suggestions and directions were largely ignored once we bicycled out of the neighborhood and made our way into the fields and thin slices of woods where we hunted snakes and found the soggy cardboard mats of old hobo camps where waterlogged issues of Playboy or Hustler introduced us to another world. We turned those pages with a stick and talked big, piling lie onto lie. This was in the time of BMX, skateboards, and stolen bottles of beer from the refrigerators of our fathers. We built fires and poured gasoline on them. We swore at each other and made crude remarks behind the backs of the priests and nuns who taught us. We drank warm beer and smashed the bottles against brick walls and then we went home to a hot meal made from some recipe that was handed down through generations. We were oblivious until we weren’t. We were rude and cruel in the woods. We were nasty on the ice playing hockey. We spat. We yelled. We used our fists and then we didn’t because we had discovered the girls of our neighborhood. They were our equals in every way, except one, they knew, in addition to the ordinary vulgarities of the neighborhood, how to temper that hardness with a softness. They would say, in the scrub of woods where we played, look at that bluebird, and we saw. At the lake, they would float on their backs way out and when they came in they talked about the quiet way the clouds moved over them. They had knowledge in seeing and feeling that we didn’t and we found ourselves changed. My best friend, whose hair was fire and whose knuckles were raw was so overcome he made grand gestures. Once he bought a bouquet of flowers and walked through all of us and handed them to the girl of his dreams. We all laughed and moved aside uneasily. With those flowers his hands became soft, his hair glowing embers. I too was swept away from brutal things. Here, on the shores of Lake Erie, a photograph was taken. It is a photograph of me and my first girlfriend. She lived a block away from me on Roebling. She knew how to spit and swear. She could do little tricks on her bicycle. She stood beside me on the beach, and when in my awkwardness I stood oddly, she put her hand on my neck and caressed it before moving it to my shoulder as if to say it’s okay, pull me close I won’t break, and I did and I could feel her power and the water fell in sighs on the shore and the sun burned bright. It burned away the coarseness and then it began to slowly set and it cast everything in perfect light. All at once I saw everything clearly. It was the way my grandmother showed my mother how to make dumplings. It was the way my father listened, directing all of his attention to my mother. It was my mother canning peaches at the end of summer for those moments in the long harsh winter when she would open them up for us, and they glowed like a sun and tasted of the summer when a girl put her hand on my shoulder and made me realize the power of softness and how it remakes the harshness into something more beautiful, the bluebird in the scrub of trees. The embers at the end of a fire. The light. The light. The light.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. This is not a photograph of me, it is the photograph of two of my classmates from the Catholic grade school I attended on the east side of Buffalo, New York. As I have described before the east side of my youth was predominately Catholic. The old Polish and Italian women in their thin dresses praying the rosary in the vastness of the basilica like church named for the Saint, Gerard, patron of children and mothers. It is not for nostalgia that I try to remember or at least try not to forget all of those moments spent on those few city blocks. It is, instead, the looking and seeing of what it was that helped shape me. It is all of those grey Ash Wednesdays that differentiated an ordinary winter day into something more, a stopping to recognize that we are here for a brief moment and then we are gone. This comes back to me sometimes, most acutely in the south where the sight of a person with ashes on their head is all the more striking on Ash Wednesday because they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but it happens other times too. At the scraping away of an old building. At a saddle shoe on a Sunday. At the dim reminders that surround us of a past that continually recedes. There was a piece of orange yarn laying in the street nearer the curb. It brought me back to the time of tube socks, Topps hockey cards, and pay telephones. Sometimes that is all it takes, a piece of string to bring me back to a grammar school parking lot at recess. To the moments that shaped me and made me who I am. In that piece of yarn in the gutter were two pig-tailed girls on a red rail holding a bit of string. Their fingers move and their foreheads narrow in lines of concentration. The old women are in the church while the children run and swear outside. In the midst of all the yelling from the jumping of the ropes and the hockey game I am watching them and everything turns silent when they run through a series of string figures passed down to them from their grandmothers. The fish in a dish to candles to the cat's eye. They were holding in the palms of their hands the secret. That bit of string that they held became the thin threads that connect one generation to the next.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. This is not a photograph of me. It is a photograph of my Aunt Laura, the youngest sister of my grandmother. My aunt who lived above my other aunt, her sister Rose. My aunt who kept a yellow canary named Dickey who when he died, bought another yellow canary and named it Dickey. It seems like nothing, this photograph. An old woman is carrying groceries and a newspaper. Seems so ordinary. Look again. This is what I have been doing on Thursday. This is what I do in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep on Monday and Tuesday. This is what I do on Saturday and Sunday. I get up quietly so as not to wake the dogs. Not to wake my wife. I put on a dim light. I read a book or try to read a book but the sentences somehow turn to memories. I pull out a shoebox of photographs and flip through them to find myself again, or to see where I went wrong, to see what happened that made me end up here. I’m not sure what I am trying to say. I think what I am trying to say is that in my youth on the east side of Buffalo, New York I was surrounded daily by what I wrongly assumed to be the ordinary. There was the butcher and there the bakery. There was the flower shop with the black mynah bird that hopped around on the counter or stood staring out the window. We jingled the bell above the door and stood fascinated before it as it said hello in greeting. A bird said hello and it pleased us until it didn’t. There was the milk machine that coughed up dimes and there was my aunt walking down the street. It occurs to me sometimes in the middle of the night how little I know about her. The non-filtered Lucky Strikes she smoked or was it Pall Mall? The yellow canary. The candy dish of kisses. With new eyes I look again at my aunt walking, the ordinary pedestrian, and I see myself. I see myself in her conspiratorial smile as she hinted at her past in the ways we all do. Relaying bits and pieces the best way we can. She was the wild one. The one who snuck out through windows to go dancing and drinking in her own youth. The one who had a married lover who I only knew as the bookie. But it is more than this too, this photograph brings back that former me. The dumb one reading books, leafing through New Yorker magazines, wanting to get out and out and out, sick of the same sidewalks. The milk machine. The way the light slanted in winter and then left altogether. I looked and listened but failed to see or hear. In the middle of the night, in dim light, I turn the photograph to let the light catch it so I can see it better. So that I can see what I missed. What I missed was the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The light tilting. The weight of the bag, and yesterday’s news in a hand I once held.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday, circa 1980 to the sweet streets of Buffalo's east side. Here I am smoking a cigarette I had pilfered from the purse of my lovely Aunt Laura who kept a canary that was yellower than the turtleneck I relentlessly wore. My Aunt lived above her sister in a spotless apartment. She smoked several packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes a day and she kept a yellow canary, that sang sweetly, in a cage. She also kept a covered glass dish on her coffee table full of Hershey’s Kisses. There was something about lifting the lid to grab a kiss that made the chocolate seem finer than the mass produced piece it was. But enough of that. Though I didn’t know it at the time, in regard to love, I was some lesser, but no less important, Antoine Doinel. I am with my gaggle of goons. We had been wandering around the neighborhood as we were wont to do in those days, laughing, riding handmade skateboards, playing stickball, gambling, and lighting small things on fire, generally before the street lights came on. This was in the time of tube socks, banana seats, and pay telephones. I was clearly delighted with myself, having just held the sweaty hand of my first love who momentously took her hand from mine to wipe the sweat onto her Jordache jeans before entwining her fingers into mine again. It was then that I realized all things were possible. We broke up a day later via a note passed in music class where my joy of being next in line to play the xylophone was greatly diminished by the words "i’m sorry” with a broken heart in place of the dot over the lowercase i on a sheet of snow white paper folded into eighths. She had found another. The first of many such experiences in my young life. But this was before that note. We were walking our familiar streets. There the barber. There the butcher. There the lot where we played hockey. We were untamed, bodily, and brutal. We laughed with our mouths open, we spit and swore, stumbling towards the things of adulthood. The holding of hands, the kissing and touching. The overwhelming beating of our hearts in our fine, thin, chests that we ignored by making sarcastic remarks or setting small things on fire that belied our true feelings. Those feelings that we felt when we held the hand of the girl in the perfectly blue jeans or when we heard the sound of that bright bird cut through the silence, or lifted the lid of a glass bowl to reveal the treasure of a tinfoil wrapped kiss.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of my childhood home. There were cherry trees in the backyard. The fruit ripening red. We ate them until our lips were stained and then ate more. My father cut them down in the early 80s and that was the end of that. The east side of Buffalo, New York was a neighborhood of nestled industrial vernacular homes, many of them doubles with an apartment on the top floor. It was a working class neighborhood populated mostly by first and second generation Italian and Polish immigrants. There was a bakery. There was a bar. There was a butcher. There was the church and its school. My street was lined with maples and in the winter the snow was shoveled into mounds at the ends of the driveways. The neighborhood teemed with children. Catholics. They smoked cigarettes and threw rocks. They built fires and poured gasoline on them and watched the flames rise. Their hockey sticks scraped the streets. They rode bicycles in groups and instead of ringing a doorbell, they yelled outside the homes of their friends for them to come out and play. My parents rented out the upper apartment to help make ends meet. They rented it to a couple. The woman plodded up the stairs in the evening and down them in the morning. I believe she was a teacher. Her pear shaped husband wore white t-shirts that were washed and rewashed until they were a dull gray. On exceptional evenings I could sit on the steps that led up to the apartment and listen to the woman yell and break plates over her husband’s head. I imagined him just sitting there, head down, aware of his failures and unable to do anything about them. At some point she kicked him out and I never saw him again. Afterwards, she seemed to carry an unknown weight up and down those stairs. Sometimes I would see her at the bus stop shifting from foot to foot waiting. I’m not sure why I remember that, maybe there was something to the image that was universal. A broken woman was waiting while her life whirled around her. But waiting for what exactly? For the comfort of home. For the telling and retelling of the stories that shaped us. In the old houses of my youth were the same old stories. This generation built on the backs of the previous generation. The neighborhood was populated by the past. It stretched both backwards and forwards. In the houses were the old furniture inherited from the death of parents. Linens, plates, and silverware all seemed to be imbued with a sense of history. The recipes of my grandmother in a tin box on a shelf. These items were the thin threads that connect generation to generation, and keep their stories alive. The houses contain them all. They are etched into the stairs with the weight of the broken tenant and in the yard with the tartness of cherries. The houses windows like eyes looking and remembering. They sit, those houses with their stories, waiting for when the rot of October succumbs to the snow of an unseasonable December which melts again to hyacinth. In the attic where I left my youth, I found my mother in a quiet box-tucked neatly behind the memories of an Easy-Bake oven, Spirograph, and orphaned Legos. Each of which carries their own stories and the stories from those stories. My sister and I were just getting things in order, pulling down my mother’s clothes to pack them in black plastic garbage bags so they could be hauled off to the Goodwill, as you are wont to do after an unimaginable grief, and then, like that, there she was again. Without the port or tubes, in perfect Kodachrome, knee-deep in the lake with her playful smile that we keep with us like the scent of the hyacinth that she planted and still lingers.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me in a square of light from the house I grew up in on the East side of Buffalo, New York. It is a curious thing what photographs do. How they stop time, edit a life to a fraction of a second, and then disappear, only to reappear again many years later, and in the instant of the seeing bring you back to those moments you thought you had forgotten. On the back of the photograph, in the cursive of my mother’s hand, is written “David in golden light, 1979.” I am struck by the ordinariness of the image. I have come from the adventure that was outside. I am as usual lost in my thoughts and watching the dust particles float. I am with my friend whose hair was fire. We have caught salamanders in a cup, or potato bugs, or beetles. I have no recollection of the day of this particular photograph to which I attribute to the long languid summer days that bled from one to the other without regard to time. Mondays were Wednesdays and Fridays were Mondays in those days. So this photograph is a photograph of all of those days when we hunted snakes and put them in Folgers cans with air holes poked into the plastic lids. In the mornings after breakfast, our mother sent my brothers and me out into the neighborhood. We ran the streets. Threw rocks until we discovered kissing girls, but this was before that. This was when I went out into the world and newly discovered it. Everything was a revelation. Each day held countless epiphanies. We jumped off of garages into pools. We ran and tripped and gashed our knees. The blood ran red and thick. We spit on it, wiped it off, and ran again. Our bodies glistening with sweat. Life and death were entwined. There was a yew bush in our yard with plump red berries that our mother told us were poisonous. We mashed them in a bowl with a stick and some mud that we had made with the garden hose. We crushed the berries into a fine paste and then the game turned, unbeknownst to me the youngest. My brothers, who smelled of gasoline, threatened me with the death berry paste until I cried. This was known as love. But here, in this photograph, I am thinking thoughts I thought I had forgotten. I am bright with the newness of discovery. I am figuring and searching, amazed with the wonder of it all. The salamanders with their flat tails. The thickness of blood. The juice of the deathberries. The ash smudged fingers of my brothers. The spokes of a bicycle wheel. The safety of light through a window. The pop of a ball in the mitt. We were baseball players in the World Series. We were gangsters. We were explorers and scientists. We were thinkers before final thoughts. We were feral and free. Until we weren’t, until Mondays actually became Mondays. Until death became real. Until we learned time. But for a brief moment this many years later, in the rush of what constitutes life now, through a photograph I am there again in the golden sunlight imagining the countless universes in the dust particles that float through a shaft of light from the window of my childhood home.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. I want to go way back because I am feeling nostalgic for the days when people read actual newspapers that stained their fingers with ink. Here is a photograph of me when I was three or four. I am on the east side of Buffalo, New York. The east side of Buffalo, New York in those days was teeming with children. The children on the east side of Buffalo carried sticks and rocks and chestnuts. They smoked non-filtered cigarettes and were routinely sworn at in German, Italian, and Polish by old women in babushka’s who sat staring with bad eyes on crooked porches. I was a taciturn child, wholly unremarkable. I am the youngest of five. I am being watched by my brothers who are clearly nowhere to be seen in this photograph. I am certain they are on the train tracks lighting things on fire or throwing rocks at the girls they like. My sister, were she to find out that they had left me, would have grabbed them by the scruffs of their necks and banged them off of a radiator, but she too is missing. She is probably eating sponge candy at the Garden of Sweets on Bailey Avenue. In any case, here I am, alone and observing the world. It is a common theme in my life. I distinctly recall this day, it is one of my earliest memories, perhaps made concrete by the existence of this photograph which must have been made by my grandmother before she retreated inside to listen to polka music on her little transistor radio. I am alone and watching the neighborhood unfold around me. Everything is a wonder and bathed in light. I remember thinking: Buffalo is no resort town. It is the sorrow of one thousand storms and a monument to the perseverance of people. I thought to myself: not far from here, the water rises and falls with a slap like a sigh on the beaches of Lake Erie. The gulls circle overhead, and the canadian geese fly in formation, as the wind comes rushing down from the arctic, carrying the whispers of goodbyes from arctic villages like Kivalina, and then hurtles down what has become the saddest of streets of leaning victorian houses. All peeling paint and cracked porches. It occurred to me, as I stood there alone, how much we lose with every extinguished life. The rotted porches can only hint at the rocking chairs and the chipped lipped pitchers of iced tea of its past. The chair will be chopped up for firewood and the pitcher sold and collecting dust in a secondhand store. I remember thinking about my mother and what would happen after she goes. Those memories of hers as she walked this same street held tight behind her eyes. Who is left to write the history of what took place here? The power of her memory will never be heard again, and it retreats into the leaning houses which creak to get our attention, then stand mute under our gaze. It was with these thoughts that I made my first attempt at drawing the figure. At making a mark that might be left when I too grew old and died. I was at the beginning of my life and saw how it was attached to so many other lives. I saw myself stretching backwards in time in the eyes of my grandmother whose eyes resembled her fathers who I never knew and it went further into a past I would later find hints of. I saw it leap out towards the unknown of the future, at things I was too young to comprehend but still somehow felt. I bent to my task with a piece of rock that when pressed into the concrete made a white line. I drew myself and in drawing was trying to make meaning of my life.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me and my sister taken about six years ago on the east side of Buffalo, New York. I want to praise my sister. There is much to praise. Her toughness and overwhelming kindness. Her heart, which is all encompassing. Her love. Her love. Her love. I am getting ahead of myself. Six years ago was a year of relentless rain in my life. One of those years where the 1% probability of a 100-year flood occurring actually does occur. I was wholly unprepared for the deluge, without raincoat, umbrella, or galoshes, but still, that rain fell and fell. It fell so much that it saturated the ground and crumbled foundations and swept them away. In wet shoes and wind I gathered up the pieces as best I could, but the whole of everything I knew was gone. In that storm my sister came out in a thin coat and tied a rope around my waist so that I should not blow away and disappear. It was an incredibly long rope. She was in Buffalo and I was in Texas. It was in that storm that I began to see my sister, who is considerably older than me, she being the oldest and I being the youngest in the family, in a way I had not seen her before. I will try to be clear. As my world was falling apart our mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. So the storm continued in a hospital near Christmas where we gathered around my mother. My brothers, my father, my sister. All of us talking in that quiet way when the person you love is resting but needs you all there, needs you to be all around them. In that quiet, a group of carolers came to the door and asked if they could sing. My sister said yes. Yes. The carolers sang Silent Night with its sleep in heavenly peace and unknown to them it was my mother’s favorite and that made my sister cry who had said yes. I had rarely seen my sister cry and that made me cry. In the room that night I saw the old Polish kindness, love, and toughness that was my grandmother and my mother come into the heart of my sister. I saw it extend further back to my grandmothers mother and then to her mother, both of whom I never knew, and then I watched it come back to settle in the heart of my sister. I remember feeling a sense that everything would be okay. In some quiet way my sister made me see this, made me see the bright sunlight through the storm. The wall of grief and uncertainty that had been built around my heart seemed to weaken. The waiting and wanting seemed to drift away. There was a brightness of my heart, and a calmness of my mind. I felt as though I could see myself from a great distance. Surrounding me was the quiet, the beauty of work, the lake, and all of the moments of those who had come before me and who had brought me to this place and then would carry me forward. The connection to everything became concrete again. There was a lull in the storm. As my mother slept, my brothers and sister and I walked through the old neighborhood of our youth where we had been formed. My sister told us the story about how she had dressed me up like a girl and then paraded me around the neighborhood. This had occurred when I was just a milk-bellied toddler with huge blonde curls. I was ringlets of golden sunshine on a glowing head that smiled and smiled at the attention and she had walked me around the block waving to everyone, showing me off. A spectacle. This was during the time of tube socks, rock and roll, and buttons. I didn’t have a clue, the only thing I knew was that my sister made me feel special and important and beautiful. At the telling of the story, she stopped and looked at me there on the street in the old neighborhood. Battered and stooped, she saw me, and I straightened up. We all stopped. She gave one of my brothers a Kodak camera, the rest she told to get the hell out of the way. We had not made a picture together in many years, but she held me like she did when I was her babiest of brothers and I put my arm around her, and in that moment I knew everything would be okay and then the camera clicked and I went back to Texas where the rain continued to fall in that odd year. Still the rain wouldn’t cease, and just when it seemed like the sun would never shine, my sister sent me mail and inside the envelope was the photograph she had made.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. I was leafing through photographs last night, you know just going through moments in my mind like I do on any given evening and was struck by this photograph of my brother Michael and myself circa 1979. It is significant for many reasons. One reason is that this is the only known photograph of the famed banana whiffle ball bat that is central to many early Gianadda boyhood stories, culminating in its destruction by gasoline and a match from a box stolen from my Aunt Laura, who, you might remember from earlier recollections, smoked several packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes a day. I hit a record 362 home runs pretending I was the great New York Yankee, Thurman Munson, with that bat. This photograph is also significant in that this is the only known photograph of my brother Michael between the years 1972 and 1989 where he is not wearing a black leather jacket. This was in the time of tube socks and showing your love by beating someone up with your fists. For instance, some many years before this photograph was taken a bully poked me and poked me and poked me in the chest with his big dirty finger and said "wah, wah, did I break your lil’ chicken bone chest lil’ chicken baby," and then poked me again with his grubby finger and pretended to cry like a baby hoping it would solicit in me a rush of tears like the great cataract that is Niagara, “wah wah.” We had been standing alone by the funeral home on the corner. I was 3. I was given the task to go buy cigarettes for my mother who was cooking gnocchi, but had been waylaid by the brutalness of language that was transmitted from the stench of the mouth of the bully. Out of the blue, my brothers, who had been setting small things on fire on the train tracks came over and waved their fists at the bully. They said, "you got something to say?" and then they waved their fists again and demanded the bully say it. They said: "say it!, say it!," but the bully cried and ran away. This was known as love. In any case, this photograph is also significant because it shows the first car my brother owned. Many girls liked my brother because he was well known around the neighborhood for the enormous amount of love that poured out of him and into the faces of bullies. He took up for the underdog and was also polite to the elderly which earned him the moniker "suchagoodboy" by many of the mothers of the girls that followed him around doe-eyed. I believe he kissed many of these girls behind our garage. But on this day, in 1979, which I remember with a clarity reserved for photographs, Karen Brzenczyszczykiewicz and Donna Kleszczynska (names have been changed to protect the innocent) were hanging around as he fiddled with his car. They were whispering about his hair, and buttocks, and making signs of the crosses on themselves as if that would help. It would not. He would kiss both of them before the end of the summer. One of them he would kiss directly inside that holiest of places in our neighborhood, the church. But this day, he talked to them softly, The love pouring out of him in a different way. It was so different in fact that it left an indelible mark on me. Karen had had her Kodak Brownie camera strapped around her neck that day, and he said "why dont you take a picture of me and my little brother?" She lifted the camera, focused, and snapped, and that is really why this photograph is significant. It is significant because instead of fists he used words to tell me he thought I mattered and was proud that I was his brother.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me in the golden moments of my youth on the east side of Buffalo, New York. I am rolling a tire I found in a vacant lot because my brothers had set fire to my Big Wheel on the railroad tracks by my grandmother's house off of Olympic Avenue. The burning of my Big Wheel had occurred several weeks prior to this photograph being taken. The matches which set fire to the gasoline that had been poured on my Big Wheel had been stolen by my brother from my Aunt Laura who smoked non-filtered Lucky Strikes. My brother will remain nameless, because I swore to him at the time of the theft that I would never tell, otherwise I would receive a fat lip administered by a knuckle sandwich. I did not know what the matches were to be used for at the time I had agreed to the pact. I am eight, still wearing the milk fat of my baby years, and wearing my favorite socks. I am shirtless because I loathed the feel of the hand-me down polyesther shirts of my brothers. I am trying to impress my first girlfriend who lived on Roebling Avenue and wore Jordache jeans. Her eyes shined like smooth wet stones and I longed to hold her hand, but her hand was held by another, and so I rolled my tire like an innocent Sisyphus. Up and down and back again. Over and over. This is what I like to remember. Not that my Big Wheel was melted on the railroad tracks by my brothers who enjoyed burning things and kissing girls behind the garage. Not the smooth wet stones that were the eyes of the girl who lived down the block and would eventually become my first girlfriend. Not the Lucky Strikes of my aunt who is a photograph now. Not my grandmother, that hero of a woman who made the love that was my mother, both of whom who are no longer. No. I like to remember the overwhelming joy and beauty of those moments. The truth and simplicity. A tire lay in a vacant lot and I rolled it. I was glad to be in the world with the air rushing over my slick summer body, full on my mother's potato pancakes. Intimate with everything I wanted. Laughing with my friend. The dream quietly waiting for the taking. The smooth wet stones still somehow shone on me. The way it was and the way it could be all wrapped up together neatly in a circle that I rolled and let go and watched as it went on and on - down the street, and then further and still somehow continues on.
Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here I am on the east side of Buffalo, New York with my first girlfriend who lived a block away from me on Roebling avenue. I would walk the block to her house, yell her name, and she would come out. We would hold hands until they got sweaty and then we wouldn't. We would play tag. We would dance. This was before I knew anything about Emmett Till, or Trayvon Martin, or Michael Brown, Jr. This was before I knew about war or death. We were just riding bicycles and smiling. I remember once going back to that old neighborhood on a visit. This was when my mother was still alive. Several years ago. We drove slowly to the neighborhood through deep snow on side streets. We were pointing out houses where our old friends had once lived. She pointed out important houses of her past. They leaned into the wind or were boarded up, their paint peeling. We kind of floated through the neighborhood. I am sure that each of us were remembering lazy summer evenings. The adults sitting on lawn chairs in yards, drinking beer, and playing euchre while their children ran along perfectly clipped lawns shouting. She said, “that empty corner lot there used to be a clam stand. Your father and I used to go on dates there.” Where the clam stand once stood had become an abandoned lot. The lot in the snow became a white square with several scrub trees poking up out of it, but it was beautiful. We drove past the library and the decomissioned church to the main road, which had been plowed. We stopped at the intersection and paused, taking in the scene. The snow and the gloaming had obscured the decay of this forgotten part of the city. It looked like it did when I was young. It looked like it did when everything was easy and carefree and the only problems children had to deal with were the streetlights coming on and taking baths.