Charting Van Wallach's adventures and obsessions, from small-town Texas to Princeton, Russia, Latin America and beyond. Open mic videos are included at no extra charge for your viewing enjoyment.
I have broad
musical tastes: Latin, 50s jazz, Israeli, The Great American Songbook, classical, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But what concert caused me
to drop everything, book vacation time and fly to Jacksonville, Florida in a
state of frenzied anticipation? In three words: Grand Funk Railroad.
My brother
Cooper, who lives in Florida and shares my fascination with Grand Funk, pitched me on the
opportunity to hear the pride of Flint, Michigan. Of course I said yes, yes YES. How could I pass on this
bucket-list thrill? In our early teens in Mission, Texas, we heard the power
trio’s epochal third album, Closer to Home, and that was it. We were hooked for
life on Grand Funk’s pounding, not-very-subtle sound and compelling lyrics.
Well, they're compelling when you’re 14 years old, but they do sink in. Live Album, Survival, E Pluribus Funk
and We’re an American Band were all on heavy rotation on our turntable at home.
The only downside
for a fan: Grand Funk never worked as a teen romance mood enhancer, if you get
my drift; nobody slow-danced to Grand Funk at Friday Night Lights post-game dances at the Mission Civic Center. The chicks I liked were more into the Carpenters, Carol King, the Jackson 5 and the Partridge
Family (and one really liked the Edgar Winter Group). So I cooled it on Grand Funk to show enthusiasm for Top 40 favorites. That didn’t add any more teen zip to my social life, but at least I learned a lot about the Carpenters.
Besides listening to the group, I kept up with all the Grand Funk gossip. Mostly that involved their disastrous legal battles with evil genius manager Terry Knight, who fancied himself as Grand Funk's equivalent of Elvis's Col. Tom Parker. I remember one headline in Creem or, who knows, maybe Tiger Beat: "The fight to control Grand Funk!"
While Cooper
heard Grand Funk in concert before, I never had. The group broke up in 1976 and spun
through several reincarnations. Lead singer Mark Farner was in and out of the band as he pursued a solo career, and drummer Don Brewer and bassist Mel Schacher at one point fired Farner. I read about
the band but never expected to hear them.
But then Cooper’s
call came, and I answered, “Yeah baby!”
Cooper greeted
me with Grand Funk t-shirts we’d wear to the concert on a Saturday night. My
black shirt accessorized well with black jeans and black hiking shoes, and my well-worn Tractor
Supply Company camo hat. We were ready for a road trip!
The Thrasher-Horne Center for the Arts in Orange Park was
packed, 1,700 seats almost all filled. We fell into the lower end of the age
distribution. I doubt 10 people there were under 40. I called the scene “rock
and roll and walkers.” And that’s OK, this was a bonding experience for Baby
Boomers who craved the visceral thrill of hearing Grand Funk live. And it’s a fact: Grand
Funk is Homer Simpson’s favorite band.
Before the show we posed in front of the stage, with its banner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of "We're An American Band." I recorded an open mic in the lobby to capture my enthusiasm for the moment. We were pleased
that drummer Brewer and bassist Schacher were still touring, then disappointed
to learn Schacher had been sidelined due to illness. Still, Brewer kept this
from being a tribute band.
The Grand Funk Brothers take the stage!
They mostly
played songs I recognized. Cooper remembered the lyrics better than I did,
singing along to “Paranoid.” We thrust our fists skyward and joined the serenade. The
crowd roared when Brewer, now the Grand Old Man of Grand Funk, waved an
American flag and wore an Uncle Sam stovepipe hat. The big finale was, of course, “Closer
to Home,” then “American Band.”
Don Brewer goes All-American
Back home in
Katonah, I told friends about my experience. Several guys responded with wild
enthusiasm; Closer to Home was the first album friend ever bought.
For one night,
I was back in 1972, 15 again. Unsure of myself, hormonally addled, I responded
to songs like “Heartbreaker” and “I Can Feel Him in the Morning,” with a children's spoken intro with the haunting line "if you're good, you'll live forever, and if you're bad, you'll die when you die." For a teen dealing with a serious crisis of faith, that song meant something.
Hearing Grand
Funk struck me with the notion of getting “closer to home.” I remembered my family,
my friends, the turmoil of being young in a small town. Maybe we cannot,
ultimately, go home again, but with Grand Funk’s musical support I can get
closer to home.
Afterward, I
wrote haiku poems about the Florida experience. Here’s one of them:
Sometimes,
timing can shift the shock of life challenges. What can feel like devastation
can become an opportunity.
Last week,
our area endured pounding rain. I anxiously checked our basement in Katonah for
dampness. Wednesday looked normal. Thursday morning I was lugging down the
traditional load of laundry when I saw rippling waves shining at the bottom of
the stairs. I yelped and stumbled back upstairs. My partner Naomi and I raced down to
gauge the extent of flooding. Estimate: 3-4 inches across the whole basement. My
look at the storage room where I keep writing examples, research materials,
records and books both relieved and shocked me. Many materials were in sturdy
plastic bins, records were on a table—but a cardboard box with tax returns and legal
papers was a solid soggy mass. Plastic bags with hundreds of pages of printouts,
including unpublished novels, were soaked. And my only electronic copies for the
novels were waterlogged 3.5 inch memory disks that went out of style in Y2K.
Naomi
immediately called John Hobby Jr. Plumbing & Heating, who are old hands at pulling our
plumbing nuts out of the fire. I feared they were swamped with calls from
flooded homeowners and it could be days before they could come over. But no! Our
timing was fantastic. Within 60 minutes a Hobby squad arrived in their
distinctive red van. They pumped out the water and replaced the sump pump,
which had given up the ghost in the wake of too much rain. Meanwhile, Naomi
contacted First Response, to get the drying process started (that’s First
Response as in the remediation company for home cleanups, not pregnancy tests).
Again, I thought the process would take days. Instead, Vinnie the project
manager arrived as the plumbers were leaving.
Vinnie
assessed the situation with a practiced eye. The next morning, his crew arrived
with industrial-strength dehumidifiers and fans that we moved around the
basement from Friday through Tuesday. While I tossed some stuff, I decided to
try to dry out tax papers and research materials. Every couple of hours I
probed the depths of my wet papers. I saw progress, as I rotated files in front
of the roaring equipment. Gradually, materials dried, even if they are
permanently crinkled.
But wait,
there’s more! A big part of cleanups involve brawn. As fate would have it,
Thursday afternoon we had a visit from Naomi’s nephew Ian, who was visiting the
area. Ian, you should know, is a 30-something commercial fishing boat and
tugboat captain from Alaska (and the brother of remarkable Alaska back-country athlete Ben Americus, who makes terrifying videos of his adventures). Ian arrived to see us at just the time when we
could use a strong, rugged Alaskan to move heavy cartons, flatten boxes and
make the clean-up process vastly easier. Otherwise, Naomi and I would have
struggled to move, flatten and throw out things, given our status as two increasingly
creaky baby boomers.
When we told
Ian the sump pump broke, he felt our pain. “On a fishing boat we always have
multiple sump pumps,” he said. That sounds prudent for a vessel sailing the roiling icy waters off the Bering Strait.
By Monday my
materials were dry enough to leave the basement. First Response picked up their
gear on Tuesday. We switched immediately to washing laundry, including every
towel we own.
I know the
recovery could have been much slower and messier, had the timing not gone our
way. If plumbers and remediators weren’t available, if the rain kept coming, if
Ian was out wrestling with giant tunas in Alaska. And the opportunity from the
flood: the clean-up turbocharged our decluttering efforts. The basement never
looked and smelled better!
This
afternoon I looked over my mostly dry papers, 20 to 30 years old. I’m trying to
smooth them out. This time around I’ll be smart and store them in plastic bins,
away from any watery threat. As an obsessive self-chronicler, I’m not going to let
something like a basement flood keep me from my materials. There’s still
literary gold in those stained, slightly soggy pages. From the grit of the
flood comes the essay.
I've become the unofficial bard of thank-you haikus, sent to friends and family after we get together. I try to do three at a time. Here are recent ones to wrap up 2023.
The Country Series
The country kibbutz
floats by the Delaware
Rachel and Alain's retreat
Rachel and Sonia
Lives depend on their work
Fighting the good fight
The sprawling kibbutz
Easy to wander its halls
The cats—never lost!
Brooklyn’s empty nesters
wonder how to fill the quiet
Well, why not more cats?
Alain's new ragtop:
Matthew's birthday Mercedes;
Drive it in good health!
NYC 8-8-2023
Van Gogh’s “Cypresses”
Breeze along the centuries
His gift to forever
Senior pass on buses
Such a deal! Hitting the road
Saves bucks for ice cream
2023 Rosh Hashanah and Christmas thank-yous
Cye, Mel, matzoh balls
Old family recipe
for a sweet new year
Founders of TBT
Cye and Mel are the Old Guard
That earns free parking
Mel at Samson AFB
Cold war front line of defense
but why no airstrip?
And here's one taken directly from the siddur today:
My hormones went crazy at a young
age. In the sixth grade I started shaving. A year later, I played shirts and
skins basketball in PE with a line of hair rolling down my chest.
Over the next decade matted curls
sprouted everywhere—back, front, shoulders, arms. Blessed with a positive body
image, I always enjoyed my look. The black froth washing over my collars marks
my visual brand. Shirtless at beaches, I think, “Gaze upon my swarthy Eastern
European-sourced Jewish physique! This is one Yid who’ll never get a back waxing.”
Validation felt good. A woman I
met in Brazil during my JDate days nicknamed me “Peludo,” Portuguese for hairy
or shaggy. I have the beach pictures of us as evidence.\
For real peludo acknowledgement, consider
New Orleans, 1987, at the Jazz and Heritage Festival. The sun, music and
crawfish made me groggy by mid-afternoon, so I stretched out on the ground,
shirt off, hat covering my eyes.
I had dozed off when I felt a
finger jabbing my chest. “What the heck?” I thought as I blinked to attention to
find two young women kneeling next to me, entranced.
“Why you are just the hairiest
thing I’ve ever seen,” declared one of them, a woman who gave her name as Mona,
from Mississippi. She’d come to New Orleans with another woman, a male friend and
the thickest Southern accent I’d ever heard to eat, listen and see the sights.
Mona kept running her fingers
down my chest in amazement; her frisky explorations tickled me, in more ways
than one.
I told her, “I bet you moan,” but
she was too sloshed to get my drift. I snapped a picture of her demonstrating a
drunken Cajun-Caribbean limbo dance move. Their male buddy took a photo showing
me flanked by Mona and her laughing
friend, as Mona’s hand stroked my peludo glory.
The peludo lifestyle isn’t all
fun and games. Shower drains clog without daily attention, bedsheets need regular
laundering. And consider the healthcare complexities. When I got a flu shot recently,
the nurse exclaimed, “I’m glad I don’t have to give you an EKG!” Ah, yes, the EKG
experience, the closest I’ve ever come to BDSM play, except there’s no “safe word”
to make them stop. Nurses dry-shave my chest and sides so the attachments will
stick. That’s the easy part. The nurses always apologize when they yank the EKG
attachments off. I tell them I’m used to the sharp but short ripping pain as
clumps of hair lift off me.
Knee surgery required my right
leg to be shaved to resemble a raw Thanksgiving turkey drumstick. I hadn’t seen
that much of my leg since I was in junior high. The shorn look didn’t concern
me—the fuzz always grows back thicker than ever (I learned that when, on a
whim, I asked a girlfriend shave her initials into my back, an escapade in body
modification that garnered peculiar glances at the gym for a few weeks).
As an adult I developed what I
call “hobbit ears.” My partner Naomi, as part pf my weekly home hair trim,
always plucks my ears and eyebrows. She’s very thorough in hunting down every
stray hair, so much so I often yelp, “Owww, this must be what childbirth feels
like!” I imagine she takes a discreet enjoyment from the vigorous tweezering, giving
me a little taste of the female maintenance experience. She also sternly warns
me to never, ever, wear a tank top in public, whenever I muse on that fashion choice
on hot days.
“No, Van, just—no,” she entreats
me. She has more common sense than I do on style matters.
I accede but still, if I ever do
this piece as an open mic, I may go all-in and let my furry freak flag fly in a tank top for
visual impact. My inner peludo needs to express itself. And if I can't do that, then I'll an OnlyFans page and monetize this look.
In July I entered a haiku contest organized by Katonah Poetry. I'd never written haikus and had barely read them. This sounded like a good use of my creative energies, so I entered with enthusiasm. To move the odds in my favor, I submitted 15 haikus for $30, or 5 for $10.
That didn't help, I didn't place. The winners were shorter than the classical 5-7-5 syllabic format, which I followed religiously, and more illusive in their images. Reflecting my mindset, my haikus were concrete and sometimes autobiographical. I strayed from observation on nature. Still, I enjoyed the creative effort and have kept writing them as the unofficial bard of weddings, baby namings and visits to friends' home. People like these snapshots of a moment. I envision them being printed and slipped into photo albums from these life events.
Here's my first batch, in the order I wrote them, with links to explanations and inspirations, plus photos. More will follow as they drift down from the ether into my imagination:
You’ve
probably heard of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ 5 Stages of Grief: denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, acceptance. That’s a time-tested and valid model. I’m
adapting it to my current approach to downsizing. Looking ahead to the
inevitable move from a house to something smaller in a couple of years, I’m confronting
my accumulation. While downsizing isn't as profound as death, it does come with emotional tumult and challenges, so I'm serious about making the comparison.
Moves over the
past 20 years winnowed a lot of furniture and electronics, but the core clutter
remains very stable. That’s vinyl records, books (including “I Learn to Write”
from 1964), shoeboxes of chronologically arranged photos, historical
newspapers, binders of clips from my journalism days, Princeton reunions
costumes and bags, hundreds of letters sorted by year, and folders of research
materials for my saucy memoir and other book projects.
Let’s start
with the “denial” stage, I always assert I don’t require THAT much space
for my stuff. My statement always gets a big laugh from my partner and open mic
videographer Naomi. But being at the point where I have to move boxes to reach
other boxes suggests I need to face reality.
I’ve passed through denial. What’s next is not anger but resignation of necessity. Something’s
got to give, or, more properly, to go. I’m starting with the records. My thinking:
I can hear everything online. Plus, records are a royal pain in the tuchus to
move.
Last week a representative from Hudson Valley Vinyl in Beacon, N.Y., came to scope my collection and make an
offer on the albums he wanted. Before vinylmeister Chris arrived, I spent 30
minutes clearing space in the basement storage room to reach the records.
Shades of “Hoarders!” Then I flipped through hundreds of albums to decide which
to keep, which to jettison.
Ready to inspection.
The stacks
reflected my evolving tastes. Obsessive compulsive that I am, I wrote the dates
I bought albums on their covers. I can track the shift from rock and pop
through BB King, Hall and Oates, Dinah Washington, Chet Baker, Cajun group BeauSoleil with fiddler Michael Doucet, Miles Davis and finally
Brazilian, my obsession of the last 20 years.
The “keep” stack
represents the “bargaining” stage of the cycle. I’ll sell THOSE but not
THESE. That elite list includes Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits, a gift
from my mother on my 16th birthday, a Coleman Hawkins album recorded
the actual day I was born, the soundtrack to the movie Chinatown, which I got
at the Virgin Megastore in London in September 1984 and lugged all the way back
to Brooklyn. My Woodstock soundtrack, stuffed with clippings about artists who
performed there. Their Satanic Majesties Request by the Rolling Stones, with the groovy 3D cover, is staying. I’m
keeping the first three ZZ Top albums, the soundtrack of my high school years
with songs like "(Somebody Else Been) Shaking Your Tree.”
As Chris
methodically checked the hundreds of albums I would sell, I moved to the curiosity
stage. What would he take. He found 60 LPs to buy, but he had to leave many others behind
because they were scratched. I didn’t get all sentimental and misty over what he wanted, preferring
to let them quietly slip to give joy to new listeners. The top album on the
stack was a Billie Holliday collection from 1933-1935.
Going to their forever home.
Now what?
Hundreds of records remain. Westchester has other record stores and I hope some
would want classic jazz. Grand Funk Railroad and Iron Butterfly, probably not.
And that moves me to the final phase: enthusiasm shading toward Kübler-Ross’
acceptance stage.
Downsizing,
I’ve found, takes on a momentum. The first steps are hard, but after Chris
left, I felt good about the progress, and the cash doesn’t hurt, either. Indeed,
I’m ready to wheel and deal some more.
At this
stage, I’m looking forward to a little less to pack whenever the inevitable next
move comes along. I’m now starting the downsizing cycle on books. Naomi and I will took boxes of books to the Goodwill store in Baldwin Place, N.Y.; I happily unloaded the car but I almost snatched back a huge collection of New York Times front pages. I finally I let it slip away.
I’m now writing to
see if friends are interested in books from my Judaica collection. Then I have
my books on the Soviet Union that I scoured from New York used bookstores in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I knew what I was looking for. Some books cross the Soviet and Jewish genres, like a volume of poetry by the Yiddish writer Peretz Markish. At a library tag sale I found his poetry collection Foterlekhe Erd (Paternal Land), printed in Kiev, Ukraine in 1938, during the Great Purge. Markish was executed along with a dozen other Yiddish poets and public figures on August 12, 1952 in a Soviet attack on Jewish culture.
That chilling book is
history in my hands. I’ve got to keep it. But will I? I’m starting over at the
denial stage so anything can happen. Make me an offer.
I’ll start
with a confession. I spent time at Sing Sing Prison and Rikers Island in the
1980s.
You may be
thinking, “Wow, this bald Jewish guy in his 60s who works for an accounting
firm must have been a real bad-ass back in the day. Either that or he was a
criminal defense attorney.”
I’m afraid
to say I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a jail-qualifying bad-ass. Maybe a dumb-ass at critical junctures of life. I’ve never been an attorney. No, back in the
80s I was a trade magazine reporter.
Writing for trade
magazines lacks the name recognition and glamor of writing for a big-city
newspaper or The New Yorker. I toiled for niche publications like Drycleaners News, The
Business of Fur, Leather Today, Banks in Insurance Report, and Magazine Age. Still, this line of work gave me entrée to Sing Sing and Rikers.
In 1984 I
was writing for Quick Frozen Foods. My assignment: write about frozen food at
the Big House, Sing Sing Correctional Facility. That sounded fun. The headline was “Frozen Fare Gives Prison
Chefs Something to ‘Sing-Sing’ About.” That punderful headline practically
wrote itself.
Staff at Sing Sing gave me very clear instructions on how to get there from the Ossining
train station a half-mile away. I arrived, signed in, was frisked, then went
with my notepad and camera to get that story. The highly cooperative foodservice team gave me a
lot of great detail on their operations. Nutrition director John Caserta took
pride in his operation to feed 2,230 men with a professional staff of 11 and
130 inmate workers, along with 14 security officers. Consistency is the key, as
one official with Bureau of Prisons said of the realities of prison life: “In a
pure socialistic society, everybody has what everyone one else has. With any
differences a black market grows.” So prisoners at the Allenwood “country club prison and the lifers at Leavenworth in Kansas” get the same grub.
Sgt. Leander
McCall Jr., head of foodservice security made a big impression. I described him
as “an imposing man with a handshake like a vise, he brooks no foolishness.”
Caserta described him as “the motivator.” My impression: dedicated people kept
the place working. I also learned the first rule of prison foodservice. And
that is (drum roll please):
“Don’t run
out of food.” Hungry customers are unhappy customers, especially in a penitentiary.
Four years
after Sing Sing, I had my adventure at Rikers. By then I was the East Coast
Editor of Video Store magazine, covering what was then the thriving video retailing
industry before Blockbuster obliterated the industry and then Netflix crushed
Blockbuster and most of the remaining video stores.
While Sing
Sing was enjoyable, Rikers was epic. I joined the press group invited to Rikers
when rap group Public Enemy performed at Rikers, an event every bit as historic
as Johnny Cash’s concert at Folsom Prison. The performance was being filmed as
part of a music video. Public Enemy was the first group to every play at
Rikers, and they came loaded with songs that instantly connected with the
audience: Don’t Believe the Hype, Bring the Noise and the classic Fight the Power.
I can’t find
any articles I wrote about Rikers, but I did make a laconic note in my journal
on August 14, 1988. The was after I returned, exhausted, from the big video industry
convention in Las Vegas. I wrote, “Friday wasn’t much of a day off. I went to
Rikers for the Public Enemy gig. That turned into an all-day romp in the heat
of a prison and I didn’t return here until 5:15.”
Lindsey Williams came up with the idea for the show. The then
22-year-old Def Jam executive was putting together a marketing plan for the
group’s sophomore album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. PE was
on Run-DMC’s Tougher Than Leather tour, and Williams, who was traveling with
the group, proposed that they visit and perform at prisons in selected cities.
. .
Planning the show took just over a week; the paperwork was
expedited by a tangential relationship between members of PE’s camp and the
Rikers staff. Turkkan arranged for two buses to transport 150 members of the
press from midtown Manhattan to Rikers . . .
The press arrived at Rikers before noon. They were patted
down, taken on a brief tour, and then ushered into a small room. Security was
minimal, with the only restriction being that press refrain from asking the
prisoners what they were in for.
Two hundred and fifty prisoners, most of them black and
Latino, entered the bare-bones auditorium. Even by August-in-NYC standards it was
brutally hot and the prisoners’ jumpsuits were drenched in sweat. In keeping
with protocol there were two guards per inmate with an additional 25 to 30
guards outside the auditorium, and additional officers from other houses on
alert. The press stood behind barricades and formed a horseshoe on the
perimeter of the crowded room a few feet away from the inmates who were seated
in plastic chairs.
Yes, I
remember the heat, the earsplitting noise, the tough-as-nails Rikers guards
and the holding pen for us reporters, who stuck out like pale sore thumbs in our natty sports jackets and penny loafers.
I now work in communications for a professional services firm. While that’s highly satisfying and has lasted as long as all my magazine gigs taken together, I still look back fondly to the unpredictable zest of writing for the trades. I never knew what I'd find on my plate. And that's something to sing about.
France forms the bookends of my parents’ five-year marriage,
almost all of it spent in that country. Letters they wrote give me details
about their move to France in 1955, after they were married in Texas, and their
bitter transatlantic split in 1959-1960. In between those dates my brother
Cooper and I were born there. After their divorce, France summarized the rancor
separating these two wildly mismatched people. As I get older, I look back on
their push-and-pull and wonder what might have happened had my French
connection remained in place.
In the beginning, newlyweds Shirley and Mark enjoyed their new life. Married
that March in McAllen, Texas, my mother had flown to France to connect with my father, who had moved to France to pursue a career in the auto industry
while working a day job as a mechanic on a U.S. Air Force base in Chateauroux. A
typed single-spaced letter my mother wrote to Dearest Ones (presumably her
parents and sister in Tyler, Texas) on August 3, 1955 brims with details about
the TWA flight from Idlewild (now JFK) Airport in New York, to Gander,
Newfoundland, to Paris. After reuniting, they were Americans in Paris.
My mother wrote, “Wednesday we walked to the section where the fine shops are.
All the shops are beautiful—didn’t buy anything except a thing for my hair.”
Stylish at the auto show.
Saturday they took the train to Chateauroux, a trip of a bit
more than two hours. She related: “Mark thought he could rent a car, but
couldn’t—we did rent a two wheel, two seater Vespa scooter. You should have
seen us—especially me in a tight skirt. No one pays any attention to you.”
Signs of dissatisfaction appear immediately. “Monday I was
awful lonesome, but kept busy, mostly washing. Visited the little house for a
while with the Sgt.’s wife and at 6:00 Mark came in and I opened cans and we
ate. . . Yesterday I washed some more and then walked to Niberne, a town
about 1 ¾ miles from here and bought bread. I wanted two loaves but I must have
said twa instead of du and ended up with three of them. Had a cup of French
coffee and walked home.” Later in the day they looked at apartments in
Chateauroux. She wrote, “Mark likes it here in the country, but it is too lonely since cleaning
is nothing and then all I have to do is read or sit. So into town we go. Too, I
want a bathroom of my own.”
Her first impressions of the locals were very positive. “The
French seem to be nice people and the country is all like a picture. The flowers
are so beautiful I can’t describe them, and Daddy, you would love the gardens,
they are about the size of our backyard and have two rows of all kinds of
vegetables.”
“Mark looks wonderful—it is so nice to be with him
again—haven’t been mad a time, yet.” That is offhand comment, in retrospect,
was ominous.
My father typed a paragraph at the end of the letter. “Dear
folks, now you know about Paris. Actually we only hit the high spots—and we ate
at some really crazy restaurants, Russian food on flaming swords—snails, all
kinds of things. Shirl is happy about the week in Paris and as soon as we
really get settled we will write more often. Love, Mark.”
I have little other documentation of the four years my
parents spent in France. My brother and I were both born there at the base’s
hospital. Photo albums show happy scenes, my parents in stylish outfits at car
shows. I’m decked out in cute toddler clothes and a beret, and clutch baguettes bigger than
me.
Fed up with financial and personality clashes, my mother returned to Tyler with my brother and me in 1959. Dad
stayed in France. She exchanged rancorous letters with him via airmail. She saw
him as financially feckless, he sneered that she needed to go to charm school. In
1960 she moved to her hometown of Mission, Texas and there we remained.
She emphatically stated her feelings in her will from
January 27, 1960, signed when she was 39 years old. The will said:
I realize I have made no provision
in this will for my husband, MARK K. WALLACH. We are not now living together as
husband and wife and the greatest portion of my estate consists of property
which I have inherited from my father and mother, JARED J. LISSNER and EVA M.
LISSNER, and of property I owned prior to my marriage. In view of these facts it
is my intention that my said husband should receive no share of my estate,
since it is my wish and judgment that my estate should pass to and vest in my
children.
The Hidalgo County Recordings column in the McAllen Monitor
of May 7, 1961, listed her divorce suit filed in the 92nd District
Court in Edinburg. I know because she saved the clipping—given to her in a card
that said “The News is Out” with a note on the inside: “Shirley, Here Tiz. I’ll
get the stamp on next trip, D.” She kept the card and clipping in her wedding
album. Was she being ironic, sentimental or simply a thorough chronicler of her
life, as evidenced that she often typed letters on carbon paper to keep her own copy? In the early 1980s I did exactly that when I wrote letters to her.
I remember nothing of France, although I must have known as
much French as a two-year old could learn. We traded the South of France for
the South of Texas, two geographies that defined my parents’ wildly divergent
personalities.
Our home had some evidence of France. The kitchen featured a framed drawing of dogs peeing against a wall, a famous piece popular with tourists by Boris O’Klein called
“Naughty Dogs." We had the photo albums.
My mother was good friends with a saleswoman named Paulette with a charming
French accent at her favorite clothing store, the Valley Mercantile in McAllen.
My brother and I learned whatever French songs American kids knew at the time,
like “Frère Jacques.” Classmates in my elementary school thought I had trouble pronouncing the letter "r."
France insinuated itself into my parents’ acidic views of each other. My mother saw it as the symbol of what she loathed about my father:
his Eurocentric snobbery, his disdain for her and her Texas viewpoint, his
self-absorption. My father lamented that my brother and I didn’t speak French, dressed
like ranch hands rather than boulevardiers, didn’t travel around Europe, didn’t
appreciate opera, ballet and art. and didn't have love affairs with beautiful older women like all the sophisticated French (men) do. No middle ground existed in their positions.
Needless to say, France, the land of my birth, never ranked
high on my list of adolescent interests. To do so felt like a betrayal of our mother. I look Spanish in high school, not
French. If I had dual citizenship, it never meant anything. Any vestigial
knowledge of the language stayed buried in me. I took Spanish rather than
French in high school and college, then Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Portuguese as an adult with a language-learning obsession.
Still,
France mattered as the empty place in my earliest memory where my parents were
a couple and Cooper and I absorbed the local culture.
I visited France in September 1984 during a month in Europe.
My mother had died of cancer that January, I was a freelance writer between
relationships and so I locked the door on my Brooklyn studio apartment and jetted off
on Virgin Atlantic for the extended travel I never had after college. After London,
I moved on to Paris and bought train tickets for the
two-hour trip to Chateauroux.
Returning to Paris.
I remember feeling anxious on the train. What was I doing? I didn’t speak
the language and knew nothing about my destination other than its name. I wrote
about the experience in the December 1984 edition of a short-lived publication
called New Men’s News. Titled “In Search of Memories,”
it records a forlorn pilgrimage to see where my mother had lived and loved, and where I began living:
I had to see Chateauroux.
I did that during a month-long
vacation. Once there, I walked down one road, then back, confused. Now what?
The staff at the local tourist office couldn’t speak English; I couldn’t speak
French. I indicated with a State Department birth registration form that I
wanted to find the Air Force base. They shook their heads.
“Le hospital c’est kaput?” I asked,
mangling three languages in one sentence.
“Oui, c’est kaput,” a woman said.
She did sketch a route to the old “base Americaine” on a map. With this help I
strolled through the noontime streets. I clutched every detail, and thought,
“So this is it.” Little cars were parked on the sidewalks, and most stores had
closed. Parents and children walked hand in hand, and my throat tightened.
There, 25 years earlier, went I.
I walked out of town to a highway.
Far away was a toy-like air traffic control tower and the former air base. I
thought, “This is far enough.” I took a picture and turned around.
Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody
rushed out and gasped, “Monsieur Wallach, oui?” I bought croissants, and got
caught in a rain shower. The ordinary events matched the way my mother
lived—steady and dependable.
Returning to Paris, I felt relieved
and somehow empty . . . A part of me will always be vacant, but the search
cleared away the gnawing I felt inside. There’s no place left to go, except
headlong into my own history.
That line—“There, 25 years earlier, went I”—reaches out, 40
years later, to describe the French connection I explore. In the past decade, I
became a big fan of French music of the eras of Django Reinhardt, Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker and France Gall. And I put a lot of time into French new wave and other genres.
I’ve seen many of the classics: Breathless, Jules and Jim, Elevator to the
Gallows (with that incredible soundtrack improvised by Miles Davis), Bob le
Flambeur, Rififi, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Alphaville, Shoot
the Piano Player. The damning Holocaust film La Rafle, about the roundup of
Paris Jews in 1942 by French cops, haunts me.
While French movies from any era are enjoyable, those of
the 1950s and 1960s especially resonate. I find myself peering around corners, watching
those parents with children, noticing the cars and fashions, mentally strolling the rain-glistened boulevards and casting my mind
back to the what-ifs of life.
What if my parents remained married and we settled into a stable expatriate life?
What if my parents divorced but my mother remained in France and my brother and I had a bi-cultural upbringing?
What we my parents divorced and we returned to Texas but our father took us to France for visits to introduce us to what he liked about France and Europe?
The last is the most plausible scenario, but it requires a radically retooled father with
the financial resources to afford a European family vacation, not to mention an
ability to accept and bond with boys from Texas. Both points, I know from experience, were
in the realm of fantasy.
I can't change the past but I can change the present, and I did. Since that trip
to Chateauroux, self-acceptance and curiosity replaced that vacant feeling. That didn't happen tout de suite, but in my own sweet time. And I'm sure I'll be back to France. A visit, some maturation and that stack of airmail
letters colored in some of the blank spaces of my life’s cartography.
The unstoppable waves of scam messages are dangerous but, once I started collecting them, took on a weird appeal. Silly on their own, collectively they have a rhythm and psychological urgency that makes them worth a look.
I never took them as messages "accidently" sent to the wrong email or phone. They're purely the output of criminal gangs looking to engage, cultivate, lure and rob victims. I never respond, despite the saucy photos sometimes included (right, I'm exactly their type, bald Jewish guys), or the chiding, pouting tone wondering why I'm ignoring their breathless desire for connection. They sound so wounded!
This is the start of my ongoing grotesquerie of lures with the hooks just waiting to latch on. Will AI make them better focused and personalized? I hope not, but with voice capture technologies and methods to mimic individual writing styles, that threat is approaching (if you get an email from me saying I've been arrested and need bail money, ignore it).
See how these sound. To add some ambiguity to the collection, several are real messages.
I am expanding my network and perhaps you have ignored my friend request because you are busy, but I hope that when you are free I will hear back from you, establish contact and give me a chance to ask you for advice
Hello, great to see your professional resume. I would love to meet someone with experience like you. I hope we can form new friendships. Can we chat if we have time?
Are you busy?
Delivery service: Provide the correct delivery address to avoid delay in receiving the goods due to incomplete door number. After replying "OK", reconfirm your address . . .
This number has been stored in my mobile phone for a long time, but I don't know who it is. Who are you?
It's been a long time since we saw each other. How are you and your family? (identical messages from the same fake number, two minutes apart.)
Hi, we have received your sample for testing from your healthcare provider
Good afternoon 🌞are you getting my texts?
You're busy
I was hoping we could get to know each other but you didn't respond
Please reply me
I was worried.
This number has been in my phone for a while but I don't know who it is, who you are
We temporarily placed your
Amazon suspended
To restore follow instruction below
Can you come over now ??? Where are you?
Hello, do you remember me?
USPS, we are currently unable to effect delivery. update the shipping address to resume delivery.
Hi! I left your number at that last party and I just remembered to contact you now, what
Alisa, did you take my email by mistake yesterday? There is a customer email of mine in it.
Do you want to go out to sea together tomorrow?
Do you mind looking in the front closet by the front door on the shelf if the game Twister is there?
Hi Hanal, yesterday afternoon I asked my assistant to send you an order, did you receive it?
Hello , I was hoping we could get to know more each other but you didn't reply yet. Are you busy or don't want to back to me? So I guess this is it, you are going to keep ignoring me.
Don't YU remember who am I?
Hello!WHere Have you been?
Hey, how was your weekend? Are you home yet?
Hey! Dear friend, you are invited to join the cryptocurrency internal discussion group. Lead you to earn 2K-50K per day . click to add group
Are you OK? Reply stop to unsubscribe (that's a tricky new twist, replying is exactly what the scammers want, to know this is a working number)
Hello, I'm Joanne. Do you know me? Reply STOP to unsubscribe.
Would you do me a favor and ask Naomi to text me?
Tim, I'm Ana, my father asked me to pick you up at Seoul Incheon International Airport. Message me when you get off the plane, please.
Serena, is everything okay? Reply STOP to unsubscribe.
I’m a great admirer of the work of linguist Deborah Tannen. She wrote “You Just
Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation” and other books. A 1993 essay in The New York Times Magazine, "Marked Women, Unmarked Men," especially struck me. Observing men and women at an academic event, she wrote,
“Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair,
clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision carried meaning. Every
style available to us was marked. The men in our group had made decisions, too,
but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower.”
Ain't that the truth. Women’s decisions resonate
and, if asked, they’d tell the stories of clothing and accessories: where
bought, who was she shopping with, the occasion, the hair stylist and salon. When
writing this, I asked my partner Naomi to run down the details of which she
wore at that moment. She related, “The pants and blouse come from J. Jill
because they fit me. Clothes are hard to find because I’m petite so when I
found these pants fit, I got them in four colors. The earrings come from the
market at Yellow Monkey Village
in Cross River. I was there with my friend Suzanne and artisans had displays
and I liked these.”
I’m proof that men’s range of options is narrow. I’ve joked
I can dress in total darkness because my clothes are so standardized: jeans or
khakis, mostly button-down shirts from Lands’ End , J. Crew, LL Bean, Brooks
Brothers and especially Eddie Bauer, switching to Tommy Bahama beach shirts for
hot weather. My shopping venue of choice: Goodwill stores and factory outlets, where I hunt for Levi's jeans and Merrell's hiking shoes.
Still, if you scan the perimeter of my accessories you'll see that I carefully choose my watches and my
ties. They carry a lot of delightful emotional freight and thrill me when I strap the watch on or pull
the tie snug up against the neck of my button-down shirts. They might not be as
noticeable or dramatic as, say, jade earrings, strappy high heels, or a little black dress from Nordstrom’s, but a careful observer could tease
meaning from my adornment. Just ask.
Back when I had to wear ties to work as a member of the
cubicle-dwelling white-collar proletariat, I settled on my specific style. I adored the Art
Deco look for ties, with their bold colors and patterns. I also had a thing for Italian ties I got in Italy in 1989, giving them so much use they finally fell apart. Two orange ties from the Princeton
University Store are reserved for alumni events, where we Tigers swan about in
glorious combinations of orange and black and nobody thinks we look peculiar. These
days, I wear ties two or three times a year. My go-to ties for the past 20 or
so years were designed by Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia.
They were a gift and I treasure them. Garcia’s ties, like his music, totally sync
with my tastes. What worked 40 years ago works now in my “touch of grey” phase
of life.
The essential tie collection
Now, let’s talk about watches. I got into watches as a kid.
I was big into 60s and 70s style watch bands, woven leather, black leather with
multiple buckles (heavy metal!) and military olive. As an adult with some
discretionary income, I indulged in watches that did a lot more than tell time.
I started with an Art Deco Gruen piece from a flea market on the Upper West
Side. On that 1989 Italian t, I bought a Raketa watch from the USSR, then a decade later two more, a Poljot (Flight) and a Komandirskie. The Raketa’s perpetual calendar ran from 1980
to the inconceivably distant year of 2000. They’re very distinctive looking—like all Russian watches—keep terrible time. As such, they're a perfect metaphor for the dysfunction of Soviet communism. But I still like them and wear them since my smart phone gives me the right time, anyway.
Heavy metal from Gruen, the USSR and Seiko.
The exciting news is I achieved my boyhood dream of getting
a vintage Hamilton watch. This isn’t a modern digital version made by Swatch in Switzerland. I’m talking about the real deal from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the ones advertised for decades
in National Geographic. I bought a Hamilton and an Elgin in a package deal at
Shop Goodwill for a mere $40, then spent many many times that amount to get
them overhauled and working. While the Elgin is cranky still, the Hamilton runs
fine and is one of my adult dress-up watches, along with a watch from my
brother Cooper. He’s a true watch connoisseur with an eye for fine mechanics.
He got me a vintage Longines that had sat for 50 years in a Dallas safe deposit
box before it came his way. When you see me at a swanky Westchester Country art opening or cocktail party, I'll be wearing my Longines or Hamilton with a Jerry Garcia tie.
I feel a lot
of affection for my ties and watches. They define my look and add a
splash of color and idiosyncratic style to the Levi's and Eddie Bauer schema I've always favored. I may dress like a colorless armadillo,
but sometimes I my inner peacock take flight.
