50-30 – The Post Office

I grew up in the post office. Sort of. Both of my parents worked for the post office, and I’d visit them often from when I was young, in elementary school right up to college and after.

I knew where the employee only door was to visit my mother, and I’d walk on through even though it said, No Admittance, Employees Only. This was also my way of bypassing the line and I would give my mother my mail and she’d dump it into the sorting tray.

I used to send a lot of letters and cards to friends and pen pals. I didn’t realize that stamps had to be paid for; that thyey cost money. My parents never asked me for money for stamps.I thought they were a benefit of working for the post office.

I’d leave my mail sticking out of the medicine cabinet mirror in the bathroom at night, and the next morning they’d be gone and on their way to the addressee.

I sat at Gloria’s desk, twirling in her chair, pushing around the cigarette butts in the ashtray with a pencil. I’d use the stampers on blank pieces of routing paper: First Class, Air Mail, Fragile.

On ocassion, I’d sort the mail into the carrier’s trays by zip code.

I would address letters to my grandmother by simply writing Grandma and her address.

I knew the importance of the return address and using a zip code. I rebelled against the zip plus four.

For a long time, I could identify a state by its zip code, and I was one of the only kids in class who knew all the postal abbreviations for all of the states.

Even today, two hundred fifty miles away from those childhood post offices, I still feel at home sending out my letters and packages. I sneak behind the second counter to build my boxes, pack them, address them and tape them closed. This isn’t an official counter where the stamps and money are kept. It is alongside the retail section. It might have had a cash register a long time ago for just the retail items, but it’s just a great space to pack up and get my Christmas presents ready for mailing. I do get asked a lot of questions, though because everyone thinks I work there. I can almost always answer the questions, which makes me feel good too.

As a kid, I knew not to put any mail in the blue neighborhood boxes. I still don’t although the problems that happened in the 70s don’t really happen too much anymore – fireworks in July, eggs at Halloween.I do hand my already stamped mail to the clerk about ninety-nine percent of the time.

Fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous? My clerk knows I know it, and he has to say it anyway, so I just smile and wait patiently to answer him. Usually it’s the first three, especially around the holiday season.

I automatically hand over my credit card, knowing the clerk needs it for the credit transaction.

I’ve asked for tape and markers and staplers.

I almost always use priority mail. I remember when priority mail was guaranteed like express mail is.

The price of stamps almost always goes up right after Mother’s Day, at least it did two or three times in a row.

I remember when computers came into the station, and at my parents’ first station together, we could walk to the pizza place and back. Joe’s Pizza.

As an adult they kind of frown on you spinning the chairs around, but there was not a chair that I didn’t spin when I was a kid.

50-29 – Wales, The First Time

When I first arrived in Wales many years ago, I didn’t know how profoundly it would affect me and change my viewpoint of everything. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered the word for what I was feeling: hiraeth. Hiraeth isn’t homesickness, but a longing, a yearning for one’s homeland, and it is not so much that you know it when you feel it, but the emotion of hiraeth is so much more than its literal definition. In fact, it doesn’t really have a literal definition, but a broad emotional meaning. It’s spiritual.

Wales, that first time, was in so many ways, a surprise. I wanted to visit a castle, not realizing that the castles I associated with Wales were English castles used to subjugate the Welsh people rather than built by the Welsh to protect them and their interests.

Wales is a surprise, and never what you’d expect. If you expect rain, the sun will shine. If they say hill, they mean mountain. Their lifeblood is slate and coal, daffodils and leeks, but most of all the people. It’s palpable. No matter where you are in North Wales it seems that you can see the mountains. The English call it Snowdon, but it is Eriyi in Welsh – the haunt of eagles. So much more evocative, isn’t it? So much more poetic like the Welsh lilt and cadence.

That cadence of the Welsh tongue is much like the valleys and peaks of Wales itself. They know their history and remember their independence, although that mostly ended in 1282 with the beheading of Llywelyn the Last and the drawing and quartering of his brother, Dafydd, their blood as much a part of the land as the craggly rocks and the rivers.

My first trip to Wales came about by accident. Luck. Fate even. I was asked to join my college roommate in England. Sure, why not? Of course, there was more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. I borrowed the money from my brother, who was better at keeping his than I was with mine and off I went.

My roommate asked me what I wanted to do. My only response was, “I don’t care. I want to see Stonehenge and a castle; I don’t care about the rest. I’ll follow you.” She planned it all through trains and buses and hitchhiking, hostels and B&Bs. I followed along, collecting pictures and memories.

We made our way from London at this first day of 1987, a new year. We went westward and south and west again, and eventually entered Wales. I don’t remember crossing the border but Wales was different. Welsh had made a resurgence so all the signs were bilingual. I began keeping a little dictionary in my journal although no one made us speak in consonants. W is a vowel by the way, but that’s another memory.

Wales was different.

The air was different.

The sky was different.

The sheep were different.

It didn’t rain in Wales; at least not the Wales I was in. This was January, and Britain was grey; very grey. It held the first patch of blue sky I’d seen in the two weeks I’d been on this island. It was that perfect cloud peppered Crayola sky blue color that exists nowhere else, its reflection off the quarries deepening it and the snow evening out its perfection. It must be special.

But the sky wasn’t all that made it special. There was a feeling I’d never experienced before, not deja vu, but I had been here before. I don’t know how or if, but physically I’d never, but I was.

How can everyone not feel it?

It was overpowering. I needed to be here, high in the mountains, midnight hikes, counting the stars, not having an historical clue, but knowing that I walked in the footsteps of ancestors, of family, of specialness, feeling as though I’d taken these steps before. This wasn’t restless spirits like I’ve felt at other historical holy places; these were memories, memories of feelings.

Crazy, I know.

There was a weightlessness, a joyful singing in my soul that nothing else compares to. I only imagine this is something of the feeling that people get when they travel to Israel, but I don’t actually know.

It is my spiritual home, an ancestry I wasn’t born to, but I was called on to feel, to be a part of, to let inside and settle into my soul. It is always there, this feeling of Wales and the Welsh, the people as much a part of the land, and as much a part of me as my own children.

When I went back almost twenty-three years later, I found the feelings still strong with only my research and readings that gave me more context and made it more tangible to breathe in. My footsteps following Welsh princes, understanding how remote a castle stronghold really was breathing the same air, wondering if I would ever understand these feelings.

Even home, I get fleeting glimpses through a looking glass – the wet colored leaves on a rural road and I forget that I’m not in Wales. The hesitation at a roundabout, confused about which way to enter it. The tree outside my church’s window when it rains – it is always a surprise and always a physical reaction and then I realize it’s through a window and I’m not in Wales. These come upon me through no special thought, but there is the realization that Wales is a part of me and who I am, and maybe one day I’ll find out why and maybe even how I have this connection.

50-28 – Like a Birthday or a Pretty View

High school was a time for friends and music and concerts. I still feel the ramifications of standing too close to a speaker in a closed building listening to The Stray Cats. Now that was an experience and an amazing memory.

There was Berlin, the Thompson Twins and others, but none more important to my life as the five Brits known (and still known) as Duran Duran. Named for Doctor Duran in Barbarella. With their hair and their makeup, their synth pop. The three unrelated Taylors, Nick Rhodes, and Simon LeBon creating music that was danceable and singable, but also moving and inspirational, a creative catalyst for my writing and exploring what was barely in my mind’s eye, but that wanted to come out in ways.

My friends and I would go to the park, climb up on the big stage at the amphitheatre. They would play their air instruments, and I would take their pictures using my air camera.

Click, whirr is the sound a camera makes, and I was the paparazzi following them on tour.

We were 100 Club, and we opened for Duran Duran. We wrote creative fiction, not song fic, maybe closer to fan fiction. Mine was a murder mystery – Murder at the Odeon. and it was my second moment of fandom and writing colliding.

Duran Duran also contributed to our creativity with their videos – The Chauffer, Night Boat. Their videos told stories that encouraged us to tell our own stories.

My current text notification is Late Bar, one of my favorite songs from them, conjuring up holes in walls, drinking, and mystey. It influenced a poem I wrote for the yearbook called Spies, which in turn encouraged a new Dungeons and Dragons game that was called Top Secret that was role playing for secret agents and government spies.

Their Hungry Like the Wolf was very much like Indiana Jones and New Moon on Monday reminded me of those undercover agents sneaking around foreign lands.

Thirty odd years later and I still listen to them. They remind me of high school, and college but they also fill me with new bouts of creativity and writing inspiration.

50-26 – Horsing Around

Writing Prompt – High School
I had three very close friends in high school. I am still friends with them today, seeing them daily on Facebook. Every high school class has its senior skip day and we were no exception. I don’t remember which one of them planned it but it was most definitely a conspiracy against me.

First, I should say that I grew up on Long Island. I can’t swim and I hate the beach. Maybe it’s all the water. Most of the senior classes went to Jones Beach for their skip day. The school had gotten wind of this over the years, so pretty much anyone who went to Jones Beach got detention. The assistant principal, Mr. Allen would drive down there and scour the sand for students, jotting down names, walking the beach in suit and tie and his school shoes.

We, however did not get detention. We did not go to the beach.

We got into Ds car and drove east on the LIE; the Long Island Expressway. It was forever in the car. I think I was in the backseat. It was a “surprise” but clearly I was the only one in the dark. I don’t know when I figured it out, maybe there was a road sign, but we were almost there when I realized we were going to a horse ranch – a stable. Of horses. I nearly jumped from the moving car.

Here is where I should probably mention that when I was in elementary school, I went with my cousins to a dude ranch in Peekskill. I loved it there. I loved horses. They are beautiful creatures, but I could not get on the horse. Not any of them. I cried. It was traumatizing.

I wondered if crying as a high school senior was appropriate now.

I got on with ranch hand assistance and off we went. The sky was that perfect blue, not a cloud in it, dust kicking up from the hooves as we set off from the corral into the wooded area. It became a bit darker under the trees and slightly cooler, but it was still a comfortable temperature – the shade keeping the heat of the sun from really getting to us, and our horses.

I had the gentlest horse, or so they told me. He was trained to follow the horse in front of him which was great, espeically when the horse in front of mine decided to trot along the edge of the cliff. It probably wasn’t a real cliff, this was Long Island after all, and I probably wouldn’t have died or anythihng but it was still terrifying. I fell getting off at the end, but I had still done it.

One and done.

50-25 – Charm Bracelets

Did you ever collect charm bracelets? Collect might be a bit strong of a description for mine. I’d get them at a variety of tourist spots on vacation, and then promptly lose them upon coming home. I remember looking at them in the gift shop, twirling them around my fingers, examing each charm. I’d wear it for a little while and then it would disappear into the netherworld of lost socks and board game pieces, never to be seen again.

I have vague memories of tricorn hats, moccasins, cactus, oranges, palm trees, revolvers, horses and buggies, Amish hats and other like trinkets in fake silver and gold.

After college, I made myself a charm necklace with pendant charms that I liked but no longer wore, strung onto a shoelace or a thick piece of twine, each separated by beads. It became too heavy to wear.

In recent years, I began collecting charms again; this time on a chain bracelet. I picked things out that were meaningful to my life now. I did lose one of a bow and arrow that I’d had since the SCA and archery practice in the ’90s, and that made me sad, but I substituted a bow and arrow that I found on a keychain of The Hunger Games.

Each one means something different and symbolizes some aspect of my life now.

The charm bracelet was the first place that I put a cross after I’d begun my RCIA studies.

The compass symbolizes the constant journey I’m on, and keeps me on the path and going in the right direction.

The salt vial keeps the demons away. Actually, it’s a symbol of Supernatural, a television show that is one of my coping mechanisms for depression (along with others). It reminds me that I’m part of the Supernatural familly and to always keep fighting.

The Tree of Life is nature, and life, and something that is bigger than me.

My griffin is from my original charm necklace. It is my favorite animal. Part lion and part eagle, they are both majestic and confident, and their golden feathers are gorgeous.

The feather is in place of a quill for all my writing.

Each one is special in its own way. It is like my secular rosary.

50-24 – Green Candy Dish

That candy dish came to our house when my grandmother moved in with us. I thought it was the most hideous thing ever. There was a mosaic tiled tray that didn’t go with it but managed to fit into the hideous theme that apparently my mother was going for. The green on it was the same color as my grandmother’s green velvet couch, two pieces that separated. When she moved in one half of it went into the basement where I wouold lie down on it, legs over the arm watching baseball and eventually the US hockey team beat the Russians.
Looking at the dish now, I don’t know what it was that I didn’t like. I love the shine of the green even under the specks of dust. The colored tiles seem like painted slate. Someone worked very hard on that art. When I pulled it out of the bookkshelf, I started thnking about where I might put it in my office instead of keeping it safe behind glass. Perhaps put it in my mother’s curio with her rabbi and upside down ashtray that makes him taller.

I also wonder how my grandmother came to have this piece. Was it a wedding gift? It’s proably not old enough for that. I don’t recall her ever going to Israel like other family members did on my mother’s side.

Maybe it was her new authority in our house that I transferred to her stuff. She lived with us now. She became mean, like a third parent, telling us when to be home, to wash our hands before dinner, you know, usual kid complaining stuff. I could have been better.

Maybe it’s true that we mature as we age, and despite not liking this candy dish as a kid, now that I’m older, I appreciate the fine work that went into it; the distance it traveled to come into my household, and wanting and asking for it when my mother died.

My kids have a better appreciation for their grandparents’ things. They appreciate where they came from and the lives that they lived as kids and young adults. They’ve each had the opportunity to interview my mother-in-law for biographical reports for school and so they talk about her and her experirences often. I wish I was more like them when I was a kid.

50-23 – Bike Week

We do not ride motorcycles, so imagine our surprise to find ourselves in the middle of bike week in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania during the summer of 2008.

I’m a meticulous planner.My oldest son was going to be studying the Civil War when he returned to school in the fall, so I decided that we’d visit Gettysburg and see some of the places that I went to as a child and that would correspond with his upcoming social studies class.

We planned to see the battlefields, the Jenny Wade house, and the interactive light up map that shows the battles in action.

For some reason, there were no hotels that we could afford in Gettysburg proper, so we ended up staying just over the border in Maryland. It wasn’t too far, and we were able to get into Getyysburg every day that we were there.

We thought it was weird. It was the first week of July, but it was after the Battle of Gettysburg anniversary and reenactment, so we couldn’t figure out what was going on in town.

We knew immediately once we arrived in Gettysburg that there was something going on in town.

Motorcycles.

Motorcycles everywhere.

Big ones, small ones, loud ones. Ones with flags, leather jackets, demin jackets, vests, every combination of bike and biker.

I have never seen so many bikes in one place before.

It was a great vacation and we got to enjoy somethng that we wouldn’t normally have been a part of.

We did all of the things that we planned on doing and a few extra.

While we were outside eating ices at Rita’s, the kids waved at the passing motorcycles and they waved back. I wasn’t surprised by that, but the kids were and they loved it.

We stopped by one of the battlefields that had an observation tower. My husband and oldest son climbed up while I stayed in the car with the two little ones, and suddenly a man got off his bike and began to play Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. The air was still, and there was a palpable feeling of nearby spirits. It was silent except for the occasional bike coming or going. It was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever experienced.

Had we noticed that the town was going to be so crowded we probably would have changed the dates of our visit. Luckily for us, I had no idea and we were able to enjoy things that we wouldn’t have seen.

Even without our own bikes, we still felt very much a part of the bike week.

50-22 – Applepicking and Fall

50-21 – Miracle on Ice

1980. US Olympic Men’s Hockey Team. The Miracle on Ice. Jim Craig wrapped in the American flag, looking for his father in the crowd, tears falling on his cheeks. Al Michaels screaming, “Do you believe in miracles?! Yes!”

The late ’70s, early 1980s were the heights of the Cold War. In 1969, we’d won the space race with the first men landing on the moon. Nuclear armament was at its pinnacle until START treaties and talk of Star Wars, which while mocked was a real defense initiative against the Soviet Union.

Today they are Russia, and a half dozen or so other republics, but in the 1980s they were the USSR – the United Socialist Soviet Republic. The Iron Curtain was firmly in place.

Defections from communist countries was happening so often it became a TV trope playing itself out on television from Murder, She Wrote to Mission: Impossible, MacGuyver, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, and The West Wing. Russian spies were everywhere too, including our televisions on Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Remington Steele, Murder, She Wrote, and of course, Get Smart. It was all around us and television and pop culture reflected that.

In school, we continued to have drills in case the Russians sent their missiles to bomb us. I’m still not sure how lining up in the hallway or crowding under our desks in the classrooms were supposed to keep us from spontaneously combusting if it did happen.

We couldn’t travel to Soviet bloc countries, including Cuba, a mere 90 miles away from our border. Cubans climbed aboard dangerous boats and attempted to find a new life here. If you could reach the beach of southern Florida, you could be an American, but instead often ended up drowned or sent back.

Not to forget that at the time of the Winter Olympics, President Jimmy Carter was considering a boycott of the Summer Olympics that was to be held in Moscow later in the year. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and they were not happy with our threat of a boycott. [We did end up boycotting, and our teams could not go to the Summer Olympics in Moscow, including one of my high school teachers who had been training for competition.]

This was the world we lived in when the world came to the village of Lake Placid, New York for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games.

The Russian Olympians were a powerhouse. They were amateurs in the sense that they didn’t get paid in the traditional sense, but they lived better than most Russians and several were full time military. They didn’t work apart from training and they trained with state of the art equipment and in arenas, and on the world stage they were the best. At pretty much everything.

Our hockey team was a ragtag bunch of scrappy college students and true amateurs (average age 22, the youngest team up until that point) mostly led by the plain-spoken, dour looking Herb Brooks, but Herb Brooks had something else. He had sayings, motivationals that were sometimes cliche, and sometimes corny, and for a long time after 1980, I compiled a list of them that is long since lost. Luckily, Wikipedia kept track:

Brooksisms

Brooks’ original expressions were known by his players as “Brooksisms.” According to Olympians John Harrington, Dave Silk, and Mike Eruzione, these are a few. [Herb Brooks]

“You’re playing worse and worse every day and right now you’re playing like it’s next month.”

“You can’t be common, the common man goes nowhere; you have to be uncommon.”

“Boys, I’m asking you to go to the well again.”

“You look like you have a five pound fart on your head.”

“You guys are getting bent over and they’re not using Vaseline.”

“You look like a monkey tryin’ to hump a football!”

“You’re looking for players whose name on the front of the sweater is more important than the one on the back. I look for these players to play hard, to play smart, and to represent their country.”

“Great moments are born from great opportunity.”

“You know, Willy Wonka said it best: we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”

“This team isn’t talented enough to win on talent alone.”

“If you lose this game you’ll take it to your grave … your fucking grave.”

“You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.”[14]

“Write your own book instead of reading someone else’s book about success.”[5]

“Boys, in the front of the net it’s a bloody nose alley.”

“Don’t dump the puck in. That went out with short pants.”

“Throw the puck back and weave, weave, weave. But don’t just weave for the sake of weaving.”

“Let’s be idealistic, but let’s also be practical.”

“You guys don’t want to work during the game?”

“The legs feed the wolf.”

“We walked up to the tiger, looked him straight in his eye, and spat in it.”

“Tonight.”

“Again.”

He pushed this team, and while they weren’t expected to do great, they were still our team.

We watched them beat one team, and then another. When they were matched up against the Soviet team, we knew it was over. We skated a good fight, but we were done. The Soviets had beaten them in exhibition a few weeks earlier by a score of 10-3.

I was huddled around my basement television, lying down on my grandmother’s half green velvet sofa, my legs hung over the single armrest, just like I’d watched baseball the summers before and after.

I know I drifted off to sleep, but woke for the final moments of the game.

Do you believe in miracles?

After this moment, we all did.

We beat the Russians! We beat the Russians!

Not they; WE.

The college trained, Herb Brooks led, no names who became household names had beat what the world called a professional amateur team, the Soviets, who lost at nothing. They had won the gold medal in hockey for six of the seven most recent Olympics. We won.

Most people forget that this game wasn’t for the gold medal. The US Hockey Team still had to go on to beat Finland in the finals, which they did, to win the Gold. But somehow, this was better than the Gold.

This….was amazing.

50-20 – Temple

I recently found myself in Temple for my friends’ daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.It is at once familiar and strange to me. As a child, I went to shul or school twice a week, but there were no services with them. It was the learning of the language, the history, the tradition, and I loved it. I went with my cousins who were my best friends and neighbors. When we all moved, they to Florida, we to Long Island, I went to a more religious center that I did not like, but was lucky enough to find my old teacher, Mr. Baran and went back to the traditional school that I loved so much.

This recent time in Temple was more enriched by my attending Catholic Mass than any other thing I can think of. I suddenly understood some of the ritual that was never explained to me as a child.

When the Cantor sang, Oh-ya-say-Shalom-bin-romav, I began to sing along. I was amazed to discover that I knew every word, and wished that the song would go on forever because it brought me to a childhood place that I thought was lost.

It reminded me of the High Holidays in Queens. The High Holiday services required tickets. All of us children were left in the parking lot while our parents went in to pray at the multi-hour service. I was one of the older kids at seven or eight.

We stayed on the warm asphalt, playing jump rope and hopscotch in our Saturday best. For a long time I thought I made up this memory, but in talking to my cousins recently they remember it exactly the way that I do, so it must have happened. We were left to our own devices and on occasion someone would come out from the temple and shush us. We had the foresight to look chagrined, but as soon as the doors closed again, we went right back to our playing, eventually getting loud enough for someone else to come out and chastise us.

It was like that every year until we moved.

Griffins and Ginger Snaps

-I write, and I have a blog because of course I do-

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