Other People, and Love

My father, a generally careful, cautious man who only wore white shirts (no t-shirts ever although there was a period where my mother promoted the idea of colored Ban Lons on Saturdays) had a college roommate named Solly Stein.  They went to Cornell, and both were pre med majors though neither one became a doctor.  My father took over his father’s business:  Oscar Cohen’s men’s clothing and ladies and children’s shoes.  Solly became an inventor and had two successful inventions. One was the Humiditron, which did something vague with air, maybe recirculating.  As a child I tried to talk him into changing the Humiditron’s name.  We had one in our kitchen, with a very faint buzz which my father said was intentional.  His other far more successful device was a hand dryer purchased for  countless public bathrooms replacing towels. Hot air came out and your hands were dry. 

Solly and my father, for the occasion of my birth, bought a duplex beach house in the Jewish part of Connecticut, called Woodmont, adjacent to where the Italians lived.  Ours was a large green house with two equal sides – each with five bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a big screened in porch overlooking a seawall on top of a long rocky beach.  We spent our whole summers in Woodmont.  I was happiest there.  The days were long, and I often spent them with my good friend Abby who lived a few doors away.  We would swim, and play on the rocks.  Abby would draw (she is a photographer now) and I would try to write as much as I could into black and white notebooks  from the drugstore.  I’d describe what I saw and what I imagined.  One summer after the Steins left (Solly’s wife didn’t like our beach.  She said it was Nowhere.  I remember writing that down) their part of the house was rented to an Italian family named the Corranos.  Anne Marie the teenager daughter had a boyfriend named Billy, and I surreptitiously began observing their courtship.  They would fight.  They would make up.  Billy would bring her flowers. But I didn’t begin my serious obsession with love, which by the way has never subsided,  an endless curiosity about what love looked like and how.  I even recorded my first minor dalliance with an older boy, the following year ( I was 13, he was 16) whose family were tenants from the Bronx.  He went to Stuyvesant High School and read Carl Sandburg poems out loud.

My real lifelong obsession with love and what it looks like, what happens next, began with a neighbor next door.  The Mendlesteins owned a hardware store and had two children older than we were:  Joanie and Charlie.  They would always talk about how Joanie was marriage age.  I’m not entirely sure what the number was then, but my guess is she was in her 20’s.  She was tall, and her mother would worry out loud that being tall was a problem. Someone fixed Joanie up with Harry, and I remember the endless discussions prior to the date between my mother and Joanie’s mother Lil.  What would Joanie wear.  Was Harry good enough?  What did good enough mean?

As much as I could, I would write life down.

For many years now I’ve attributed my wanting to be a writer, and my lifelong obsession with love, to Joanie and Harry who ended up marrying and living in Hamden, Connecticut.  Were they happy?  What did they think of their lives and the choices they made?  They only way I could know the answers, even vaguely, was to make up their motivations, and their lives.

This week I’ve been collecting people’s favorite love songs.  Here’s one of mine.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Aretha+Franklin+It+Was+You&source=hp&ei=mcIHYrmBPcTEytMPhP-cwA0&iflsig=AHkkrS4AAAAAYgfQqjmEeSXNrMM_o_S6UBzekqJgBOCR&ved=0ahUKEwj5sYnJrvr1AhVEonIEHYQ_B9gQ4dUDCAw&uact=5&oq=Aretha+Franklin+It+Was+You&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAMyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeMgYIABAWEB4yBggAEBYQHjIGCAAQFhAeOhEILhCABBCxAxCDARDHARDRAzoLCAAQgAQQsQMQgwE6DgguEIAEELEDEMcBEKMCOggILhCxAxCDAToOCC4QgAQQsQMQxwEQ0QM6CwguEIAEEMcBEKMCOggILhCABBCxAzoLCC4QgAQQsQMQgwE6CwguEIAEELEDENQCOggIABCABBCxAzoFCC4QgAQ6CwguEIAEEMcBEK8BOhEILhCABBCxAxCDARDHARCvAToOCC4QgAQQsQMQgwEQ1AI6CAguEIAEENQCOgQILhAKOgQIABAKOgQILhANOggIABAIEA0QHlAAWJNQYIZVaAVwAHgAgAFNiAG6DpIBAjMxmAEAoAEB&sclient=gws-wiz

Tell us yours.

Love from Alte, and Esther.