Some twenty
years ago I was invited to play in a mixed doubles tennis tournament at a
friend’s club. My partner was a lady
named Mimi, and Mimi turned out to be
a sex therapist.
Chatting
between matches, Mimi and I discussed, among other things, the sexual mores of
the younger generation. I told her what
I had observed on the campus of my daughter’s college, and Mimi told me about a
niece’s wedding that she had recently attended.
It seemed
that a few minutes before the ceremony began, Mimi was alone with her niece
doing the things that aunties do with needle and thread and safety pins at a
time like this when her niece said, “Auntie Mimi, I am so lucky to have an aunt
who is a sex therapist. Please tell me
what I need to know.”
For a few
seconds my friend pondered what she might say to her niece on the subject of
sex, three minutes before she was to walk down the aisle. Finally she came up with, “Maintain a sense
of humor at all times.”
The moment I
heard this, I realized that it was a great philosophy not only for the perils
of sex, but for the minefield that is marriage in general. It was too late to apply this newfound wisdom
to my first and second marriages, but it’s done wonders for the current one.

Last night
we had our first out-doors-grilled hamburgers of the season. Some years ago Donna bought an electric meat
grinder and now grinds her own hamburger.
That way we can be reasonably sure that it contains none of the
contaminants that make eating rare hamburger hazardous. And I like my hamburger rare.
I do make a
mean hamburger, but nothing like the ones I used to eat at a place called “Primeburger”
on New York’s Madison Avenue. I don’t
know what cut of meat they used or what they did to it, but it was wonderful
and, back in the 1960’s when I was in my 30’s and working in New York, I would
frequently have my lunch there.
There were
seats at the counter, and I can’t remember whether there were tables in back or
not, but at the front there were maybe twenty chairs set against the wall with
little attached trays like the ones they have on a high chairs. The tray would swing out for you to sit down,
then you could pull it closed and create a nice eating surface for yourself. And this was where I preferred to sit. Sometimes I’d have to wait for an empty
chair, but the wait was not long and well worth it.
One day,
when I came in, there was an empty chair beside two older ladies, one of whom was
very attractive and looked extremely familiar.
Immediately, sirens went off inside my head. Not recognizing people I should recognize and
being chided for it has been a life-long affliction of mine. Aunts and cousins have had a field day
embarrassing me publicly for this failing.
And this attractive, well dressed lady, I decided, must be one of my
mother’s New York friends. I commuted
from Connecticut, but my widowed mother had moved from Philadelphia to New York
a few years earlier and often held parties to which my then wife and I were
sometimes invited.
This woman,
however, was more familiar than just someone I was introduced to at a party. She was someone I saw repeatedly and, clearly,
I should know her and acknowledge her with
a hearty greeting and an embrace. If I
ignored her, she would certainly recognize me, have her feelings hurt, and I
would not hear the end of my social faux pas. I approached cautiously, thumbing through my
mental Rolodex of Mother’s acquaintances.
Were we on a first name basis? Should
I ask about her husband or would that get me into further complications?
The woman looked
up at me, recognition in her eyes, and I knew that I was, again, in trouble. Then, in a baritone voice that was surprising
but not unfamiliar she said, “Hello.”
I immediately
made the connection. She was the actress
Lauren Becall. I had met many
celebrities in Mother’s salon, but Ms. Becall hadn’t been one of them.
“Hello,” I
responded. “Wonderful burgers, aren’t
they?”
Ms. Becall
agreed that they were and turned back to her interrupted conversation with her
companion. I caught her saying, “So then
Bogey looks at me and….” before she lowered her voice out of my auditory range.

Last summer my behind went into spasm. I was bending over a paper trimmer on a
counter in my basement and suddenly my right butt muscle began to hurt like
crazy as it went into spasm.
I have a
thigh muscle in my right leg that cramps in the middle of the night, every once
in a while when I’ve brought my knee up to my chest in my sleep, and I know
that if I stretch it, which is exactly opposite to what it wants to do and a
very painful maneuver, the cramp will soon subside. Then I’ll just be left with a very sore thigh
muscle. But here I was standing in the
basement, which is none too clean, in my good pants, because I was on my way to
a ceremony marking the start of hybrid bus service at a transit agency that Donna,
my wife runs, and any muscle stretching that I could do at the moment was very
limited. Suffice it to say that when the
spasms were over, several long minutes later, my entire right leg was numb, my
behind was in pain, and I could barely make it up the basement stairs.
Driving an
hour to the ceremony, where Donna was already getting ready to greet the
governor and the media, was no easy task.
But at least I had a good conversation starter for the reception
afterwards.
The
following day, I betook myself to my chiropractor, a man with magic fingers
and, possibly, in league with the devil, who made most of the pain go
away. But he did forbid me to do any
running until further notice.
Further
notice did not come until some six weeks later, and I knew from long experience
that my first run would have to be a very gentle jog of no more than a
mile. Running every other day, I could
increase my distance by a few hundred yards each time until I reached my
customary five miles, two and a half out and two and a half back. I could have done more than five miles, and on
occasion I had, but I didn’t have the time.
That first
day I ran actually a little less than a mile and found myself quite tired that
afternoon. Two days later I did extend
my run to that full mile, then slept away a good deal of the afternoon. But two days after that I was still able to
do no more than that one mile. That was
five months ago. Now, after training
faithfully, I can only do a little more than two miles. And getting around is an effort the rest of
the day. Then, if rain forces me to skip
a day or even two days, I find myself back to that first mile again.
What have I
learned? I have learned that eighty,
which is the age I reached in January, is elderly. If I skimp on my running, for whatever
reason, I get out of shape real quick. And
getting back into shape takes much, much longer than it used to.
Now, I’m a
Capricorn and a classic late bloomer.
I’m doing things now that I could only dream of doing twenty years
ago. In addition, I get senior discounts
in theaters, on trains, and even at our hardware store. When people see me coming, with my white hair
and mustache, they hold doors open for me, a lovely experience after a lifetime
of holding doors open for everyone else.
But I don’t know if I’ll ever reach that two-and-a-half-miles marker
again.

Yes, I’m resuming this blog after a very long absence.

These have been two very exciting years. In 2010 my first published novel, “Writer’s Block” came out. What makes it even more exciting than my first memoir, “Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939,” which came out in 2006 is that being a full time writer of fiction has been my dream since the age of 12 or so.

Those of you who have read one or more of my memoirs will know that I was living in Poland and Jewish at the start of the war, that I had a beautiful and courageous mother who, unfortunately, missed out on the “nurturing” gene. She brought me out of Hitler’s clutches in heroic fashion, then plopped me into boarding school in America, something I was emotionally not ready for, because she had a life to make for herself in this country and didn’t really have room in it for me.

Well, “Writer’s Block” is a humorous and fictitious account of what might have become of me had I zigged instead of zagging in a number of places. My hero, Kip, was born in Germany and Jewish and brought to America and deposited in boarding school much as I was. But, while my mother soon married then proceeded to push her husband to advancement he wasn’t ready for in the diplomatic service, Kip’s mother, Anna, is a business woman who, with help from rich admirers, develops a modest chain of dress boutiques.

When Kip graduates from college, Anna wants him to come and manage one of her dress shops, and Kip runs as fast as he can to a small college in the Midwest and gets a teaching job in the English department. There he gets seduced by an attractive unwed mother whom he marries and who gives him three years of misery before running off with the assistant football coach.

Brought up in boarding school and with no experience in family life, Kip doesn’t know how to cope with all of this. His colleagues on the faculty shun him like a leper, he is incapable of engaging in a proper romantic relationship, and a new college president begins to turn the cozy little college into an impersonal university. Kip spends some thirty years doing the only thing he knows how, enduring.

Then, and this is where the story really begins, a colleague, a teacher who spent his summers in the little village of Venice on the Massachusetts coast writing successful Gothic romances, and thus enjoying a more prosperous life than the average teacher, crashes his private airplane and leaves Kip his Venice house. Kip, of course, is sure some lawyer made a mistake because things like this don’t happen to him, but he is finally convinced to drive to Massachusetts and look over his new house before he puts it on the market.

The keys to his new house, he is told, should be picked up from the village postmistress, a widow named Amanda Lazaro. Kip takes one look at Amanda Lazaro and falls in love. The fact that the fifty-something postmistress is very attractive is aided by Kip’s romantic mind finding a reason why she should have his bachelor friend’s house keys in her possession. Kip decides that he will quit his job, settle in Venice, and turn his lemon of a life into the Great American Novel…. while courting the delectable Widow Lazaro.

But Kip is the poster boy for disaster, and …… well, I don’t want to give the story away. At any rate, let me say that “Writer’s Block” is the start of a series of adventures featuring Kip and Amanda, and you’ll do well to give them a try.

So now I have my new hearing aids. They’re free from the V.A., as compared to my old ones that cost nearly $3,000 commercially. And they don’t plug up my ears, the way the old ones did. As the audiologist explained it, these units will just boost the higher frequencies, which I have trouble with, and leave me to hear the lower ones on my own. With the old ones, I could hear nothing except what the contraptions fed me. For all I know, there could have been little, tiny radio receivers inside and someone was telling me, subliminally, what products to buy and whom to vote for.
Also, these don’t hurt. When I first got the other ones, the man told me to wear them all the time to get used to them. But, since I’m alone all day writing, and since, when my wife comes home, she speaks in a clear voice, there was just no point to it. All I would be doing is burning those tiny batteries and building up calluses in my ears. The only time I used them was in a social situation, when certain people didn’t speak loudly enough, and when I gave my talk and couldn’t hear questions from the back of the room.
Bur these new ones sit behind my ears with just a wire leading inside, so they don’t irritate, and I can wear them all day, if I want to. That way I hear birds singing and crickets chirping. And I also hear the stairs creaking, as I climb them, I hear strange noises from my car’s engine, and I turn around, thinking someone is talking to me, whenever someone across the street says something. Of course, when I turn on the tap in the kitchen sink, it sounds the way Niagara sounded to me the last time I was there.
As for my wife, she’s delighted that we don’t have to have the television so loud anymore – probably the neighbors as well.

One evening last week I gave a talk about my two books to a group of women at the Westport, Conn. public library. My wife came with me, as she often does, and we came away particularly pleased. The crowd had been smaller than we had hoped for, but they were very attentive and asked really insightful questions. To celebrate, we decided to have dinner out, and we ended up at a restaurant in Westport that I knew from when I lived there, some thirty years ago.
As we were getting back into our car, after supper, I heard something fall out of my jacket pocket. Looking down, I saw the little blue plastic box in which I carry my two hearing aids. I am slightly hard of hearing and I carry the hearing aids with me on such occasions in the event that I can’t hear the questions that people ask. With our small crowd, that problem did not come up, and the hearing aids had stayed in their box, in my jacket pocket.
How the box got out of my jacket pocket was a mystery, since I was wearing the jacket, and I had never known of anything falling out of a side jacket pocket, while someone was wearing it. Nevertheless, I picked it up, put it back in my pocket, and we drove off.
It wasn’t till the following evening, as we were getting into bed to watch some television, that I had occasion to avail myself of the hearing aids (I hate the damn things but they make television more intelligible), and when I did, I discovered the box to be empty. It was quite clear that the box must have snapped open in the restaurant parking lot, spilled the hearing aids, and snapped shut again.
It is by the rarest coincidence, that next week I am scheduled to take possession of a new set of hearing aids from the Veterans’ Administration, at no cost, so the loss of these was not such a tragedy. They had cost over $2,000, two years ago, before I knew that the V.A. had begun giving them out for nothing, but, as I said, I hated them and saw no difficulty getting along without them for a week.
Still, $2,000 is $2,000.
Westport is two towns away from here, at a distance of around eight miles. By the following morning it had been some thirty-six hours since I had dropped the hearing aids in the parking lot, and countless cars must have had the opportunity to grind them into the pavement. With the new aids arriving soon, it didn’t make sense to make the trip.
Then I remembered a scene from my coming book. In Book III of my “Mother and Me” memoir, “Loves of Yulian,” (due out next March) as those of you who go on to read it will learn, I describe a scene in Rio de Janeiro, in 1941, when my mother and I were on our way to safety in the United States after escaping the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in Book I. Our journey from Poland was being financed by my mother’s diamonds, which she managed to sell, one at a time, along our way. At this point, she was down to her last diamond ring, and it had to feed us and pay our way to New York. After returning from a morning at the Copacabana beach, my mother discovered that her ring was gone. It must have, we assumed, come off at the beach and either buried itself in the sand or some sun-worshiper was one diamond ring richer.
I was nine at the time, and volunteered to go back to the beach and look for it. Mother said it wasn’t any use, since I would never find it. But my mother and a friend of hers were in such gloom in our hotel room, that I wanted to get out of there and went down to the beach and dug around. As I dug, I fantasized finding it and rushing back to our hotel , a hero.
Of course I didn’t find it, and came back dejected to report my failure. And then my mother did a strange thing, but one that was characteristic of her. “What’s the point of sitting around with a long face?” she said. “All right, the ring is gone, and that’s a very serious loss, but we aren’t going to bring it back by crying over it. Let’s go downstairs, have some tea, and cheer ourselves up.”
Leaving our room, we found the elevator out of order, and had to walk down the stairs. The stairs had windows on an alley between the hotel and the next building over. And, as we passed the bottom window and saw a man sweeping the alley, we also saw Mother’s ring lying there. “Quick, Yulian, get out there and grab the ring!”
I clambered out the window and retrieved it. The ring must have flown off Mother’s finger as she was shaking the sand out of her beach jacket, outside our bathroom window overlooking the alley.
Now, remembering that story and my mother’s unshakable optimism, I climbed into my car and drove to Westport. I even had a lawn rake in the trunk, in the event that I had to rake underneath some cars. But, at ten in the morning, there were only two cars in the lot and, right where we had parked two evenings ago, were two pink plastic hearing aids. One had a piece out of its housing, but seemed to work. The other showed no damage, but didn’t work. Well, it was damp from the rain and might work after drying out.
I now have a piece of Scotch Tape over the broken housing, and, after drying out, the other one does work. When I told my wife about my find, she couldn’t believe it. “I would have just given them up for lost,” she said.
“I would have also,” I answered, “except that I remembered the story of Mother’s ring.”
“What story?”
“The one in ‘Loves of Yulian,’ in Brazil.”
What I had found is something considerably more valuable than $2,000. Thanks, Mom.

In my last posting, I questioned whether anyone was reading this blog, since I hadn’t received any feedback in some time. I said that, unless I got a response from somebody, I would not continue.
This morning I received an e-mail from a woman named Alejandra in Argentina, who asked me to continue since this blog helped her with her English. Thank you for your interest, Alejandra. This story is for you:
As I was running a few days ago, another runner caught up to me (at 78 I don’t run very fast) and we ran together for a mile or so, talking. Being neighbors, we tried to find out if we knew any of the same people, but we couldn’t find any. But we did get onto the subject of the “six degrees of separation” theory, meaning that, supposedly, if you count “someone who knows someone” six times, you can reach anyone on earth. This reminded me of a story that I went on to share with him.
You see, I came to America at the age of 9, landing in New York in May of 1941. My mother and I moved in with an aunt and uncle of mine who had an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. And on November 11th, Armistice Day, which we now call Veterans’ Day, I walked to Broadway to watch a parade.
There was a band and units of soldiers in helmets, with rifles on their shoulders. Behind them a group of WW I veterans marched proudly, in their puttees and Smoky Bear hats. And behind these veterans there were several open cars containing bearded old men, mostly in blue uniforms, but some in gray ones.
Now, I didn’t know much about U.S. history, at that time, so I took these men to be retired city and state policemen. It was some time later that I realized that they were soldiers from the Civil War.
Thinking back over that experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that some of these Civil War veterans must have, certainly, laid eyes on Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Gen. Lee’s father was Light Horse Harry Lee, a soldier in the Revolutionary War and a personal friend of Gen. George Washington. Which means that I’m separated from the “Father of our County” by only three degrees. It’s an interesting thought to ponder on a quiet evening.