Different Slants

Part Three

 I stood up and walked over to a table.  There were some blank white sheets of fax paper scattered across the surface, and then I saw a black marking pen.  I quickly wrote down three lines each on two of the sheets:

                                             MONSTER                                                      ALL

                                             POSTER                                                         $10.00

                                         BLOWOUT!!!                                                  EACH!!!

Grabbing the 8 and ½ x 11 sheets, I raced out the door to a copy center one mile away.  For nine dollars each, I could blow up the crude handwritten signs to three feet by five feet, big enough to seen by all of those cars racing by my windows, day after day. 

I counted the cash in my pocket.  

Forty bucks. 

I told the cute clerk,

“Make two of each sign, maximum length and width.”

 Ten minutes later and thirty-six dollars lighter, I raced back to the store, turned on all the lights and climbed into each dusty window. Standing on a couple of plastic milk crates, I taped one set of my two signs as high as I could to the top of the western windows so they can be seen over the tops of any cars that might be parked in front of my store.  Then I did the same on the eastern windows.

 Lastly, I plugged in and turned on the dusty, flickering orange “OPEN” sign…and then tied open both glass doors so the world could storm in.

 And I waited.

 And I waited.

(Read on …)

A  Bat Mitzvah (which means, a good deed), is a once in a lifetime coming of age ceremony and then a party celebrating what Sarah had worked for four years to achieve.  Now, it was only three weeks away. 

Was there to be no mercy for the children, as my country cries and the unemployed zoomed into the millions? 

This microscopic, in the grand scheme of things, but highly personal and emotional event in all of our lives was always intended to be a modest event.  But now, even “modest” was out of our reach.

As to: Modest?  A modern day middle-class Bat Mitzvah (Bar means for boys) can easily cost $10,000.  But if the underlying objective is for the parents to advertise their wealth, influence and prosperity to the world, it can be $100,000 or much higher.  But then, it is no longer about the child.

However, with careful planning concerning all details, i.e. choosing invitations, renting a hall, buying a special dress for the girl, ordering the food, having it catered with someone to clean everything up afterwards, a dessert table, a professionally produced movie, now common, about the sequential phases in the child’s life from zero to thirteen, a photographer, a videographer (for the party)—and it is not difficult to go on from there—a very small, unpretentious Bat Mitzvah celebration could still cost $5,000.

But none of this was possible now, on any scale.  Sarah, however, remained unaware of this reality.  Both a blessing…and a lie.

Joyce, afflicted with multiple sclerosis that robbed her of a decade old job as a controller in a surgical center, then consequently, causing the loss of our house as well as half our income evaporated—had watched this last act disaster of the failure of my business from the sidelines, keeping silent, impotent to stop it, a prisoner of her body.  She didn’t know what I knew.  I hadn’t had the nerve to tell her.

 Then she too, a strong-willed woman, and then Sarah, plunged in to help box up the sea of our magazines as fast as they could.  Part of a family and unwilling to do nothing to help out.

 But Joy still thought, somehow, there was money for a party for Sarah.  And Sarah still thought there was money for a party for her that all her many friends from both Hebrew and public school would come to.  I clung to that lie.  I couldn’t face the rotten reality, or them.  I embraced them for their work, but said nothing of their expectations about our tomorrows.  That secret was an acid that burned my mind, and my heart.

(Read on …)

 September 2009

Part One

I beg for your patience, because to find the glowing nugget of celebration that lies at the heart of this moving and true story, a person must delve deep inside the seemingly hopeless drama that surrounded it, fiercely, during the cruel economic Recession of 2009.

So, to begin, it starts like this: 

Some necessary facts— 

Joyce, my friend and wife of 35 years, was born Lutheran, is mostly Scandinavian and lived in a completely Christian southern suburb of Chicago, when she was the same age as our youngest daughter Sarah is, in this story.  She converted to Judaism in 1975. 

Sarah, my luminescent daughter, now thirteen, is adopted and also happens to be Scandinavian.  She has been part of our lives since she was six weeks old and knows of no other family dynamic or culture, but ours. 

Helen, my adored (and how else would you put it?) Mother-in-Law, now ninety, lives with us, next to Sarah’s room and down the hall from ours.  Wise and strong, the mother of eight and grandmother of multitudes, she too is Scandinavian, of course, and remains Lutheran. 

So, whatever else you read from this point on, it is very safe to assume that Norway and Denmark are two of the best places on earth.  Why?  Well, just look what they sent to me, steadily, and how much love and goodness came along with those gifts, as you will eventually see. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 After a long slow tortuous decline, reasonably blamed on the run-up to the present killer Recession, the community where I had my collectible periodical and poster store since 1990 began to seriously implode in 2009. 

Never a Mecca of excitement to begin with, my town—let’s just call it Sleepyville—was mostly composed of neat, modest middle-class homes and a series of national franchises on a main drag connecting two major very long, very wide Interstate highway on/off ramps, about six miles apart. 

A lot of very fast traffic racing between those two Interstates passed my store daily—thousands of cars, too—but year, by year, by year, less and less of those cars bothered to stop at the dozens of small owner operated shops that lined the north and south sides of that east-west connecting road that was the commercial heart of Sleepyville.  

There was little crime there, but virtually no night life at all.  People who slept there went elsewhere for entertainment.  But, as the bad times silently crept into each local home, eerily like the fabled Old Testament’s Angel of Death soaring over ancient Egypt and killing all of their first born, more and more people stopped going anywhere. 

(Read on …)