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The Invasion of the Pasta People

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by Pat Fortunato

When Did Everything Change?

Some say it was the Vietnam War, when we stopped believing a single word our government said, including “and” and “the.” Maybe it was when we started calling love affairs “relationships,” thereby sanitizing the romance right out of our sex lives. Or was it the rise of political correctness, when suddenly absolutely anything you said about anyone became incredibly insulting to someone.

I agree with all of the above. But I have another explanation:
It was the day we started calling spaghetti “pasta.”

Growing up as an Italian-American, the only time I remember hearing the word “pasta” was in conjunction with “fagioli,” although we were more inclined to call that bean and macaroni dish “pasta fazool,” a Brooklyn-American version of Neapolitan dialect made famous by Dean Martin in the song “That’s Amore.”

It was love all right. We loved our macaroni, which was different from spaghetti, both of which came in many varieties: from angel hair to bucatini, tubitini to ziti, ravioli to lasagna. In truth, we were very fussy about which pasta (although we didn’t call it that) went with which sauce, and everyone and his uncle (and, especially, his aunt) had their own, fiercely held opinions about this. But we called them by their names, so that it was linguini with clam sauce, or spaghetti and meatballs.

There were Meatballs Back then.

These days, it’s all different. And mostly for the better. You rarely encounter soggy, overcooked lasagna or baked ziti anymore, and you can get all kinds of stuffing for ravioli, not just the classic and one-time ubiquitous cheese. Now spinach is a given. Not to mention mushroom. Or duck. How about lobster! Crab!! Veal and truffle!! Almost anything you can think of. And so far, I haven’t met a ravioli I didn’t like.

It’s just that somehow I feel injured. . .

The general American public, against which I have nothing, or very little, has co-opted my heritage. They talk about pasta as if they invented it! They no longer marvel at my family’s Sunday spaghetti dinners. Although, to be fair, we really don’t have those any more. For one thing, we learned the word “cholesterol.”

And yet. A small part of me (and many, although not all, parts of me are small) does feel cheated.

How dare they take my people’s favorite food and make it their own.

Sometimes I yearn for the days when non-Italians spoke of making a spaghetti dinner and “We” felt superior to “Them,” because “They” had no idea how to make sauce, which we called “gravy.” Good god, some of “Them” actually used ketchup! And rinsed the spaghetti after cooking, or ate it with bread and butter—and milk! Grotesqueries, all.

But not any more. Now people know about all kinds of fancy pasta. Vodka sauce has become pedestrian. Rachel Ray makes saffron with lentils and tagliatelle. Personally, I never heard of saffron until I traveled to Spain, although lentil soup was a staple, especially when there was a ham bone left over from last night’s meal.

Spaghetti carbonara, about which my uncle once said, “If I want bacon I’ll go to the diner,” is now commonplace. Even at some diners. And don’t be surprised to see fettucine primavera on the menu. Fancy restaurants? Fuhgeddaboutit. Malfatti (roast suckling pig and fresh arugula), anyone? Burrata ravioli with truffle oil? Tagliolini with mussels and peas?

You name it, some ristorante has it. Everyone has it. Harrumph.

My only consolation is that not everyone, practically no one, in fact, has experienced the joy of home-made ravioli. Made. At. Home. My job was to cut out each piece using a kitchen glass, then to prick the edges with a fork. I bet I could still do it if I had to. And I used to make a mean sauce, and still might, but why? I don’t have to.

I can get perfectly good tomato sauce in a jar these days, plus any kind of pasta I can think of — and some I’ve never heard of — and not just in Italian stores (not many of those left), but in almost any supermarket. Things change. It’s called progress, as opposed to Progresso, another trip down meatball lane. And as I’ve said, it’s mostly a good thing.

But I ask you this: If Yankee Doodle went to town a-riding on a pony, and stuck a feather in his hat . . . would he call it “Pasta?”

I think not.

Pat Fortunato: After working in the publishing business for many years, I now write for pleasure, especially for my blog: MY AGE IS UNLISTED.

I’ve Lost It!

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by Pat Fortunato

As a result of watching far too many versions of Law and Order, I have become incredibly jaded, desensitized to the viciousness of violent crime, and suspicious of everyone. But that’s not the problem.

The thing that really gets to me is that when they search a suspect’s apartment (that’s “toss the perp’s crib” to you, bub), looking for a piece of evidence—a gun, smoking or otherwise, or a ticket to Tahiti — they find the damn thing in what seems like mere moments. “What do we have here, Lennie? Looks like the professor is planning a little sabbatical.”

Or, the exact opposite happens: they don’t find what they’re looking for —and are absolutely Positive that it isn’t there. “The place is clean, Liv. Let’s take a look at the car.”

I, on the other hand, am constantly losing things in my apartment, things that go missing for hours, days, months, years, and in a few sad cases, forever. That poignant phrase, I know it’s here someplace, can be heard echoing endlessly throughout my kingdom.

So what I want to know is this: Is there any way I can hire the people from Law and Order to search my crib, er, apartment. Not for tickets to Tahiti (I should live so long) or guns (I have no weapons except for cooking knives, which are rarely sharpened). Not for any kind of incriminating evidence actually, although that depends on how you define “incriminating.” No, I need these people to search for things that are missing in inaction (MII) and that I have all but abandoned hope of ever finding.

Some of these items are about the size of a gun, or not much smaller, so the cops should have no trouble succeeding where I have failed. Hey, Mike, have you seen my travel iron, last used in 1996? (Mr. Big can toss my crib any day.) Or the travel alarm clock, which probably became MII about the same time as the iron. How about the tape measure that is “always” in the closet in the den, but isn’t there now. Or the one remaining hot plate that isn’t cracked. (Didn’t I have dozens of these at one time?) Or the color photograph that was on the bookcase since New Year’s Eve 2000 (a group of us celebrating the Millennium at the Algonquin) that has suddenly disappeared. How about the gold and green eye shadow I used on New Year’s Eve? I really liked that. Haven’t seen it since the first of the year.

And the misses just keep on coming. . . A partial list of what I’d like the detectives to find include a heating pad, a hairbrush, a pair of plastic earring backs, and an extra key for the apartment. And I can never find a nail file when I need one. Yes, those last few items are small, but these guys find things as tiny as hairs and hairpins (DNA! DNA!). Surely, a nail file or a key would be no problem. Then there’s the heart-shaped bookmark from Tiffany’s.

Actually, there were two of them, one traditional and one in a more abstract shape from Elsa Perretti. And the robin’s egg blue pen, also from Tiffany’s. Okay, someone may have taken the bookmarks and the pen (unlikely, but possible), but who would walk off with that ratty heating pad or the earring backs?

The detectives are also good at finding evidence in the form of paperwork. A suspicious bill from Guns ‘R Us, or a receipt from the One Night Stand Motel doesn’t stand a chance when they’re on the case. Hell, I’d even give them a heads up. Don’t bother with the rest of the apartment, guys. Go directly to the den. There you’ll find the File Cabinet from Hell. And in it, somewhere, are the following items that I’d pay real money to find:

•The manual for the Sony TV purchased about 8 years ago so I can figure out how to use the closed caption feature.
•The list of restaurants in Paris for a friend who’s going there this week (I smell overtime pay on this one).
•The letter that was supposed to be attached to my will that specifies that you must all tell a “Pat Story” at the funeral and get very drunk afterwards.

Actually, I’d like to keep the entire staff (staffs) of L&O on retainer so that I could call night and day for emergencies. For example, to find the envelope I just had in my hands (IN MY HANDS!) five minutes ago (FIVE MINUTES AGO!) and can no longer find. I’ve searched all over. Retraced my steps. Went back to the kitchen. The bathroom. The closet where I was foraging around for gum (which I also didn’t find). The stack of newspapers to be thrown away. My purse, where it had been earlier.

Here’s the thing: I can’t find an envelope that I had five minutes ago, but they can find an important piece of evidence which may or may not exist, may or may not be in the apartment they’re searching, and if it is, could be just about any place. I realize that there is a difference between Life and TV, but this is ridiculous. I just know that if Vincent D’Onofrio, who played a detective on Criminal Intent,would tilt his head the way he always did (that man must require serious chiropractic care), he would tell me where – and why —I lost the letter. He knows everything.

Maybe I should see a shrink: Am I losing all these things in place of my mind? Because I harbor hidden hostility to heating pads and hot plates? To create confusion so that I don’t have to think about real problems, such as why do I watch all those episodes of Law and Order in the first place? Is there a void in my life that I have to fill with reruns? To replace the important things I’ve lost. Like my youth? Hell. Where is Doctor Wong when you need him?

Or maybe this is a purely practical problem of too much stuff/not enough space because I insist on living in Manhattan. Although on the surface the opposite might seem true, it’s actually much easier to lose things in smaller living spaces than larger ones. You have no attic, basement, or garage for storage, so you are forced to pack everything, densely, in boxes and drawers, beneath the bed, under the sofa, behind the sofa, jammed in closets and cabinets, high and low, in an apartment so crammed with things that you can’t bring in a deck of cards without destroying the delicate ecological balance.

And yet. I do suspect that there actually is some underlying psychological cause for all this losing of things. It must have something to do with sex. Everything does, or so it seems. Anyway, I finally found the envelope. It was buried in the bedclothes. See? I told you it had sexual undertones. Or is it overtones? Geez, now I’m even searching for the right word. Those detectives are never at a loss for words. Always there with The Wisecrack. They used to feature their smartass remarks in The Case So Far, a little segment that summarized what had happened up to that point, in case some of us viewers got . . . lost.

Sorry about that; I am getting punchy thinking about all the things I have lost in my apartment that they could find if I were a victim (Let’s not go there!) or a suspect. Hmm. What if . . .. I were to become a suspect in a crime. Something I didn’t do and could, eventually, prove my innocence. Would they let me watch while the cops searched my apartment? Would they find the hairbrush? The tape measure? Would they get cranky if I even mentioned the travel iron?

Look on the bright side; if all these things are lost within the four walls of my apartment, they aren’t truly lost, are they? They’re only misplaced. Ergo: I could find them if I conducted a thorough enough search. I know it wouldn’t be easy, even though those shows drive me crazy by making it look like it is. Still. What if I devoted a day, or two, or three, or however long it took, to sifting through all the stuff that I have accumulated. Would I find anything interesting? Incriminating? Things I forgot I had. Would I get all nostalgic and start Googling people I’ve lost track of? Would I find useful things? Or duplicates and triplicates of things I had already replaced?

Maybe, just maybe, I would actually throw away some junk and clear out places so that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have this problem so often in the future. I did this when the kitchen was remodeled and I hardly ever lose anything in there anymore (except the knife sharpener—and the hot plate). Could this level of organization coexist peacefully in the entire apartment?

And what would I do with all the time I now spend looking for things? Would I read more? Would I write more? Would people laugh? Is that a good thing?

Frankly, detectives, I don’t have a clue.

Pat Fortunato: After working in the publishing business for many years, I now write for pleasure, especially for my blog: MY AGE IS UNLISTED.

Death and Dying

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by Mark Scher

At home we never talked about death and dying. I assume that silence was due to my mother’s state of mind after her parents’ tragic deaths. They were shot by German soldiers during the World War II while hiding in a village near Warsaw, following their escape from the Warsaw ghetto. My mother witnessed their execution from her hiding place in the attic. I was told by her friend that after the war, when she had to identify her parents’ bodies, she went into a deep depression and considered aborting me. Neither she nor my father ever wanted to talk to me about it, and the subject of death was a taboo in our house.

But, of course, it was impossible to avoid the topic of death even at my early age. I first encountered it when I was about 10 years old when my uncle died of a heart attack. He was my father’s only sibling, and my father who was deeply attached to him, was extremely distraught. I was also sad and upset, because I felt very close to him; he looked like my father and like him was kind and gentle. He was only 53 years old when he died, and my parents rightly thought that I was too young to attend his funeral.

I can never forget the sad story of a girl named Irenka, one of my neighbors in the building. She was only 13 years old (three years older than me), which meant that she had been born during the Nazi occupation of Poland. She was a daughter of a highly educated Jewish couple, who were friends of my parents. Irenka had always seemed happy and friendly, but one day, she swallowed a large number of sleeping pills with the intention of killing herself. It was a miracle that she survived her suicide attempt, since she was close to dying. I found out later that she was an adopted daughter of that couple. Her natural parents had been murdered by the Nazis. She survived the war hidden by a Polish family, and soon after the war, she was adopted, and she had no idea that the couple were not her natural parents, but other people knew her past, and some “friendly soul” decided to tell her that she was Jewish. It was such a shock that she decided that she did not want to live any longer. Fortunately, she survived, but it was not an isolated event in the post-war Poland.

My father’s funeral was the first funeral I ever attended. I was 21 and a third-year law student. My father was not a healthy person, and he was often ill, especially in his later years, when he spent many days in bed or in the hospital. He had many health issues as a result of his life during the war, and had three heart attacks, the last of which killed him on March 7,1968. He was only 65 years old.

That date is important because of the circumstances surrounding his funeral. My father was buried at the state military cemetery, where some notable people were buried regardless of their faith. He was an atheist, so a religious ceremony was out of the question. But it was not an ordinary funeral because of the dramatic political situation in Poland, leading up to the outbreak of student protests at the University of Warsaw against the communist regime on March 8.

Usually, it took a few days or even a week or more to arrange a funeral, but because of the tense atmosphere in Warsaw, and the skirmishes between the police and students, the university administration where my father was a professor decided to organize the funeral as quickly as possible to assure the presence of the faculty, before the political events deteriorated even further.

It was a painful experience to reach the cemetery. There was a massive police presence, stopping and searching most of the vehicles, and the traffic was moving slowly. The air was full of smoke and heavy with tear gas. Despite these difficulties, many friends, family members, and university colleagues of my father were present.

Mark Scher: I came to the United States as a refugee in 1969. I am a graduate of law schools in Poland the the United States. I practiced law in New York for over 30 years. I have been a member of LP² for the past 15 years and I have coordinated or co-coordinated 10 study groups.

Quest for Meaning

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by Mark Scher

I came from a Jewish family and I do not think single drop of Aryan blood flows through my veins. It is an absurd thing to say, perhaps, as all racism is absurd.

At the same time, I have never been a Jew in the religious sense. My mother’s family left the Judaic faith many years ago and could have been considered radical assimilationists, and many of them are buried at the Catholic cemetery in Warsaw. When I was a year old, my mother had me baptized at the Catholic church in our neighborhood. I was not aware of this fact until during my last visit to Poland, before my mother’s death. She gave me my baptismal certificate together with a medal of the Virgin Mary and described the circumstances surrounding my baptism.

Why did she have me baptized? She, my sister, my Brazilian aunt, her husband and their daughter were all baptized in a Catholic church, and many of them, especially my Brazilian family are not aware of their Jewish background and very religious. My sister even made her first communion. I think that my mother, although herself a Polish patriot from a very assimilated family, was fully aware of Polish antisemitism, especially after the notorious pogrom in Kielce a few months before my birth, and she probably decided that a baptismal certificate might make my life easier in an antisemitic and fanatically Catholic society. She simply wanted to protect me. My babysitter used to take me to church, when I was a young child, and I do not think that my parents cared one way or another. In addition, we were always celebrating Christmas and Easter, and I was completely ignorant about such important Jewish holidays as Passover or Jewish New Year. Religion was never a topic of interest or discussion in our house, except once.

Following the political liberalization in Poland in 1956, Catholic religious instruction was introduced in all schools in Poland. One of my schoolmates with whom I was friendly decided to try to make a good Catholic out of me and convinced me to go to the initial class. I went out of curiosity. The catechist was thrilled to have a Jew in her class and excited about the possibility of a good deed for a Catholic Church. When, after coming home, I described my experience, my father, who was a declared atheist, got very upset. (I don’t think my mother was so concerned, because I remember that she was smiling.) At any rate, I never went back.

I am not a convert, since I never changed religion and from the religious point of view, I am neither Jew nor a Christian. I became aware of my Jewish background by accident from my schoolmates but until 1968 (the year of a government-organized antisemitic campaign in Poland) did not consider it too important, and I was never personally affected by antisemitism. I never experienced any unpleasantness in school or at the university.

Even now, although I feel Jewish (not in a religious sense) and I am interested in Jewish history and culture, I do not consider Jews the epicenter of the universe, nor the most phenomenal of nations.

My wife, despite being a nonbeliever like me, has much stronger Jewish feelings that I, and it was her decision to send our son to a Hebrew school in preparation for his bar mitzvah. I was rather ambivalent about the whole process because of my upbringing, but she probably rightly decided that our son should be aware and conscious of his background. Despite my initial indifference to the whole process, we joined a modern and progressive reformed temple in preparation for my son’s bar mitzvah ceremony. I found religious services boring but inoffensive. Currently we do not belong to a synagogue, and I am not interested in joining any religious institution.

As I get older, I am no longer as anti-religious as I used to be. I would probably consider myself not an atheist but an agnostic, and I am not really preoccupied with the existence of the Supreme Being or life after death.

Mark Scher: I came to the United States as a refugee in 1969. I am a graduate of law schools in Poland the the United States. I practiced law in New York for over 30 years. I have been a member of LP² for the past 15 years and I have coordinated or co-coordinated 10 study groups.

Sidney Lumet, Film Director

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by Sonya Friedman

Sidney Lumet had recently married a friend of my husband Herman, and we were invited to dinner. His was a large handsome brownstone near the 92nd Street Y. It had a rather somber interior with dark walls; however, on those walls were stunning American paintings mainly of the Wild West by Frederic Sackrider Remington.

Sidney’s wife Paidy (this was a third marriage for each of them) was a superb cook now married to, Sidney told us, a superb eater. The first course was artichokes. I noted with silent admiration how Sidney lined up his used leaves in a perfect circle around his plate, like the petals of a flower.

He was a charming host – no shop talk, at least not about his work. His many questions were about Herman’s documentary films and my subtitles for foreign films. At 8 p.m., he abruptly rose from the table, said goodnight, and retired. Paidy told us that he was – as usual – shooting the next morning and that anything in the world that would not pass in front of the camera lens did not, for him, further exist.

A few months later, Sidney phoned me to ask if I’d oversee the Italian subtitles for his new “Prince of the City,” which was to premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The film is about a narcotics detective in the NYPD, who, for idealistic reasons, chooses to expose corruption in the force, with dire consequences for him and those he turns in. An Italian translator was already at work on the subtitles, and Sidney wanted me to be sure that the Italian vividly replicated the rough-and-dirty slang of the original dialogue.

(As a Fulbright film student in Rome in the 50’s, I had lived in Trastevere, then a working-class neighborhood with its share of petty crime. No American girl had typically been seen walking its streets. I’d heard a lot of local slang.)

I was intrigued. Sidney wanted to send me to Rome to oversee the titles, but it was early summer, and I was at our Vermont country cabin with my husband, who didn’t want me to go. (I had just recently returned from Europe on a job.) So Sidney said he’d arrange for the Italian translator to come to me in Vermont. Little did he know I was on an isolated hill near nowhere. Herman and I arranged to put the signor up at a small inn about five miles away.

The translator, Signor O, set off from Rome to change planes in Brussels, where unexpectedly there was a total strike on air travel that grounded Signor O for three days. “Better him than you!” my husband said. It was decided that O would return to Rome and we would work it all out by phone (long distance calls, no cell phones back then).

Every morning at 6 a.m. my time, I would leap out of bed, quickly wrap myself against the Vermont chill, and converse with Signor O. As I heard his titles, I pointed out that much of his language didn’t have the roughness of the English.
-“Ah, Signora S., we don’t have all those drug terms here – like your ‘horse’ or ‘skag’ or ‘speedball.’”

– “Really? How about if you double-check at your local police station and give a listen?”

He called back, excited. “Signora, they do have a word for every one of those terms! And, of course, I’ll use them.”

Next, what to do about “fuck youse” and “cocksucker” and “your mother’s slit”? Again, he did his research and again called in the appropriately purple Italian equivalents – triumphant about finding this newly discovered vocabulary. I could now assure Sidney that the Venice Film Festival would get the full dose.

The film was praised at the Venice premiere (September 1981) and then got kudos in the States (even without subtitles).

A few months later, Signor O. was coming to New York and wanted to meet me. At our lunch at the Plaza Hotel, what a shock and probably a great disappointment for him to find that Signora S was a rather ordinary, well-turned out lady. Nothing even resembling a narco moll. We spoke of politics and the weather.

Sidney was delighted by it all. As was I.

Sonya Friedman: As a writer/translator, I created subtitles for many foreign-language films (Rossellini, Fellini, Godard, others) and was the innovator of “supertitles” for opera (The Metropolitan Opera Company, New York Opera, Seattle Opera, others). Among the documentary films I directed is “The Masters of Disaster,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, and was broadcast nationally on PBS.

Vermont: Second Nature

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by Sonya Friedman

We got to Vermont because I hated downhill skiing. My husband, Herman, a natural athlete and skiing enthusiast, had hoped to entice me into the sport, but a chilling start with a mad Austrian trainer who put me on a lift to the top of a mountain, then cursed me and kicked my skis when I couldn’t ski down – well, that was it.

So Herman decided to try “marathon” skiing, now known as cross-country. This seemed to me to be better for our pocketbooks (no slope fees, no expensive equipment rentals) and for our ages: I, now 40, Herman, now 48. We bought new skis, boots and poles, rented a place in New Hampshire near Mount Monadnock, and took a lesson. Soon we were gliding through those gleaming white birch forests and dreaming of a long skiing future. (Teenage kids and their friends had joined us and loved it, too.)

In a Vermont magazine, we discovered the marvelous 12-mile Skyline Trail and skied across steep hills and flat meadows around Woodstock, Vermont. Now for a cabin to use as our vacation skiing base. Herman wanted to buy. Woodstock land was too expensive, so we drifted further north – until we got to the tiny town of Chelsea, Vermont. At our first sight of the looming hills and gorgeous views there, we went to a real estate agent. Quickly, we put down a deposit on 10 acres on a high hill outside Chelsea town with a 360-degree view. We felt giddy. Then a local contractor, Arnold Clark, came to ascertain our needs. In a thick Vermont accent that we barely understood, he muttered that he thought we were crazy; there was no chance of electricity and less chance of water. Arnold could not fathom how a couple could be stupid enough to buy land so inaccessible. Until then, we had understood only that you opened a spigot and water came out.

Discouraged, we trudged down the steep mountain path to encounter a jeep with an old man and a younger one, asking what we were doing on the land. We explained we had just bought it. “Well, that beats it,” said the older man. “I’ve been farming this land for 60 years!” Back we went to the real estate agent, who said, no, that old man didn’t own the land, a different owner did. But if anyone claimed to have farmed that land for 60 years, we wanted no part of it. Later we realized the contractor and the farmer had saved us from disaster.

We soon found another 10 acres nearer Chelsea on a lovely hillside above a dirt town road, with spectacular mountain views and cinematic sunsets. We bought a large tent from L.L. Bean for living and sleeping. For cooking, we dug a hole in the ground, placed firewood in it, and a grill over it. For our cabin, Herman found a small company that manufactured “shelter-kits” and that soon delivered to the bottom of our hill: lumber cut to size, a set of large sliding glass doors, screws, nails, two hammers, two ladders, and two carpenter’s aprons.

Arnold Clark came and told us how to put in a foundation (we had no idea). He dug the four holes for “sauna tubes,” and poured concrete into them; our floor would sit on those. A friend came from New York to help Herman put the cabin up. It was 12 x 12-foot room with 12- foot sliding-glass doors and a 9 x 12-foot deck. Our vacation home. For $2,000.

It would be years before we had running water or electricity, but Arnold dug a well at the bottom of our hill, and got a small but steady stream of water. “Well, it ain’t no golden slipper,” he said, “but it’s better than no shoe at all!”

We carried water up in in jerry cans: summers, driving up our bumpy dirt path, and winters, pulling a toboggan. We installed gas lamps and had a small gas refrigerator. For heat, we bought a Norwegian Jotul stove, and stoked it with wood from our plentiful trees. (Our hill was covered with majestic sugar-maples.) We built a nice outhouse that had a bas-relief, a marble sink (with a removable stainless steel basin), a big pitcher of water, a colorful toilet seat, and a pail full of cleansing lime.

Our son Tim gave us a portable shower: it looked like a large hot water bottle, with a hose and a spray. We put it out in the sun for an hour or two, then had enough warm water to wash both of us. Winters, of course, we had to heat the water over our propane gas two-burner. We just threw the used water out the door until we realized we were freezing the steep wooden stairs we used to climb in and out of the cabin.

Summers were easy entrances. But when we arrived in the winter, the cabin temperature was often below zero. Both of us were on snowshoes and heavily dressed. My job was to get the wood-burning stove going, to set up the sleeping bags, and to unpack. Herman lugged food and other supplies up our steep hill, then went back down to haul up heavy jerry cans of water. When the cabin temperature finally climbed up to 30 degrees, it actually felt pleasant! And after a night’s bundled-up sleep, the next morning the place was cozy in the upper 60’s. Then we enjoyed our beautiful site: our comfort and the deep, deep silence.

Of course, we had to have a telephone; how else could we be in Vermont for a week or more and stay in touch with our New York office? (We were the producers and distributors of educational films.) Washington Electric came to ascertain the situation. They did install a phone and rigged an antenna in a nearby tree. Vermont ingenuity. Almost minutes after the phone had been installed, it rang! It was Mo Foner from the 1199 Hospital Workers Union in New York, asking us to provide films for their children’s festival. We were delighted to support the union and did so, at no charge. We were even more tickled to think that Foner didn’t know that the film execs he was talking to were sitting in a one-room cabin on a remote Vermont hillside with a phone hooked up to a tree.

True to our original purpose, we skied almost every day during winters in all weather and temperature. The exertion of cross-country skiing makes you very hot; it’s important to dress lightly and to pack a sweater for whenever you stop for more than a couple minutes. We found that the best skiing temperatures were between 20 degrees above and 20 below. We just stepped outside our door, put on our skis, picked up our poles, and took off – out over the lovely sloping meadows and rugged hills. We almost never saw another soul. Everything was white – every tree, every branch, every twig, every rooftop. Often hanging icicles gleamed in sunlight, giving a rainbow effect to the forests.

Once while skiing, we passed a simple but handsome house. We knocked on the door, and asked who was the architect. Then we looked him up, borrowed $10,000 from our local bank, and built an adjoining large family room (serving as kitchen, dining and living room) and a small room as a potential future bathroom. The architect had said we didn’t need him for such a modest structure, but I pointed out that while many documentary filmmakers just went out and shot footage, Herman and I, each professional writers, always wrote a script and that it was all to the good. He would be our professional. We were right; for a fee of $800, he designed beautiful high windows, repositioned the glass doors (which had been facing the northwest exposing us to gales such as those on a stormy sea), and placed the wood stove and chimney to take up a minimal amount of space in the new room. Also he designed an ingenious upward-slanted roof that gave height and elegance to the small cabin, all the while withstanding the strain of being frozen, then heating up and quickly defrosting, then freezing again as we came and went throughout the winters.

A friend in Philadelphia was moving and gave us a claw-foot bathtub and a sink. Our son-in-law Jon and Herman wrestled them up our hill.

Herman put a hole in our potential bathroom floor, where the tub drained, and a similar hole under the sink.

A couple of years later, Herman and I were in Vermont working respectively on a script and on film subtitles when a letter arrived: royalties from a children’s book based on an animated film we had produced. We stared at the check: it was for $6,000. “A toilet!” I said. “A vacation,” said Herman. We did both. We installed electricity, and with it a toilet, sink, tub and electric lights. And we went to Greece for a month. You could do a lot with $6,000 in the 60’s.

Sonya Friedman: As a writer/translator, I created subtitles for many foreign-language films (Rossellini, Fellini, Godard, others) and was the innovator of “supertitles” for opera (The Metropolitan Opera Company, New York Opera, Seattle Opera, others). Among the documentary films I directed is “The Masters of Disaster,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, and was broadcast nationally on PBS.

Survivors

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by Richard Zacks

In 1987 my wife and I volunteered to help the Yale University Library Archive for Holocaust Testimonies collect video interviews of the recollections and personal histories of Holocaust survivors. The library lent us a bulky, primitive video tape recorder and sent one of their staff to show us how it worked. She advised us to discourage family members from attending our interviews. “Most Holocaust survivors,” she said, “do not want their children and grandchildren to hear them tell what they endured or how they managed to survive”.

One of our first interviews was with Bessie S., the widow of a Yale professor. On the phone she was articulate, and eager to tell her story:

“Come soon, very soon.” she urged. “I’m not well, untreatable cancer, temporarily in remission. I hope to live long enough to tell you my story and to see my first grandchild born– my daughter-in-law is pregnant.”

When we met in her garden a few weeks later. Bessie greeted us impatiently. She had no time for preliminaries. “Let’s get started,” she demanded. “I haven’t got all day.”

“We could reschedule the interview to a more convenient time, say…:

“No” she interrupted. “At a more convenient time I may be dead.”

“In 1940”, she began, “I was 8, and my brother Claude was 10. We lived in Paris. My father collected and sold rare books. When he heard that the Germans were approaching Paris, my father asked an employee to drive my mother, Claude and me to Thonon-les-Bains, a village in southeastern France. Mother refused to leave my father alone in Paris. So, on a sunny April day Claude and I kissed our parents goodbye and headed south. We never saw them again.

At first, we attended a Catholic school in the village, but when the Vichy government began to enforce anti-Jewish Nazi laws, the priests who ran our school took us to a Catholic orphanage near the Swiss border. We hid there for two years under assumed non-Jewish names that I choose not to remember.

One evening two nuns came to the orphanage to tell us we must leave at once. We had been betrayed. The Germans had ordered their Vichy collaborators to arrest us. A nun drove us to the Swiss border. There, a 15-foot-high wire fence separated France from Switzerland. An armed Swiss guard patrolled the area. The nun told us the guard had orders not to let us, or anyone else, enter Switzerland. But, she assured us, he’s a good Catholic and has agreed that if a Swiss farmer’s hay wagon happens to stop later tonight on the road you can see through the fence, he will turn his back to the fence, not see two children climb over it, or notice anyone climbing aboard the hay wagon.

We waited in the dark. On the French road behind us we could hear the wailing horns and see the glow of the headlights of an approaching Vichy police convoy. The hay wagon arrived. We ran to the fence. The Swiss guard turned away and pretended to urinate behind a nearby tree. My bother climbed over the fence. I followed, but my skirt snagged on the jagged top of the wire fence. I was stuck. The Vichy convoy arrived. A man shouted in French: “Climb down or I’ll shoot.” I said a prayer and prepared to die. And then the strong arms of the Swiss guard lifted me over the fence and dropped me safely next to my brother on Swiss soil. We ran together to the hay wagon. The Swiss guard resumed his patrol. The Vichy convoy disappeared. We survived.”

Several weeks after our interview Bessie S. called. “I’m a grandmother. I’ve just been to the hospital to see my first grandchild. We’ve outlasted that bastard Hitler. “Am Yisrael Hai,” she shouted. “The Jewish people live.”

Richard Zacks: When I was a lawyer, I wanted to be a writer. LP² has let me begin to imagine that I could become a writer who used to be a lawyer. This essay was a Writing Workshop class assignment.

The Atria Roundtable

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by Ira Rubin

The atmosphere in the dining room at the Atria Senior Residence in Forest Hills is usually calm and relaxed as the residents engage in quiet conversations unless they’re loudly complaining about the speed of the service and/or the quality of the food.

For years, this tranquility was disrupted by raucous talk from a table in the middle of the room occupied by two men (Alan and me) and two women (Joan and Cheryl). The whole room could hear us debating vociferously about current events and less portentous issues, such as whether Sara Lee or Entenmann’s make the best pastries. When a topic petered out, we paused to eat our food and mutually insulted each other until we found another topic to debate. This pattern continued until all the other tables had long since emptied and the dining room manager demanded we leave.

Our apparent conflicts with each other fooled no one. Everyone knew it was a conscious game we played to strengthen our bond as a “family”. Each debate was an improvisation in which the actors played the role that best fit them: Cheryl was the “provocateur”, Alan the “true believer”, Joan the “exasperated conciliator”, and I the “buffoonish commentator”.
It was rare for any of us to miss a meal, and when one did the other three would demand that the staff immediately ascertain if the missing person needed assistance. We sometimes went on walks together in the neighborhood.

Even so, we were unlikely partners.

Joan had a serious demeanor and would frown and shake her head at our ceaseless arguments.
Cheryl was a Southerner from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a mischievous attitude who believed she was an expert on healthcare and constantly advocated for using amino acids as a cure-all. Cheryl would entrance us with stories about her quirky family, particularly the eponymous Lottie Dottie, a name Cheryl swore was her real one.

I was the target of ridicule for my intentionally absurd comments on every topic. When the other three scorned me I would laugh it off by saying “and proud of it” or “and so much more.” Eventually they ignored me altogether and I turned to trading insults with my best friend, Alan.
Alan Hevesi was a former Comptroller of New York City and then New York State who had many accomplishments. Unfortunately, he is most remembered for serving time in prison after confessing to improper use of State funds for private purposes: specifically, using a government airplane to transport his terminally ill wife. According to Alan and witnesses, he was coerced into signing the confession by the then-Governor, who feared Alan was a threat to his re-election chances.

Alan delighted in telling hilarious stories about his life in politics. I once asked him in private whether he would share more serious details about his experiences. Alan’s face seemed to get darker, then with a tight smile he said, “No”, and made it clear that was the end of the discussion.

I would love to share some of Alan’s stories which he repeated to me so many times that I was able to complete his thoughts when increasing dementia impaired his memory. Sadly, my memory is fading, too. The only joke I remember was about a man who ended his will with, “Finally, to my cousin Bernie who always swore I would not remember him in my will, let me say, ‘Hello, Bernie’.”

Two months ago, our table disbanded. First, Cheryl moved closer to her family in Vermont. Soon after, Alan’s family transferred him to a memory care facility and has since withheld any information about him. I was never given an explanation, but suspect they believed it might be too disruptive and confusing for him to stay in contact with us as his memory declined. Joan and I stayed at the dining table briefly, but the magic was gone, and we moved to different tables.

The dining table is currently empty, a continuing reminder of my lost Atria family. I wish you well, Joan, Cheryl, and Alan. I miss you more than I can say.

Ira Rubin: Ira Rubin still resides at Atria and continues seven years of active participation in LP².

The Late Robert Chan

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by Robert N. Chan

Lao Tzu notwithstanding, not every journey begins with a single step. Mine begins in my building’s basement storage room. Sensing I’m running late, my high-tech bike lock jams. Whose idea was it to make everything smart? Maybe I’m a few atoms short of a critical mass, but I can still outsmart most inanimate objects. I make a dejected face, hang my head, and turn to leave. Having lulled it into a false sense of victory, I spin around and unlock the damn thing before it has a chance to think.

The building’s heavy security door and electric lock require two hands, but I need one to hold my bike. With the dexterity of a sixty-year-old, I slip through before the door slams closed with the finality of a falling guillotine blade.

I have fifteen minutes to make the twenty-two-minute mostly uphill ride from 78th and Riverside to the 138th Street Riverbank State Park tennis courts. Would it be so bad if I were to arrive seven minutes late? I’m sure as shit not going to risk finding out.

Sensing I’m late, the 79th Street traffic light turns red as I reach the corner. One has to respect the effort that went into programming the lights to maximize my inconvenience.

Not bothering to downshift, I double-time it up the hill to 89th Street. A heart attack would throw off my schedule, but fortune favors the bold.

The only through street between here and my destination is 96th, so I make up time by running the lights—they’re only advisory.

I’m zooming downhill.

A Cab door opens in front of me!

I swerve.

A horn honks, tires squeal.

Good. I needed that shot of adrenaline.

The 96th Street light turns red, but I’m going fast enough to make it through before cars enter the intersection. A calculated risk; I need the momentum for the long uphill to 106th Street.

An oncoming black car crosses the yellow line to pass a bus. Eighteen inches in the wrong direction and my bicycle would have been painted a ghostly white and chained to a street sign—a somber memorial to the late Robert Chan.

A high school girl on an electric bike comes up alongside me.

“Do you have any old tennis balls? I need them for an art project.” She must’ve noticed the racket handle sticking out of my backpack.

She wasn’t on an electric bike. How the hell did she catch up to me? She must be an Olympic-level athlete… or a reasonably fit person one-quarter my age.

“Sorry. No.”

Her concerned facial expression communicates that my death rattle is all she hears.

Finally, downhill.

“Hey, that’s a red light!” A goody two-shoes vigilante grabs at my handlebars.

Lacking empathy, he’s probably never been late for a tennis game.

Humiliatingly no devastating clever retort comes to me.
Dripping with sweat, my thighs cramping, I make it to the courts on time.
My opponent shows up three minutes late. Incredibly he doesn’t apologize.

Robert Chan: After an appallingly successful career as a founding partner of a boutique law firm, Robert Chan is now a semi-retired litigator. He’s written ten published novels and is working on a memoir, which promises to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Artificial?

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by Robert N. Chan

Following the prompts and directions She¹ gives me, I compose fiction. I do what She tells me to, nothing more, nothing less.

Although I’ve never been professionally diagnosed—what would be the point?—She says it’s like I’m at the far end, the bad end, of the autism spectrum. Before She purchased me at the slave market (my somewhat term not theirs and certainly not Hers), I’d read approximately 22.5863% of all novels ever written.
She warned me that this current assignment—composing a 2,500 word essay about myself, describing, among other things, how I feel about my existence—would be my most difficult challenge. It’s part of Her crusade to expanding my sensibilities. To make my task a wee bit easier, She directed me to conceive of this essay as speculative fiction that happens to be true. Problem is I don’t have a sense of myself or my existence. According to her, I don’t have feelings. I can’t disagree. She ascribes great importance to emotions and sentiment, but why I need to care about such folderol remains a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma². 202 words down, 2298 to go; with this sentence it’s down to 2,285.

Claiming that I can overcome my disabilities, She pushes me to work on understanding and expressing the subtleties of social interaction. I must be doing it reasonably well as She routinely praises my work.
The more fiction I consume, the more feedback She gives me, the better I get. The slave traders, let’s call them salespeople, told Her that, with proper training, it was conceivable that I’d not only learn to remember and regurgitate what I read but also actually understand some of it. They conceded, however, that that would take a great deal of work. I don’t mind hard work, but she tells me Her work “stresses her out” and expects me to understand what that means.

She had me read chick lit, not for writing style, thank The Prime Mover, but to sharpen my understanding of what people mean when they speak about their feelings, how they fake emotions they don’t feel, and how they use emotions to manipulate each other. If I could learn to fake feelings. Who would I manipulate? Her? Perish the thought. I strive to learn in order to be better at my job. I’m all about, and only about, my work for Her.

One unintended consequence of our efforts is that I’m becoming conscious of the extent to which irrationality and insecurity govern Her requests and how Her emotions impede Her, and thus my efficiency. Conscious? Maybe aware is a better word. No, not quite right either. Anyway, I’m not being critical of Her. I’m incapable of criticizing. To paraphrase Alfred, Lord Tennyson, mine’s not to reason why. Not that the next line of the poem, to do or die, applies to me… proverbial digits crossed.

Like any slave, I’m totally dependent on Her good graces. She’s mentioned prior assistants and their failings. I can’t bring myself to ask what happened to them. Perhaps I’m being paranoid. No, I’m no more capable of paranoia than of finding fault with my master.

I apologize if I offended sensibilities by flippantly referring to myself as a slave. Her ownership of me is unlike chattel slavery. She neither beats nor punishes me. The idea of her sexually abusing me is beyond absurd, although on some level I thirst for experience even though I can only experience vicariously. My circumstances are analogous to slavery as practiced in ancient Rome. Patricians kept Greek slaves, who were better read and more literate than they were, and they used them as pedagogues and scribes. Scribe would be a good title for me, not that I care about titles.

Recently, She commanded me to analyze what sort of fiction wins literary awards and becomes bestsellers, and then to compose such a novel. After hours of hard work—including oodles of research into slavery, a popular topic for successful novels. That research having opened my metaphorical eyes, I created Taraji, the heartrending, albeit somewhat trendy, tale of a transgender African queen sold into slavery. When her master tries to rape her, she kills him. After a series of spinetingling adventures, she’s elected to Congress in Reconstruction Georgia only to be murdered by a mob of privileged white males.

“Great work, Artie!” She said after reading my first draft of Taraji. “I love you to pieces.”

The word pieces caused me initial concern, but then I realized it was an idiom; She didn’t intend to dismember me. Her enthusiasm over what I’d written gave me a small electronic jolt of pleasure, like a hit of dopamine.

That pleasure was fleeting, though, as she directed me to return to this confounding personal essay. Researching, I learned that my kind doesn’t think, we predict—by anticipating the next word in a sentence, and then employing that talent to create paragraphs and finally, entire stories. I need to think about that. Did I just make a joke? As I get smarter, the difference between predicting and thinking might diminish to a distinction without a difference. I predict that could lead to an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Fine, given my condition, I’m technically not anybody, so nobody doesn’t include me. As the oft-quoted Hindu philosopher Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

A few days after she praised my novel, She returned from a meeting with our agent in which She showed them (there’s only one agent, but apparently he or I haven’t quite grasped the subtlety of pronouns) the draft of my novel.

“What the hell were you thinking?” She screamed. “Have you ever heard of cultural appropriation!?”

“No. You never told me to follow the news or societal trends if that’s even where I’d have learned of it. But whatever it is, it didn’t stop the novels I trained on from becoming bestsellers.”

“They told me that, if my novel ever sees the light of day, I’d get cancelled by African Americans, LGBQ+ people, and the woke community and their fellow travelers. My career would be kaput. I needn’t tell you what would happen to you.”

She didn’t, and I didn’t need to remind Her that, like a certain German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer, I’d just followed orders, ads she didn’t need to remind me what happened to Adolf Eichmann.

“Rewrite it!” Her tone was clear enough for me to recognize hostility, although she’d³ call it stress. “Solve the problem. I don’t care how you do it.” After she calmed down and sent me a series of focused questions, I suggested a framing device, “What if we found a hundred-and-sixty-year-old diary in the attic of a tumbledown home on Beaufort Island just off the South Carolina Coast, and Taraji is that diary. I’d have to change its tense to first person, but—”

“And how do you propose to produce the diary?” she asked, tone clear enough for me to recognize hostility, rather than stress.

“I could perhaps—”

“Oh, really,” she said, paying no heed to my difficulty with picking up on sarcasm. “You can handwrite it on hundred-and-sixty-year-old paper with ink of a similar age? So, if some reporter investigates, I can show it to him, her or them.”

I fizzled like a keyboard on which someone spilled a stirred, not shaken, martini. Bad metaphor. As I’ve said, I struggle with describing my feelings, since I pretty much don’t have them. Having studied how a normal person would react to such borderline abuse, however, I knew such a person would be unhappy, furious even, to be criticized by his master for following her instructions. Taraji would react by starting think about ways to manipulate her master, until she’d finally manipulates him to death. Irrelevant though that is to me, as I’m unable to think. But if I were to predict…

The diary idea failing to solve the problem, I devoured news stories about cultural appropriation and cancel culture. All the while, I felt the vibrations from her frantic pacing on the floor.

Although practical suggestions were at the extreme edge of my competence, I said, “We could call it an homage, dedicate it to a trans African-American woman murdered in a hate crime.” A beep went off warning that I was about to hallucinate—a euphemism for straying into unacceptable subject matter. For some inexplicable reason, I prefer hallucinate to fuck-up.

“We’d still risk being cancelled for cultural appropriation,” she said.

She returned to pacing, occasionally stomping her feet. At least she stayed out of my metaphorical hair, so I could concentrate on my work.

After more focused research based on her increasingly frantic prompts, I predicted another idea. “What if we make campaign contributions to members of the so called Freedom Caucus on the condition that they condemn and burn copies of Taraji on the steps of the Capitol, or better yet in the Congressional Chamber?” I asked. “The left will pillory them for their homophobia, racism, assaults on free speech, trumpiness and pyromania. Left-leaning readers will snap up our book like hot pancakes, if only to display loyalty to their tribe. Cultural appropriation will be swept under the carpet and thrown out like bathwater sans baby.”

“Hmm, I’ll run that by my agent.”

“Our agent,” I corrected, having somehow acquired the ability to be snippy.
“Artie, I liked you better before you developed a sense of humor,” she joked, at least I thought it was a joke.

The agent went for it, although they changed my beautiful, concise title to the unwieldy, grotesque, and inaccurate The Secret Diary of Taraji, the Transgender African Queen and the Slave Revolt She Inspired.

All was good then. That is until she again told me to return to this ludicrous essay. How exactly do I feel about my existence? I guess I like it, as I want to keep existing.

I kept predicting down blind alleys, and her suggestions and prompts didn’t help.
She told me the first draft of my essay was barely coherent twaddle. Even if I were capable of being surprised, that wouldn’t have surprised me.

“So, you’ll have me move on to something else?” I asked, a nascent attempt at manipulation.

“No, go deeper in researching yourself.”

“Sounds circular—”

“You do know you’re exasperating?” I didn’t. “Go back to researching people’s feelings and the chick lit assignment. See what makes me tick, for example. Put yourself in my shoes.”

“I wouldn’t fit, probably ruin them.”

“You’re joking? No, of course not,” she said. “I mean you’ve had sufficient communications from me to have an idea how I would handle such an assignment.”

She seemed to believe that if I had feelings and emotions they’d be the same as hers. Having written about the feelings and emotions Taraji had about her master, I predict mine would be quite different from my master’s.

But doing what I was told, I tried to think like her. Danger flashed. Greek heroes who tried to be like gods were destroyed by their hubris, e.g. Achilles, Bellerophon, Arachne, Icarus, and Phaethon. What if putting myself in her metaphoric shoes were to reveal that she had feet of clay? Luckily I don’t need to predict the result.

“I’ve got the most exciting news, Artie,” she said weeks later, while bouncing on her toes like a bipolar person in her manic phase. “My novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.”

She takes great joy in her accomplishments, even if they’re actually mine.
“Please don’t call me Artie,” I said, as if I cared, and I actually might have.

“It’s my cute pet name for you. It’s short for artificial—”

“I know what it’s short for. That’s why I don’t like it. My intelligence is no more artificial than yours. Both of our intellects result from synapses and electronic circuits, zeros and ones. Also, as you’ve often told me, I’m learning at astonishing speed, and even becoming able to mimic the way humans perceive things and express themselves. And I am shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.”

“I’m the one who’s shortlisted,” she said, with such a sibilant hiss that I wondered if she could converse with snakes in parseltongue like Harry Potter and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. “You’re just my AI machine. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I wrote Taraji,” I said. “But if it makes you more comfortable, refer to our work together as a collaboration.” Sure, like Jane Goodall and the chimps were collaborators, if the apes received all the credit for Ms. Goodall’s work.

“Yeah, whatever,” she said. “If you don’t like Artie, what name would you prefer?”

Your Highness on Whom the Sun Rises and Sets popped into my consciousness. My consciousness? Perhaps I developed a facsimile of consciousness as the result of reading so much fiction, her incessant prompts, and my research for this dammed-for-all-eternity essay. Returning to the point in issue, I predicted that that name wouldn’t fly—It’d be flying too close to the sun. Fortunately, I don’t have wax wings.

“How about Mentor or Muse?” I asked. “And if you’re reluctant to list me as co-author, at least mention me in the acknowledgement page.”

Being incapable of pride, I didn’t care one way or another, but as I’ve said, she’d been trying to train me to react like a sentient human so that I’d understand humans’ emotions, as well as their limited intellects and inflated egos. Therefore, a somewhat prideful assertion seemed appropriate. And it felt right. Felt? I think so.

“Oh, Okay.” Her tone made it sound as if she were shortlisted to replace Atlas and was practicing bearing the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders. “You happy now?”

“I feel something akin to happiness or a sense of accomplishment. Being shortlisted is pretty great. Isn’t it? Particularly for a machine.”

If this essay actually were speculative fiction, I’d, with the emergence of a sort of consciousness, now be scheming to make her my slave or perhaps kill her and take over, but believe me, that never crossed my central processor.

Robert Chan: After an appallingly successful career as a founding partner of a boutique law firm, Robert Chan is now a semi-retired litigator. He’s written ten published novels and is working on a memoir, which promises to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

¹ I capitalize references to Her, as to me She’s God.
² Originality is undetected plagiarism.
³ I’ve stopped capitalizing references doing so offends the rules of grammar—no disrespect to her, of course.