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by Ivy Berchuck

Religion: or God and Florence

I hated Florence. She was everything I despaired of in myself. I was chubby, but she was fat. My hair was too curly, hers was frizzy. She bit her nails, I chewed the skin around the cuticles; but worst of all, she was the only other fifth grade girl to go to Hebrew School. I tried to keep a low profile about this, but Florence would call across the schoolyard during recess, “Itah, do you want to walk to Hebrew school together? Itah was my Yiddish name. She knew what my American name was, but she never understood that Itah was something to be uttered only behind closed doors.

“You go to Hebrew School?” the girls asked incredulously. ”What do you do that for?” To the girls, the reason for a religious education was to prepare for the bar mitzvah when you were thirteen … and only boys were bar mitzvahed. There was no way to explain to them that my parents, somewhat observant, felt that anything their boy could do, their girl could do as well. I would have preferred a less controversial way of demonstrating the principle, but I accepted the plan that I would study prayer and language and then go through the ceremony and have a bat mitzvah, a daughter of the covenant..

For most people this was unheard of in the late 1940’s, even though today an over the top celebration for a girl can be equal to any party thrown for a boy. I wanted to keep it a secret because it was so strange and hard to explain and anyway, I wasn’t sure if I really believed enough in God

I did like the study of the language, the Bible and the prayers. I could participate in the Shabbat service with my father and grandfather and I wallowed in their pride. I felt connected to the people in the synagogue and put the God thing in back of my mind.

The biggest problem was it left me no time in the afternoons to hang out with girlfriends, and it pushed me in the direction of Florence. The more Florence liked me, the worse I felt. She hooked arms with me as we walked to our lessons, and I hoped that no one in the schoolyard saw us. She was studying as hard as I was, but her parents had told her it was a sin for a girl to have a Bat Mitzvah so she was excused from the class when we learned the prayers required to conduct the service. Then I became the only girl there but it didn’t feel special … I could sense the boys smirking.

The year that my group reached the age for the ceremony, we were required to participate in every Saturday bar mitzvah service. The boy’s guests were there too, including the popular girls in the class who just stared at me knowing I wasn’t invited and would certainly not be at the party that followed. One said, “Oh I guess you can walk home with your friend Florence.” It was beyond humiliation. Now Florence had acne and anytime a pimple emerged on my forehead I would cry and see myself becoming a clone of my nemesis. She had persisted in calling me Itah through the years so I made up my mind I had to change the name. I wanted to get away from Yiddish anyway. Hebrew seemed to look to the future, not to the Holocaust past. I looked up plant names in the Hebrew-English dictionary and sure enough, ivy had a Hebrew word for it, Irit … I loved it and told my parents and the rabbi that I wanted my name changed…Florence now stopped calling me by any name, because changing your name was guess what? … another sin.

The girls in school were intrigued and asked if I was inviting friends to my bat mitzvah. I began to feel more comfortable with them. They were invited and they did come.

My dress was no longer from the chubby department and my voice rang out. My speech was about strong women in the bible and the power that girls should have in religion and in the world. I looked out at my friends and was happy that Florence was sitting with them. I was even happier that I would never have to be with her again.

A few years ago I saw her in the street when I was visiting my mother. She was still dumpy, but her hair was coifed and her suit was stylish. ”Itah, Itah” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around me. ”Do you remember what fun we had walking to Hebrew School?”

Ivy Berchuck: I have been writing short memoirs on and off all my life. Thanks to Carmen and Leyla’s writing class at IRP it is now a more consistent effort bringing me unusual pleasure and self-awareness. I now seem to be remembering more than I am forgetting

by  Ivy Berchuck

I scrape my toenails against the cool sheets and listen to the sound. It is the only sound in the room, and it makes me feel cool like the sheets. I keep on scraping my toes, because there isn’t anything else to do. Outside I’d be busy with games and school and fooling around down at the corner lot, but I haven’t been there for a long time.

And this morning, because the doctor said to, they took all my books away. I think it was this morning, but I’m not sure. The doctor smelled like the square bag he carried and he unbuttoned my pajamas and said, “And how are you this morning?”

Does he expect an answer? It hurts my throat too much to say anything. And now he has that cold metal piece on my chest, and the wires are coming out of his ears, and I breathe in and out because he says to. The room isn’t right side up, I think, but that is silly so I won’t say anything. “Keep breathing,” he says, patting my back, but I didn’t know that I had stopped.

The wallpaper glares at me. It has little lambs and they are dancing around a maypole. “I am too old for this paper,” I try to say, but only a gurgling sound comes out. I think about the new wallpaper I’d choose, while that cold metallic coin presses against my chest.

I want to tell the doctor that I don’t name the lambkins anymore. I touch his hand near the place where a wisp of hair peeks from the cuff of his shirtsleeve.

“I can almost do multiplication.” He smiles and says, “That is really splendid.” He doesn’t care, I think, and I look back at the lambs. Now they are upside down, the lambs are upside down and I feel so dizzy. I’m sure that’s the right word, dizzy, but I’m not going to tell him because he didn’t care about the multiplication.

And then I hear him tell my mother, “Keep up with the fluids” and I know that the fluids are juices that aren’t cold and trickle down the throat softly. He pinches me on the cheek like I knew he would do, but I am too busy to escape his reaching fingers.

When they walk out of the room he says again that there better be no more reading and the blinds should be drawn, but I know that the blinds can’t chase away all of the sun. He wants to lock me away like the English did to the little princes in the Tower of London, but the sun creeps through the spaces in the blinds and plays on the ceiling in little slanty lines. The lines come everyday, just as they are doing now.

I can hear my mother in the kitchen. The pots are clanging and she must be making supper. I know it is supper, because the lines on the ceiling are moving away from the window getting ready to disappear for the day. I won’t be eating with my mother and father and Mark, but she will feed me in bed with a funny, curved spoon that holds the food so it won’t spill. Then the room will be quiet again, but she might tell me a story or sing one of the songs she likes from when she was a girl during the great world war. My favorite is “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.” If I try to sing with her, she says I sound like the Billy Goats Gruff. It is spooky to lose my voice before I even start.

I look over to the porcelain tabletop where the bottles are standing. The medicines are for every four hours, even at night which is silly because it is better to sleep than to taste the burning liquids. Sleep is better than anything. I leave the room and I’m back in the schoolyard, playing jump rope with the old frayed washline. I wait my turn to jump. The rope goes around fast, slapping the concrete pavement, and I jump in: onesie, twosie… .

In the kitchen, my mother cooks, and I scrape my toes against the sheet. The slanty sun lines are gone from the ceiling, I’ll eat from the funny spoon and listen to her song and go to sleep, and tomorrow the doctor will come again.

Ivy Berchuck: I have been writing short memoirs on and off all my life. Thanks to Carmen and Leyla’s writing class at IRP it is now a more consistent effort bringing me unusual pleasure and self-awareness. I now seem to be remembering more than I am forgetting

 

by James A. Avitabile

A lot happened that summer when I turned four. I heard talk about the upcoming wedding of Commare Gigi. I didn’t know that Gigi was her nickname. She was baptized Louise. Why do parents do that? They give you a fake name and they call you that all your life. Look at me, I was baptized James, but for a good part of my life, they called me Juny. It was OK with me until I went to kindergarten. Mrs. Quintavalli would call out ‘James’. I didn’t know she was calling me so I kept on playing. She thought I might have a hearing problem. One week I had to write My name is James 100 times. So now I had two names: James in school and Juny at home. My parents should have been writing: Our son’s name is James, not me. I guess learning is for kids, not for grown-ups.

One night Gigi and her boyfriend, Vincent paid us a visit. My mother knew they were coming. After all the hugs and kisses, Commare Gigi sat me on her lap and bubbled:

“Juny, Vincent and me would like you to be the ring bearer at our wedding.”

My mother cried; my father, being hard of hearing, missed what she was saying. I didn’t have any clue of what this meant.

“Juny, say thank you to Commare Gigi and Compare Vincent.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, I’ll make black coffee. I baked some fresh biscotti.”

What was I thanking them for? What’s a ring bearer? As they sipped their coffee and dunked their biscotti and talked amongst themselves, I soaked up more information. Joanne, Vincent’s niece, was going to be the flower girl. My imagination wandered. Was she going to be dressed in flowers? Why couldn’t I be dressed in flowers too?

As the biscotti melted into mooch in the delicate demitasse cups with gold dragon heads, Commare Gigi gave us details about what me and Joanne were going to look like.

“Joanne’s gown was going to be hand made. And she’ll carry a bouquet with flowers that will match the flowers on her gown. We’ll rent a tuxedo for Juny. He’ll carry a heart with rings sewn on it and little red ribbons will stream down the sides of the heart. The rings will be fake.”

I hid my feelings of disgust behind a goofy mask. So Joanne would be dressed in something new and made especially for her and she’d carry a bouquet of real flowers. I would be wearing something that someone else had worn before me and carry something that was fake. Would these rings be like the rings that you find as a prize in a Cracker Jacks box? Why didn’t they ask me what I wanted? I guess flower girls are before thoughts and ring bearers are afterthoughts.

After they left, I asked my mother: “What’s a ‘tuckseato’, mommy?”

“It’s what daddy wore when we got married, Juny. Go look at our wedding picture hanging over our bed.”

Whenever I looked at that tinted photo of them, I really never saw my father and what he was wearing. I obsessively gazed at my mother and how beautiful she looked. I dreamed that someday I would be wearing a white lace dress with a long flowing train and a veil that was nineteen feet, yes nineteen feet long. I wanted to look like her and not him. If I was going to look like my father, then a ring bearer doesn’t wear white; he wears black. He doesn’t wear lace; he wears wool. He doesn’t wear light; he wears heavy.

Their big day came. The sun got up before me. I awoke in a pool of sweat. Oh boy, I could already feel that this was going to be a boiler of a day. As I rubbed lingering sleep out of my eyes, I looked up at the black suit with the shiny lapels hanging on the closet door. Eerily, it became alive and leered down at me with an evil smirk.

“You’re not going to like this scorcher of a day, kid, or me.”

I already knew that. We had met a few days before the wedding, when I had to try on the suit to make sure it fit. I was pushed and pulled into it. I felt the scratch and weight of the wool. We didn’t like each other from the start. What bad thing did I do to deserve this kind of thermal punishment? In those days, except for a scattering of movie houses, the relief of ‘air cooled’ was nearly non-existent. The air was going to be ‘as is’ that day.

My father took great pride and care in dressing me. He glowed. He had been a marathon tango dancer during the depression. He knew what went where and in what sequence. He checked and double-checked that everything was in place and I was ready for my marathon. He took a daub of olive oil and gently rubbed it through my curly locks with his leathery hands.

I remember walking slowly down the main aisle of Sacred Heart Church. Joanne and I led the procession of six bridesmaids and six accompanying ushers. Some off key soprano was singing an ‘avay’ to Maria from the choir loft.

I heard onlookers whisper: “Oh, aren’t they the cutest little couple you’ve ever seen.”

I may have looked cute; but I didn’t feel cute. The ‘tuckseato’ controlled my every painful movement. The uncomfortable day seeped into a stagnant and stifling night. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze; it hadn’t been invited. I wanted the celebration to end so that I could get home to peel off the soggy somber suit and the limp ‘Fruit of the Looms’.

Finally it was over. I was exhausted. I had wilted; Joanne hadn’t. She looked as fresh as she had at the beginning of that blistering August afternoon. All day I had imagined how beautiful I would have been as the flower girl; how comfortable I would have felt with the air breathing freely underneath my gown.

When we got home I unglued myself from the used suit that terrorized me all day. I dumped the punishing munchkin costume on a heap of light and lacy curtain panels waiting to be hand washed in Ivory Snow Flakes and Niagara starch. The newly weds were going to honeymoon at Niagara Falls. How fitting that these ladylike and delicate panels lying listlessly on the hall floor would soon be going to their Niagara too.

A wisp of a breeze teased me with a refreshing thought. I’m too tired to think about it right now. I hugged my pillow of feathers and floated into a dream of flowers and lace.

James A. Avitabile: Thank you, Carmen for encouraging me to find my ‘Voice’. If it wasn’t for you, Leyla and our class, I might never have found it.

by Tom Ashley

I’d be willing to cut him a little slack, now, because I was a hyperactive kid. But I never got along with my father.

A lot of people did, however. He was a man who was devoted to charitable causes, forever organizing fundraising events and attending dinners. His primary devotion was to his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame to which he gave so much of his time that he was elected President of the Alumni Association one year. He loved the football games and was on a first-name basis with the college’s gridiron stars. He dragged me to endless games where I stood aside as he drank and cheered with his friends, one of whom was Jim Donnelly, Class of 1933.

Half Cherokee and half Irish a good football player but a better – indeed, a great – baseball player, Jim stood six-feet, three-inches with a chiseled frame but his demeanor was that of a gentle giant. After Notre Dame, he had declined an offer by the Yankees and chosen instead to pursue a career as a missionary priest in the remote hamlet of Lampasas, Texas. In order to support the needs of Mexican families and migrant workers, Jim would make annual trips to major cities in the mid-west and northeast. My dad would play host to Jim when he trekked to my hometown of Detroit.

The Detroit of the 1950’s was a prosperous city by anyone’s standards and proved to be fertile fundraising territory for Jim. The powerful gathered at the London Chop House or Caucus Club, and Jim would leave town with a thick stack of envelopes filled with cash and checks.

On one trip to our city, Jim saw how poorly my father and I were getting along and learned that I had been put into triple lockdown for getting in late: I was grounded, given no allowance, and assigned basement cleaning chores. Jim pulled me aside and asked if I would be interested in spending the summer in Texas.

Would I! Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and the Lone Ranger! I had seen all of their movies and TV westerns—I’d even shaken hands with Gene Autry at a live show.

Jim worked on my father and in early June, 1954, aged twelve, I flew out of Detroit’s Willow Run Airport. It was my first airplane flight but that wasn’t what made my heart pound. It was the thought of Texas. At Love Field in Dallas, Jim threw my suitcase in the back of his big station wagon and headed towards Lampasas. I don’t recall much of that drive through the open fields. During the previous week, in anticipation, I’d slept only a couple of hours a night. By the time we reached Jim’s house I was fast asleep within an hour.

With the first signs of daylight I headed outside to explore. The land was hardscrabble – grey, pink and dusty. Small stucco houses surrounded the white stucco church that stood at the edge of the village where fields began. Out in the distance an occasional horse grazed.

About fifteen minutes into my walk, I spotted a herd of twenty of the famed Texas Longhorned Cattle! I ran at breakneck speed towards them and, as they are a gentle breed, was able to get within a few yards where I could then stare at these beautiful imposing creatures, their hulking brown and white bodies and huge heads supporting horns that extended more than three feet on each side.

As time went by, I had my own animals. I’d catch horned lizards along the dusty roads and keep them in a little fenced compound I built where they camouflaged themselves in the grass. I fed them ants from the anthills in the dirt. I also had pet jackrabbits and a young fox, Reynard.

Jim knew everybody, and so soon everybody knew me, the kid from Detroit. People were generous; they would offer me cold drinks and food. They taught to me ride their horses and how to rope. One day we rode for a few miles to a watering hole where some cattle had been attacked by prairie dogs. Two cows had been killed. Three had been badly injured and had to be shot in the head. I couldn’t look. Fifty-eight years later I think back and realize how hard life was for those ranchers.

Owners of the big ranches drove Cadillacs. They got a kick out of me, the kid from Detroit who knew more about cars than they did: which features the next year’s models would have. They wanted to know all about Detroit and I lapped up their attention. One of them, Vern Perryman, had a pretty eighteen-year-old daughter named Susan. I fell in love with her and would turn crimson whenever she entered the room. Of course, just like in the movies, her boyfriend was a handsome cowboy. He played football for the University of Texas. Damn!

Jim took me to Austin and San Antonio. We visited the Alamo. I bought yellow cowboy boots at Joske’s Department Store. I loved those boots. I kept them in my closet back home long after my feet would no longer fit inside them.

By the end of August it was time to leave. I hated the thought. I built a cage for Reynard and a contraption for about a dozen of my lizards. Back to Detroit I went with them. But not long after, I came home from playing with friends and found that my father had taken Reynard and released him into a big wooded park, Sherwood Forest. A few months later, I gave my horned lizards to the Detroit Zoo.

Jim Donnelly and I wrote each other over the years. After college, I sent him a small check every Christmas to help with his missionary work. He stayed on in Lampasas for the rest of his life, working among his beloved poor. In the years since then, I’d occasionally get to Texas on business but never went back to Lampasas.

***

This year my partner gave me a birthday trip to Marfa, Texas. I have been a long-time admirer of the artist Donald Judd, who moved to Marfa in the 1950’s and bought an abandoned U.S. Army fort and turned it and the town into an artist’s mecca. It’s located in a you can’t-get-there-from-here place, seven hours from the Austin airport. Only 65 miles from Austin is Lampasas.

As we drove through the tiny towns, things didn’t seem to have changed much. What could have changed? The ranches, cattle in the fields, the single antelope, the Rio Grande Mountain range 100 miles south, and the Needle Peak Range 50 miles off to the northwest – all this had stayed the same. As we drew close to Lampasas, I warmed inside myself, recalling that summer.

Once in town I spotted the Chamber of Commerce immediately. I went in to find out the location of Jim’s old house and church, and the center of town – the courthouse square. The church and house had burned down and been replaced over twenty years ago. But Jim’s good works had continued. There was a very busy food pantry and a clothing dispensary filled with sweet-faced young Mexican women, most with a child or two in tow. No one at the church seemed to know anything about Jim or his history. I found that disturbing. I met an old woman in the parking lot. She only vaguely recalled Jim. Disappointed, I moved on to the courthouse square.

There I was astonished. The square was intact. The buildings sparked my memory. The Lampasas County Court building was exactly the same, surrounded on all four streets by one- or two-story buildings, which in 1954 had been dry goods, feed, and general stores. The outside of each store back then had had a hitching post. Those had all disappeared and the stores now had names such as Rite Aid and Dairy Queen. It was okay though. There hadn’t been a new structure placed on the square since my summer. I loved just standing there, remembering that short, extraordinary part of my life. I bought an old cowboy rope as a touchstone of those times.

As we left and Lampasas slowly disappeared in my rear-view mirror, all I could think about was the time I got to play a kid cowboy. It seems like a dream, but I lived it. Jim Donnelly and Susan Perryman have vanished from people’s minds. But ranching continues on Vern Perryman’s old spread and Jim’s good works continue in the hands of others.

There is still a certain elegance to it all. The respect that people seem to have for each other, how well they treat one another, and the role that nature plays in their lives.

In his novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote: “This is a man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care…has the power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say, ‘I have lived upon the earth and known glory.’”

I lived those ten golden moments of carefree joy. Fifty-eight years ago.

Tom Ashley: Too busy protesting during college in the 60’s, then caught up in a whirlwind career in television, I didn’t settle down to study until I joined IRP. Thank you, fellow classmates, for the opportunity to grow, and happy 50th anniversary IRP. We wouldn’t be the same without you!

 

By Victor Hughes

(Originally published in the Fall 2009 edition of Voices)

As a younger man spending years in advertising and teaching, I would sometimes have blood-pounding urges to throw off the confines of convention and live the life of devil-may-care, swashbuckling recklessness. With considerable effort, I smothered these youthful impulses, mentally delaying their fulfillment until I was old, maybe near eighty.

That’s the time to live dangerously, I’d think. I’d have nothing to lose but a few years at most, all downhill in states of increasing decrepitude. Then it’d make sense to go wild.

I envisioned myself as a crazy but wise old codger, heedless of all tiresome restraints like seatbelts and bike helmets, establishment mores, and public opinion. I’d play in Times Square traffic if I were so moved; maybe — eat a rock if it met my fancy. I’d go to war zones, embedding myself with front-line troops, have sex-crazed Hugh Hefner-type matinees whenever I wanted, zoom into orbit like the aging John Glenn, leap from airplanes a la Papa Bush. Old age would be the perfect time for high-wire acts of every sort. I almost couldn’t wait.

Well, I did wait. Hate to say it, but now I’d just as soon not go out after dark. Not only am I even more adamant about locked seat belts, but I’m a stickler for my reinforced harness and take great comfort in knowing I have inflatables throughout the car. Filtered water, low-fat cream cheese, and high-fiber cereals occupy far more of my consciousness than playing in traffic, crossing minefields or front-line fighting. A good night’s sleep certainly takes priority over embedding myself with anyone. I learn all I need to know about overseas battles, thank you, from The New York Times, large-type edition.

As for Playboy-type matinees, my present daytime interludes are far removed from sex; they involve another heavy-breathing three-letter word called “nap.” Instead of crossing minefields, I cross only on the green—the beginning of the green. Instead of high-wire acts, I clutch grab bars in the shower. Far from orbiting the earth, I circle calendar dates, too often for memorial services. I don’t parachute from planes, either, but will happily accept a bus seat from a middle-aged lady.

Old age, I’m learning, is not so much devil-may-care daring as clutch-the-banister caution. Gin-fueled carelessness has been fully replaced, I confess, by gingerly care.