Daddy's Heroism in NYC, Part 2

I just got back from Pleasant Hill, where Kathy hosted our monthly Supporting KAST--Kathy, Suzy and I (Tina).  That was after I helped Javier get his BMW out of the garage onto 19th Avenue (where he thinks it's more at risk than my Civic Honda) at noon on a day we began with our usual morning ritual plus a reading-aloud of an article by Fariba Nawa, "Fremont savors new cultures."  (That should be a separate blog, especially if it includes Javier's responses!)    But I will make note here and now of the vegetarian restaurant Sarvana Bhavan.

Now, back to Daddy, whom I was praising a couple of days ago for rising to the occasion (which some might call an emergency) when I arrived alone and unexpected in NYC while he was at a conference for the American Psychological Association.  That was in or around 1953.

Today's account is of summer 1969, when Suzy and I were on a trip to the east coast--Georgia, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania--before I left for Peace Corps Training for Tonga in Hawaii.  Missy, several months pregnant, was then living with Daddy in a townhouse in Harrisburg.  Daddy offered to take us to New York City and whatever Broadway shows we wanted to see, so I suggested Man of La Mancha and Cabaret.  I really can't remember which one we were going to on the night I accidentally tested the kindness and patience of both the theatre manager and Daddy, but let's say it was for The Man of La Mancha because that was the better production if not the better  show.  (Maybe the better show too, though)

I was awe-struck that Daddy, who didn't believe in spending money, would take us to see any shows at all, but two?   It seemed too wonderful to believe.  Had dating again after his divorce from Mom changed him so much?  Had he taken anyone in the family to see a show since he'd taken Mom to see Oklahoma in 1945?  (The answer is probably yes, but not on Broadway.)  He gave me the tickets to keep for the nights we were going, and on our way to the theatre, I held The Man of La Mancha tickets in my hands and marveled at their beauty.  I read the words and numbers printed on them and memorized it all like poetry.  Then Daddy said he would drop us off at the theatre and go and park.  (That was pretty heroic too for a father who when we were children expected us to wipe the car windows on  frosty or rainy morning and then push the car to get it started, as we so often had to do.) 

Now comes the scary part:  When it was time to get out of the car, I neatly laid the tickets down at the carpeted floor where my feet had been and got out--an act I was totally unconscious of doing until we got to the theatre, and I noticed that the tickets were not in my hand. 

"Do I--Could I possibly be remembering this right?" I asked my sisters.  "Did I lay them down on the floor of the car?"

I don't remember what they said.  That wasn't the important part.

I asked to see the manager and explained what I had done, and he asked me whether I knew the seat numbers.  Because I'd memorized the tickets like poetry, I did.

"You can take those seats.  But if anyone comes in with the tickets, we'll have to give the seats to them."

Ah, New Yorkers!  The kindest, sweetest people on the face of the earth.

I thanked him and said that the only possible person who might have them would be our father.

When Daddy arrived, I asked, "Did you by any chance notice our tickets on the floor of the car?"

He said, with amazing calm, "No."  I told him what I had done and how stupid I felt about it, and he didn't scream or holler or take God's name in vain.  He may even have said, empathically, "Well, sweetheart..." without following it with any threats.  Of course I quickly followed my confession by explaining that the manager was going to let us go to the seats he'd bought for us even though we didn't have the tickets.

Once seated  we saw an absolutely wonderful production of Man of La Mancha, which I'll always remember because it was so wonderful, and so was Daddy, who was transformed into a knight in shining armor more real than don Quixote.
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Daddy as Hero in NYC, Part 1

I've had a really busy day, first reading about White House Down, then going to the Y with Witer in Madrid by C.J. Sansom, and then writing notes to Vicky, Shehla, Janet, Beth, followed by a three-hour session with Efren, my wonderful computer-help.   After than I had to get my hair cut like Jane Fonda; that's easier than getting my body like hers.  So even though I did start working on those 40 messages exchanged to plan a walk and lunch at the Embarcadero, I haven't finished.  That's why I'm coming back to Daddy and his heroism.

When I was eight years old, I flew to New York alone by mistake.    I was spending the summer in Atlanta with my grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins, and my dad was at a psychologists’ convention in New York.  The mistake came as a result of a long distance telephone call from my dad.  We all knew that a long distance phone call cost thousands and thousands of dollars, especially if it went on longer than three minutes.  So we tried to listen real fast, the way my dad talked, even though he was a southerner, and southerners usually talk slowly.  They don’t talk slowly when it costs thousands and thousands of dollars.  Also, one of my dad’s guiding principles was that money wasn’t meant to be spent.  He’d go out of the city to get day old bread—enough to last a week.  And when he recycled paper towels, that didn’t mean putting them in the recycling bin.  It meant drying them out and using them again.  So knowing how expensive this call was, we all gathered around the phone in a panic, and my grandmother bravely took the call.  She said  three things during that three minute conversation:  Hello.  Okay.  And “Love ya too.”  And at the end of the conversation she paced around the living room trying to decide just what it was my dad had said.  Was it, “Don’t send Noelie to New York tomorrow” or was it “Send Noelie to New York tomorrow.”  (My real name is Noelie, and relatives have a way of hanging on to your real name longer than other people do.) After quite a bit of pacing, Grandmother decided it was “Send,” so they got me on a plane and sent me to New York. 

Of course, my dad didn’t know I was coming, so when I arrived there was no one to meet me, but the New Yorkers were very friendly and warm.  I’d been told never to get kidnapped or molested, which I think they explained as playing doctor with grown ups, and my parents advised me  that people might offer me candy, so I’d made a mental note:  Don’t get kidnapped.  Don’t get molested.  Hold out for the people with the candy.  So when I arrived in New York, and there was no one to meet me, I got my suitcase and sat down on it and began the business of not getting kidnapped or molested.  Nobody offered me candy.  But people kept coming by and saying, “Little girl, where are your mommy and daddy?” And I kept saying, “My daddy will be here any minute.” 

And finally he was.

What happened is that my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins had had the foresight to send a telegram because even though they were pretty sure that my dad had said “Send Noelie tomorrow” rather than “Don’t send Noelie tomorrow,” he hadn’t specified a time tomorrow.  So they sent a telegram with the flight number and the arrival time, and my dad finally got the telegram announcing my arrival time, which was an hour or so before he got the telegram.   So my dad—the man who didn’t believe that money was meant to be spent, the man who went out of the city to get a week’s supply of day-old bread, the man who dried out paper towels so we could use them again—this man took a taxi to get me.  And of course, if a three minute telephone call costs thousands of dollars, a taxi ride went into the millions.  But he was very heroic about it.  He told me that grandmother had misunderstood.  He was in the middle of all the sessions now.  He had wanted me to come to NY later.  But he also told me not to tell my grandmother about her mistake because he didn’t want her to feel bad.  Then he turned me over to the wife of another psychologist, a native New Yorker,  who showed me all around that incredible city, and every one I met was friendly and warm, and nobody kidnapped or molested me, though some people did offer me candy. 

          So it worked out beautifully.  My father had the chance to be heroic.  I got to love New York.  And I had the chance to do some thinking:  If my grandmother had made a mistake, it was the right mistake. And if I were like my grandmother, as some people said I was, and I’d inherited the prone to error gene, as some people said I had, then I wasn’t going to worry about making mistakes as I traveled through life.  I was going to focus on making the right mistakes.  And I think I’ve made a lot of the right mistakes.

          But the point here is that Daddy as heroic.   And tomorrow--even before I share the 40 messages it took to get a group of five friends together, I'm sharing part 2 of Daddy's heroism.

40 messages and Plan A, B, C

This is just a place-holder for what I want to write about when I'm awake later.  I was telling Janet, Beth, and Shehla (for reasons that I'll explain later) that in our family, we always had a plan A, B, and C.  Janet suggested, "And then you did D."  We had quite an amazing series of messages as we were trying to get together today and for today.  I'll share some of them tomorrow.

It's also true that we have always spoken in rough drafts, A, B, and C.

The third part of this that I want to mention is Viktor Frankl's quote:  "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."  Of course, he was speaking within the context of concentration camps, not in terms of a birthday celebration!

Oklahoma for Servicemen--Free Tickets

Between visits today (Janet for a walk in Stern Grove, Vicky for lunch, seeing Bill and Vilma on Divisadero) I watched snatches of The American Musical Theatre:  A Jewish Legacy.  One snatch said that service men were given free tickets to Oklahoma, and that made me wonder whether that's how Mom and Daddy  happened to see it.  (I've already talked about how ecstatic she was.)  Daddy didn't like spending money even when he had it, and that may have been during the years when Mom was staying in NYC with a really nice Jewish woman who'd pass Daddy money so he could take Mom out when he was on leave.  (Her daughter objected to this, thinking that her mother should be getting money from the tenant, not giving it away.)  But one of my warmest memories of Daddy pertains to his taking Suzy, Missy and me, in 1969 after their divorce, to see both Cabaret and Man of La Mancha.  More about that tomorrow.

But on the subject of the Jewish Legacy, Mom sort of wanted to be Jewish, so maybe she (an adoptee) was.

Admiring Words about Mom from Daddy, 1987

            I just printed out a map showing how, today, someone could walk to UCLA from 9134 Hargis Street, where Mom lived with her parents, my Grandparents Robison, until she married Daddy, and I looked it up because of something Daddy said at a reunion in 1987.  I have it on a cassette I made while I was there but hadn’t listened to for decades because the ribbon broke. My great tech help Efren brought it to me restored yesterday, and together we made a CD of it from my Crosley, imported it into iTunes, and got it on my iPod.

            It’s an interesting listen just a few weeks before Dana arrives for a short visit and after some summer reports on how bullying by someone in the family can be just as detrimental to the victim as peer bullying can be.  I had thought Dana stopped bullying me after she was an adult, but she gets on this cassette and makes very mean, mocking comments.  She tries to get Jonathan to participate in her deriding of me, but he won’t.  He was good at picking up on things.  At the beginning of the tape, when I try to reassure him about the plane trip, which he says makes him just a little bit nervous, I say, “These pilots know what they’re doing, I think.”  He says, “You think!  That means you don't know!”

            I think he picks up on Dana’s mocking me too as she uses baby-talk to describe what I’m wearing for pajamas (just too precious and tacky) and talks about the “Tina show” when what Suzy and I most remember about the reunion is that Dana sat us down on the stairway and went through a monologue (I don’t have on tape, unfortunately) for almost an hour. 

            But this is a blog about Mom and sometimes Daddy, and this time both appear even though Mom wasn’t at the reunion, and Daddy’s hardly ever heard.  He does bring up the subject of lights left on in 25 rooms.  (Dana was living in the huge house where she still lives and has a electric bill of several hundreds every month.)  Last night as I was watching The Bicycle Thief, which takes place in Italy right after WWII, when Italians were facing a Depression, I thought about how Daddy and Mom both talked about those years.  Mom in particular remembered how her father struggled to make a living.  (Her story “Tomorrow’s Christmas” relates to that.) 

            Anyway, Daddy says that Mom had to go almost five miles to UCLA, and to save 5 cents, she walked instead of taking the streetcar.  (Jonathan remembers Mom’s telling him that she had a choice sometimes.  With five cents she could take the streetcar or she could have a Coke and then walk home.)  Daddy goes on to say that she could read half a book in the time it took her to get from home to UCLA. 

So I looked it up, and it appears that it’s 4.4 miles and takes about 1 hour and 32 minutes to walk. 

            I’m impressed that Daddy brought that up.  This was long after their divorce, which he didn’t want but really (sorry, Dad) made necessary.  I’m impressed that he spoke so admiring of Mom. I'm also impressed that Mom walked those 4.4 miles to campus and that Daddy turned off lights when they were not in use.

Anyone for a pilgrimage from 9134 Hargis Street to 405 Hilgard Avenue (UCLA)?

9 Parts of Desire 2006

I'm now going to go back to visit my mother as she was years before her evaluation.  February 26, 2006

Javier came at 12:45 and we went to Berkeley in the rain to see 9 Parts of Desire with Mom.  It had been almost a year since the day in March when she first met Javier, fresh from protesting with me against the war on Iraq, then in its third year, and this was a play about Iraqi women.  But there was something strange about the end of the evening.    She chose not to eat in Berkeley (or did we decide that?) because it was raining so hard and it would take extra time to get back to Pleasant Hill, but she didn't want to get home too early.  She seemed really troubled.  

.  "Let's stop and call Kathy." 

 Was that before we had cell phones, or were all our batteries dead the way they used to be because we so rarely used them?  

         "By the time we stop and find a phone, we could have you home," I said.  

          But I could tell that it was to warn Kathy that she'd be coming home earlier than expected, and I wondered whether Kathy was having someone in and had complained that she never had the house to herself.  

           Candles were lit and something Kathy was making smelled really good.  Mom was apologetic that she was home in time for dinner.

          Javier and I returned to San Francisco, and we had a quick dinner of fresh spinach and couscous and sun-dried tomatoes while watching Ebert & Roeper.  And we did other things.  But I thought about Mom for a long time and wondered why she felt like an intruder that night.

Neuro-Dams--Mom's and Mine

Since I was writing about my mother's love of everything French, I should share a letter I wrote to a neurologist, whose research on stage fright was reported on in the SF Chronicle this past week:

Sent: Sat, Jun 22, 2013 4:25 pm
Subject: Stage fright in speaking a foreign language

Dear Dr. Gannon,

                I was really interested in your article about stage fright because of what I’ve sometimes experienced when speaking a foreign language.  I don’t speak French or Spanish like a native, but I range between speaking them pretty fluently and speaking them not at all.  When the not-at-all experience comes, I’ve attributed it to self-consciousness.  One example is when I was in Turkey, and I spoke spontaneously with a guide who was leading French people around.  Then I noticed that my friends who don’t speak French were listening, and I couldn’t utter another word.  It wasn’t out of courtesy to them, I’m sorry to report.  I just became aware that they might be passing judgment (even though they don’t know French), and I froze.   I had another experience when I was giving a English-teaching methodology seminar with other American teachers in Tokyo, and one of them, knowing that I had lived in Madrid a year,  asked me for the words for “Stand up” and “sit down.”  I drew a blank.  I couldn’t remember a word of Spanish.  Then, when I found out that a Japanese teacher had lived in Spain for four years, he and I spontaneously began a conversation in Spanish and it flowed.  The teachers I’d failed to help looked at each other as if they thought I’d been holding back on them, but I certainly hadn’t wanted to do that.  These are not “big” moments like being in front of an audience.  They’re just with two or three people, and in all cases I see that I’m feeling self-conscious—maybe thinking too much about how I’m coming across.  When I was being evaluated for language classes in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Besancon, France, however, I was quite fluent, and after being tongue-tied with the manager of a hotel in Paris who needed something translated form Spanish, I spoke to a Mexican housekeeper with great ease.

                Have you studied this kind of coming and going of a foreign language? 

                Tina Martin

He responded the same day and invited me to contact his office.  But I'm really more interested in the reason than in the solution to the problem.  I advise my students that they focus on what they're saying--interesting (we hope) information or insight--so they can stop thinking about how others see them.  

Neuro-Dams keep the river flow from taking its normal course.  I've thought about Mom's different moods and states in terms of how I feel at different times of the day.  I wake up in a really good mood, but if I take a nap in the afternoon, I feel very gloomy when I awaken.  I wondered whether Mom was affected by the different times of day.  I thought of her mind as an accordion with rooms separating hours and years in different files until the accordion is pushed in (note my incredible music terms) and all the hours and years are pressed together.  

 But now, back form my road trip that took me to Hoover Dam, I'm thinking of dammed rivers.