Reflection

Recently I had the chance to spend time with two high-school (50 years ago) classmates. It was great to reminisce, question, uncover, reveal, different bits and pieces of our shared history.  With one friend, our association then was completely in passing---a hello-goodbye relationship (as I recall). The other was someone who was in my life, a sister cheerleader.  Hers was an absolute Father Knows Best family, unlike anything I knew (save for TV).  And I was lucky enough, also, to work for her father.  A real job, cleaning his office and once a week, in addition to a paycheck, I had access to a real father and that was a gift to me.

It struck me that they shared/remembered/had many more memories than I did. 

Had we not participated in the same sphere of events? OR had I not felt those experiences because I was working so hard to appear "normal." 

For me, life was far from normal.

It Only Takes a Moment

For most people making a life change like mine, there's a plan.




I had no plan.




I only knew I couldn't move forward until I left my home, left my marriage.




Once I began to tell my friends, one I had known for 35 years (but hadn't seen in 15!) invited me to come stay in her home in exchange for part-time work in her shop.  It was an unexpected offer and one that intrigued me. Elena had an antique/consignment business — and I loved rearranging things and setting up displays, plus my decades of thrift-store shopping meant I had an abundance of things to sell.  It seemed very fortuitous and she lived just ten minutes from the ocean — a huge bonus for me.




The ocean is a place of refuge for me.  The smell of briny water, the echoey crash of the waves pounding in on the shore reverberating in one's ears, the intense heat of the sun baking your skin to a darker, more flattering color.  The ocean always made me feel good, made me feel better and that was exactly what I was looking for so, I accepted her invitation, packed the car with boxes of china, pottery, knickknacks, clothes to sell, and supplies from Trader Joe's — Thai Red Curry Sauce, Epicuro wines (and two-buck Chuck), sparkling pomegranate juice, vinegars, pasta, pesto sauce, pitted Kalamata olives — the works.

I drove out of town on my own with no plan other than to get to South Carolina.  I wasn't much looking forward to the four-hour ride but it was a Saturday and the middle of the day when there'd be the least traffic.  Unlike my usual self, I drove UNDER the speed limit the entire way.  I didn't even have my phone out because I didn't want to be distracted by calls or tempted to answer them.  I was being exceptionally careful.   

More than three hours in to the trip, I was on a small two-lane highway going 45 mph in a 55 zone.  I glanced down at my GPS to see how much further before I had to make a change in direction — saw twenty-two miles, looked back up and there — smack in front of me — was the back of a black pick-up truck.

SLAM!  Without time to even step on the brakes, I smashed in to this truck that seemed to be stopped in the road.  And then there was steam or smoke coming out of the hood, my car door was being opened, and a woman from I-don't-know-where was frantically urging me.

“Honey you gotta get out of this car NOW.  Can you move?  We gotta get you out honey.  EARL! Come help me GET HER OUTTA THE CAR!!”

“I can get out but I can’t get out without my phone, my laptop and my chargers,” I stupidly replied.

“Now honey you’re be gonna be okay but you gotta FORGET about those things and get outta this car.  EARL!!  C’mon now honey,”  she implored, hands waving, hair falling in her face.

Chest heaving I repeated in a strangely high-pitched voice, “I can’t leave without my phone and laptop!” I was starting to get hysterical as I saw the pieces of my car scattered over the highway, saw the crack in the windshield, saw the front of my Toyota bunched up against the passenger side of the car.

I knew the laptop and chargers were in my black bag stashed on the car floor right below the impact, so I dragged the heavy bag out but couldn’t find my phone.  The woman’s voice was still insisting I get out of the car.

 

Slowly it was sinking in.

I’d had an accident. 

My car was badly smashed.

I wasn’t going to be able to drive the rest of the way to Elena’s.

I couldn’t find my phone anyplace and then I realized it was still in my pocketbook.   So with the woman’s hand on my arm lifting and leading me out, I started to exit the car.

Another woman was bringing a folding chair from Clemmon's Seed, Feed and More to the edge of the road so I could sit down.  The ladies from the feed store were looking out for me until the ambulance could get there.  I never saw the truck I'd hit (it rolled off the road and into a telephone pole) or the guy in it who had slowed down to turn in to the feed store.  When I sat down I saw broken pieces of my car — the glass, plastic, and hubcaps littering the roadway — I began sobbing and crying out:

“OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, MY CAR, MY CAR!  LOOK AT MY CAR! IS THE OTHER GUY ALRIGHT? IS HE OKAY?”

EMS workers showed up, started looking me over and getting me into the ambulance while I kept repeating “OH MY GOD, IS THE OTHER GUY ALRIGHT?” as they kept taking my vitals and reassuring me everything was going to be alright.

“The other guy is refusing to go to the hospital so he’s walking on his own steam.  He’s gonna be fine and so are you but you should let us take you to get checked out.” And off we went to the local medical center.

Three hours later a PA saw me.  No broken bones, no injuries other than significant bruising across my chest (seat belt doing its job) and a painful knee.  Two more hours before I could be released but to where?

The officer who'd been on the scene came to give me the paperwork.  My ticket said I "failed to reduce speed to avoid a collision."

"Isn't there en-knee one you can call?" Officer Ransom asked in his thick Southern drawl.


"No, my husband is more than three hours away and he offered to come, but he can't leave his mom unattended and that would be six hours back and forth.  My friend is over an hour away and not available until later."

"Whay-ell, I cud drive you to the state border but that's as far as I kin go.  Maybe your fr-end cud meet you there?" he offered.

"No, it doesn't make any sense.  I'd just have to come back here Monday with a rental car to get all my stuff.  OH MY GOD, my stuff.  Where is my car?  Do you think it can be fixed?"

"Well m'am, I'll leave that to Mr. Babson to say, but I'd say it was pretty well wrecked.  We tried to move it off the highway but it just wouldn't move no way.  So we had to have it towed to the salvage yard.  Now, I'm off in an hour and I don't think you're getting out of this place before then seeing as nobody's seen you yet, so I'm on tomorrow at 7am and I'm gonna give you a number to call and they'll call me and then I'll call you and I can drive you over to Mr. Babson's if you like.  It ain't far and if he's willing, I can take you there so you can get some of your things outta your car."  I looked at this as a great kindness.

"Is there a place to stay around here?" I asked realizing that I'd have to find somewhere to stay for two nights as I wouldn't hear from the insurance adjuster until Monday and I'd found out that there wasn't any car rental place within 45 minutes that would be open before Monday.  The one place that was nearer had closed at noon.

Officer Ransom looked at me and said, "Well u're gonna have to go about ten miles from here where there's a Days Inn cause that's the nearest place to stay.  And yu're gonna have to take a cab there because there's no other way to get there.  But don't you worry, I'll come get'ya in the morning to get yur things.  You just call that number." and he and his beige Highway Patrol hat and uniform rose to leave.

I called the Days Inn.  I told the clerk I didn't have my Triple A card with me but I had Triple A.  He said he'd believe me and save me a room.  I told him I'd had an accident and didn't have a car.  He said to call Royal Cab and tell them my "situation." 

"What about a restaurant? Do you have one?"   I hadn't eaten in hours and whatever food I'd brought with me was in the car.

"No m'am. We do have a continental breakfast in the morning, but no restaurant on the premises."

"Anything within walking distance?"

"Just the funeral home next door," he replied.  I was certainly glad I wasn't going there.

I called Royal Cab and got the nicest woman.  Told her I needed to stop and get some food.

"Fast food?" she asked.

"Not fast food.  I need real food. Good food."

"Well we got Angelo's and that's Italian and pretty good.  Your driver can take you there and if you call in your order will then that would really help ya out.  Now usually we charge ya $22 for the trip and making one stop — but we'll just charge ya $15 seeing as you're having some troubles tonight."

When I got to my motel room all I wanted to do was get into my pajamas and crawl into bed.  But then I realized — I don't have any pajamas.  I don't have any clothes or my toothbrush or just about anything except my laptop, iPhone and chargers.

At least I had those.  And Netflix.

The dinner from Angelo's was delicious.  I took my painkillers and had a decent night's sleep. In the morning Officer Ransom picked me up and took me to Babson's where Mister Babson came out of his house and unlocked the yard so we could get to my car, pry open the door and get to my luggage.  One look at my car and I started crying all over again.  

Mr. Babson told me flat out there was no salvaging the car.  In a moment my best little 96 Toyota Corolla would be no more.

I tried to think what was the takeaway message from this calamity?   Was it true as many therapists would say "There are no accidents" ?  What was the universe trying to tell me? 

Whatever it was I didn't know.  But I knew that despite this pretty awful setback, I wasn't going back.  I wanted to keep moving forward. Car or no car.

On Sunday afternoon I got a call from the Days Inn manager Dave.  He was home but wondered if I'd gotten out to get any dinner.

"Oh no, I haven't been anywhere — I'm feeling pretty sore but don't worry — I saved half my dinner from the other night for tonight.  And I had yogurt and fruit from breakfast for lunch.  I'm okay Dave."

"Well if you like pizza, I'm gonna send you a pizza for dinner and that way you'll have something leftover for lunch."  And before I knew it there was a knock at my door and the delivery guy brought me a pizza, a dessert pizza, and a liter of soda. 

It was the nicest thing. 

It was again, the kindness of strangers.

On Monday when I took the rental car to get all my things out of my car, not one single thing was broken.  Not the china, not the wine, not the plates, not the pottery, not the knickknacks.  Not one single thing in the car or the trunk.  Very lucky.

I was lucky I wasn't hurt worse.  Lucky the airbags didn't deploy and break my nose.  Lucky not to be paralyzed. Lucky the other guy wasn't either.  Lucky to be alive.   

Because Nationwide took care of the claim and settled with the other driver, the ticket was dismissed, I didn't have to show up in court or pay any court fees or fines.

All in all I have to say — I was feeling unbelievably lucky.

Maybe, just maybe, that was the message.

The Amazing Kindness of Strangers

In my March 22 post, A "Micro-moment of Positivity Resonance" I promised you another story of a wonderful collision where I connect with total strangers and come away feeling happy and filled...this is it!
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Last January while I was in New York I eagerly went to see the play Constellations — with Jake Gyllenhaal (not a bad-looking guy) and Ruth Wilson (whom I’d been admiring on Showtime’s series The Affair).  Only 68 minutes, this play skipped and hopped between past, present and future throughout the “multiverse” as the Playbill proclaimed — though I confess I hadn’t a clue.

Interestingly staged and meticulously choreographed, the swift-moving conversation between the beekeeper (he) and an astrophysicist (she) freeze-framed every few minutes.  It was quick, complicated and witty, and you really had to pay attention to keep up.

I was thoroughly enjoying the experience.

Deep in to this not-so-long production, Ruth Wilson’s astrophysicist announces, “I have glioblastoma.”  

The words were like a gut-punch to my abdomen.

I had just come to Manhattan to attend a dinner marking the two-year anniversary of the death of my 62-year-old, full-of-life sister-in-law — from glioblastoma.

For those of you who don’t know this disease, it’s brain cancer and scarcely 7% of the people who contract it survive it.  Robin was not one. [Beau Biden just died of it. Ted Kennedy was felled by glioblastoma.]

From the moment the actress uttered, “I have glioblastoma” I no longer saw the play.  I only heard the words and felt this visceral emotion radiate out from my belly.  

I felt sick.

I quietly sobbed inside, sucking in my cries, trying not to disturb the people on my right and left.  I was holding it all in until the play ended.  Then it was over.  The lights went up and a voice-over said there would a talkback.  "If you plan to stay, please move as close to stage as possible" the loudspeaker boomed.

For me this meant carefully standing up from my seat in the steeply-pitched-rear-mezzanine row, inching my way to the exit, down two flights and toward the stage.  I saw an empty spot — fourth row, one in from center aisle.  I remember breathing deeply, exhaling slowly, and trying to calm my shaking body as I sank into the seat with my big coat piled on top of me.

Before the actors came onstage, the young moderator was capably engaging the audience in a conversation about what they’d noticed, liked, questioned, about the production.  Then Jake and Ruth appeared and sat on two folding chairs close to the lip of the stage.  The moderator (with two admonitions: no pictures and ONLY questions about their work in this play) fielded questions from the audience and the actors answered genuinely and attentively, their trained eyes scanning the audience that had stayed behind.   

Then I raised my hand.  I spoke directly to Ruth Wilson describing my initial experience watching the play and how it changed for me after her pronouncement, and the connection to my sister-in-law’s death.

Immediately, Ruth looked at me and said, “I felt the same way when I first saw the play in London.  It started out funny and kind of a head-thing and then I got gut-punched and the play shifted and it became a heart-thing…” and I remember she kept looking at me directly and talking to me about how intense a play it was to do.  I told her that some of her dialogue was verbatim what Robin had said, about not being able to work anymore and having to leave a job she absolutely loved, and how she would know a thing but couldn’t get the words out, couldn’t say what she meant and the frustration she had with that.

The whole time (which probably was only three or four minutes but seemed much longer) I was physically shaking and fighting back tears.  I mumbled something about “Job well done.”  The moderator closed the talkback, thanked everyone, and requested that people leave quickly as they had another show to do that evening.

As people rose and pushed past me with all their winter gear, I found I couldn’t move. I was just too shaken up.  I came into that play with a certain expectation of entertainment and enjoyment and through sheer coincidence it brought me up short and forced me to feel the loss of my sister-in-law.  Feel the sadness of being in New York but not being with her.  Feel the emptiness of the holidays just past without her seasonal exuberance.  Feel the loneliness of dealing with my mother-in-law without Robin's commiseration.  Feel the foreboding of knowing I’m now the age she was when she died.

Sunk in that melancholy, I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder and the voice of a woman in the row behind me softly saying as she leaned near, “I am so sorry about your sister-in-law.  That must’ve been hard for you to deal with during this play.  I got so much out of the talkback; I didn’t understand that she was dying.  I missed that completely!”

“Thank you,” I said as I turned my head and saw a woman with gray hair like mine whom I judged to be slightly older, maybe sixty-nine, and then next to her, a man kindly asked, “Would you like to go for a drink or something?  A cup of coffee or a glass of wine?”

In the void suddenly a connection.

“I know I can’t have any coffee; my ulcer’s going ballistic at the moment.  I just feel so shaky.  I can’t seem to get up.”

“Well that’s alright,” the woman said, but the usher came down to our row and firmly asked us to vacate as they were waiting to clean the theatre, so I stood up, put on my coat and braced myself to trudge up the aisle and out into the freezing cold.

“Where do you have to go?  I’m Janie and this is my husband Vincent.”

“Well, I was planning to go to an exercise class further uptown at the JCC and but that's not until 7:15.”  It was about 3:45 pm at the moment. 

“We know where the JCC is,” she said firmly as she steered me out the theatre door.

“I could go to a friend of my sister-in-law’s around Columbus Circle.  I told her I’d text if I wanted to stop by but,” I hesitated not knowing what I felt like doing or even could do without falling apart at the seams.

I cropped me out of this shot :)

“You should get a picture,” Janie said as we walked in front of the people waiting at the stage door.

“Well, I was thinking that too but they said, no photos and now it’s too cold to wait.” But the stage door opened and out stepped Jake Glyenhaal making his way along one side of the crowd, signing autographs, posing for photos, and as he got to the end of line and was about to cross over to the other side I said aloud, “Oh I don’t know if I can get a shot with him,” and he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Oh yes, you can” and I said something stupid like I wasn’t sure my arm was long enough for a selfie, but then I pressed the button and sure enough got this shot, and off he went.

“Well that was great!” Janie smiled, “Now you have to get a shot with her!” but the guy on crowd control told us she’d already come out and gone back in, so we knew that wouldn’t happen.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stop and get something?” Vincent asked.

“Honestly I don’t know what I want.” I said dejectedly so they took me in tow as we headed for the subway and we walked and talked and got on a train and changed at Columbus Circle.  As we exited the subway car one of them said, “Would you like to come home with us?  Have a cup of tea; pull yourself together before heading on?  We live very close to here, just another stop away.”

Suddenly I stood still and just looked at them. Looked at them with astonishment and perplexity at these two individuals who didn't know me from Adam.

“I can’t go home with you.  I’m an emotional wreck!  I’m like a stray dog.  I can’t just go home with you.  It’s Saturday afternoon — you must have better things to do!”

Janie looked at me and said, “No, we’re free until later tonight.  It’s no bother.”

Vincent looked at me and said, “She’s a therapist, she’s used to these things, it’s no problem to come home with us. Come home with us!”

I looked at them both, thinking how lonely I was for a connection and how crazy this was but I simply said, “If you really mean it, I could use the company.  I’d love to come with you.”

And so we went.  Changed trains, went another stop, left the subway and entered their apartment filled with things of beauty and most of all, their openness to letting me spill my sorrows.  Janie and Vincent sat patiently as I told them about my past, my present, even divulged my difficult decision to separate from the life I’d been living for 30 years.  I spilled it all.  They listened caringly and patiently; gently shared their thoughts, their advice, their encouragements.  Slowly my heartache lessened and I felt lightened from the weight of my grief and sadness.  Hours later (refusing their offer to stay to dinner!) finally I left — stuffed with tea, smoked salmon, cheese, crackers, wine and so, so much more.  

I don’t know if it was God, my sister, Divine Intervention, or simply the serendipity of the moment but I felt lucky, lucky, lucky.   A guardian angel bestowed upon me these two charming, compassionate, wise, and generous strangers who took me in, gave me comfort and support, and in three hours, filled me with the emotional sustenance I was craving.    

Amidst the January snow and the cold and my deep loneliness, the constellations aligned and the universe sent me exactly what I needed — the utterly amazing gift of their friendship. 

Thanks

I've written before about my feelings around Thanksgiving.

This year, I'm going to focus on what I have to be thankful for — and I have a lot to be thankful for.

I am alive.  In relatively good health.

I have a lovely home. (However much work it needs.)  A roof over our heads. Heat in winter. Cooling in summer.

I have two refrigerators and a pantry filled with food.

My children (young adults now) can walk outside and will not be approached, profiled, stopped, arrested, or shot because of the color of their skin.

Whatever my life, whatever my problems, I have so much.


After my last post about regrets,  I heard from many of my friends.  
Some very worried about me. (No need.) 

Some reassuring me. (They too have regrets.) 

Some advising me. (The past is the past.)  

Each sharing their affection and support from their respective places in the world.

One thoughtful friend, even sent me absolution. (She's a minister, so it's legit.)

But I thought long about this shared wisdom from a dear friend…

"Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but you never get anywhere."

That seemed very profound to me. I thought about it and thought about it and I thought about how true that was and I wanted to accept that wisdom and move on — but oh, how I love a rocking chair!  How I just sink into the comfort of that motion. Back and forth, back and forth, and no where to go but be in that swing and sway.  Back and forth, back and forth.  Maybe I'm comfortable sitting in regret.  

I hope not.

Another wise treasure came from a high school chum…

"Regrets limit us. Nobody gets a chance to go back and fix them so why do we focus on them? We did the best we could. Hopefully, our children can come to appreciate that. Don't beat yourself up...try to let go of shit you can't change."

And so, uncharacteristically, I find myself feeling very good about all the feelings of friendship and warmth and caring that have come my way and I'm trying to be in my present.

This Thanksgiving I made:

• the organic turkey (with a thyme-rosemary-salt & pepper butter rub, for the first time),
• my root-vegetables-only, no-flour FABULOUSLY DELICIOUS gravy,

• sausage stuffing (with mushrooms added in this time with the celery and onions)

• creamed onions with toasted almonds on top,

• cranberry-mango sauce

• and my wonderfully smooth and luscious caramel pumpkin flan with whipped cream...

          and you know what?

IT ALL CAME OUT GREAT!  

I WAS HAPPY WITH EVERY LAST THING I MADE 
(I didn't make the mashed potatoes but with my gravy, they were great, too.) 

AND (This is really pretty amazing...)

I DIDN'T CRITICIZE A SINGLE THING!!!

Now I know many of you readers out there don't know me, but those that do, KNOW that for me to make a meal that I don't chop into little pieces complaining about the taste, the texture, the color, or any other way I failed to make it right — that's pretty miraculous.

I'd say that's a lot to be thankful for — and believe me I am.

But more than this — thankful, thankful, thankful for ALL OF YOU.

Stuyvesant Square and Surrounds

My friend Shirley Sender died much too soon and whenever I am in New York I think of her.  This trip was no exception.

On the Lexington bus headed downtown, I passed (too fast to take a shot) a restaurant awning  Shirley.

I was going to see one of Shirley’s best friends (one of two Nancys) who’d recently had open-heart surgery and (thank the Lord) was doing very well.  Despite feeling as if she had been rammed by a car and a truck (one in front and one in back),  Nancy was sitting up, talking, taking short walks, and wise-cracking like her pre-surgery self. 

She was at Beth Israel Medical Center, down on First and 16^th, in a spacious room (bigger than her West Village apartment, with French doors no less!) and a beautiful view — despite the scaffolding that wrapped the building outside her window.  In addition to seeing Nancy doing so well, meeting her multiple friends (Bryan, Dodie, Christina & Josh) and sharing stories, I got the pleasure of perusing the neighborhood once I left.

 



Stuyvesant Square Park — actually two lovely parks, back-to-back on either side of the avenue.  Though it was November, the leaves were turning and falling all around me, still there in the park were flowers in bloom…

           

       a beautiful strong and stalwart church standing guard — ready to slay dragons if needed…

             

and the quiet majesty of the Quaker presence — with their meeting house from 1786 (with plain but elegant moveable bench-pews painted dove-gray with worn red velvet cushions) and their Friends school.  Here I visited another friend-of-a-friend who was tending children while their Quaker parents communed in the hall upstairs.

The Quakers have their own tenets of truth.  Some emblazoned outside for all to see…

and other more subtly displayed to embed in one’s conscience.  Inside, where the children stayed and played while their parents discussed the problems of the world and how their social activism could help, I found a little truth for my own.

I was wearing the scimitar pin Nancy saved for me from Shirley’s collection.  

Maybe I’ll be slaying some dragons of my own.

Return To Sender

                                                SHIRLEY ANN SENDER TOUILLON

                                                                      JUNE 24, 1947 - OCTOBER 15, 2013

I don't remember when I first met Shirley Sender.  It might have been when I started work at Butterick Publishing and as a gesture of trying to fit in with the new workplace I volunteered to give blood during the blood drive that first week.  After my blood was drawn I walked across the main area, threw up, and fainted right there in front of everybody.  I think Shirley was the one who came to assist, pushed away my thoughts of awful embarrassment and became my friend.

Shirley was vintage.  Not just her last name which always reckoned the song               "RETURN TO SENDER!  Address unknown!   No such number, no such zone." 
but everything she searched out was a find.  

She was the Queen of Street Fair shopping.  This top (kind of a heavy quilted cotton thermal) was one I liked and was hesitant about buying (maybe it was $20?) but Shirl urged me to buy it and I'm still wearing it — 35 years later! [Recently, I did have to restitch a seam at the neckline but hey — small price to pay.] Still there were times when she had to push, push, push me to spend my money on something...

With Shirley, every encounter was an adventure.  She knew I loved vintage clothes and she took me to this place where the clothes were piled high in those huge canvas rolling carts used by commercial laundries and dry cleaners.  While everywhere else a dress might be $15 and up, here the dresses were $3 each but you sure had to plow and dig for them!  Shirl was an expert — she’d dive right in to the bottom (“The top stuff’s already picked through, but these YUPPIES don’t have the balls to work to the bottom.”) and with her keen eye pull out what turned out to be a spectacular garment.  

This is what that dress looked like...

My very, very favorite was a black crepe cocktail dress from the 50s with a nipped in waist, three-quarter tight sleeves, and a draped boat neckline that stayed in place with a metal weight that was sewn in to make it dip just so…I have a killer photograph of me in that dress in a sea of people at a party in the West Village (not far from where Shirley lived).  The photographer (maybe the hostess of this bash) is way above on a loft looking down into this throbbing mass of party-goers and there I am in the middle of the crowd, in the middle of a laugh with a lit cigarette poised mid-air.  I look SO happy and I wish I could find that photo.

Another great find of Shirl’s was when she heard I liked old china and took me to this small crevice of a store that sold old restaurant dishes from everywhere made by Syracuse, Shenango, and Sterling China.  The dusty shop was filled with old wooden barrels that held piles and piles of these heavy, indestructible plates, bowls, mugs and platters with logos from airports, railroads, university clubs, and restaurants you never heard of (see below) but loved their signature dishes!  The place was called Fishs Eddy which made no sense to me whatsoever but today they are alive and well and have a booming retail and internet business.  They got “yuppified" as Shirl might say….

Shirl was "Ukrainian from Pittsburgh" and took me from one little place to another to sample pierogies.  We loved this place in Tompkins Square Park — Orchidia — probably the only Italian-Ukrainian restaurant that ever was — "It's got raviolis and pierogies!" she'd cry out whenever she wanted us to trek over to Alphabet City to eat.  She introduced me to Spanish food at El Faro close to where she lived on Horatio Street.  On one of our jaunts through the East Village, she took me (and later my husband) to a favorite dive — what I think was called The Lime Rock Inn — a dark and hidden bar with barely enough light to find your chair but their crispy, batter-dipped soft-shell crabs — OH-OH-OH. Served with a homemade marinara sauce — they were unbelievably delicious.  My taste buds cried when that place closed down.

Street-fair shopping was a breeze with Shirley because she always knew exactly which table, which vendor, under which box to look for the most unusual, most exquisite knick-knack to own.  Take those red heart earrings.  She spotted them and convinced me I should buy them.  Even though hearts are no longer the fashion staple they were back then — the summer I wore only red, black, and white — even now decades later, I still wear them every Valentine’s Day.  Long after I’d moved away from Manhattan, over the years,  an envelope would arrive in the mail from Shirley and inside her funky card with a loving handwritten note would be a little red Chinese paper envelope or cloth pouch with a trinket she’d found especially for me —  a pin, a bracelet, a fabulous charm.  She was a generous soul like no other.

Shirley was always trying to expand my limited horizons.  One summer she called me up and said I had to come spend the day and night watching Live Aid.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a benefit concert to raise money for Ethiopia and there are going to be some incredible acts.  You can’t miss this," she said, sensing my hesitancy and knowing I was not one to just venture out, “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Com'on it’ll be fun — we’ll be outside in Rigney’s backyard with food and drinks and everything — it’s a happenin'!” she teased me.

So I packed myself up and made the long subway trek from the Upper West Side down to Horatio Street in the Village and entered the backyard garden of Shirl’s best friend Nancy (actually one of two Nancys...the other Nancy the wife of Richie Havens who would be performing at Live Aid) who had run a 25-ft electrical cord out from her apartment to the plug in a TV that was set-up on a table outside.  Though the reception was intermittently fuzzy with static the sound was good and a group of their friends spent the next ten hours drinking and watching group after group perform at what was indeed a memorable and ground-breaking concert.  The stand-out for me was Sting performing with then new-to-the-scene Branford Marsalis.  Branford comes out on stage to play with him — Marsalis on soprano sax is accompanying Sting singing Roxanne and soon he's not just playing, his soprano sax becomes another voice — in exquisitely beautiful harmony — they perform a duet.  The performance made me cry then and still makes me cry every single time I hear it.  You owe it to yourself to listen to it on youtube.  Since that day I’ve wanted to ask Branford Marsalis about that performance — how did he feel? Did it feel as if it was the best performance of his life?

When I got married, Shirley gave us this sensational piece of art called, "In a Sentimental Mood" by Havlicek '86.  At first glance it was hard to tell what the image was, but close up, close up you could see the lovers kissing. This hangs in our living room and reminds me of her gift everyday.





                                                                                 


Shirley was a dear friend whose life was cut short by cancer.  There are so many more stories to tell and I know I've left out a lot but perhaps I've given you a glimpse at the gift she was to us all.  

I suppose now "Return to Sender" will mean our Shirley is from whence she came...

That's Shirley on the right in happier times with our friend Bob-o — who took the great shot of Shirley at top