If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Proust had it right. One small act or sensory impression leads to a panoply of remembrances , appreciations, sadness and joy. For him it was that bite of the Madeleine. For me last night it was bubbles in the tub. I know one isn’t suppose to use bubbles in a Jacuzzi. It gums up the works and shortens it’s life but what is the point if you can’t be engulfed with the scent of something you love. And being a confessed addict of hot baths I enjoy a long soak and hydro massage every night. It was a ritual  enjoyed by my mother and inherited by me. For her it was being surrounding with the scent or arpege perfume followed by clouds of dusting powder. For me it is kneipp in several scents, last night was juniper. And as I lay in the tub, the bubbles  rising faster than I had ever seen I wondered if I would be totally immersed in the bubbles before the Jacuzzi timer stopped the attack. It was a delicious dare, all I had to do to stop the war was to stand up but I wanted to see how long it would take for the bubbles to surround me and maybe even overtake me completely before accepting defeat. As they neared my chin I had to blow them from my mouth and this only attenuated the north woods scent blowing up from the steaming water. And of course I thought of my mother. And an early memory where I had jumped from the bath, ran naked and maybe damp into her room to plop on the bed waiting for the dusting powder she swept across my little body. And occasionally the naked escape afterwards to run naked around the house  with three year old glee. Two other early memories are sitting on the floor between her and Hilda’s knees and using a low coffee table to hoist myself up to standing. It was a glorious moment , to rise up on my own power and see the world before me. And then there is an even earlier one , still crawling – moving to my grandmothers treadle sewing machine to push the platform back and forth. Sewing and powder and autonomy all converging more than  half a century later to help me write this nonsense little blog.  But the memories didn’t stop with my mother. They roamed over to my dad, the biggest love of my life until Jim and then to NYC and Picasso and trains and new haven and paper white narcissus in march. But that’s another entry. A love affair with NYC begun early and completely entangled with the men in my life and babies and freedom and emotional incarceration and how once NYC enters your blood it never, thankfully leaves. All this from a bath? No wonder I love them so.

 

 

Lennie at 21

 

 

            When he wasn't around, his sisters called him The Prince but  his parents named him Leonard. To his colleagues and friends he was Len.  The red haired Irish woman who married him always called him Lennie.  And to his daughter he was, and always would be, Daddy.

He was born into money  and even after the family lost much of it in the crash of '29, he moved through life like the heir to a vast fortune. He had the nose for a deal and long after his family left the old neighborhood and moved uptown, he spent Sunday mornings bargaining in broken Yiddish with the clothing vendors on Orchard Street. He could spot a bound buttonhole from twenty paces. Few men his age could tell the quality of a jacket from the feel of the interfacing as well as Lennie. He demanded impeccable tailoring and he flirted his way into the graces of the elderly men who spent their lives making the tiny alterations that suited his self image.

He had never learned to cook, but he could iron a shirt so that it looked newly purchased. He  had never washed a dish in his life, but he could replace a button with a tailor's stitch that would make a seamstress proud. The guilty pleasure of towering over a man who slapped and whipped his shoes into a high sheen never  failed to lift his spirits.  

As the first born son of  recent immigrants from Russia, the world was his playground. Boats and cards and good food. He saw little point in self sacrifice. Coming first into his family, he learned the role well and expected everyone else to assent. It seemed so little to ask. His pleasure in having things his way was so evident,  most people deferred to Lennie.

His wife, whom he always called Babe, would say, "Lennie would flirt with a cat if he thought it would get him something he wanted. "  And people flirted back. To Lennie, the laughter and the compliments felt as good to give as to get.  Being surrounded by beautiful things, interesting people, and ample time to enjoy them was Lennie's goal in life.  It  made sense.

Lennie drew the redheaded Irish woman to him like  iron to a magnet the summer of 1940.  It was his dancing that converted her, first to liking him, then loving him. He waltzed her through her entrance into Jewish life. They tangoed at their wedding. They moved in such awesome unison to a melody of their own making  that other dancers often paused to watch.

            And photographs captured it all. Dressing like gangsters on New Year's Eve.  A slender black haired man gliding the woman in dark taffeta over the oak plank  floor of Roseland.  Lennie and Babe clicking cocktails at The Stork Club. Dinner at 21.  The sepia images captured not only what the eyes saw, but also the laughter and the voices of the young lovers.  And if one looked well enough, the photographs conveyed the music that echoed through the time: Glenn Miller, the Dorsey brothers, and Paul Whiteman. The images hummed with the romance of early married life in New York City.     

When their first daughter arrived ten months later,  Lennie danced  the nurses down the hospital hall. And while the settings of the pictures changed to bathtubs, beaches, and naps on the chenille covered couch, the love that spilled into the photographs was barely containable.  Lennie must have carried that camera everywhere: into the bathrooms, cafes, train stations, and synagogues that comprised family life. Each photo held the  record of Lennie and Babe, and then their baby, dancing with their delight in the gurgles bubbling out of this product of their love.

So when their baby's throat swelled with that furious infection, it was no surprise to anyone that the photographing stopped. The laughter lost its sound. All that took their place was the stillness of a funeral walk in the full heat of July. Maybe he wanted to stomp out a dance over her grave.  But the crying eyes that watched him bury his daughter the summer she turned two held him back .

In years to come, Lennie and Babe would get up to dance again, at a wedding, at a nephew's Bar Mitzvah, in the solitude of their living room. Maybe they swayed together the night their next daughter precariously entered the world. But one kind of  music stopped  for them that summer  and they never danced to that song again.

Copyright   dku     July 1 2000