We interrupt your regularly scheduled program...

So, it’s been quiet around these parts because I’ve just been too busy, too stressed and not really inclined to write for awhile.

So, what I’m going to do is start going through the drafts queue of the blog and emptying everything out. Getting all those unfinished thoughts and bits out and into the interwebs because you know I just shit jewels baby! JEWELS!

Anyway, this is from 2006 (wow five years!)

How I spent Yom Kippur.

You notice things like a Jewish holiday in and around New York more than other places. Probably because we have a nice healthy-sized population of people of the Hebrew persuasion. It makes me wonder sometime what it is like in other cities where that is not the case.

Living in New York, you have to be acutely aware of these things in a way other Goyim are not. It’s part of the heritage of being a New Yorker and it’s a good thing. Thinking about Yom Kippur makes me think about the first Shiva call I had to make over the summer. I had never made a Shiva call before and the circumstances surrounding this one were quite sobering.

I was about 12 when I first met Jackie.

It would be around 1972 when Flo, Jackie and Laurie became a part of my life. They would be a big part of my life from 72 to around 76 or thereabouts I think. Jackie was the older daughter of a very sweet woman (Flo) my father was dating then. It was through Flo and her family I wound up meeting a wonderful group of people. People who would become important to me throughout my years as a teenager. I got exposed to a lot of things I would have otherwise missed out on and been a lesser person for it.

There was Flo, Jackie and Laurie - we wound up spending a lot of time together for a period. Me, a boy on the cusp of being a teenager, an only child to boot, it was a bit of an adjustment being exposed to this household of women. It wasn’t a problem so much as being a kid in a candy store with two very beautiful girls in close proximity to my own age.

Jackie, two years older than me and Laurie a year younger, our parents dating and as a result, all of us thrown in together because of it. We would go out with our parents and have a wonderful time. I saw Gilbert and Sullivan plays because of Flo. I remember going to see Ben Vereen in Pippin on Broadway and seeing Gigi and the Desert Song as well. Also, I can recall dinners at La Crepe and the Hawaii Kai - vaguely mind you but, with fondness nonetheless.

Laurie would have been my first girlfriend and Jackie... well Jackie was the cool, good looking, older sister young boys always dreamed about. She was that unobtainable woman because even though only seperated by two years, I was very much considered a kid.

Life through memory’s prism is a highlight film, all the best moments there for you. It’s the magical times and magical people who made a lasting impact on you. They are fixed in your memory and if you grow out of touch they remain there unchanged by time. You look back on life and it’s funny the things which stick with you. Memory is interesting. You block out a lot of the bad stuff and the past takes on a rosy tint. It’s a wonderful glow, free of the suffering and trauma that may existed when it happened.

A lot of my memories are of those people and of those times because they were good times indeed.

Flo was always considered in and around the family as the one my father let get away. She was a nice outgoing and attractive woman, people liked her, I liked her. I’ll never know what the reasons were for the rift between the two of them (my father and Flo), it was just a matter of one day my father had a new girlfriend on his arm - she was just another of many of the good partners he let slip from his grasp but, that’s a tale for another day.

As the years went on, while we all moved out of each other’s lives for the most part - we would still encounter each other in an almost comet like fashion briefly coming in and out of each other’s orbit. Jackie, while she got older and changed, was ever the very lithesome and pretty young woman of my teenage fantasies.

Earlier this year, in the maelstrom of cleaning up and dealing with the storm of the EYOC’s many affairs, I came across some old letters from Flo to him. She had obviously made her mark in his heart and he had saved those things she had written to him long after they were apart. I couldn’t throw them out and I had to admit to feeling a bit of an interloper having chanced upon them. Thing was, the letters (cards) made the passion between my father and Flo a very concrete thing.

As it was, it got me thinking how I hadn’t talked to Flo in a long time and how it might be a good thing for the EYOC to have a visit from her. So, I called and it was wonderful. I wound up meeting Flo for lunch and then accompanying her on the visit to EYOC and overall it was a very good day. ‘The girls’ would be glad to hear their mother had news of me and they were doing well.

Five months later, I got the call that Jackie was gone...

There is a bench in the New York Botanical Garden now that has a plaque on it with Jackie’s name. I contributed to it but the bench doesn’t begin to attest to the woman she was. And since I started this five years ago, I’m older than Jackie was when she passed and her passing was so very sudden. It speaks to the nature of how there are no guarantees of tomorrows or that we will even be remembered for the time that we had here.

I miss her. I didn’t see her much as the years progressed but I still miss her. And I carry within me a whole host of memories of her time here so she lives on in that way.

A year or two back, Flo invited me over to share in her Passover Seder and I felt both privileged and honored to be extended the courtesy. Laurie was there with her husband and two children and she turned to me at one point and made note of the fact her daughter is at the age now that we were at when all of us first met. And we commiserated because, could it really have been that long ago? And seeing her daughter, were we really that young and innocent (because surely at the time we knew it all).

But that’s the way things go and the one thing that’s assured is life changes, the world changes all around us each and every day. It doesn’t stand still for any one of us so you better make use of what is allotted you.

That Jackie though... boy, she was a peach.