Approval

She works too hard for approval

My friend

Tap dancing, tap dancing

For all who enter

Round and round

Faster and faster

For some who are worthy

Those who are not

The quest for approval

All that attention

All that energy

All that time

Or maybe not

Tap shoes on, tap shoes off

Left outside the front door

Next to the sign

No more – Ø

 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

Dancing With Angels

Red is a color worn by others.  Haven’t worn red since Howard left in ’92 and I moved to back to Phoenix.  So I haven’t a clue what made me buy a dark red Ralph Lauren shirt and tank top yesterday morning.  Maybe it was the incredible sale at Dillards or I had to have one in each color as fall and winter are approaching and I’m never going to find another sale like this in my lifetime.

My friend Melinda thinks I spend too much time by myself, so she’s been planning many events in hopes I’ll say “yes” to one or another.  Usually, I arrive a few minutes late and often leave early.  Don’t like crowds much and it’s too hot to be outside.  Let’s go to La Encantada Saturday night and hear the flamenco music special event put on but GOVAC.  Yeah, right, what little cigarettes have you been smoking?  Jazz maybe… flamenco never!  Okay, I give; I’ll meet you at 6:45.

Old habits die-hard, I’m late as usual and in the back row.  Another favorite place when you’re pissed at life (because somehow it’s to blame for passing you by) and hiding out seems like a good solution.  Can’t see far away, left my glasses at home (of course did I really want to come to the show?), besides who needs to see to hear.  Pablo’s guitar music is dynamic, tickles the soul and as much as my feet want to dance, my butt stays firmly in the tiny white folding chair.  So I whisper to Melinda, I’m going to try to move closer.  She rolls her eyes…been here before, she’s going to bolt any minute.  “Talk to you tomorrow,” she whispers.

For the next hour I’m up and down like a yo-yo (probably A.D.D. in my last life).  Finally, I hide behind a plant partition close to the stage where I can see and hear everything.  Red is definitely the color of the evening.  While the beautiful woman in the sexy long red dress is clicking her castanets and stomping her very proper low-heeled black maryjanes, a beautiful blond little girl in a long red ruffled dress with black patent leather maryjanes is mimicking her in front of the first row.  The guitar music is powerful, the tall woman stomps her feet, clicks her hands, and swings her dress showing gorgeous dancer’s legs.  The little girl stomps her feet, clicks her fingers, swings her dress, and twirls her ruffles ‘round and ‘round.  

I’m lost in the music, in the dancing, and in the wondering when exactly we lose the joy of twirling when everyone is looking while we are unaware of their eyes upon us.  When do we become self-conscious of other’s eyes and other’s thoughts of our behavior?  At what moment in time do we starting judging ourselves more than anyone else could ever judge us?  Why does what “they” think matter?  Who are the “they”?  And why do they matter so much? 

When exactly God, do we stop dancing, I wondered more like a prayer than a question.  And what has to happen for us to twirl, to be 5 again, playing with an open heart?  A chair opens up in the front row next to friends and I sneak over and sit invisibly still.  OMG, I’m in the front row!  The concert is almost over; maybe no one will notice I’m in the front row this close to the stage. 

For all my desire to remain invisible, 80 year old Francis, 4 ft. tall, born in Spain, complete with walker and castanets comes over asking me to dance.  Now I have two fears simultaneously going off in my head – do I get up and dance with Francis in front of several hundred strangers, making a complete fool of myself or do I turn down a little old lady who can’t dance without her walker or a partner in front of several hundred strangers.

I got up and danced with Francis (who survived the Spanish Civil War before age 11, making it to Ellis Island on a ship in 1940), letting her lead me all over the place.  Within minutes half the audience was up dancing and twirling.  More people dancing than sitting, when Francis turns to me, winks, and says, “I knew they’d all get up and dance.”  In the midst of all those people twirling around, it occurred to me that courage is contagious.  And so is joy. 

What is that saying about being very careful what you ask for?  Sometimes God listens to me a lot closer than I suspect I think he does.  Last night God listened to my heart, because if he had been listening to my head, he would have heard all that grumbling about last row, heat outside, and why did I leave those darn glasses at home.  He would have heard my brain telling me to sit still before Melinda told me to leave cause I was driving her crazy.  This time though, my heart won out, that is why God sent me two angels, one 5 and one 80 to teach me again to dance and twirl not caring who’s watching.

 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

Footprints on My Heart

The best girlfriend I ever had was a buyer named Ron.  Ron was my dear friend, my soul mate for about 10 years.  He was gay, I wasn’t.  I sold ejection seat sensors for the F-16 ACES II ejection seats.  Ron was the buyer for the company that made those seats.  He got me a yellow “eject” handle from the F-16 scrap bin for my RX7.  I used it to threaten my son’s teenage friends with a trip through the moon roof.  They all thought I was “real cool.”

I loved him so much I threw a birthday party for him January 1983.  He showed up in chaps.   Thank God he was wearing jeans underneath.  Joey asked him if he was cold.  He laughed.  When I went to his house we would go shopping for material for curtains, which he would then sew, calling me to ask what colors went with what.

He was 6’4″, blond, stunningly gorgeous, had abs no one would believe, and came to my office wearing beige slacks (with a pressed fold), a hot pink golf shirt, a white jacket, loafers no socks.  I’m 4’11″ and everyone in the building thought he was madly in love with me.  One could only dream.  He played everything to the hilt, driving his aqua Cadillac convertible with white leather seats down Hollywood Blvd.   He called me “Babe” and “Dear” during a time when everyone minded, but me.

He called screaming everyday at 9 am and 1 pm sharp.  I would lay the phone on my desk speaker side up and let him scream for 30 minutes.  The secretary and I would look at each other and howl silently.  We were always late on parts.  He would drive from Burbank to Torrance and scream at all the big wig vice presidents.  My boss would hand me $400 in cash and tell me to get him out of building.  “Take him to lunch, anywhere he wants to go.”  We would leave in my RX7, go to Redondo Beach, and wait till we crossed 190th Street to start laughing.  Lunch was three hours of gossip and stories – mostly whom he picked up on Hollywood Blvd in the aqua Caddy.  It was 1982 and the aids virus was only a whisper in certain circles.  What did I know?  I didn’t travel in those circles.

If I could get a redo a year it would be 1992.  It was not a good year for me on any level – personally or professionally.  He died that spring of complications from the aids virus.  I remember so many tiny details of the ten years we were best friends I often surprise myself.

After the funeral I sent his Mother a Flavia card that read “Some people come into our lives and quickly go, some stay for a while, leave footprints on our heart, and we are never ever the same.”

 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

Lemons & Honey, Crackers & Tea

 

 

 

 

 

We had a tea party, you and I

Yesterday, when March was cold.           

We were three or four again

Five or six or seven.

 

Changed the world

Solved the chaos, hunger, pain.

Waved our magic wands

Fixed all the ills

Brought peace to a planet torn

From the vantage of the couch.

 

A romantic and pragmatic

Created a world of love and hope

Magic and men who understood.

Then drank our tea with lemon and honey

Out of a teapot trimmed in gold.

 

And as I sit here remembering you

With a smile on my face

A tear running down my cheek

 

Yesterday…

 

For a brief moment

I was three or four, five or six

 Again…

And every second of life held

Magic and wonder and new discoveries of friends.

 

Another gray morning arrives

Drinking tea out of your cup

With the lipstick mark where

You left it on the rim last night.

Remembering again the magic of being

Three or four, five or six again

Drinking tea out of a teapot trimmed in gold.

Love On Wings

San Xavier Mission by Sara Fryd

I held a mirror up to you

So you could see the fire

You carry deep

The voice you crave to share

With the hunger of years

One cannot retrieve

No matter the longing.

You reversed the mirror for me

So I could visit my own reflection

Hear my own voice, however faint…

Answers to questions asked

You, and me

Birthed in need

Watered with tears

Fed with joy

Grown strong, slowly with time

Nurtured cautiously

A tiny bird’s egg

Placed gently back inside the nest

With love, with thoughtful respect

We were created

A world that took God only seven days

Took us a lifetime

Or so it seems.

 

For Aunt Judy.  All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

Nothing to Prove

You had nothing to prove

To me…

It was love at first sight

How could you not love that face

Blond hair, piercing blue eyes, wearing red

Be still my heart…

Wrote you a poem on your birthday

Which I left amongst the papers

On that big desk

“The biggest desk in the building,”

You reminded me smiling.

“Bigger than the President’s!”

Another story, another lunch

In a yellow bug convertible with the top down

I thought…

I was the luckiest girl in Orange County

You wore your new black cashmere coat

You kept on the special wooden hanger

On the back of the door.

You always thought you had something to prove

Not to me, though to yourself

To feel you had finally arrived.

The need to climb Mt Everest

And you did, and you have

You have proved it all

Said goodbye to the naysayer forever

Just so you know

You never had to prove anything

Not to me…

I always wanted to call you Jimmy

Though I always called you Jim.

 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

Pish in Dien Hosen

It’s easy to love people who love you back.  Who are good, kind, and remember your birthday.  Loving someone who is a pain in the behind is much harder.  And yet, somehow much more memorable and educational.  Humans seem to need everything to be exceedingly problematic to learn anything, and I am no exception.  Neither was Aron. 

Aron was Nusha’s (my Mother’s) youngest sibling and we were raised together till I was almost six.  We were Jewish refugees living in difficult circumstances outside Munich in 1948.  His challenge wasn’t necessarily that he was a Holocaust survivor; Aron would have been a problem child even if he had been born in Des Moines.  He had this  “j’ne sais quois” quality of intelligence, Dean Martin good looks, and the ability to charm anyone he wanted to.  The operative word here is “wanted,” but those stories will have to wait for another 4 a.m. morning. 

He took crap from no one!  Certainly not one three-year-old girl with a big Polish Ghetto Litvak accented Yiddish/German mouth that knew as many languages as she was old.  Thanks to a liberated Father, she had her own Rabbi Hebrew tutor at two.  Learning Yiddish on purpose to figure out what the grown-ups were saying was a piece of cake (has to be the Zaslover Chutzpah genes we are so known for).

Nusha liked nicknames and everyone’s had a little twang of some sort.  She called him “Aronchik” – the Romania, Russian, Polish, German, French, Yiddish (all languages she was fluent in) equivalent of Aron.  She also made him take care of me.  Eighteen-year-old males don’t much like babysitting their bratty nieces, even if they are adorably cute with blond curly locks.

So here I am toilet trained, needing to go to the bathroom, pulling on his trouser leg.

“Aronchik,” I cried.  “Ich daf gehen pishen.”  (Aron, I have to go pee.) 

“Pish in dien hosen,” my uncle responded.  (Pee in your trousers.)

“Pish auf sich” I answered.  (Pee on yourself.)

Great practice for succeeding in law school.  Don’t you think?

 

 

 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

The Girls Really Like This

Every time Aron called Phoenix from Detroit, he would share stories of his wealth, friends, and apartment on Nine Mile Road.  Aronchik (Mom’s youngest sibling) eventually became a successful entrepreneur, though summer of 1964 he was still trying to figure out how to get his contractor’s license, tell his ex-wife they were divorced six months earlier, and date women with a 14 year old nephew and a 18 year old niece staying with him in a 500 sq ft one bedroom apartment that had an accordion door separating the 3 foot kitchen from the rest of the place.

There are a few baby boomers’ coming of age fantasies that involve Patrick Swazye and a dance floor.  I’m not that fortunate.  My coming of age memories are a trip to Detroit, a pole with colored lights (no dancing girls), and a grown up party with blonds sitting on green couch arms with their long legs crossed at the ankle wearing pencil skirts and tight sweaters in pastel colors.  One tall blond whispering to me, “We knew there was a woman staying here.  There are napkins on the table.” 

Girls, friends, girls, food, girls, fun, girls – the daily agenda.  Though the major priority was the acquisition of money.  Lots of cash which one carried in bags in the trunk of one’s car.  Never knew when you might need a few coins for the meter or bialys and whitefish at the deli.  It’s a simple algebraic equation (A + M = W).  Aron plus lots of money equaled women.  Back then, when men actually paid for dinner and a date was dinner and dancing, but I digress.  You needed lots of cash to dress the part, drive the car, and get the girl.  And Aron played the part with gusto.

Took me all freshman year to save up for the ticket to Detroit.  An eighteen year old female traveling alone by train from Phoenix to Detroit during the days when no matter how hot it got, a dignified female wore a girdle, nylons, a black pleated skirt, sweater, and high heeled pumps.  Even with all those undergarments, it was liberating being alone at last with strangers in the big world. 

For 72 hours I was an adult on my own in a safe place – the Silver Streak bound for Detroit.  Hitchcock might have had a different of view of trains, but my Mother was in Phoenix and it was way before cell phones, texting, twitter.  Free at last, free at last, no Mother, riding the rails through Kansas on my way to Detroit, I was free at last. Pure unadulterated freedom staring back at me through the window at 75 miles per hour.  All dressed up where to go?  The dining car with white tablecloths, white linen napkins, white china cups with saucers – for drinking coffee with seven teaspoons of sugar plus real cream.  

Like any number of my storybook heroines, I was on my way to the big city to see my very handsome Uncle, stay at his bachelor pad, and sleep on his emerald green Danish couch with teak legs.  Normal people live in Detroit and vacation in Phoenix during the winter.  Then there’s me. 

Three days later, after a train change in Chicago, Aron picks me up at the train station.  As we are entering the narrow hallway of the bachelor pad on Nine Mile Road, Aron is behind me telling me to turn on the light switch in the early afternoon.  So I flip the switch to one of those 1960s teak pole lamps with five lights in red, blue, and green at intervals all the way to the ceiling.  Lights flashing at odd intervals.  This pole changed colors like the bedroom scenes in those seduction movies Dudley Moore stared in.

“I installed it myself,” says Aron behind me with a smile and a wink.  “The girls really like this.”

 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd

You Meet No Strangers

Edith, her cousin Nancy (both over 70) and I met on an America West flight back to Los Angeles from San Antonio May 1991.  I noticed Edith while I was waiting in the airport for the flight that would take me back to Long Beach (where I lived) after negotiating a contract at San Antonio Air Force Base.  She was dressed head to toe in black with a black hat and special black glasses wrapping the top half of her face indicating she had a problem with her eyesight.  The only colored clothing was a noticeable lime green jacket covered with huge red and yellow roses.  Like meeting Spring.  She must be an artist, I thought.  As it turned out, we were sitting next to each other when the plane took off and I had guessed correctly.  

My career as a poet was two months old; I was handwriting all my poems in a tiny spiral notebook, which I carried with me everywhere.  I was writing feverishly on my poem in the aisle seat while we were taking off, and they noticed.  Hadn’t even reached the novice stage yet.  We started talking, I shared my notebook of poems, and Nancy gave me their calling cards in white lace gloved hands.  When I arrived home, I wrote Beautiful Ladies and mailed it to San Antonio, Texas.

It turns out that Edith Kroshel was a renowned watercolor artist who had been commissioned by the City of San Antonio to paint the Alamo. 

She sent me a thank you letter with a note, “Thank you for seeing past the wrinkles.”  Hand written on pale blue tissue paper.  Edith and I have been corresponding since that airplane ride.  She now lives in a retirement home in Texas and sends me letters written with a magnifying glass and tiny drawings of her surroundings.  I respond in 18 pt font so she can see the words.  Recently she wrote that she’s been reading my poems to her exercise swim class.  While the “girls” are doing kicks in the pool, Edith is reading my love poems out loud.  Imagine that!

Guess when you share your gifts of gratitude; you never really know how far your gifts will travel.  In retrospect,  always put back more cookies in the cookie jar than you take out.  Then the cookie jar will always be full, and so will your heart! 

All rights reserved.  ©2009 by Sara Fryd