Archives for June 2016

The phone rang early this morning. It was Lyla and Josie, my granddaughters, calling to say hello and tell me that I still have very funny hair. Which I do. Because I can. I used the moment of laughter to lace up my newish speedy-go-fasters and get after a hill workout. While I was out there I found myself lost in the memory of another early morning run years before that turned out to be the beginning of the end of my hard times and the beginning of a none-too-easy journey to here.

Years ago, I thought this morning, I met the ghost of myself talking aimless in anonymous streets across America. I never did meet “the best minds of my generation”  while running down the “Negro streets” of Terminal City at dawn. I was not the best mind of my generation but, yeah, I was there looking for an “angry fix”; there was “madness and I was starving, broken, naked.” And then it ended with me on my knees praying to a god I had never believed existed and with whom I was interminably angry. I heard myself ask to be allowed to go to sleep and a while later to be allowed to wake up. The sun rose that morning as always. I put on a pair of rarely used running shoes and went out into the wreckage of my life piled up on the front stairs of my house. Without a glance back I took off down the street, made the turn to 4th avenue and stopped running – maybe I had run 100 yards.

I found my way to the back door of Jacques’ cafe – sort of next door to my running store of choice and directly across the street from the new Spandex garden of a gym for those with too much money and time on their hands. Jacques asked me how I was, and when I told him I was okay, he shrugged in his Gallic way and gave me a bowl of his excellent French pea soup. When I asked him for a couple of eggs, he asked me if I had any money. I said grandly, “Put it on the tab, please.” He said he couldn’t do that until I brought the total down. He seemed almost apologetic. I did not get angry – I was too tired and, amazingly, grateful for his kindness over the previous months. I had been in what turned out to be the end stages of my crack addiction; he had seen it, called me on it and kept me fed until as he put it, I got my head out of my ass. I was so messed up (read selfish) and using all my money for drugs that I had taken unholy advantage of his kindness and run up a big bill, way too big for a small cafe. I said thank you for the soup and went out into the sunlight.

I bumped into a guy who had been a lifelong friend with whom I had fallen out not a couple of years before. He was with his soon-to-be new wife, and they both greeted me with sweaty smiles and hugs, having just “trained” over at the gym across the way. “You look fabulous,” said they to my crack-racked, disappearing body with its unused running shoes on full display. “You have lost a lot of weight – you look great” ( I, fyi, call that phrasing the traditional Jewish greeting). I did my imitation of a smile and nodded enthusiastically at the great virtue of being crack-cocaine wasted and apparently stylin’. We had been friends since we were teenagers 40 years before. I turned to go home, mumbling about finishing “my run.” I made sure I was out of sight before I broke down and wept for the simple sadness of the deception, the total waste of it all.

I had kept everything hidden from nearly everybody for all those years, lived easily with being thought an asshole and worse. My old friend had his own troubles and, unbelievably, would contract a bug that inevitably became Acute Myeloid leukemia (AML) and he died 3 years later. I was clean and sober as that happened and we got in touch, he from his hospital bed, me from my new home in North Texas. He was unabashedly pleased to hear my amends and delighted to hear that I was finally clean and living decently. His happiness for my recovery seemed pure and without hesitation. I could not get to his memorial but he is always present in my life. We were friends for a long time through some very difficult circumstances. And so we shall remain.

Shortly after I got out of treatment, I arranged through a friend to get Jacques the money I owed him. I never heard from him although my friend said that Jacques had smiled when he took the money and asked if I was doing okay, and when she said I was, he shrugged as if say to I’m glad it worked out; it doesn’t always.

I walked this morning up the steep hill outside my front door – up the hill and north over the next hill and back, and I finished with a short jog up the little hill that runs directly in front of my house. The great adventure took 35 minutes. I was able to do a little lifting when I got back from the “hills”; then I took the car to get it washed, for the first time in a year, and bought myself a skinny cappuccino on the way home.

I checked out my shoe rack, which sits near my font door, and yes there are many pairs of unused running shoes waiting for me and my physical recovery to show up and take them out to do what they do so well.

This morning has been a long time coming and as they say, it will be a long time gone. I couldn’t be more grateful. Or more humbled.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

“I know you are tired but come, this is the way.”

Rumi said that. 

It is soon to be Fathers Day (M. Mickey Lebowitz 1918-2000). Not enough sleep and some bad juju brought me to this tarmac meditation on my long road to here. It took me a very long time to realize that where my father was concerned, most of what was wrong between us was on me. He was a good man, reserved and thoughtful and wryly funny, disciplined and thorough, hardworking and committed to a world and its peoples much bigger than he. He loved his family fiercely and with a loyalty that knew no compromise. I saw all that when I was young, admired it, and rejected nearly all of it in the self-imposed miasma of drugs and bad choices. Lately I have struggled with what I was tryin’ to be, with who I used to be. I became an empty version of myself. I have come to know that simply to be who I am right now is what matters. Warts and all. A few weeks ago I came across the following piece by Senator John McCain:

“Not all the Americans who fought in the Lincoln Brigade were Communists. Many were, including Delmer Berg. Others, though, had just come to fight fascists and defend a democracy. Even many of the Communists, like Mr. Berg, believed they were freedom fighters first, sacrificing life and limb in a country they knew little about, for a people they had never met.

“You might consider them romantics, fighting in a doomed cause for something greater than their self-interest. And even though men like Mr. Berg would identify with a cause, Communism, that inflicted far more misery than it ever alleviated — and rendered human dignity subservient to the state — I have always harbored admiration for their courage and sacrifice in Spain.”

***

“’The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for’, Jordan thinks as he waits to die, ‘and I hate very much to leave it’. But he did leave it. Willingly.

“Mr. Berg went to Spain when he was a very young man. He fought in some of the biggest and most consequential battles of the war. He sustained wounds. He watched friends die. He knew he had ransomed his life to a lost cause, for a people who were strangers to him, but to whom he felt an obligation, and he did not quit on them. Then he came home, started a cement and stonemasonry business and fought for the things he believed in for the rest of his long life.

“I don’t believe in most of the things that Mr. Berg did, except this. I believe, as Donne wrote, ‘no man is an island, entire of itself.’ He is ‘part of the main’. And I believe ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’”

My father was one of those guys. And while he didn’t go to Spain to fight, he raised money for the Lincoln Brigade on the street corners of Union Square in New York City during the 1930’s; he printed leaflets, organized rallies and stood tall in support of the rights of of the oppressed Spanish loyalists. His dedication to freedom from Fascism knew no bounds and he enlisted in the US Army prior to Pearl Harbor to get into the “fight.” His politics cost him dearly in later life as the US government frowned on folks who were “prematurely into fascist “ in the euphemism of the times. His work life was restricted and he was on various lists at the FBI et. al. It took years for him to be able to travel freely and for my mom to not worry about whether or not he had been arrested on his way to work in the mornings as arresting people on their way to work in the mornings was the habit of the FBI in those days. She used to wake up and watch him walk down the block – we never knew that there was more to that watchfulness than a fond good morning-goodbye and a wish for him to have a good day at work. Ours was an insecure household for reasons that had only to do with heartfelt politics and fiercely defended philosophy.

I never knew the difficulty of it all and when I found out about it years later I blew it off as a romantic, heroic fairy tale which was way beyond my capacity to adopt and make real as a guide for my own personal commitments. After all, Spain was a righteous war, and Vietnam was an unholy mess. My responses to both were laced with what I came to know as my own selfish predilections for  drugs, alcohol and bad choices.

“I learned life were no dream /I learned truth deceived /Man is not God /Life is a century /Death an instant.” Gregory Corso said that.

I started today, after the long night’s journey to daybreak, with the realization that Dad (Mickey), you been on my mind– go figure.

“Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that…” Bob Dylan said that a long time ago about a love that was no longer in his life.

Love to you always, and if not always so easily expressed, it is deeply felt nevertheless, and laced with a large measure of gratitude. It is clear to me that whatever little of me has come to be worthy and upright in the physically and emotionally complex days of my life these past few years, I am your son in so very many stubborn, thoughtful and perseverant ways and it works for me, best it can. I still suck with money and frugality, Mickey, but I’m getting better.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Poster image: No original copyright found (United States Library of Congress)