what some people remember, others don't

(The following is a transcription of a phone conversation I had in early 2002 with my dad.)

“Hey Lyse, did you hear there was another Amtrak crash? That’s twice in two weeks.”
[sidenote: strangely enough, there was just an Amtrak crash right outside of Chicago yesterday.]
“That’s terrific Dad,” I say this sarcastically as I’m supposed to be taking a 20-hour train ride from Penn Station to Union Station—school to home—next week.
It’s Thursday night and I’m completing the role of a good daughter making my weekly call to Hoffman Estates, Illinois to inform my parents and younger sister of what’s been going on in my second semester at New York University.
“Well, Lyse, you know I wouldn’t be worried about it if I were you. This was just a fluke. Trains only crash every twenty years or so.”
“Yeah except we almost got killed by one last year.”
He sounds astonished—“Huh? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember after the Elton John and Billy Joel concert when we came within inches of being smashed by an oncoming train?” I ask in disbelief that he could possibly have forgotten this near-death experience.
“Oh no that never really happened—I imagined the train.”
“Um…what? No you didn’t”
“Yeah I did.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yeah I did.”
“Are you kidding me with this? Dad, how could I have just made that up?”
“Well what do you remember happening?”
I relayed my memory to him, careful to include as many details that I could see vividly as I watched the event replay in my head. It was a school night a few days before my senior prom. The concert was great, but I was exhausted, so when we got to the van afterwards I immediately laid across the back row of seats. My last conscious thought was that Mom always told me not to lay like that in case we got in an accident because “it’s a dangerous position to be in” and “the seat belt is working improperly.” But at the time I also made a conscious decision for the first time to ignore her warnings since sleeping was my ultimate priority. The next things I remember are really bright lights and a loud horn-like noise. I’m always disoriented when I first arrive back at an awake state of mind. Maybe it was the bright lights or what I thought was possibly a siren, but when my eyelashes first opened I thought an ambulance was driving perpendicular to the road. But then the train plowed past us, just as the van had crossed the tracks--tracks that we didn’t even know were there.
"It was like a scene out of Ghost, Dad! I swear it looked like that train literally passed through the back end of the van!"
I wanted to scream but I felt paralyzed and, not to sound dramatic, prepared to die. But there was no impact—no compressed vehicle, no flying body parts, nothing.
"You pulled over to the side of the road for a few minutes because you had a temporary emotional breakdown, choking on your words, saying 'I ALMOST JUST KILLED MY WHOLE FAMILY OH MY GOD!' And I think you kept saying how sorry you were, sorry that you almost killed us (even though it wasn’t your fault) because there were no barricades and no railroad crossing signs."
And then we all rode in silence the rest of the way home.
“Hmm.” He tries to take it all in. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.”
“Well I remember seeing the train after we crossed in front of it but I felt ok once I looked in the rearview mirror and realized that train was stopped there.”
“It was not stopped! If it was stopped, why’d they have the light on and why would someone lay on the horn? And most of all—why would you have freaked out about ‘almost killing your whole family?’”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Well you did. Why don’t you ask the other two because at least one of us is wrong.”
“As a matter of fact the little one just walked in the door.”
“Where was she?”
“Ballet! Where else would she be on a Thursday night from 8:30-9:30?”

For a few minutes I listen to the conversation between my dad and sister. I picture her in her dance attire, her hair messily rubber-banded to the top of her head, gracing my dad with the look of utter bewilderment and defensiveness she always uses whenever he greets her with a question before she even gets a chance to kick off her shoes, before she can even drop her armload onto the foyer doormat, before she’s instructed, ‘Hey! Shut the door! What’d you grow up in a barn?’ My dad stands shirtless with thirty-year-old gym shorts on, sweating, drinking a tall glass of previously refrigerated water. He has just finished his bi-weekly, twenty-four minute hardcore Lifecycle exercise. He holds the kitchen phone between his left ear and his shoulder so he has one hand free to gesture with. The phone cord is almost pulled straight, stretched to its maximum distance. The plastic coating silently rips somewhere and a few wires show their colors.

“Oh Sher,..” He draws out the “er” (pronounced “air”) so it almost sounds like two syllables.
“Oh Da-ad…” Sheri mimics him, a habit she adopted from watching her older sister all those years she lived at home.
In the most casual voice he asks her, “I was wondering…Do you happen to remember anything out of the ordinary that occurred that night of the John/Joel concert last year?”
“You mean when we like almost got hit by a train?”
“See?” I say into the mouthpiece.
“So you remember that too, huh?” he asks her.
“How could I forget that?” she responds. “I remember seeing a bright light and thinking it was God because there could be no possible way I wasn’t dead.”
I start laughing.
“Don’t you remember pulling off the road cause you were too scared to keep driving?” she continues.
“If you say so. That’s what Lysie said too.”
“That’s cause that’s what happened,” she says to his confused face from her place standing on the rug and I say into the phone at the same time. We have a knack for doing that.
“Yo!” Synchronized sentences always cause this exclamation from him. “Well I guess I’ll have to ask Mommy now—here talk to your sister.” I see him stick his fully extended arm out to her in one sudden, strong motion. He sees the open door. The air-conditioning isn’t running yet since it’s almost a month till Memorial Day, but for other unknown reasons this is wrong. “Hey! Shut the door! What’d you grow up in a barn?” Then he’s in the background.
“Oh Bon…” He draws out the “on.”
“Hello?” Sheri says to me in a somewhat ‘this talking long distance thing is an inconvenience’ tone of voice.
“How was dance?” I ask cheerfully just to piss her off cause we both know the answer—it’s the same answer we both give to everything.
She sighs. “Good.”

My dad locates my mom not too far away, probably in the family room on the couch crocheting a baby blanket for a co-worker’s daughter’s new arrival while the ten o’clock news anchor on NBC 5 nightly news looks at the camera straight on, looks straight into our family room and questions if maybe the upcoming month of May will bring an end to the “war on terrorism.”

I don’t say anything else to my sister, as I want to hear our parents go over the sequence a third time.
In the same nonchalant voice, but with an almost unnoticeable twinge of desperation, he asks my mom, “Do you happen to remember anything out of the ordinary that occurred the night of the Elton/Billy concert last year?”
“You mean when we almost got hit by a train?” She recalls the same sequence he’s just heard twice.
“Huh.” My dad surrenders. “Well if all three of you say it happened it must have happened…huh…unbelievable…”
Sheri and I chat for a few minutes (after laughing when our mom said almost the same sentences we said to him), reminiscing about that infamous night, verifying that we didn’t imagine the whole thing.
“I can’t believe he doesn’t remember that,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “It was like the scariest night of my life!”
“He probably has selective memory,” I add. “He doesn’t want to remember ‘almost killing his family’ so his brain has chosen to block the memory of what happened and create a new, safer one.”

I know at least I, at this present moment, am reliving the word, “Danger.” It sends a shiver through my body that I can’t quite compute as a specific feeling—energy, paranoia, adrenaline, horror—some kind of psychotic mix. Living dangerously is quite exhilarating when you can live to tell about it. After all, we escaped death; we took a rain check on God’s light; we weren’t brave, just lucky, just squeezing through the danger zone with power-locked doors and eight eyes staring.

Suddenly there is piano music.

My sister moves closer to the culprit—my dad—sitting on the bench, his back straight as a railroad track beside the window in the living room, facing the player piano. But I can tell by the sound that he is producing the music with his own fingers, not with a machine-propelled scroll. I have instant flashbacks of my grandparents’ old house when they owned the same piano and my eyes were the same height as the keys and I’d watch my grandma dance around to the same song, before gleefully joining in the fun by shrieking and spinning around in my own corner of the room.

“I don’t know what the heck possessed him to play that song all the sudden,” Sheri says to me.
I had forgotten she was there for a few moments.
“Yeah…well it’s 'The Entertainer,' one of the only six or so songs he’s had memorized since age eight.” I pause. “He’s probably just trying to prove to himself that he can still remember something.”

funny things you won't want to miss

Today has been filled with funny things...so I thought I'd create an interactive post to spread the laughter.

It all started this morning when I got an e-mail saying, "Giana has a posted a comment about you on myspace." So I sign into the site and see that she'd posted the following link:

alyse as the dancing hanukah elf!

Click on it and see what happens ;-)

Myspace also told me I had "video comments"...I had forgotten I even posted videos on there, so I watched them and started rolling around my bed laughing uncontrollably. So here they are:
Posted By:Alyse

Get this video and more at MySpace.com
Description: this video includes inordinate amounts of breakfast food, dixie chicks singing, glasses-wearing, and unintentional hilarity that seems to ensue at every family meal (as my sister pointed out--one of the reasons this is so funny is that within the one minute of footage we're all acting as our typical selves...mom's on the phone, dad's "in his own world," and my sister and i randomly begin singing at the same time)

Here's the other video (from aruba 1/6/06):
Posted By:Alyse

Get this video and more at MySpace.com
Description: my dad, sister, and i went off-roading in a jeep really early our last morning in aruba...i spotted a crab in the road, my dad stopped and tried to make it dance...the beeping is me falling on the horn and my dad saying "go around!" to a pretend car

I told Giana (one of my roommates senior year) I couldn't stop laughing and she said:
wittynameAQUI: haha
wittynameAQUI: can your family adopt me?
snlhricome: YES
wittynameAQUI: great!
wittynameAQUI: you're all insane, but in a good way.

When I asked Brianna (my freshman college roommate) today if she was going to light a menorah tonight, we both at the same time said: REMEMBER WHEN THE MENORAH KILLED THE WANDERING JEW?? and then simultaneously started laughing....here's the story...freshman year, the only place for me to put a menorah was on the window ledge in our dorm room. The window ledge also housed a small potted plant, called a Wandering Jew, that my mom gave me when I moved to NYC. You can probably see where this is going....but what happened was the melting wax from the candles in the menorah, unbeknownst to me, fell on the leaves of the plant over a period of 8 days and dried there....therefore suffocating/killing the Wandering Jew. Don't even try and steal the idea because Brianna's already working on the screen play, starring me as the wanderer ;-)

And to top it off, here is a picture I took of my dad last Hanukkah ('05). At first glance one might think he's wearing traditional Jewish gear...but really that's an old, ratty exercise towel around his shoulders. Dressed to impress....not.

ode to ancestry

In lieu of last night's entry re: poetry, I figured I'd post one of the few poems I've ever written that has stood the test of time and I don't look back on as crap. I wrote it in late October, 2002 after going on a mini adventure through the streets of New York to find the apartment building that my maternal great-grandfather lived in.

109 Ludlow Street

Every time I ask about my great-grandfather
relatives deny knowing anything--
Except that his name was Michael
and he died from a heart attack
when my Bubby was sixteen.

What I know of him
are six stolen photographs
creased and slightly blurry.
He looks like Hitler, I told my mom.
Don’t say that! She scolded.

Rumors circulated that he came from somewhere in South America.
On my Bubby’s death bed I asked her if the rumors of her dad rang true.
I think she slightly shook her head, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Maybe someone made it up to explain why she was named Juanita

Then a paper surfaced:
Naturalization Certificate #1423062
Immigrated from Russia through Ellis Island
On May 5, 1920
Including a New York City address

Down East Broadway, down Pike, down Canal
Turning left on Ludlow
Just past Delancey
Before Katz’s Deli on the corner of Houston

Eighty-two years later
The air is still bitter
I am not wearing a jacket
The sky is white
There is more graffiti than people
I find the apartment building
Rising six stories above a tailor shop

Cross the street to stand closer to these bricks
Step in front of an oncoming car and jump back
Look at its license plate—my initials.
Coincidence constantly mocks me.

I am in the same doorway
On the same steps
My face pushed up against
The same dirty glass window

A pigeon lands at my feet
and cocks its head at the fire escape ladders
The same way I do

I tell it I love its wings
I confess to the bird
What’s hidden behind walls
And dragged behind boats

The city’s at a standstill.
Michael found Anne.
She is my namesake.
I’m gonna keep walking
And whispering to birds
Someday I will be an ancestor.


A few weeks ago I read the following quote on one of my best friend's facebook profile: "Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is an illusion." After reading it, I left her a note saying that I wasn't trying to stir controversy but that I don't see the way I define myself as an illusion just because I don't really identify with God. I couldn't put my thoughts into more words than that at the time, but I started to think about it more later. If I say I don't identify with "God" or "God's love" or whatever, then what or who can I say I do identify with? I mean, to me, that question has an infinite number of answers. But I've known since age 11 that my best friends and I don't quite see eye to eye when it comes to this religious stuff, and that we bring sometimes polar opposite opinions/beliefs to the table. The conclusion I came to is that I identify myself with my ancestors...or at least I strive to find an identity link within our diminishing family tree.

The other night I spent a few hours at the Borders in Hyde Park flipping through travel magazines. Doing that is bittersweet. It excites me to see pictures and think about all the places I still can look forward to discovering, yet it kind of bums me out because I don't really know when the next time is that I'll get to do major traveling again. But anyway, I was looking at Condé Nast something or other, and the main story in there was all about Bucharest and how Romania will be joining the European Union. This reignited my intense interest in planning a "return to my roots" jaunt around Eastern Europe...specifically Romania, Hungary and Poland. Romania is the one country that I know the exact town that my family came from: Panciu (pronounced: Pon-chu....as my grandpa and dad would respond: "i'm gonna pon-chu!") Finding out that this country is going to join the E.U. made me want to quit my job and go over there right now. I want to see this country before it homogenizes; I want to see this country as it was when my ancestors called it "home" (or whatever "home" is in Yiddish).

I think it is really important to know where you come from, to know that you are here because your parents had you, your grandparents had them, your great-grandparents had them, and so on and so on. I didn't realize how important this ancestral knowledge was to me until March 19, 2000, the day my Bubby ("grandmother" in Yiddish) died. As I referenced in the poem, I didn't ask soon enough about why the heck she was named Juanita or anything about our shared ancestors. Later that same year my uncle died in October and my Grandma died in December. My Zadie ("grandfather" in Yiddish) had already passed away when I was 7. So I never got to ask him about his experiences as a Marine in WWII, witnessing the flag being raised at Iwo Jima...or how he fell in love with my Bubby...or tell him that I followed in his photographic footsteps.

Losing all these people made me reevaluate a lot of things. I felt secure in who I was, and yet I was clueless to my past. Who were these people that preceded me and how did I end up where I am today? I became obsessed with documenting my last remaining grandparent, Grandpa Joe (my dad's dad). Every time we'd drive out to Rockford I'd bring along an available notebook and frantically write down everything he said. Sometimes I even brought my video camera and recorded our visits. I mean most of it was silly stuff--he convinced himself he was blind for the last few years of his life, so a lot of what I wrote down was in reference to the hilarity that ensued from that. But, I did get some valid information as well, such as the Panciu clue. Obviously that's just one piece of the identity puzzle, from one grandparent out of the millions of things I could have asked the rest of them before their time was up...but it's a puzzle piece that I treasure.
Grandpa Joe died February 11, 2005 (2/11...adding to the worst days in my life almost always falling on an 11th) and was buried on Valentine's Day (thus continuing my string of awful Valentines Days)

I want to see the world. I dream of going on African safaris and taking my sister to Iceland. But the number one trip I want to take is this leap back in time to these mysterious, ancestral lands. Now I just need to find the funds, and once that's covered I am determined to set aside the time....

(the photo doesn't necessarily directly relate to this posting, but the pictures i took when i found 109 Ludlow are at my parent's house...for some reason this photo seemed the most appropriate out of anything i have on my computer here...i took it of my dad almost a year ago when we went to Aruba over New Years. the last morning we were there he and i and my sister got up before the sun and took our rented Jeep on one last off-roading adventure into the uninhabited areas of the island. i took this picture while standing in the entrance of a cave. 1/6/06)