Parkchester, Celebrate Me Home

My hometown?  Like many of us I guess I can claim more than one –  born in Charleston, SC but bred in the Bronx with idyllic summers spent at our family-run hotel in the Catskills.  (See My Heart Remembers My Grandmother’s Hotel,  The Troubadour, Hotel Kittens, The Cat and the Forshpeiz, and My Game Mother)

Then after grad school a year upstate.  (See Shuffling Off to Buffalo and My Snowy Year in Buffalo,

Then back down for several years in New Rochelle,  NY,  and then a fabulous year in foggy Londontown.  (See Laundry Day in London, Kinky Boots, Intro to Cookery and Valentine’s Day in Foggytown)

Then to Manhattan and the same upper eastside apartment for the past 45 years.  (See (The Lion, The Witch, and) The Wardrobe,  Stay-at-Home Mom, and Moving Day Blues)

And for the past decade or so,  weekends in Torrington,  CT in the Berkshire foothills.  (See Sheltering in Place,  Bike Trail,  Pickled, Country Living, and Wisdom in the Weeds)

All of them places I’ve been happy to hang my hat –  here’s a bit more about two of them.

I first heard the Kenny Loggins lyric Celebrate Me Home at a Lifespring retreat my husband and I attended many years ago.   Part of the human potential movement,  Lifespring was,  as I remember,  a kinder and gentler offshoot of Werner Erhard’s California-based program known as EST.

After that first Lifespring weekend we went back to take what was known as “the advanced course”.   Although our son told his friends we had joined a cult,  those weekends didn’t change our lives as promised.  Yet they did make me think about the meaning of home.

I was born in South Carolina where my father was stationed during World War II.  He was an Army doctor and shipped out from the Charleston port of embarkation,  escorting soldiers to the European and African theaters of war.  Then he’d return with the wounded,  treating them on shipboard,  and bringing back the dead for burial.

Like many WWII vets,  my dad didn’t talk much about his war-time experiences,  and my parents seemed to lose touch with most of their Army friends.   And although they often spoke about going back to Charleston to visit,  they never did.

But anxious to show my husband and son my birthplace,  one spring we went to Charleston.  We found the street where my folks and I had lived,  and delighted in the fragrant magnolia trees in bloom everywhere in the city.

And happily we found old Charleston friends of my folks and put them on the phone together,  and it felt like a homecoming.

After the war when my parents returned to New York they bought a house on the GI Bill on McGraw Avenue in the Bronx.  My dad’s medical office was on the ground floor,  and our family’s living quarters were on the two floors above.   And in tribute to their Charleston years,  my folk planted two magnolia trees in front of the house!

Our shady street bordered Parkchester,  the apartment community that had recently been built by the Metropolitan Live Insurance Company.

Parkchester was an oasis in the midst of the city,   and on it’s 120 landscaped acres were the artfully designed buildings,  many with lovely Art Deco statuary on the walls,   and the shops,  restaurants,  offices,  movie theatre,  library,  schools and playgrounds that encompassed my childhood world.   Divided into four quadrants –  north,  east,  south and west – Parkchester was planned around Metropolitan Oval,  a large, oval-shaped pond with spouting fountains and giant goldfish,  and surrounded by benches and well-tended flowerbeds.

It was within Parkchester’s safe environs I went to school,  learned to ride a bike,  and took piano lessons.   And it was there I first went to a movie,  tasted pizza,  and kissed a boy.   Historian Lloyd Ultan,  writing about that time and place called it  “the Bronx in the innocent years”.

In May 2010 I went back with hundreds of others for a Parkchester reunion.   It was a wonderful day of nostalgia,  renewed friendships and homecoming.

The workshop leader at that Lifespring retreat years ago had said,   “Home is not a place you go back to,  it’s a place you operate from.”

Parkchester,  celebrate me home.

– Dana Susan Lehrman

At dinner time, dads cup their hands around their mouths and call their kids home.
Read More

I was always a good student, a striver, a high achiever, I got straight A’s. Until it came to penmanship. There I fell apart and got C’s. My second grade teacher, responsible for teaching cursive, called my mother in, bemoaning my lack of manual dexterity and told my mother to teach me knitting as a way to improve my writing skills.

My dutiful  mother did. She had knit “Bundles for Britain” in World War II, so certainly remembered the basics. She bought me needles, cast on for me and taught me the basics of knitting and purling. I had small balls of different-colored yarn and decided those little rectangles I made would be rugs for my Barbie dolls. You can see that as I progressed, my stitches became less even and I even dropped one in the final, orange yarn (yes, these are the originals from 60+ years ago, tucked away all those years ago with Barbie and Ken). My dexterity did not improve.

If I really concentrated, my writing was semi-decent, but most of the time, while taking notes, it was barely legible. I learned to touch type in 10th grade. That was important for doing papers in high school and college, and even my first job, which was primarily data input. Now with computers, iPhones, texting, etc. keyboards are all we use. The Featured photo is from my Bride’s Book, so a sample of my cursive in 1974, 46 years ago.

Email has replaced most snail mail, but I am old-fashioned in many ways. I still send hand-written thank you notes and condolence notes on personal stationary. My son’s girlfriend lost her father in May. We sent flowers and I sent a long, personal condolence note. A few weeks later, I received a lovely, handwritten note from her mother in London. It was appropriate and touching. It speaks to good manners.

My children learned cursive, but neither can actually write it any longer. My husband, a year older than me, can’t either. Even in college, he printed faster than he wrote for note-taking. Today, even his signature is barely legible. I still write out my grocery list in cursive on white note paper, write yellow sticky notes to myself all the time (did some for myself today). I used to send long letters to friends, but now they have morphed into long emails. I am lucky if I get short responses, or maybe texts. Some friends do send long emails and I have a difficult time replying to them with as much information as I’d like.  I guess I always have a lot on my mind and my fingers can’t keep up with my brain, so I may do a draft, then rewrite to get the penmanship looking better. I’d rather talk on the phone if there is really a lot of ground to cover.

Vicki truly hates the way kids abbreviate while texting. She thinks it’s lazy and doesn’t promote good thought processes. I tend to agree, but will use a few, as I find my texts are always full of typos (spell check!)…I am usually rushing as I type and frequently don’t stop to proofread.

I worry that historians will not have reference material for famous people if thoughts aren’t committed to paper. No one keeps diaries. Twitter is a terrible place. We would all do well if it were shut down altogether and the Orange Monster lost that particular avenue of communication and had to go back in time to other forms of communication. His signature is a child’s scrawl. It reflects his state of mind.

I am on many social media platforms (though increasingly wary of what I post), but I tend to be old fashioned in my thinking about cursive, even if my handwriting is awful. Email does provide instant communication and gratification, but I do think something is lost if we don’t remember how to be polite and keep social graces alive, whether those include cursive or not.

 

 

What was the best thing about Belleville? That it was only 13 miles from Manhattan.
Read More