Brooklyn's Finntown has Officially Died

Back in the 1970's, my aunt enrolled in a Brooklyn driving school.

A New York City native, and living fairly close to a subway stop, she technically didn't need to drive, but being an independent woman, she figured having a drivers license provides a measure of independence.

Half-way through her first drive with an instructor, she was so exasperated by the experience, she pulled the car over, in the middle of Brooklyn traffic, put it in park, got out, and stalked home - on foot.

I'm sure the instructor was as relieved about my aunt's decision as she was.

Helena Laitinen, in 1986

My aunt, Helena, passed away yesterday at a memory care facility in Florida, never having gotten a driver's license.

My aunt never married, never had children, never earned a lot of money, and never was what I would call "happy."  Contentedness proved elusive for her.  Yet she had many friends, could be extremely generous, and was loyal to the point of obsession.

A century ago, her childhood neighborhood in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was America's center of Finnish culture.  It was called Finntown, but the number of Finns in Sunset Park was never more than 10,000, which isn't large by New York City's ethnic standards.  New York's Finns tended to be clannish, living within several blocks of the picturesque city park with stunning views of the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan. 

There were at least three Finnish churches; Lutheran, Congregational, and Pentecostal.  They had a large social hall called Imatra, built in 1908; a rambling, rickety wood structure notable for being the first public building in the neighborhood with its own electricity, provided by an on-site generator.  At first Imatra did not allow liquor, but by the time I visited it in the late 80's, about the only thing people frequented in it was its bar.  Yeah, Finns are known for their prodigious consumption of alcohol, and they had several bars in the neighborhood.  And a newspaper, New Yorkin Uutiset, for which Helena's father often wrote short stories.  In Finnish, of course.

My grandfather was one of those Finns who loved his liquor.  In fact, he was one of Finntown's biggest boozers, squandering on alcohol whatever money he and my grandmother, a cleaning lady, earned.  Family life for Helena and my father was utter misery.  The horror of having that kind of person as a father and male figurehead in her family deeply scarred my aunt against the male gender, and I heard her comment frequently about how much she generally disdained men.  That's one reason why she never married.  She was going to prove with her life that she could be happy without a husband.

And she found some solace in hard work, first selling chocolates at a boutique in downtown Brooklyn, then after graduating from Brooklyn College, clerking in Manhattan offices, slowly climbing the limited career ladder for women to secretary, then editor, then legal assistant.  She made some lasting friendships while working as a textbook editor, and hit her professional stride as a legal secretary to a high-priced, female, Park Avenue lawyer, who came to trust Helena with matters few other lawyers in their firm would convey to their underlings.  Helena took great pride in that!

My grandmother, Matilda, and Helena
celebrating my aunt's birthday in the 1950s
at a friend's home on 43rd St. in Finntown

Despite being good at the jobs she held over the years, Helena's main identity came from her native Finntown, even while the neighborhood changed completely during her lifetime.  As white flight surged through New York after World War II, Helena and her mother, my grandmother, remained committed to Finntown.  When they pooled their money to purchase a better home than what they'd endured during the worst of my grandfather's inebriation, they didn't move out to the suburbs like their Finnish friends were doing.  No, they moved to a bigger apartment one block up the street - the same street on which Helena ended up living about 98% of her 88 years.

My grandfather died before my parents ever met.  An apparent heart attack killed him in the foyer of their new apartment.  My grandmother got home from work first, then Helena.  Then my Dad, who said he literally had to step over his father's corpse to get inside the apartment and close the door.  For quite a while, the three of them stood, silent, looking at the lifeless body of one of Finntown's most incorrigible boozers.  They were relieved, mostly.  Finally, my Dad said aloud, "I guess we need to call somebody to take him away?"

For my aunt, my grandfather's death provided a sort of freedom, but she couldn't escape the shadows and demons with which he'd tortured his family in that neighborhood.  Some people would flee the place where so much pain had been inflicted upon them.  But not Helena.  As much as she loved Finntown culturally, I think the main reason she stayed was so she could somehow try to redeem her awful childhood as the tall, angst-ridden daughter of a hardened alcoholic.

A few years later, my parents got married and set up housekeeping in a much better Brooklyn neighborhood until I was born. Then Dad was transferred Upstate, and we left the city. Mom and Dad spent years trying to cajole Helena and my grandmother to at least move to a better neighborhood, especially since the thought of suburbia made them blanch. 

Mom came to believe that my grandmother was willing to move, but she didn't want to leave Helena.  And Helena was adamant about staying, even as the neighborhood was disintegrating before their very eyes.  Crime became rampant, buildings became vacant, hoodlums moved in, stores on the avenues closed.  Vandalism exploded, and graffiti was everywhere.  The streets were dangerous, even in broad daylight.

One of Helena's single girlfriends moved to Virginia and raved about how beautiful and safe it was.  "Come to Virginia," her friend nagged Helena.  Others were nagging from New Jersey, Long Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Florida.  Even Staten Island.  But no, Helena and my grandmother would insist:  All the Finns can't abandon Finntown.  Things would improve any day in Sunset Park.

Unfortunately, things went from bad to worse.

I remember one afternoon when we were visiting Helena and my grandmother, and other friends were also in their third-floor apartment, when suddenly, shots rang out down the block.  We all fell to the floor, except my elderly grandmother, who after years of scrubbing floors on her hands and knees, could no longer get down on her hands and knees.  The gunshots kept coming, and police car sirens screamed and whooped.  Before long, the entire block was full of cop cars, people shouting; pandemonium.  My grandmother sat in her chair, looking at all of us on the floor, listening to the shoot-out outside, her face in her hands, laughing with embarrassment at the absurdity of it all.

Then the church which Helena had faithfully attended since she was born closed. Its pastor and his wife, dear friends of Helena and our family, moved to Florida to minister to the legions of Brooklyn Finns who'd resettled down in the Lake Worth, West Palm Beach, and Boynton Beach area.  It seemed as if all of my family's friends were encouraging Helena and my grandmother to escape Sunset Park while they still could.  But they didn't.

One day, while at her job in Manhattan, my aunt received a call from the police back in Brooklyn.  Apparently a gunshot had gone through the living room window of their apartment, and would she come home to let the cops inside, so they could retrieve the bullet for their investigation?

I remember Helena found particular encouragement in the fact that, while the city was going to you-know-what-in-a-handbasket, the police still wanted to follow up on that one bullet.  See?  Things can't be all that bad, right?

Up the block, in Sunset Park itself, thugs literally bombed the Olympic-sized swimming pool, and the cash-starved city left it in shambles for years, unable to fix it.  Mass transit, upon which my aunt and grandmother relied almost exclusively, since Helena refused to get a drivers license, became ridiculously dangerous, dirty, and unreliable.  Yet they stayed put.

Things got so bad, when my grandmother had an aneurysm and fell backwards down a flight of stairs in their apartment building, it took Helena about half an hour, frantically scanning the yellow pages, to find an ambulance company willing to enter their neighborhood after dark, before the days of 9-1-1.

After my grandmother's death, we again tried to convince Helena to at least move to a better neighborhood in the city, if she didn't want to leave it entirely.  Yet she refused.  She had plenty of excuses:  Sunset Park was so crime-ridden, she couldn't get anything if she tried to sell her apartment.  If she left Finntown, who'd be left to carry on the Finnishness of the place?  Anyplace else, she'd have to learn to drive, and she didn't want to try that again.  Things had to get better; how much worse could they get? 

But it wasn't optimism that fueled her determination to say.  I believe it was an overwhelming urge to somehow redeem her awful childhood.

Thankfully, Helena was never mugged, raped, or even physically threatened.  Her apartment was never burglarized.  As one of the few white women left in the neighborhood, and an exceptionally tall one at that, I think Helena came to relish her distinguishing presence on the sidewalks, the bus, and at the subway station.  She came to represent resistance, and tenacity despite the neighborhood's stunning decline.  She had grit, she was strong, and she wasn't going to let a bunch of punks and welfare cheats drive her from her home.

And it certainly seemed like there were a lot of welfare cheats.  Young men sat on brownstone stoops all day long, ogling their personal luxury cars parked at the curb, obtained through no legal means.  When Helena went shopping at the only grocery store left in the neighborhood - a filthy den of rotting produce and past-sell-by-date staples - she was often the only customer not paying with food stamps.  Or purchasing copious amounts of beer and cigarettes.

She'd yell at the neighbors on her block who were doing and selling drugs.  She wasn't scared of the dealers; she was indignant towards them.  She'd scream out her third-floor windows at Latinos playing their salsa music too loudly.  She'd walk up to parents on the sidewalk whose kids were using foul language, and she'd angrily critique their lax parenting.  Sure, some of the newbies in the 'hood who grew accustomed to Helena's rants would curse her to her face, but it only fueled her defiance.

And plenty more people pretty much left her alone.

Indeed, except for some chatty neighbors in her apartment building, my aunt was soon very alone in her neighborhood.  She'd visit dear friends who'd moved elsewhere in Brooklyn, and she had her work in Manhattan, but on her block, she was the last holdout.  The last Finn.  A few elderly Finns remained scattered around the old Finntown, but the good old days when Finns didn't need to speak or write any English to flourish in the neighborhood were long gone.

As best as I know, today, there are approximately five - maybe eight - Finns left in Sunset Park and the original Finntown.  Down from 10,000 at their peak.  The handful who remain keep to themselves, and were never as involved in New York's Finnish cultural community as Helena was.  They live on 41st Street, between 7th and 8th avenues, across the street from a revitalized Sunset Park, and amidst a boom of Chinese immigrants that has driven housing prices through the roof.  Indeed, Helena enjoyed a bit of validation for her years of holding out, as the Chinese practically invaded the crumbling shell of her neighborhood, beginning in the 1990's.  Storefronts that had been empty for decades were re-opened.  Restaurants moved in.  Decrepit vacant buildings were torn down and shiny, modernistic, ugly new ones - tall ones! - were erected in their place. 

On Helena's block, the Chinese crammed into every house, even living in illegal basement apartments.  Helena would stand at her third-floor windows every morning, marveling at the swarms of Chinese who would emerge from every doorway and march towards the subway station.  That many people hadn't gone to work on her block in a generation.  She was pleased to see such industriousness, even though she knew that many of those poor souls were in Brooklyn illegally, having sold themselves to human traffickers who were literally holding each of them for tens of thousands of dollars in ransom.  Money Helena's new neighbors faced years of repaying, many working long hours in virtually sweatshop conditions.

When she began to develop dementia several years ago, my family finally convinced her to move to a retirement center in Florida.  She sold her 700-square-foot apartment for $300,000, a staggering sum for her, but still a pittance compared with similar apartments in far better neighborhoods in trendier parts of the city (and not quite half what similar apartments are selling for today, just a few years later).

Her death yesterday represents dementia's continued toll on my family, after my Dad's passing from Alzheimer's last fall.  Thinking back on all of the friendships both Dad and Helena maintained from their childhood days, growing up in Brooklyn, nearly all of those friends have died from some sort of memory-related illness as well.

One of the responsibilities Helena assumed for herself back in the old Finntown was being a nurse for older Finns who had remained, like her.  And in Florida, as her mind was taken from her, Helena was visited by younger friends who'd long ago moved from Finntown to Florida.  It wasn't the most ideal set-up; we'd asked Helena if she wanted to relocate closer to family in Michigan or Texas, but she chose Florida, because that's where most of her Finntown friends were now.

Throughout her entire life, Helena obsessed over her Finnish roots far more than the rest of us in her small family have.  But it wasn't just her Finnish roots that gave Helena her identity.  She seemed driven by a desire to re-craft for herself a life that could suffocate all of those painful childhood years as the daughter of a Finnish alcoholic.

Sunset Park's dismal decay during the worst years of New York City's urban blight couldn't shift Helena's focus.  The crime, the graffiti, the stolen, stripped cars junked on the avenues, the empty stores, the vandalized subway stations couldn't force her to abandon an intention I doubt she herself fully understood.  It was as if she'd already become hardened to the hardness of life in a ghetto.  She saw what was happening, but instead of making her flee, it made her more fierce in her resolve to fight.

Was it foolishness on her part?  Some would say it was.  Was it unrealistic?  Without knowing if Helena really knew why she refused to move away, it's hard to tell if she found any measure of peace by staying.  It certainly never looked to the rest of us like she did.

Of one thing we can be certain, however:  My aunt hated giving up.  Yes, she gave up on driving - car, instructor, and all.  But that was about it.

Yesterday evening, as her caregivers were putting her to bed, she stopped breathing, and one of them gently jostled her.  "Helena!"  She called out in alarm, "You've stopped breathing!"

Reportedly, Helena's eyes briefly opened, and she shot the caregiver one of her trademark cold, hard glares.  And then she closed her eyes, and softly took one final breath.

She always did like having the last word.

Doesn't Individual Agency Still Matter?

Have you heard about it yet?

It's the new non-fiction book by J.D. Vance about why poor white people seem disproportionately enamored by Donald Trump's candidacy for president.  Entitled Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it's become an instant best-seller and a topic of conversation across several prominent conservative websites.

And while I haven't read the book, I'm struck by how it helps to represent the eagerness with which a certain segment of American conservatism is trying to figure out the hold somebody like Trump has secured across a vast stretch of of a mostly white, mostly less educated, mostly poorer cross-section of the electorate.

And it's not just the legions of faceless, nameless middle Americans who are gushing over Trump.  Evangelical blue-chips like Focus on the Family's James Dobson are eroding their credibility by championing the billionaire developer.  They're twisting Scripture and invoking platitudes about a religious Americanism that brazenly defy orthodox theology.  Churchgoers across the country are lapping it up, fretting amongst themselves about what is going to happen to our country if people don't overlook Trump's glaring flaws and vote for him anyway.  And people like me who are voting third party this year?  Many conservatives who've reluctantly decided for Trump say we're throwing away our vote, and saying we're part of the Hillary problem.

Actually, if Democrats weren't so busy fighting amongst themselves, they would see that all of this hand-wringing by Republicans actually spells deeper trouble for Hillary than whether or not the Russians helped expose the DNC's obstructionism towards Bernie Sanders.  These past eight years have not been kind to this country socially and economically.  More single women are raising families than ever before.  Wages for all but the One Percenters have been stagnant.  Even with a black man in the White House, racism seems worse now than when the Obamas first moved onto Pennsylvania Avenue.  The wars started by George Bush and his neo-cons have spiraled out of control and out across the Middle East like Whirling Dervishes.  Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize - of all things - at the start of his presidency, Obama has instead presided over an incessant drumbeat of terrorism and bloodshed.

People are afraid.  Americans are watching their paychecks purchase less and less, and we're watching Europe being bombed by disgruntled Muslims.  Our government is currently fixated on existential topics such as men using the women's restroom, while voters want to see genuine progress on bread-and-butter issues such as the economy and national security.  It doesn't matter that Trump has no concrete plans for how he's going to strategically and effectively address the problems he clearly can identify.  Shucks, we all know what the problems are.  Yet both Trump and Hillary seem more preoccupied with name recognition than policy creation.

Which is where Vance, the author, chimes in.

One of the reasons Vance says he wrote his book is to provide a bit of a kick to the American electorate's rear end.  In one of the more provocative interviews he's given during his book's publicity tour, Vance is asked by TheAmericanConservative.com's Rod Dreher if voters will even tolerate being told that many of their problems aren't the fault of their own government:

"We’re no longer a country that believes in human [individual]agency... To hear Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they have no power to affect their own lives.  Things have been done to them, from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help.  And without that help, they’re doomed to lives of misery they didn’t choose."

In other words, our elections have turned into one big "look what you've done against me" and "what can you do for me?" parody of self-reliance that actually perpetuates the notion that, contrary to what many conservatives say they believe, the government holds the key to a better life.

So we get really afraid when we consider that people like Hillary could be at the helm of the entity that supposedly influences our lives the most.  And that fear makes people like Trump practically salvific in terms of his audacity to suggest that, first, America is a decrepit morass of dysfunction (which, as the world's largest economy, we're obviously not - yet, anyway); and second, that all it will take is one loud-mouth CEO to build walls and renegotiate contracts, diplomacy and civil rights be damned.

Of course, other countries have had leaders like that in the past, and what usually ends up happening is some sort of upheaval, when the ordinary people realize that their individual liberties have become diluted by the person they hoped would do the opposite.

When it comes to the concept of "individual agency," that scenario is what our elections are supposed to help us avoid.

(That's another reason I'm voting Third Party.)

Spot On: Seeing Eyewear as Safety Gear

A freak thing.

After learning that stormy winds blew a panel of wood from a Manhattan construction site onto a passerby yesterday, I was reminded of my own similar brush with construction danger on Gotham's busy sidewalks.

Yesterday's victim, an older man, was hit in the head by the falling wood, and taken to the hospital in critical condition.  It could have happened to anybody walking by.  Just another unsettling reality of big city life.

There's an old joke that New York will be a great city - once it ever gets finished!  And sure enough, with construction sites a ubiquitous part of New York City's experience, most New Yorkers walk past work zones with barely a thought to them.  And considering the many ways pedestrians could become injured by all of the dangers of high-rise construction, whether it's a remodel or a brand-new project, perhaps the only surprise is that more passersby don't suffer a similar mishap as yesterday's.

Mine took place in the early 1990's, when I lived on East 28th Street, and was a regular commuter along the Lexington Avenue 4-5-6 line, which has a local stop at 28th Street and Park Avenue South (a far less prestigious stretch of that famous boulevard).  At the time, there was an old building on the northwest corner of the intersection that was being remodeled in some way, with scaffolding around parts of it, and one of those rickety pedestrian "tunnels" along the sidewalks.

It was a blustery morning, I recall, and I was approaching the subway entrance from the east, along with dozens of other people.  At the intersection, waiting for the light to change, I was looking up, enjoying the bright blue sky, and a small dot of water landed on one of the lenses of my glasses.

Living in New York, having droplets of water hit my glasses was a common occurrence for me, especially in the summers.  Air conditioners, from small window units sticking out of buildings, to those massive machines on skyscraper rooftops, regularly spit their condensation all over the place.  It's not that big of a deal, and frankly, the water created by those units would be far cleaner than what might be in your beverage glass at your neighborhood diner.

At least, I thought this was water.  I remember crossing the street to reach the subway station's Downtown platform, with the breeze whipping around; descending the dank stairwell to the underground platform, with the customary rush of wind coming up the stairwell as express trains blew through the station.  And as I stood waiting for my train, the dot of water was still on my glasses.

Odd, I thought.  With all of the air that's been blown over my glasses, this spot of water should have dried by now, and become invisible.  But I didn't take my glasses off to inspect them; Manhattan subway platforms during rush hour congestion aren't the best place to take off one's glasses and hold them up to the light.

So I rode down to my usual stop, got my toasted sesame bagel "with a schmear" (of cream cheese), walked down to my office building, and got to the 25th floor... and the dot was still on my glasses.

When I reached my desk, the first thing I did was take off my glasses, and wouldn't you know it?!  It wasn't a dot of water on my plastic lens after all.  It was a small hole!

Whatever liquid had landed on my glasses back up at 28th Street wasn't water, but some sort of corrosive chemical that burned a hole half-way through the plastic lens of my glasses!

My co-workers, most of them native New Yorkers, were only mildly interested in my discovery.  I, on the other hand, was a bit more excited.  "What if this whatever-it-was hit my naked eyeball?"

Fortunately, the optician's shop where I'd purchased the glasses was located a few blocks away in the Financial District, so I quickly called them up, and they told me to come on over.  An optician examined the lens with one of those magnifying glasses like jewelers use, and he held both my glasses and the magnifier over for me to take a look as well.  The hole had burned itself almost clear through the lens.

"If that residue that flew onto your glasses had actually landed in your eye, you'd be at the hospital right now, not this eyeglass store," I remember him marveling.  It took a couple of days for them to re-make my one lens, at a cost I don't recall.

Suffice it to say, ever since that morning in Manhattan, I've never once seriously regretted having to wear glasses.  Over the years, as surgeries and lasers have become more sophisticated, and the need for glasses to correct vision problems has been drastically reduced, I take a moment and think back to how that pair of spectacles may have saved me from severe optical damage.  From a freak speck of some unknown corrosive chemical that was being carried along by Gotham's fickle wind.

People have suggested that I should have gone to that construction site on the corner and asked them what they were using that could have become airborne and damaged my glasses.  But since I couldn't prove the chemical actually came from that construction site, meaning the contractors there would care even less about my story than my co-workers did, I figured it wouldn't be worth it.

So, what's my point?  Isn't it clear?  Although glasses can be inconvenient - and even annoying, now that I have to wear bifocals - I know they can be worth the bother.

Indeed, for me, "four-eyes" has a distinctly comforting ring to it.  After all, it's better than "three-eyes."  Or "one-eye."

Then again, maybe having to wear an eye patch would make me look more enigmatic and rugged...

I can hear myself now:  "I don't always visit New York City.  But when I do, I wear my glasses."

One or Two? Bridging NY's Z Crisis

Yo - fuggeddabout all diss Orlando, ISIS, Trump, Hillary fiasco, aww-rite?

You want controversy?  We got some hot sizzling controversy heating up for ya right now down in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Staten Island, and our big, byootiful bridge!

Yes, indeedy, folks.  As if New Yorkers didn't have anything more to fuss about, now a group of Italian historical buffs are pressing the city, owner of America's longest suspension bridge, over the spelling of its name.

It's the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and no, they're not trying to simplify its spelling.

At least these history activists aren't calling for a completely new name for the iconic bridge, which links the middle-class neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with Staten Island, across the southern end of New York Bay.  Officials have been on a bridge re-naming binge lately in other corners of the city, much to the consternation of New Yorkers loathe to the fickle mentality from which such switches seem to spring.

And this bridge is truly a New Yorker's bridge - very few tourists likely ever cross it, since it's so far away from Manhattan, even though it's clearly visible from the borough's southern tip.  However, if you've ever tried to get from Kennedy International to Newark International, or from Long Island to the Jersey Shore, you've almost certainly crossed the Verrazano (or had a very deceitful cabby).

When it opened in 1964, it was the world's longest suspension bridge, surprisingly graceful and elegant for such a grimy and industrial city.  From a distance, the steel architecture of its designer, Othmar H. Ammann, has aged quite well.  However, up close, you can tell it's a workhorse of a transportation link.  Unless they've spruced it up recently, anytime I ever crossed it, the swaths of rust coating its surfaces made me wonder where the bridge's expensive tolls were being spent - certainly not on its meticulous maintenance!  These days, the normal toll for passenger cars is a whopping $16 each, although residents of Staten Island pay as little as $6.24.  Yet gridlock remains common, despite the prices.

And if you've ever set sail on a large cruise ship, even if you never docked in New York, chances are that the Verrazano played a role in your cruise ship's design.  You see, to reach any dock in New York's vast harbor, all of the world's major ships need to fit underneath the Verrazano's span, which actually can fluctuate by 12 feet between summer and winter, based on the temperature.

By any measure, the Verrazano is a significant structure, even if it's not as famous as its much shorter suspension siblings like San Francisco's Golden Gate, Manhattan's George Washington, and the world's granddaddy of bridges, named after Brooklyn itself.

Yet still, why does the Verrazano's name need to be fixed?  Because of discrepancies between the various ways the bridge's namesake spelled his name, or other people spelled it for him over the centuries.  You see, Giovanni da Verrazzano normally spelled his name with two "Z"s, whereas the city only put one "Z" into their bridge's official name.  And they did that because back in the 1960's, when the bridge was being designed and built, historical experts insisted that Verrazzano himself, ostensibly in a self-aggrandizing manner, would also spell his name in its Latin form, Janus Verrazanus.

So why didn't they call the bridge "Verrazanus-Narrows"?  Nobody seems to know.  But this issue bothers a lot of Italian-Americans who want the rest of us to remember that back in 1524, it was Verrazano, or Verrazzano, or Verrazanus, who became the first Eurpoean known to sail through the narrows, over which his namesake bridge soars today.

As if misplacing a "Z" is going to cause people to forget that, or refuse to learn it in the first place.

Whenever my family would visit relatives in Brooklyn, and we'd see the sweeping Verrazano, we'd call it "Daddy's Bridge," since my Dad used to work for a company that sold a lot of the construction products used to build it.  Dad made a number of on-site visits to the construction zone in the early 1960's on behalf of his employer.  He'd even chronicled the bridge's progress when he was a student at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute.  After Dad died last year from Alzheimer's, while I was cleaning out his boxes and boxes of old photos, I came across several photos of the Verrazano under construction, and the massive gutting of venerable neighborhoods in Fort Hamilton and Bay Ridge to accommodate the mighty bridge's "landfall" in Brooklyn.

Indeed, the freeway ramps and entryways leading up to the bridge and back down to the Belt Parkway wiped out blocks and blocks of established neighborhoods - with water views, even, making them particularly desirable.  Back then, it's what big cities did to accommodate the unprecedented demands of new vehicle owners, suburbanization, and what we've now come to know as white flight.

When the Verrazano opened, western Brooklyn was an aging urban core, although its far eastern waterfront was still being developed.  Staten Island was predominantly rural, and Long Island was still bucolic.  Today, property values have skyrocketed in all of these areas;  residential subdivisions and strip malls sprawl across Staten Island's former farms and forests.  While Brooklyn's Bay Ridge neighborhood still boasts iconic bridge views from almost any avenue, it's white population back when the Verrazano opened has become more Asian, more Middle Eastern, and more Hispanic.  Yet plenty of proud Italians remain in their traditional neighborhood, with its quiet parks, tree-lined streets, immaculate homes, and tasty restaurants.

Indeed, if I had to live again in New York City, Bay Ridge is where I'd want to be.

But getting back to the missing "Z" in the Verrazano's name:  How do you think the valiant explorer would feel if he came sailing up to the entrance to New York Harbor today?  And see that mammoth silvery span arcing across those choppy, chilly waters?

Yo, dude - we name dis after yoo!

Since the ways Verrazano himself spelled his own name have contributed to confusion over how we spell the bridge named in his honor, what do you think he'd say in response to today's controversy?

Everybody, say it with me:  FUGGEDDABOUDIT
_____

Extra!  Three photos from the flotilla of ships, including warships, tall ships, and the QE2, celebrating the Statue of Liberty's 100th birthday over the 4th of July weekend in 1986 - thirty years ago.  And yes, that's me in those white pants...

 

Your Body Wants its Missing Fat

Losing weight is hard enough.

Keeping it off is even harder.  And a new study involving a popular reality TV show may reveal why:

Your own body may fight your attempts at keeping your weight down!

A six-year scientific project examined the ability of "Biggest Loser" contestants from the show's eighth season to keep off what pounds they'd lost.  A fan of the show, Dr. Kevin Hall, happens to be a metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health, and he approached the show's producers about following contestants to see what would happen as, over time, their bodies responded to significant weight loss.

Hall figured the success of contestants to keep the weight off would depend largely on those traditional metrics we've been taught for years about weight loss:  You know; exercise, balanced diet, yadda yadda yadda...

Instead, Hall discovered that metabolism controls more than science had realized.  As a person loses weight, their metabolism will slow down automatically, but when a new, lower weight is reached, and a person relaxes their weight-loss regimen, their metabolism often will not return to "normal."  Instead, not only does metabolism stagnate, it continues to slow even further, making weight stability a battle, let alone efforts to lose more weight.

That's why keeping off lost weight is so difficult!  Have you ever lost a significant amount of weight - even ten pounds is significant - only to regain it?  Plus add a few more pounds as the months go by?  Well, this is likely the reason why.

On the plus side, at least some of the frustrations about not being able to maintain one's discipline about exercise and diet can be alleviated!  Keeping lost weight off isn't simply mind over matter.  It's not just about commitment to the cause, or weakness in the face of temptation.  It's not all about willpower.

In many people, according to this scientific study by a real doctor at a prestigious medical organization, the reason you can't keep off the weight may be biological.

Your body apparently has a mechanism at work whose purpose is to restore what weight was removed.

Weird, huh?  And yet, somewhat comforting.  At least, to a point.

Then you begin to get frustrated all over again:  Well, isn't there anything I can do to win this battle of the bulge?!

Well, if you can afford it, bariatric surgery can work.  You can increase the time and exertion levels you spend exercising.  You can slice even more bad stuff out of your diet.  Indeed, absolutely no cheating is allowed!  But even then, doctors warn you'll probably always feel hungry.

Doesn't sound very encouraging, does it? 

Obviously, it's best to start early and prevent the weight from adding up in the first place.  But none of us can go back five, ten, or thirty years to correct our poor eating and exercise habits, if indeed diet and exercise were the only reasons people gain weight to begin with.  After all, some medicines we may need for other health issues can either contribute to weight gain or prevent weight loss.  Social and environmental factors are also at play, and they can be just as difficult to change as one's caloric intake and exercise regimen.  

To a certain extent, this theory of weight re-gain, dubbed "set point weight", may simply pose a troubling reality in the midst of our postmodern Western culture's obsession with thinness.  In many societies, both currently and throughout history, plumper bodies are considered more beautiful than skinnier physiques.  Not that overeating and lack of exercise should be considered good for us.  Perhaps set point weight theory shows how gluttony really is more physically dangerous than many of us consider it to be, since our abuse of food isn't as correctable or reversible as we've been led to believe.

Only two of the contestants studied have been successful at maintaining their new lower weight; one has gained "only" a few pounds, and the other has managed to lose a few more, but she says it's been a royal struggle to do so.  And these are people who were equipped by the show with all sorts of weight loss and weight maintenance strategies, trainers, nutrition experts, and equipment for the task.  Imagine the daunting prospects for success facing the rest of us!

The basic take-away here is that, like many other things in life we'd like to correct, it's best not to start those processes that eventually produce unwanted results.

Because while it is possible to lose weight, your body doesn't make it easy to keep it off.

Your metabolism won't even let you splurge on your favorite comfort foods for consolation.

Don't Endorse the Evil of Two Lessers

It's time for America's evangelical voters to put up or shut up.

I've resisted the groundswell of #NeverTrump up until now, but today Trump provided the straw to break that camel's back.  He tipped the needle over the line.  He nudged the cart over the precipice.

Up until now, Trump has been "the lesser of two evils" for holdout evangelicals exasperated about choosing between him and Hillary.  Up until now, the plethora of conventional warnings from theologians and moralists about how spiritually and emotionally unfit Trump is for the presidency have carried little weight with the legions of religious conservatives who insist that political incorrectness is all Washington needs these days.

Up until now, Trump has been the celebrated schoolyard bully of this election season, dropping vulgar innuendos about the only Republican female contender, and snarking away on Twitter with juvenile jabs at other contestants who, one by one, have pulled out of the ugly race.  He taunts and belittles others while unabashedly boasting about the greatness he plans for America - even though he hasn't provided any detailed plans for achieving that greatness.  In any other election, his public package of empty promises, sound-bite insults, and incessant vanity would be considered bad politics, but this year, his followers cheerfully describe Trump and his schtick as refreshing.

It's the bully-fication of America, I guess, thanks to years of pugnacious right-wing talk shows, the dumbing-down of American history by the religious right, and thinly-veiled anger and confusion over the economic stagnation that casts a pall over a sprawling cross-section of voters.  Traditional conservatives remain adamant that America's One Percenters, despite their extreme wealth, really don't manipulate their assets to the detriment of the rest of us.  Meanwhile, ironically, this manipulation by the One Percenters has helped Trump attract an unprecedented amount of support from labor unions and other traditional Democrats; "liberals" tantalized by a so-called Republican who says he's fed up with all of the corporate cost-cutting, down-sizing, and offshoring of jobs that have eroded our standard of living.

Somehow, having an egomaniacal developer who leveraged his father's rental apartment business in one of the world's most expensive real estate markets into a multi-billion-dollar company represents America's last great hope of greatness.  Even though he's never run for any public office in his life.

And yeah, maybe it just might work, having a political neophyte win the White House without having to solicit campaign funds from a plethora of donors looking for taxpayer-funded handouts.  But what happens when that political neophyte holds anybody who doesn't embrace him in as much contempt as Trump does?

He calls people who don't want to vote for him "losers."  He delights in calling people "wacko," including Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck.  He's called Carl Rove a "failed Jeb Bushy."  He described Lindsey Graham as "one of the dumbest human beings."  And voters are drinking it up as entertainment.

Indeed, immature voters may giggle and guffaw at such petty insults, yet isn't that what the impotent, scared kids on the playground do when a bully is swaggering about, shooting off his mouth?

And when it comes to Trump's infamous insults, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg.  The New York Times is keeping a running tab of them - hundreds of them, regarding at least 210 people, places, and things - just from Trump's Twitter account.

Trump has made a name for himself of demeaning the names of so many people he doesn't particularly like.  And that's a good temperament for a president?

Add that to Trumps' mocking of a handicapped reporter.  How about his lusting after his own daughter?  How about his affairs... or is sexual infidelity so provincial now?  How about his multiple bankruptcies, or is he entitled to break a few eggs while making his omelette?

How about his weak flip-flop on abortion?  Or his ambivalence about freedom of religion?

He's still better than Hillary, even after all that?

Up until now, for many conservatives, he has been.

Then today, after the Baptist theologian Russell Moore refused to back down from his personal #NeverTrump stance, the Donald unleashed on one of the most popular and prominent evangelicals of our day:

"Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for.  A nasty guy with no heart!"

Now, I don't agree with Moore on everything, but I'm not sure anybody (except Trump) can point to anything Moore says or does that makes him a "truly terrible representative" for us evangelicals.  Moore is almost certainly not "a nasty guy" by any stretch of the imagination.  And it's downright goofy to say he has "no heart."

If Trump is entitled to his opinion, isn't Moore entitled to his?  So doesn't Trump's belittling of Moore in such a fashion say more negative things about the presidential candidate than it does the Baptist advocate?

It also raises a deeply troubling question:  For evangelicals to say that Trump is the "lesser of two evils," is this the type of president you'd want interacting with leaders within our evangelical sub-culture?  Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders - none of them have said anything even remotely as negative about any leading evangelical figure as Trump did today.

Sure, liberals in the public eye may think all sorts of nasty stuff about Moore and other prominent evangelicals.  But they usually think twice before publicizing those private opinions.  And that's because there's a greater power in thoughts that are publicized.  It's one thing for a public figure to think negative things about somebody else, or even discretely share them within a tight group of close friends.  But to unleash such negative things for the entire world to consume - especially as consistently as Trump does regarding his opponents - should be deeply troubling to the rest of us.  Such careless open vitriol bespeaks not only Trump's political incorrectness, it more than suggests a temperament of hostility, narcissism, and immaturity that would disqualify anybody else from virtually any leadership post in any organization... except the United States presidency?

Um... No.  Today Trump erased any benefit of the doubt regarding his being the lesser of two evils.

If you consider yourself an evangelical, and you've been willing to vote for Donald Trump, today is your day of reckoning.  I don't think I'm making too big a deal out of this, since, as I've been saying for months, it's virtually impossible to embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ and Donald Trump.

No, we're not electing a pastor.  This election is about the presidency of the United States.  And yes, Hillary has a lot of unseemly baggage that makes her a distinctly dubious choice as the leader of the "free" world.

But if you think people are wrong to vote for Hillary, then you should also understand why it's wrong to vote for Trump.

As the saying goes, there's such a thing as "the evil of two lessers."  If two candidates are wrong for the job, don't choose either of them.

It's not who you don't vote for that matters.
_____

Update 5/10/16:  Anne Graham Lotz claims she's voting for Trump because "he can change."  With all due respect to Lotz and her family pedigree, "he can change" is not a Biblical reason to vote for anybody.  Hillary can change, according to that logic, so why not vote for her?  Anybody can change, right?  Shucks, as far as banking on somebody to change, Trump could change into something even worse than what he is now.

Nothing Contrary About Miss Mary

She hopped up the moment we came through the front door.

"Well, welcome, welcome!  Y'all come on in!"  Her voice was hearty and expressive.  Miss Mary sprang from her wing-back chair, arms extended wide, an enormous smile stretching across her time-worn face.

She's a life-long Texan, with a twangy accent that could charm the rattles off a snake, as they say.  Very tall, very slender, with very wrinkled skin, likely from years spent basking in the Lone Star State's vicious sun.  And an untamed dollop of kinky gray hair crowning it all.

Three of us had arrived at Autumn Leaves for a visit this morning:  Mom, a friend of ours, and me.  Autumn Leaves is the memory-care facility where my Dad died last fall, but we still visit regularly.

The people there - both the residents and the staff - had become such a significant part of life for Mom and me.  During Dad's stay, Mom learned that a long-time member of their church was also a resident at Autumn Leaves, and that her retired daughter attends their church.  Thus started our little carpool service for the retired daughter - who no longer drives - once a week for her to visit her nonagenarian mother.

And today was our weekly visit.  And Miss Mary was sitting with one of her middle-aged children, who had his pug dog on a leash, in the lobby's sitting area, along with her personal nurse.

Miss Mary had become a resident at Autumn Leaves just before Dad passed away, so we didn't get to know her well then.  But over the intervening months, we've learned what a hoot she is, as her gregarious personality welcomes everybody, even as she doesn't know who any of us are.

Her arms still outstretched, she waved her hands in a circular motion, like a proud grandmother welcoming her brood to Thanksgiving dinner.  We were told that after her family placed her at Autumn Leaves, Miss Mary had wasted no time claiming the entire facility as her own home - although she once confided to me that she couldn't remember ever having picked out that furniture!  I don't know if that meant she didn't like it, or if she did, but it didn't stop her from considering the lobby her main living room.

Her son, with the dog, remained seated, but his mother came over to me, hugging me like a long-lost relative, cackling about how relieved she was that we'd finally arrived.  Trying to be friendly with her son, a balding veterinarian, I told him about the time I'd asked Miss Mary if she was behaving herself, and she quickly retorted, "wail, cain chew see mah hay-low?" in her yellow-rose-of-Texas accent.

(For you Yankees, let me translate:  "Well, can't you see my halo?")

Once time, after she'd returned to Autumn Leaves with her personal nurse from a trip to the local Starbucks, she marched up to me and asked me if I'd been able to keep myself entertained while she'd been out.

Miss Mary loves men, and she hugged my Mom, giving her a sloppy kiss on the cheek, asking her if she was proud to have such a handsome son as me!  I'm telling you; sometimes, these dementia patients can be excellent for your ego!

Usually, the friend we bring with us goes down to an activity room, finds her mother, and spends an hour or so sitting with her.  They don't chat much - one can rarely have any kind of meaningful conversation with a dementia patient - but spending time as mother and daughter has a value for them that anybody should be able to appreciate.

During that time, Mom and I normally are able to chat with the staff, commiserate with other family members who are visiting, and even interact with residents; but today, things were pretty quiet.  Miss Mary's son left not long after we arrived, and several staffers were in a meeting.

So eventually, Mom and I found ourselves lounging in some upholstered side chairs in the lobby, when Miss Mary came back from having her pants changed.

Hey - it's a fact of life.  Many dementia patients have brains that cannot process biological signals for how their body empties its bladder.  Wet pants are part of daily - sometimes hourly - dementia care.

At any rate, Miss Mary was now agitated.  She couldn't stand still, or sit still.  She carries an empty purse with her ("It's as empty as my head," she'd joke, perhaps indicating her dim awareness of her condition).  She'd toss her purse into a chair, like she was staying... and then snatch it back up, like she was leaving.

Earlier, after we'd arrived, and greeted her and her son, I was watching the morning activity in one of the side rooms, when I heard Miss Mary marching down the hallway, muttering "I hate you" to nobody in particular, with a few F-bombs thrown in for flavor.  When she passed me, I greeted her (you can never greet dementia patients too many times; they won't have remembered your last greeting) and she muttered something about having misplaced something.  This scenario happened twice.

Miss Mary usually wasn't this rattled.

At any rate, as Mom and I now sat in the lobby, Miss Mary came over, sputtering about how long she had to wait for her son to come and take her to lunch.  She maneuvered one of the big wing-back chairs to face us, ostensibly so she could sit down and have a chat.  But she spent so much time rearranging the chair, she forgot that she'd wanted to sit down in it.  Without stopping, Miss Mary stalked off to another part of the lobby.  That happened a couple of times, too.

While she was waiting for her son (who had just left, you'll recall), another couple arrived to visit a loved one.  They had never been to Autumn Leaves before, but Miss Mary welcomed them to her "home" anyway with all the charm and enthusiasm of the perfect southern hostess.  Surprised, and obviously uncomfortable with such familiarity from a woman they'd never before seen, the couple stammered something about the person they'd come to visit.  Miss Mary had no idea who that was, of course, but with her long arms, she waved them down a side hallway, assuring them that they'd find what they were looking for.

I think that couple spent all of five minutes at Autumn Leaves, before they were hurriedly trying to leave.  The woman made some apologetic comment to me about how the place unnerved them, and I completely understood:  If you've never spent time in a dementia care facility before, it can be a distressing experience.  I don't know what it says about Mom and me that we're so comfortable when we visit Autumn Leaves!

Still, we don't spend much time there, either.  You can get surprisingly drained from being around so many people whose memory no longer works.

Although, with Miss Mary, her delightful sense of humor obviously has a stubborn streak.  It's proven to be one of her last senses to go.

Back in the day, she used to be a public schoolteacher - proper, organized, with excellent diction, and an upright poise - and we were told she has always been a proud Southern Baptist.  Once she came up to me with an empty plastic cup, asking me if "they had something stronger than water in this place."  

I laughed, and she did, too.  "Miss Mary," I teased, "I thought you were a Baptist!"

"I am," she shot back with her quick wit, "but I'm not always a good one!"

One Shell of a Sculpture

Show and Tell
 

Good grief.  With all of the stupid politics our partisan brethren and sisteren keep making me write about, it's too easy to forget that life isn't about elections or public opinion.

Which is a good thing, actually, since public opinion probably wouldn't consider today's installment of "Show and Tell" any kind of genuine art.

But I kinda like to think it's some sorta sculptural thingy.  Can you tell what it is?

Okay, I'll give you a clue. The white plinth is actually an upside-down plastic birdbath, with the birdbath part facing the ground, and its base sticking up in the air, topped by a circular concrete stepping stone.

And atop the concrete disc is an old sea shell.

Still wondering what it is?  Well, it's not supposed to be a brain teaser.  It's just a little something I created for our backyard to symbolize two memories that we have of my dearly-departed Dad.

The birdbath he purchased years ago, after a couple of concrete birdbaths kept getting broken by raccoons who insisted on climbing up in it to bathe.

Unfortunately for Dad, what the concrete birdbath lacked in flexibility, this plastic birdbath lacked in sturdiness.  I don't know how many mornings I'd wake up - usually the first one up - go out into the kitchen to make my coffee, look out the window, and see the plastic birdbath tumbled on its side, with muddy paw prints all over it.  Yes, the hollow base of the plastic birdbath was full of sand, but that was insufficient to withstand three or four raccoons trying to wash their dirty little paws.

Even now, upside down, the underside of the plastic birdbath has fresh, raccoonish pawprints on it! 

Nevertheless, whenever Mom and I look at this new creation, although technically we see an upside down birdbath, we also see an object that Dad used to fuss over almost daily; either by going out and setting it back upright and re-filling it, or by sweeping leaves out of the water if the birdbath had managed to remain upright and full for an extended period of time.

Of course, during our brutal Texas summers, sometimes the water evaporated so quickly, Dad would have to refill it daily.

As for the shell - what some might call a "conch" - it was something the previous owners of our house left when Mom and Dad purchased it.  We don't know where it came from, but like all shells of this size, it reminds us of the ocean.  This particular shell is fairly old; newer shells have a pink hue inside; this one has just a faint suggestion of pink.  It's mostly white, while within its tiny cracks and crevices, black decay has set in.  There's also a sizable hole in its underside.

Even though it and us are a long way from any ocean, we've kept it all these years, and it helps us recall those wonderful summers in Maine after Dad retired, when he and Mom spent a lot of time up there in idyllic coastal Sedgwick.

Still... it is art?

Well, I'll admit:  It's not anything I'd pay money to see, or that I'd buy.  Yet it has value to Mom and me because every time we look at it, we know the things - and the person - that it represents.  Anybody wandering into our backyard would likely consider it a bit weird, or at least unimpressive.  But then again, Dad wasn't into show at all, or impressing other people.  Besides, he himself liked to repurpose objects after their original use was no longer necessary.

Dad graduated from Brooklyn's prestigious Pratt Institute, which has a world-famous design school.  Some of the stuff I've seen their graduates produce looks a bit weirder than my modest assemblage, and I'm sure that stuff costs a whole lot more.

But even the most snotty-nosed critic from the elite cultural salons and clubs of avant-garde New York can appreciate at least one quality of this piece:  it's green!  Environmentally-friendly art.  Keeping stuff that otherwise might be considered garbage out of our precious landfills.

Reduce, reuse, recycle; right?

Memory Loss Beyond Dementia's Victim

Dementia has claimed yet another life that I have known.

A long-time family friend passed into Eternity this morning at a local hospital after suffering a fall on Saturday.  She was the mother of six, a grandmother, a retired schoolteacher, and the sister of another lady who's struggling with dementia.  Their mother died from it years ago.

Technically, our friend who died this morning likely did so from complications of her fall.  Yet it's also likely that having dementia did nothing but destabilize her sense of balance.  Indeed, as dementia continues to corrupt its victims' brain, motor skills and balance can become casualties of one's deteriorating mental capacity.

This particular family friend didn't have dementia for as long as my Dad did.  I'm not sure she was on any of the medicines that can help minimize some of dementia's worst symptoms.  Compared with my Dad, this family friend was fairly docile during her illness, and was able to remain in her home.  She and her husband were blessed with the loving resources of a large family, although the strain on her husband's face whenever I saw him was distinct.

She and her husband attended my Dad's memorial service back in October, and while she looked gaunt, with the telltale dark and stony face of dementia, she seemed relatively functional.  Although she could no longer remember my name, she acted as though her brain was telling her she knew who I was, so she'd grin broadly and giggle nervously around me - and around anybody else she'd known for years but were now nameless to her.  At Dad's memorial service, there were a number of those friends.

Last summer was the last time she and her husband visited Mom and me at our home.  While her husband and Mom chatted about all sorts of things, she nodded her head, smiled, laughed, and heartily echoed her agreement whenever there was a lull in the conversation.  Nevertheless, it was uncomfortably obvious that she really didn't know what her husband and my Mom were talking about, even though their topics of discussion - church, families, nostalgia, and even (oddly enough) funeral homes - should have otherwise been within her realm of comprehension and contribution.

Finally, she jumped up and began to touch everything - EVERYTHING! - in the living room where we were.

Not that she necessarily wanted to look at anything, however.  She didn't inspect what she touched and picked up, like she was interested in what it was, or curious about how it was made; she seemed to simply have a compulsion to touch it.  So she moved quietly around the room, picking up curios, picture frames, candles, glass vases, pillows, and photo albums.  She didn't look at the pictures, or browse the albums; she simply moved them about just a bit.

At first, her embarrassed husband began to apologize for his wife's odd behavior, but Mom and I cut him off.  Although having to touch everything in sight wasn't one of the ways Dad's dementia exhibited itself, he'd been in a memory-care facility long enough for Mom and me to understand that some dementia patients are extraordinarily tactile.

And dementia patients can also possess surprising strength and agility, despite their frail appearances.  When our friend picked up some of our heavy glass vases, I tried to suppress little gasps of apprehension over whether her dubious grip could hold the deceptively weighty object, but our friend displayed a deceptive nimbleless of her own as she'd lift one object while setting down another.

Indeed, like many hallmarks of dementia, it can seem contradictory how a dementia patient's brain can focus on and process one function, yet otherwise completely fail at another function.

Along one wall of our living room, a grouping of over a dozen framed photos is displayed.  And wouldn't you know it, but our friend shuffled over there and picked up each one!  She didn't look at any of the photos, although Mom tried to tell her who was in each photo, since our friend would have otherwise known most of our family members.  No; she'd pick up each frame, and then set it down again - but not exactly where it had been.  Before she was finished, every frame had been raised, briefly held aloft, and then replaced askew.  It was actually somewhat comical to watch.

I remember that when they got ready to leave, her husband had to help her into their car, even though she was fully ambulatory.  She simply didn't seem to understand the mechanics of sitting in an automobile so a seatbelt can stretch across your chest, even though she'd spent her life driving.  She used to pilot a huge Ford station wagon - white, with that fake woody applique on its sides! - all over Texas.  But now...

After they left, I spent 15 minutes straightening everything she'd rearranged.  But I didn't care.  Considering all of the far more destructive ways dementia can make its victims act, our friend's tactile obsession was far preferable.  Nevertheless, we did hear from the family - and I'm sure you can imagine as well - that living with such a compulsive behavior pattern on a daily basis was extremely exhausting for them.

It's not that dementia patients with such an obsession go once around a room and touch everything.  They keep going around the same room, and throughout the house, touching and touching and re-touching and re-touching, often moving things from one place to another - and then back again.  You can understand how things might get lost; Dad re-arranged his desk drawers constantly, and was constantly misplacing things.  Few items may get broken in the process, surprisingly, but that's little comfort when your loved one starts accusing you of stealing what they've misplaced.

Dad developed an obsessive pattern of trying to "fix" our expensive grandfather clock, and now it neither keeps proper time nor chimes in sequence with the quarter-hour.  A family member of a fellow resident at Dad's memory-care place told me their family had come up with the idea of getting some junked appliances for their father to "fix" every afternoon in their garage, so he'd stop trying to "fix" the real, functional appliances in their home.

As for our family friend who passed away this morning, I wonder if her lifetime spent straightening and tidying-up after six kids and classrooms full of students contributed to her dementia-fueled compulsion for touching everything in sight.

Maybe, but...

My purpose in telling you these things about our family friend is to describe for you one of the many odd ways dementia can express itself within its victims.  The risk in doing so, however, is that you'll finish this essay with a lopsided impression of our family friend as a compulsive, fidgety, overly-tactile weirdo.  Oddly enough, none of these characteristics stand out in my memory of her as she was back before her dementia set in.

Yet that's one of the problems of dementia:  by the time a dementia patient passes away, it's become hard to remember the way they were, all those years ago, when they were in their right mind.  Recent, emotionally-laden memories of our loved ones as they've suffered through years of raw dementia are what's seared into our mournful minds.

Perhaps it's in this way that dementia victimizes more than just the patient; all of us who knew the patient can be deprived of the reality of the person who used to exist, before dementia took its toll.

"Gone, but not forgotten," as they say.  But in the case of dementia's victims, we really have to work at it.

Two Cabbies, a Knife, and Second Avenue

Hey - you know what?  It's been a long time since I've told you one of my "only in New York" stories.

And with all the talk about the Middle East these days, I had a flashback yesterday to one night in Manhattan, when I was living there in the early 1990's, and an absurd, politically incorrect event that rattled me as much as it rattled the taxi cab in which I was riding.

Back then, the stereotypical American jobs for many Middle Easterners ran the low-wage gamut, from counter clerk at convenience stores and gas stations to cabbies in cities large and small.  Even today, these jobs tend to be comparatively risky, and wholly unglamorous.  They're jobs many of us tend to marginalize, and although they're all around us, Middle Easterners working these lowly jobs rarely become anything more to white Americans like me than a means to an end - like paying for a quick snack of junk food, or being shuttled from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible.

So it was, then, very late one Manhattan evening, probably after I'd stood around longer than I thought was reasonable for a bus, that I hailed a cab for a ride down Second Avenue to my apartment on East 28th Street.  Second Avenue is mostly residential, with no attractions for tourists, and no major office buildings, so long after the evening rush, traffic would be nil - by New York standards, anyway.

And my ride down Second Avenue began normally enough.  The cab clattered and shook as it bounced over Gotham's ubiquitous potholes.  I hadn't bothered to consider the ethnicity of my driver.  What difference did it make?  By the early 1990's, white cabbies had become extremely rare; most were from the Middle East, Africa, India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh.  Many wore turbans, but I'd developed an admittedly ethnocentric system of sloppily differentiating between their styles - thicker, fuller and more circular shaped for Muslims; and slimmer, sleeker, oval folds for Sikhs.

It was at an ordinary red light that my cabbie, whatever his religion was, began introducing me to his personality.  After all; religion is one thing.  How one behaves can be quite another.

As we waited for the light to change, my driver - a young, stocky, olive-skinned Middle Eastern man - glanced over at another cabbie who'd pulled up alongside us.  The other driver looked very much like mine.  Suddenly, however, my cabbie began yelling derisive things at him (I'm assuming they were derisive) in a language I didn't understand.  Both of our cabs' windows were rolled down, and the other cabbie returned the obviously acrimonious volley.  And things got more ominous from there.  Both men were loudly engaging with each other, and I remember both of them were wearing the same type of thick, round turban.

Okay, so yes; I reached my conclusions through crude stereotyping.  But what I thought didn't matter to either of them.

Our light turned green, and both cabbies were off - tearing down Second Avenue like there was no tomorrow.  And the way they drove, I began to wonder if I literally had no tomorrow!  David Letterman used to joke that riding in a New York taxi was "like watching your life flash before your eyes."  I'd taken plenty of those types of rides; most Gotham cabbies believe speed limits, lane striping, turn signals, and brake pedals are for suburbanites.  

Nevertheless, this ride had instantly become even more perilous.  I quickly realized theirs wasn't simply disgruntlement - and this was back in the days before we had "road rage."  Some major hatred existed between these two cabbies, and since Second Avenue was wide open - about four traffic lanes with hardly any traffic at all - our two cabs surged and dueled across the open blacktop; potholes, uneven manhole covers, and all.

If any pedestrians had been trying to jaywalk, they'd have been splattered all over Second Avenue.

We were flying.  Well, flying as much as two full-sized American-made sedans can fly down a poorly-maintained big-city boulevard.  I'm pretty sure we did get airborne a couple of times though, however briefly.  And as we flew, the cabbies never stopped yelling insults at each other.  At least, I figured they were insults.  Or maybe threats.  I didn't understand a word of it, except that their tones were mutually scalding from utter contempt.

Before too long, my cabbie reached down and brandished a big knife - a weapon he likely kept under his front seat in case he was ever robbed.  He leaned across the front passenger seat to wave his flashy flesh-slicer at the other cabbie.  The whole episode had crossed from the merely bizarre to full-blown lunacy!  They wove their cars back and forth across the empty traffic lanes, and even bashed their vehicles into each other!  I kid you not.  I used to wonder how New York's taxi fleet could look so incredibly tattered, but if this is what cabbies do when the streets are sparsely-trafficked, now I know.

Twenty-Eighth Street came (and went), and I was bellowing at my cabbie to stop and let me out.  He seemed to have forgotten that I was still in his back seat, having braced myself between the two rear doors, anticipating a horrendous collision, yet oddly fascinated enough by such raw drama to maintain my ringside perspective.

He slammed on his brakes, obviously agitated over the delay I was causing him, as his nemesis continued on full-throttle.  I threw a couple of bucks into the front seat - not the full fare, and certainly without any tip - and hurriedly scooted myself out the passenger-side door.  I didn't even get to close it completely before my cabbie was off again - his barely-latched back door rattling ajar as the yellow sedan tore down Second Avenue to continue the fight.

Alone at the curb on an empty sidewalk, I realized my driver had overshot 28th Street by a couple of blocks before he'd finally stopped to deposit me.  It took the extra time walking back to my apartment before my heart rate had returned to normal.

Now, I'm not telling y'all this story to bash Middle Easterners.  I have no idea whether the grievance between these two men wearing Muslim-looking headgear had anything to do with religion, Islam or otherwise.  

Maybe they recognized each other as being rivals for the same romantic interest, since as I've written before, unlikely coincidences seem to play a big role in much of Gotham's perpetual drama.  

Maybe they simply recognized the serial numbers on each other's cabs as meaning they were employees of rival cab companies, between which bad blood brewed.  

Since they were both headed in the same direction on a long boulevard, maybe they'd already clipped each other's cars further uptown.

I don't know.  But I did figure I should've simply walked those forty-odd blocks.