Inanimate Objects react to the snow

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

By now, we’re all used to weather reports predicting heavy snowfall. This has happened maybe five or six times this winter, and there’s probably more to come. We know how people feel about the snow. But how do inanimate objects feel about it?

I have several pairs of shoes and several coats. One of the coats, a nice green coat, is perfect for normal winter weather, say, the 40s or 30s. I have a much heavier coat, but normally, I only wear it in extremely cold weather, in the teens or 20s.

This winter, however, is throwing my coat routine way off balance. Instead of wearing my extra-heavy coat two or three times, I’m wearing it more often than the other one. As for my third jacket, the one that’s appropriate for temperatures in the high 40s or 50s, I’m not wearing it at all.

And if this is the case for my coats, then, what of my shoes? I have two “regular” pairs of shoes, one pair of sneakers and one pair of heavy boots. Most of the time, I rotate the two pairs of shoes and wear the sneakers on weekends. During normal winters, I only wear the heavy boots maybe four or five days, when there’s a heavy snowstorm.

But this winter is different. This winter, I’m wearing the boots, which I think of as being for abnormal weather, more often than the shoes.

I haven’t even mentioned my pants. I have two pairs of heavy corduroy pants that I usually wear two or three times for the entire winter. This winter, I find myself wearing them a lot more than that.

It’s plain to see that my regular shoes, jackets and pants are jealous of my heavy-duty clothes. They’re accustomed to being worn on a regular basis. Being inside the house most of the time, they don’t know about the constant snowstorms, and they blame me for not wearing them enough. If I’m not careful, they’ll start a revolt, and I’ll come home to find my clothes scattered all over the bedroom floor.

Also in the bedroom, there’s a small toy polar bear that we’ve had for years. Usually we don’t pay much attention to it, except when the cat decides to play with it. But now, the little polar bear is looking forward to the time when real polar bears will come to New York if this weather continues, and it’s getting ready to join them. One day, we’ll come home and the toy bear will be gone.

If you think that’s bad, you should see what’s happening elsewhere! Over in the Museum of Natural History, the mock-ups of the wooly mammoths behind glass have come to life. For maybe 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, they’ve felt out of place. Now’s their chance. The  snowstorms have awakened them, they think there’s a new Ice Age, and they’re beginning to move about in their display cases when no one’s looking. Soon, they believe, they’ll be roaming the Arctic tundra once again.

Clearly, the snowstorms are disrupting people, animals, stuffed animals, coats, shoes and everything else. It’s time to tell the weatherman, “Enough already!” Tell the scientists to bring back global warming. Anything’s better than this!
 

Jean Shepherd and `A Christmas Story'

 From Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 2013

It’s Christmas time, and once again we’re treated to showings of the holiday favorite “A Christmas Story.” The film has become so much a classic that it’s been turned into a Broadway play, and the house in Cleveland that was used as the Parker family’s house has been turned into a museum. Characters like The Old Man, bully Scott Farkas and the hillbilly Bumpus family, not to mention inanimate objects like the leg lamp, have become part of American folklore.

Lost in the shuffle, however, has been the author and narrator of the story—Jean Shepherd. Many of the millions of people who have seen the film, perhaps most, are only familiar with him through “A Christmas Story.” And that’s sad, because as good as it is, it only represents a small portion of Shepherd’s work.

Jean Shepherd was born in the early 1920s and grew up in Hammond, Indiana (called “Hohman, Indiana” in the film). The late Eagle columnist Dennis Holt, who lived there during part of his youth, knew Shepherd and his friends, although they were older than him. While the film takes place around 1940, the real events upon which it is based took place about seven or eight years earlier.

Like most men of his generation, Shepherd served in the military during World War II (his Signal Corps stories have recently been collected as “Shep’s Army”). Afterward, he drifted into TV and radio, but he didn’t become famous until the mid-1950s, when he began broadcasting one of the first talk shows on WOR-AM. About half of his show was dedicated to tales of his Indiana childhood and his Army days. The rest consisted on his observations of the passing scene. He commented on advertising, popular music (he loved jazz, disliked rock), sexual mores, suburbia, all-night diners, beer and almost everything else. He avoided politics, but at times he “got serious,” as he did after JFK’s assassination and again after Martin Luther King’s assassination. In between it all, he played hokey Dixieland jazz songs, accompanying them on the kazoo and Jew’s harp, and recited old-time folk poetry like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

In one of his best-known pranks, he began to talk about a non-existent sexy book, “I, Libertine,” supposedly written in the 18^th century. He told his listeners to ask for it in bookstores. Eventually, the demand was so great that a publisher hired several authors (including Shepherd himself) to ghost-write the book.

Shepherd continued on, broadcasting every weekday at 10:15 p.m. and on Saturday nights from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Thousands of young New Yorkers listened to Shep on their transistor radios under their pillows when their parents thought they were asleep. In 1977, he quit his radio gig. By this time, he was becoming known nationally. He wrote stories for Playboy and published several short-story collections. He also had a public television show, “Jean Shepherd’s America,” in which he visited different parts of the country. There was even an unsuccessful follow-up to “A Christmas Story,” called “My Summer Story.”

Shep died in 1999. After his death, his dark side was discovered: He had two children from an early marriage, neither of which he had seen for 30 years. In fact, he often denied that he had children at all. Still, I prefer to celebrate his contributions to American culture. Quoting Shep’s most famous catch phrase, I proclaim to everybody concerned, “Excelsior, you fatheads!”

Remembering the Masters School

By Raanan Geberer

One rarely thinks of attending a school for disturbed children as being a golden time in one’s life. And yet, that was the case for the three years I attended the Masters Children’s Center, described as a “therapeutic nursery school” for autistic children, although it actually continued through the lower grades of elementary school.

When I was four and a half, my “regular” nursery school teachers began to notice that I was acting withdrawn and wasn’t interacting with the other children. The teachers recommended to my parents that I be sent to a “special” nursery that was being organized at Jacobi Hospital, right there in the Bronx. In the fall, my mother started to take me there every day. The school was run by old-school Viennese psychoanalysts who had come to the U.S. just before World War II, and they soon diagnosed me as having “infantile autistic psychosis.” None of these things meant anything to me at that age, of course. What did is that I enjoyed the school. I began to read and write, and wrote down some of my thoughts, with stick figure-like drawings and the assistance of my mother, in a notebook that I still have to this day.

The next year, the school moved down to an old brownstone in Greenwich Village, and that’s where I really began to thrive. There were three floors – one for kids like myself, one for non-autistic siblings (such as my brother), and a third for kids who were more seriously, violently disturbed. My group was very small–there were about six or seven.

Although my memory is dim, we spent most of the day playing. The teacher, Mrs. DelFiore, was friendly and helped me write and draw stories starring  my imaginary characters (many of which were based on the stuffed toys and dolls at the school). There was a train set made of wooden blocks and a ‘train’ with wooden wheels that I played with endlessly. I loved constantly devising new layouts for the train, then showing them to my friends. .

One day, I made a tunnel for the train to go through. Ronnie, one of my fellow students, pointed inside the tunnel and said the immortal words: “there’s eh-eh in there!” “Eh-eh” was her word for feces. To this day, the phrase is a running joke between me and my wife.

Sometimes, we had group play. We would line up, Mrs. DelFiore would play records of children’s songs like “A Hunting We Will Go” and “Pony Boy,” and we’d run in place to the music. Other times, we’d go in the back yard and go on the swings and the slide. This was called “Jungle Gym”

Actual learning was done individually. Mrs. DelFiore or the other teacher would call me or one of the other students over to the table and give a lesson in reading or math. The reading sessions were straight out of “Dick and Jane,” but they helped me with my penmanship, and I learned how to write in “big” and “small” letters rather than in my previous all-caps style.

 I also saw a psychiatrist there, but I didn’t know it – the teachers called him a “play doctor.” Interestingly, the last time I looked him up, this particular “play doctor” was still practicing, although he must be in his early nineties now.

After three years at both Jacobi and Masters, it was decreed that I attend a “regular” school, or public school. The school’s supervisor, one of the old-time Viennese psychoanalysts, wrote a note intended for the principal of the school, explaining that while I had been extremely withdrawn when I came to Masters, now I not only played with the other children but often invented stories and games and led them in activities.

My first semester in the public school, I continued to be a leader – it just came naturally-- and was elected president of the class. Sometime during the Christmas vacation, my mother took me back to Masters for a visit. I noticed one of the kids, Peter, playing with a toy racing car. “What happened to the train?” I asked. “You’re not here, so we don’t play with trains anymore!” he answered. I felt a little betrayed!

That spring, a tragic incident happened that left me in a state of shock. My mother had a nervous breakdown and was taken to the psychiatric wing of Jacobi Hospital, where she stayed for six weeks Little by little, I became withdrawn and fearful again. Within a year, I went from being one of the most popular kids in the class to being one of the least popular. Clearly, the Freudian psychonalytic methods espoused by Masters (and probably by most mental health professionals in those days) didn’t inadequately prepare kids like myself for the real world, with its trials and tribulations. I continued to see a psychiatrist after school, but he didn’t help me either. It wasn’t until I was older and sought out more unorthodox methods of therapy, like bioenergetics and primal therapy, that I began to make some progress.

My mother kept up with Beatrice, Ronnie’s mother. Ronnie apparently wasn’t able to handle either the work world or the school world, and eventually went into a group home. At my mother’s funeral in the 1980s, one of the other mothers from Master’s showed up and told me that her son, Jim, now worked for the Sanitation Department.

The Masters School is no longer there, and the brownstone is now a private residence. The school didn’t completely succeed in its mission, at least not where I was concerned. But while I was there, it provided me with a wonderful time.