RIPOSTE
by RIP RENSE |
|
GENTLE
THINGS
November 4, 2013
In brutish,
crass, profanity-spitting L.A., in developer-ravaged $2500-a-month
“elegant density” L.A., in have-and-have-not ethnically separated L.A., in
get-out-of-my-way-(epithet of choice), hit-and-run, texting-and-primping-while-driving
L.A. . . .
Gentle things still happen.
She leaned on
a walker in front of one of the wobbly tables at
Papa Cristo’s, the old Greek deli at Pico and Normandie in the so-called
Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Across the street from St. Sofia’s Greek Orthodox
Cathedral and St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, or, more appropriately
considering that the masses come with mariachis, Iglesia Santo Tomas Apostol.
. .
“This is excellent!” she said,
and, really, it was amazing she could say anything at all, let alone in a
clear, commanding voice. The withered and dry autumn leaves on the sycamore
trees in the neighborhood looked stronger. This was, to be indelicate, a
corpse that hadn’t gotten around to officially dying. Stick limbs, prune
skin, sunken cheeks. Talk about frailty, thy name is woman. . .
“Okay, Babe,” said her
companion, a young guy with brown curls pulled back in a pony tail.
“Don't worry, I’ve got you.” And he steadied her as he removed the walker,
and then helped ease her into a wooden chair.
She didn’t seem comfortable.
“Does your butt hurt?” said
the companion.
What butt, I wondered. Nothing
there but bones.
“Okay, we’ll get you another
chair. One with a cushion on it. Is that what you want? Or do you just want
to sit at a different table?”
“I don’t want to be any
trouble!” she said.
“Whatever you want is
absolutely fine,” said her companion, and they moved to a table by the
window, the one next to me. Brown Curls ran outside, came back
with a pillow, slipped it under the talking skeleton.
“Is this better?”
“Excellent! Just excellent!”
Curls got up to order food,
and in a few minutes he was wolfing down a salad and they were splitting
a big bowl of lentil soup. The woman repeated “Excellent” again, every couple of
minutes, in between sips. I thought this was a tremendous achievement, to speak
this word, or any word, over and over, and with gusto.
After a while, Curls---who
I heard address the lady as Grandma---got up to go to the bathroom or something.
Grandma just sat there, putting the blank in blank stare.
“How was your lunch?” I said.
She looked at me. I was
startled. There were lyrical blue eyes hiding in the ancient face.
“Excellent!”
“Well, good. You have a good grandson, to bring you to lunch.”
“He’s my buddy! He’s a
wonderful grandson!”
“Yes, that’s a blessing.”
“Yes! A blessing! You know,
I’m very, very old," she said, as if letting me in on a secret. "I’ve
been here so long. And I have a lot of problems, but I won’t tell you what
they are. I’ve been here a long time. I don’t know why they keep me
around! I’m a good girl, but I used to give ‘em hell! I tell my family,
don’t say goodbye. I don’t say goodbye. I say hello! I greet people!”
“Well,
that’s wonderful. That’s how it should be.”
Grandson returned, sat down. I
smiled.
“She
was telling me that she likes to greet people,
likes to say ‘hello.’”
“Right,” he said. “People
should do this. I think of it as recognizing their humanity.”
“I say hello!” Grandma
continued. “I don’t want anybody paying any attention when I die. I don’t
say goodbye! I’ve been here so long.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m ninety-two, no,
ninety-three.”
“Congratulations. That’s an
achievement. I hope to match it some day.”
“Thank you! I used to raise
hell! I was pissed off! I was a communist socialist! I called everyone
‘comrade.’ I said, ‘hello, comrade!’”
“I’m sure you did.”
Grandson nodded, laughing.
“She did. She fought for a
lot of causes. She went to the south in the ‘60’s to register voters,
during the civil rights movement. She worked in hospice care, she’s been all
over the country, protesting for people’s rights. She’s been arrested many
times. I was raised in a communist socialist household!”
He laughed.
“I prefer to say humanist. I’m
really a humanist. As she is. We were going to go to the anti-nuclear
protest today, weren’t we?”
“Yes!”
“But she really wasn’t up for
it.”
I was going to say something
about how there was a time in this country, largely in the Depressed 1930’s,
when every student and young person with an ounce of compassion either
attended, or was tempted to attend, communist meetings. That the word did
not carry the hoodoo of later times, and essentially meant “humanitarian.”
But I couldn’t get a word in.
“I’m Esther,” she said. “I
never say goodbye. I say hello. Hello!”
“Hello, Esther!”
Her grandson got on a cell
phone, as most everyone does. Some creative confusion with a fellow
musician. I spoke to keep Esther company, but she did most of the talking.
“I say don’t hold back!
Live! You’ve only got so many years. We’re all gonna die. I say if
you’ve got something to do, I hope you are inspired! And then it’s so long,
Toots!”
Her blue eyes and her voice
were as lively as the rest of her bent old body wasn’t. And we jawed a
while, Esther and I, there in the front window of Papa Cristo’s, while all
manner of people filed in and out in search of spanakopitas and plaki and
good cheap Greek wine.
“My grandson is a genius! He’s
wonderful! He’s my buddy!”
“She saved me,” said Curls,
clicking off his cell phone. “Saved me from my parents, didn’t you, Babe?
Not that my parents were bad or abusive, but when I went to visit Grandma,
it was always fun time!”
“You’re the greatest!” she
said. “I am so lucky to have you! Did we eat yet?”
“Yes, we did.”
“Oh, we did? Okay, then let’s
get going.”
And Esther the 93-year-old
one-time communist-socialist-crusader for human rights got up to leave, and told
me how it was good to talk to me, but she broke her credo and said goodbye.
In her way.
“So long, Toots!” she smiled,
and leaned on her walker and moved her twig legs along with surprising
agility down the sidewalk outside, as bicyclists and ladies with strollers
weaved and dodged recklessly around her.
About an hour later, I was
sitting on a bench in Little Tokyo, as the sun went down, having my dessert
of imagawayaki, a Japanese hockey-puck sized pancake full of sweet
red bean paste. A burly guy from Detroit, a Little Tokyo regular, sat a few
yards away, playing shamisen, a three-stringed instrument plucked with a
plectrum, with banjo-like resonance.
A compact, older
Japanese-American lady with beautiful, straight, shoulder-length white hair
sat down on the bench with me. She was also eating imagawayaki.
“Do you like the music?” she
asked.
“Do you want a happy answer or
a truthful one?” I answered.
“Truthful.”
“Well, he’s very good, very
skilled. But sometimes he plays a kind of rock ‘n’ roll shamisen, which
I think sounds boorish, and does not serve the instrument. He kind of
ugly-Americanizes it.”
“I see,” she nodded.
“But what he’s playing right
now sounds fine. Traditional Japanese music.”
“Pentatonic,” she said.
I nodded.
“Are you a musician?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What do you play?"
“I’m a composer.”
“Really. Orchestral pieces?”
“Piano and voice. I just wrote
two Christmas songs.”
“Ah, well, wonderful.”
She took a bite of her
imagawayaki.
“My husband died two years
ago. I had a B.A. in music. God has given me a long life, so I decide to
make music again.”
“Lovely. I can’t think of a
better thing to do with one’s time than to make music.”
She nodded.
Her face was
serene, her voice
clear and matter-of-fact, her skin still smooth, youthful. She wore a merry,
multi-colored quilted jacket, black slacks.
“I am celebrating my birthday
week,” she said.
I tried to pronounce the
Japanese word for “congratulations,” which I picked up from a Japanese TV
series. She smiled appreciatively.
“I am 18!” she said.
“Of course you are!”
“Only reverse.”
“Right. Well you look
wonderful.”
“Thank you. I just came from a
little restaurant where I had a birthday dinner. Bratwurst and a tall dark
beer.”
“Good, sounds just right.”
“It was!”
She smiled, and stood up.
“My name is Pat,"
she said. "It was nice talking with you." And she shook my hand, and went on her 81-year-old---I mean 18-year-old---way.
In brutish, crass,
profanity-spitting L.A., in developer-ravaged $2500-a-month “elegant
density” L.A., in have-and-have-not ethnically separated L.A., in
get-out-of-my-way-(epithet of choice), hit-and-run, texting-and-primping-while-driving
L.A. . . .
Gentle things still happen.
Note: Esther turned out to have a long reputation for activism in Los
Angeles and elsewhere.
http://keywiki.org/index.php/Esther_Cicconi
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