Trail of Tears.

One thing we have never been short of here, in this family, especially concerning my mother and me, are tears. So many events, large and small, are emotional. We cry easily, our feelings are worn right on the surface, for all to see. We do not have poker faces, nor are we cheery people. We do laugh, but underneath our joy, is the tempered sadness, the ever present feeling that life is short, and perhaps destined to end tragically or painfully.

So I found these slides from 1983, that seem to show me in Woodcliff Lake, NJ during a college break from my studies at Boston University.

I am packed up, suitcase and brown bag full of lunch, ready to get into the car for a trip to Newark Airport and onto the People's Express plane. Notice that even 25 years ago I was looking backwards to the 1950s for sartorial inspiration.

Someone (most likely my father) snapped the poignant and pained expression of my mother as I left her to get on a flight that only brought me 60 minutes away from Bergen County.

Origin of the Species.

Nantucket, originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Origin of the Species

The other night I asked my mother, Louise, how she met my father, Sol.

She told me that she had been out with some friends, in late 1958, and walked into Mr. Kelly’s Nightclub in Chicago and saw a guy she thought was cute.

She told Norm Jacobs, who told his friend, my father, Sol, about Louise. So Sol called Louise, they went out on a date (to a Hungarian restaurant) and hit it off. They were engaged and then married six months later.

The only problem with the story is that the guy my mom saw in the club was not my father. He was just given her number and called her up blindly.

Hearing this story, I wondered if I hadn’t inherited some gene that makes one behave randomly and obliviously in matters of great importance. I don’t quite know how to phrase this. I’m the byproduct of a mix-up of two people who met, on a blind date. And here we are….

Looking back now, I realize that the younger me, just like me now, has walked down the road of life backward. I never look ahead. I have always kept family history in my head, organizing slides, photo albums, letter and chronology with my mind swirling around mid 20th Century America.

People tell me that I have a lot of talent, and others told me I was good looking, and still others admired my hair, my ass, my smile, my dick, my wit, my writing. But it hasn’t added up to much of anything. (Dollarwise) I sit here today, just as I sat in this bedroom 30 years ago, a virtual teen-ager. Jobless and undefined in my money-making “career”.

I’ve seen sour-faced idiots become successful comedy writers; less masculine guys procreate and raise kids; illiterate, book hating dudes practice law; brown nosing queens rise to the top of NYC fashion. Everywhere I turn there are a lot of people earning a lot of money. They are dumber than me, but I have to admit, perhaps a lot smarter.

I’ve come back to Woodcliff Lake, NJ to pack up a house that I first saw at 17, and now I wander these rooms, just as I roamed in them so many years ago, lonely.


Like most humans, I’ve devised a series of lies about myself and my life and I have tried to stay true to them. This house, at 25 Birchwood Drive, was a noble lie. It was a refuge, a place where I had love, books, food, peace,quiet and security.

So now that my parents are leaving this house, and I have been elected as the executioner, my sad daily duties involve making sure that this property will be vacated by August 15th. People, things, memories: all swept out the front door so someone new can go into debt until 2038.

And I look backward, as I always have, through decades of Kodachrome, to try and dissect how I got to this place of limbo, a middle aged adult eternally trying to reinvent himself so that he will become that idealized man he once imagined he would grow into.

It’s un-American, I realize, to not brag about your success. Ask anyone how they are doing, even if their legs were amputated, and they will say, “good”.

Somewhere deep inside of me, I want to say that I’m doing good, and frankly, despite the loss of this house, the decline of my parents, and the futility and powerlessness that I feel for both myself and them, I want to believe again in the power of happy accidents, those unforeseen events that bring us good things.

The Dismantling of a Great House.

More than any place, Louise has loved the back deck which sits perched high up among the trees. Down below, a hosta garden was planted a few years ago, and the geometric greens are now fully grown.

There is no grassy squared off backyard. The house, instead, was built on a hilly slope, at the end of a street that once dead ended. The basement is at ground level, with French doors that open beneath the deck.

In the summer months, the deck was an extension of the kitchen, with outdoor furniture, a barbecue, and one of those cabinets that my mother filled with bright plastic plates, utensils, glasses and serving trays. Those serving platters held Jersey tomatoes, sweet corn, skirt steaks, and grilled chicken.

We ate here in 2004, me and Danny, after we returned from France, and we thought, and still think, that backyard American cooking beats the hell out of Parisian restaurant, cigarette smoked, sauced laden pretension.

They cooked a lot here, and bought too much food, but in this area of Northern NJ there is an abundance of good eating, some of it from local farms (like Demarest or DePiero’s) and good bakeries and Italian specialty stores. This is the Garden State, after all, and despite the pave over of much of the area, there is small and sturdy group of agricultural survivors who may last well into the 21st Century.

This house is being taken apart, its contents sold and shipped off to California, because my parents are moving out. My unhappy job since May 9th has been to initiate and execute the dismantling of a great house. Room by room, closet by closet, box by box. Photographs, slides, letters, magazines, yearbooks, books, baskets, pillows, stereos, hats, gloves, scarfs…..All the accumulations of a lifetime of buying and hoarding and not throwing away.

I counted six yardsticks, perhaps two dozen umbrellas, a ridiculous amount of pots, pans, glasses, dishes, serving trays. The kitchen “pantry” has enough beans to keep Pittsburgh electrically lit for a year.

This house on Birchwood Drive has seen a lot of activity this summer, but not the activities of the young and growing, but rather those that signal the close. Circling overhead, as the dark clouds of illness and aging made themselves apparent: the realtor, the frightened children, the home health care workers, the physical therapists, the wheelchairs, the bedpans, the steel grab bars in the bathroom.

But if one can comfort oneself in mathematical percentages, then I believe that at least 80% of the time this family lived here, there was health and happiness. And every town in New Jersey, New England and New York, and all over the Mid-Atlantic helped make this time here more meaningful.

Without the snow in Vermont, the Yankees, or the trips up the Hudson Valley, or those countless nights coming back from Manhattan across the George Washington Bridge, and the visits to see the Bosserts in Bedminster, or Chicky and Tom on the Jersey Shore, or the adventures in Westchester, or the days on the beach on Long Island, or walking through Brooklyn Heights on a humid July night, and seeing the fireworks on the Fourth….yes every memory of this house and this region was wondrous. Even the rotten things in NYC are great in this massiveness, because they are real and forged out of human knowledge and history. I speak of the Subway, of Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the shimmering, humming harbor.

And yes, the late Eli Graubart, who few remember, and some who do, consider him contemptible, you taught us to go forth and seek knowledge, without mystical and magical idiocy. You marched to your own beat, and when you took us flying to Nantucket, New Hampshire and Martha’s Vineyard, you raised us and our imagination far above the horizon and we are grateful for your time and generosity of intellect. We also loved swimming at Lake Minnewaska and Shepard’s Lake and riding in your convertible. You might have behaved better and stayed married and raised your kids like everyone else does and perhaps now you would have a marble monument to your life standing up in some Jewish cemetery.

But I’m glad you didn’t…..


This region of Bergen County is a superb place, no matter what anyone says, and yes it did happen, it wasn’t a dream, it was life and we were lucky to have lived it.

Jay Chu.

Jay Chu., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

NY Style.

Anticipation.

Lillies., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Every summer, the lilies pop up in this part of the country, and bring their bright colors to a mostly shaded background of dappled woods and stone walls.

This was the high point for me, the most glorious moment in the short summer. A few weeks after they bloomed, the lilies would fade, and then we would be in August, anticipating autumn, and school, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, winter.

That is why living in Southern California is so very strange. The guideposts of American life, the seasonal markers, are missing. Life and spring, with their promise of renewal and rebirth, go on month after month. The roses bloom in December, the leaves drop in February and reappear in March. Nature is marinated in formaldehyde, and the living things, humans and plants, are retouched, as if by digital process, to stay in bloom year around.

I don’t think this is natural. The “depressing” months, back East, if one chooses to think that way, when the leaves and temperatures drop and the ice and snow and slush surround us, are a breather for the planet. We need cold weather, yes we do. It is unnatural and unhealthy to live in heat and sun all the time.

That’s why I relish every thunderstorm this summer in New Jersey. Because when I return to Los Angeles in August, I will leave the rain and the short lived lilies behind in New Jersey.

The Uninvited.

These days, nights really, the house is full of a crying person, one whose mournful sobs remind me of the ghost of Mary Meredith in "The Uninvited".

In that 1944 film, Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey are a brother and sister who fall in love with a beautiful haunted house, "these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here... and sea fog... and eerie stories..."

The ghost of Mary fills the long nights and her dreadful crying is a plea for someone to render some justice for a youthfully truncated life. Milland and Hussey soon learn that there are some bad people who covered up some bad things in this gorgeous mansion on the rocks.

And what about me, the person who sometimes just gets out of bed and walks from room to room, remembering those ghosts of lives who had lived here in the past 30 years? Some of these people are still alive, but in other rooms, I bump into the young Andy, the one who walked into this house at 17, and thought he was dreaming.

Not all the times spent here were nice. Some were rotten and dishonest and wasteful and cruel. Hours and days were expended worrying about situations beyond our control. There was yelling and screaming, and bitter times too.

But mostly I think of my times in New Jersey and New York as the best years of my life because I was young. When I walk around now, I touch the walls, and drink from the tap, and breathe in the air of three decades ago.

And the crying in the night comes not from a ghost, but from my heart.

Watching the Rain.

Andy Watching the Rain., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

One of the privileges of spending time at this tree rich home in Woodcliff Lake, NJ was to sit on the front porch and watch the rain.

Since we moved here in 1979, there was always a connection to the outdoors to thrive on. Sitting amidst a lush conglomeration of woods, the house was part of the green shady forest.

The newer, uglier, grosser McMansions that were cruelly bulldozed and grafted onto this once hidden lane, are exposed to the hot sun, and require multiple air-conditioners to cool down their “great rooms” and their seven bedrooms.

But not this 1965 non-air-conditioned Dutch Colonial. Inadequate with its tiny bathrooms and crooked windows, it nonetheless charms me to this day when I unhook the front Dutch doors to let the wet, humid, woodsy air inside. An aged attic fan, noisy and disruptive, struggles to make a blowing breeze blow.

We are selling the house, (and moving the folks to the "Golden State") and discovered that the old oil tank, disconnected, sits buried underneath the garage windows, and will have to be disinterred and removed.

The way they once built homes in America: were they trying to teach morals in the too small showers, sparse and unlit closets, and by making us go outside to get into the garage? Oil heat, gurgling steam pipes heating the bedrooms. Lest we be too comfortable…..

What builder would even bother these days to sell a house where talkers and dreamers might congregate under the eaves to watch the winds bring in another storm? Those lives we lead now, with shoulders hunched and leaning into the online, what do we know of the outdoors with its wily moods and sudden fits of wind, leaves and the onrush of meteorological madness?

I sat here again today and watched a violent front attack from the West. But it has passed and left, a great performance forgotten but to be repeated again…for eternity.