It's coming soon: A chance to join in the changing. Holding on to the old paradigm for healing no longer works. Many people are showing we are ready for a change. Look at the Wall Street sit-ins. Dissatisfied with a system that doesn't work for the 99% of us.

The last time I remember this was when I was in my 30’s. It was HAIR. It was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and our music, our Fashion, our Hair Styles began to show a change. Hippies. Flower Children, free love without realizing that there might be consequences. It was wild freedom no longer caged in the old guard, the way our mothers and fathers grew up. It represented a new freedom whether it was real or in our imagination, we picked it up and ran with it. Danced, picked flowers, celebrated at Woodstock.

Here it is coming around again. Now in different costumes, but the same agenda. We want our power back.

I remember sitting in our living room, my adoptive mother Esther, my dad and myself, listening to G.E. Theater on the air, or on an old Victrola record player listening to the old wax lacquered recordings of Caruso and Nelly Melba. The box of other records are now somewhere in my garage. Perhaps they sat on that couch bouncing me on their knees or cradling me carefully in their arms, the feet of the couch planted firmly on the carpet. Or maybe earlier, when Alice and my dad lived near my Aunt Gertie. My cousin Ray remembered Alice and told me about her fine singing voice and her kind ways. This was in a house they lived when they were first married.

The companion armchair also in the same style still holds up well in the floral print Esther had it covered when they moved to Shasta Circle South when I was ten. Both couch and chair rested in the living room, a formal room set aside for company and very rarely used except for Tuesday nights when card tables were set up and the women's group played Mah Jong and then men played Gin Rummy. I can remember sneaking out of bed those nights and hiding in the hallway enjoying the music of the 135 tiles clicking as they mixed them up before hands were picked. It was a magic sound, one that carried laughter and oh no's or melding, as my mother or my aunt or one of the other women won a hand. Each Tuesday, all winnings were set aside from the games and placed in a kitty that was cashed in once a year when the gang would all get dressed up and go the Moulin Rouge on Hollywood Boulevard, a ritzy nightclub or maybe the Coconut Grove on Wilshire Blvd. (Information on Mah Jong: http:''en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mahjong. )

There are two pieces that lived in my parent's living room as long as I can remember. They bought them for their new home at 4027 York Boulevard in Los Angeles. These two pieces remain with me. Both have the feet of an animal and are reminiscent of the period of Duncan Phyfe. Originally from Scotland, Phyfe immigrated to Albany, New York and served as a cabinetmaker's apprentice. My particular pieces are mahogany. Pieces of this style can be seen in the White House Green Room. As a child, I always thought they walked into our lives and here they stay.

I have known three fabric coverings. The first one, most formal was sateen stripe and very reminiscent of that period of furniture. When my parents first gave the two pieces to me I recovered the couch in burnt orange velvet. And many years later, before I moved to Santa Fe, had the couch refurbished, the frame stripped down and the fabric changed to a rich warm gray, the color it remains today. It rests in my bedroom where I can read or write on a lovely winter day, a fire in the fireplace, or in summer with the windows open allowing for a late afternoon summer breeze.

Return soon to read more about the memories from my home that the furnishings recall and thank you for visiting Not Just A Jewish Book Blog.

Fall is showing in my north courtyard. The quaking aspen on the right side is so far ahead of the other that bare sky shows through where leaves used to be on branches. The one with more shade more stubbornly shows leaves of green, orange, yellow holding firm to branches.

The birdbath is filled with yellow and orange silver dollar shaped leaves.  I want to leave them in. Surely the birds will know to drink around them before heading south for their winter haven. They must be smarter than to make the journey to their winter abodes thirsty. Nights are now dipping down into the middle thirties. Fall is certainly showing itself in Santa Fe.

My new tomato red comforter is so light yet so warm. I needed something bright. I have been in this house for two months. A bum knee, back and left hip.

My mother, Esther, kept photo albums, all in order, chronological and titled, pinned in with Dennison corners on black felt pages of the photograph album. I grew up with these images. They filled in part of the vacuum while memory receded.

As I wrote, I pulled their faces out as a reminder of that earlier time when testimony was blurred or altogether obscured.  They informed me and helped the voice to come forward. The documented experience long hidden was factual and true.

I returned to Los Angeles as I got further into the story just to see, yes … the tree with the soft bark like papyrus Grandma Goldenberg taught me to hug was on Cochran Avenue. The La Brea Tar Pits, although now held in by mesh wire fence, were still where Grandma and I visited them. Ohrbach’s was now part of the Page Museum.

These are all images a child remembers and pulls forth to hold to her as gospel.  My own safe haven, warm and holding me now appeared on the page. There is a topographic map in the recesses of my brain. Yes, that child lived.  Yes, she is in there to guide me.

I start with a blank page, words formed randomly, across formidable space, pulling back this child who I was. Did I know before I wrote what would appear?

There is a cavernous, overwhelming emptiness, loss, a mother, a lie of omission, trying to bring together what was vaporous?

How do I know what I put down on paper is true?  I travel back to Los Angeles down streets I traveled in memory.  Yes, my mother Esther said it didn’t happen like this. What did she know within the mind tangled of a small childhood, how it was stored, recorded and brought out one grain at a time?

Five people have five different stories.  Same incident.  Memory bends, turns, reforms in its own order of interior importance. First a poem, a hieroglyph, then the filling in of images, story, all one at a time, to reform and pull back the dead.

My mother left me a code for understanding the world. Invest in words. Gather bounty in two realms. If they ever come together, fill the bland pages with the process. What you find in between can be defined as narrative. Words laced one to another make a map of a journey, a treasure map. This is a scavenger hunt. That's what she meant in the poem she sent to me in my waking dreams, my letter to her and her response.

It was up to me to fill in the distance, the journey like any other quest, to find the Holy Grail. Seeking to find the road map of my life before words. To retrace the travel in the holy land of my hidden fears, my waking memories.

Narrative. Where memory dares to come forward and take hold of one hand of the story, and carry it, both hands open to create the connective tissue that fills in what has been frozen for sixty-seven years, left hanging in an abyss of trauma.

Some people say it is connecting the dots. I say it is connecting the heart and soul to the body, no longer in freefall the narrative IS the net.

Narrative, a story created in a constructive format that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb, narrare, to recount and is related to the adjective gnarus, knowing.

Thank you for sharing in my story, and for reading Not Just A Jewish Book Blog.

 Keep writing! That's what my mentor, Kate Braverman, said to me when I told her I didn't get it. Keep writing. My heart sister, Pat, tried to explain to me what it was for twenty years with no success. Frustrated, she finally gave up.

I woke up on the morning of my birthday and picked up my journal, took out the Pelican pen my friend Martha had given me twenty-one years ago in Paris. Did I even suspect then I would find myself here in Santa Fe, a newly published memoir 158 pages long? A narrative poem when the actual word, narrative, had very little meaning more than a concept that as a poet I had no need to understand. While stitching one word to the next I attempted to bring order to an empty space in memory. A feeling. Not an elongated phrase attached to an image of a woman who birthed me, leaving like one long exhale, gone forever, memories left behind with photographs, notes on a small leather bound book with a few poems in front and stocks and bonds accounted for in the back. The ethereal coupled with the real. Substance. Survival left one no more important than the next.

Return soon to read more of my story. Thank you for reading Not Just a Jewish Book Blog.

Up until this summer, travel was usually composed of the trips within the state of California, like trips to San Diego and the zoo with the Lutz's. Other trips we took were like the time we went to Carmel where we stayed in a motel with red and white striped wallpaper, my mom and I restless to see the ocean, my father waiting moment to moment to have his next meal out. A visit with my cousins, Bernard and Ann and all of their kids, with chickens they raised and taught the kids how to slaughter and prepare them for supper, leaving the neighbors up in arms. Imagine in Carmel Highlands but that was just their way of preparing their children for the real world. And me, I enjoyed the mother dog with ten puppies all looking different from each other and at sixteen learning that there can be different fathers not like we do as adults.

But this summer the return to St. Paul was special. I had been there with Mom when we were new together. I was going to be six, and she wanted to "show me" off to the relatives. We went in 1968 to see where her old high school, Mechanic Arts was, where she was valedictorian of her class. We made a special visit to Ashland Avenue and the duplex where the Goldenbergs, Grandma and her husband, Avrum, and the five kids lived, on the second floor, and discovered a piano in exactly the same place where they had one when my mom grew up and they all stood around singing songs while Uncle Max sang and played the piano.

I remember riding the Santa Fe Chief that summer of 1968, right before my eighteenth birthday. My mom, my dad and I rode from Union Station in downtown Los Angeles to Chicago, and then from Chicago by what they called the "milk train" because it made so many stops at each small town. Stops were in Pasadena, San Bernardino and Barstow. Then continuing on to Albuquerque New Mexico. I remember getting off there and felt the heat slap me in the face, so I quickly got back on. I remember stopping in Kansas City, the dry one, Missouri. From there I remember following the Mississippi River, up toward Iowa, then Illinois, Galesburg, Chillicothe, Streator, Joliet and finally into Chicago.

During this ride, my mother was deeply engrossed in her latest book of the month club selection, my father reading some sports magazine, and me, a book from the library, probably a Perry Mason mystery by Earle Stanley Gardner. Upon arrival in Chicago, we had dinner with a friend of my mother and then back onto the slow train to St. Paul, Minnesota where we were greeted by my cousin Annette, her husband Norman and their daughter Ellen who was several years younger.

Of course we saw my Aunt Toba, Aunt Bertha, who were courtesy aunts by virtue of being my mother's oldest school friends.

We stayed with Auntie and Uncle, my Grandma Goldenberg's sister and her husband. They had a freezer in their basement full of so many different flavors all made by the St. Paul Milk Company for whom my uncle had worked for so many years.

We visited the cemetery where my grandfather was buried and where later, because Grandma was buried at Beth Olam Cemetery in Hollywood, the same place my birth mother, Alice, was buried, her plot was given to the temple to bury old prayer books and torahs because you never throw away the name of God.

Blue skies the whole trip, big white clouds, humidity, then late afternoon rain bursting from the sky and cooling everything down. Ice cream every day.

Return soon to read more about this adventure and thank you for reading Not Just A Jewsh Book Blog.