Archive
02/21/11 - (2)
Thirty-Eight Minutes
This peaceful Sunday evening, at your home, in St. Louis, We're in an apartment on Union Street, In Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, Traveling sixty-five years, via an 8-mm home movie Saved from extinction, first on VHS, then on DVD — An often grainy, jumpy, blurry thirty-eight-minute montage Of 1946 through 1957, your first fourteen years of existence... One of the few remaining visual records of your past.
We're guests at your third birthday party, Being celebrated in that second-floor apartment, In the four-story walk-up where your history began, Directly across from your mother's parents' brownstone, Watching you become a precociously poised, stage-struck star, Entertaining the very large, very extended Glatzer/Wanchell family (Ubiquitous at every imaginable celebration, occasion), Singing, dancing, doing your best to charm them:
Your father, Murray, and mother, Shirley, at the heart of it all; Her sister and brother and their spouses; Your Russian and Austro-Hungarian Jewish grandparents — Your mother's father and mother (with her five sisters, One of their daughters, Rene, and all their husbands) And your father's mother; his two brothers and one sister; His brothers' wives; his sister's husband and their daughter, Judy; (Your unborn sisters Marlene and Denise yet to grace the stage).
Now, it's winter, and we're at a resort in Lakewood, New Jersey, Where the six-, seven-, and eight-year-old Lindas are ice-skating; Now, we're on the boardwalk and the sand, at Rockaway Beach, Where, at nine, eleven, you're frolicking, sunbathing, swimming; Now, we're at the all-summer cabin at Green Valley Farm, Upstate, in the Catskills, near Tennanah Lake, in Roscoe, Where, at fourteen, you're learning how to water-ski, Behind the yellow speedboat your father, the skipper, gave you.
Now, we've returned to your TV room/den, in St. Louis, Back from the beginning of who you are, Linda Glatzer Green. And even though those grainy, jumpy, blurry thirty-eight minutes Have disappeared into the safety of their disc, When I take your hands, peer deep into your wistful eyes, I see the entirety of your life, in a single sweep — Hopes, disappointments, ambitions, realities, dreams, Yet coalescing into the beautiful, complete woman I love.
02/21/11 - (2)
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