Golden Yellow Blues

From time to time when the sky is gloomy I gather various textiles that are not happy whites anymore and I turn them into golden days.
I'm told being useful to others, sharing your knowledge is the way to go. Keith Pavia fellow artist reminded me that talents are given to be shared not buried away.
It is still trying for me because I grew up under communism and much was taken from us in the name of altruism.
Yet for many years I went that route only to get burned out.
So: dissatisfying whites get soaked for an hour or so.

I put to boil 4.5 gallons of water  and 13 tablespoons of turmeric and 9 tablespoons of alum. If curious Google as to why.

I pushed the clothes thoroughly under the concoction and made sure it stayed oppressed.

After an hour get them out without burning yourself. 

Rinse. The turmeric powder might create a Milkyway of sorts on the bathtub floor. Get metaphysical.

Take pictures with your phone and not spify camera while rinsing until the water is not yellow anymore.

Put  a second load into the brewing cauldron.  If you get annoyed by the waiting like I do since I equate waiting with terrorising controlling tactics, as experienced under said communism, double task. Repot your plants. Here goes Pandele, my digging assistant:

After rinsing put them in the dryer and get all metaphysical again.

Then fold the fluffy clothes and uuu and aaa about how soft and sunflower fields and daffodils and autumn ginko tree leaves they are. And how you'll never get to be depressed by blahy whites again. It's not your fault the washing cycle is just half an hour here in America and you can't get them be the required white. 

And that how disgustingly patriarchal it is that brides must wear virginal white. And you can't remember the biblical title of a movie in which Betty Davis stubbornly showed up in a red dress she bought of a sexual worker and Jane Fonda's father dumped her. Jezebel the film. 

At my wedding my head looked like a buffalo partition in the middle  teased in two mounds stiff with hair spray. Made my own white dress. God, every year I find more stuff in my younger past to be embarrassed about.

Here are the invigorating results:

Even rust splotches look artsy now:

This flower is my phone screen now to remind me that when in doubt use yellow.

After trimming off the stray strings I made a tassel:

and left the rest to Pandele to play

while I took a hot bath using the brewing. Turmeric and alum is great for you. Google, Google. If you douse your nether parts you can be a virgin all over again. Yep.

New York City 

November 11, 2017

Purple Boobs

I like my skin clear of warts, black heads. I am fine with time wrinkles, light bruises I acquire bumping into things, and now and then the odd scar. On my right breast showed up a black head without a black head a small bump. The cosmetologist didn’t want to touch it because it was on the breast. The dermatologist said I should just live with it. The gynecologist said were it to be on my vagina she’d remove it pronto, she often does for her patients, but since it’s on my breast, she wanted to make sure nothing was lurking under it, so off I go to get my mammogram, then she’ll refer me to a general surgeon. A mammogram for those who haven’t experienced it is like trustingly putting your breasts or testicles in a waffle maker and then the cook slams it hard and then screws it tighter and tighter, all along praising you you are doing great, so you suffer thru the various positions, angles to get a full view of the insides of your breasts. Then you wait a few days for the results. In my case a phone call came asking me to come back because there’s something to check on my left boob. I went in for my right boob, for the offending blackhead, and now I’m told something is wrong with my left one! So dutifully I go stick my boob in the waffle iron again. Then wait on the premises for the results sitting on chairs with other quiet women in pink hospital gowns. The doctor shows me on a screen two white dots, like far away stars on a cosmic photo. Those are calcifications, she explains. Is it because I take calcium pills daily? No, no, nothing to do with that. But it requires biopsy, to decide if the stars are cancerous or benign. My cousin died from cancer. I checked the intake sheet box, Do you have cancer in your family? Yes. Breast cancer? Yes. I stuff my pink gown in the disposal can, and amble out in the bustling street. People eating lunch, talking on phones, walking with a purpose. Life. I feel excluded.
With a mournful voice I call the radiology clinic for the biopsy appointment. In two days they’ll take a peck of my flesh. Drill for oil in my breast. I walk about in a daze. I don’t want to tell anyone. People hear more than enough about breast cancer. I shall not burden anyone with my sorry tale. It is all my doing. Decades of anger and misery because I won’t forgive and forget the past. It is all my doing. I want to hear kind voices; I call my elderly friend in Hungary. She needs a knee replacement and has to wait for two years to get an operation. I merely called the biopsy center and they scheduled me for that very week.
On Thursday at 1:30 p.m. the young nurse gives me an instruction sheet of paper, explains the procedure, and I nod. I’m clamped in the waffle iron grid again, this time I’m not allowed to look. The doctor tells me she’ll give me an injection to numb the pain. Alright. I had my teeth fixed this spring; my gums are perforated like a drug addict’s veins from all the anesthesia. I can do that. Ouch, and ouch and ouch. I don’t look, there is a drill in my breast, but I shall survive. I take a peek, there’s blood running all over my lap. The assistant takes a wad of gauze and pushes into my breast with all her might. Go away, you are hurting me, don’t hurt me! What are you doing? This is a breast! You can’t beat a breast! I’ll get cancer; don’t you know you are not supposed to hit breasts?! She pushes like a matador into a bull! You’d think they found some medicine to stop bleeding without further injuring you. The doctor comes back after 10 minutes or so, starts to seal my wound, reminds me she placed a grain of iron in my breast, a marking for the surgeon if the area needs to be removed. But the airport detectors won’t scream their alarm. She puts sterile band aids, then a wad of gauze, then she wraps me in plastic gauze, flattens both my chests like I’ve seen in Boys Don’t Cry, a girl who wanted to be a boy would flatten her breasts. I laugh at my disfigurement. The doctor orders the nurse to put my bra on. What for?! To hold the pack of ice over my wound. I’m to keep my bra on 24 hours. What a grotesque joke. I crawl home and don’t want to see anybody, don’t want to talk to anybody. Enough stories about breast cancer. I can’t. I can’t.
The ice pad is just water now, I throw it away, they warn you not to refreeze it, you can get frostbites. And the few hours of light pass, the kids in the apartment building play boisterously. I sleep thru the night. Next day I don’t want to go grocery shopping with my misshapen bust. I count the hours and at 2 pm I take off my bra. The aftercare sheet says take off the gauze after 24 hours. Which one? The plastic wrapped around me? I call for clarifications. It’s Friday afternoon, no one answers. I call the gynecologist’s office, the woman who deals with breast cancer pep talk. She is not comfortable to advise me which gauze I should remove. I should go to the emergency room. I won’t. I just want to know what gauze means to her. The aftercare sheet doesn’t say anything about the plastic flattening strip or the wad of gauze, which can I remove? She’s not comfortable. Alright, I wish you a nice weekend.
I take the flat-chestner off. I have red grooves all around my chest from its margins cutting into my flesh. I remove the band aids holding the wad of gauze. A layer of my skin comes off with its glue. My breast is purple. It stays purple for ten days. Ten days I walk about in a daze. I look at women’s breasts bouncing in the street. I applaud a low cut. God for you girl, good for you. I’d like to hug women for what they have to suffer. I start informing people I have purple breasts. My friend in the suburbs whose daughter suffers from breast cancer says at times the best policy is to stay away from the hospital as fast as one can just run. I’m waiting, waiting for the biopsy results. I sit next to Yusuf on the corner and tell them I have purple breasts. He is stunned mute. I point a baseball cap and I tell him my breast looks like that cap, purple is my breast. He tells me Ramadan starts in a week. I show my purple breast to my mom over Skype. She clarifies that my cousin died from pulmonary cancer and her grandmother on her father’s side had cancer. There’s no cancer in our family. And if the radiology center didn’t call me yet, that meant good news. Were it to be cancer they would have called by now. In a few more days the gynecologist calls, not malign, follow up mammogram in six months.
My breast is now a patchwork of purple and yellow. My scars from the plastic bandage healed. There is a large lump in the depth of my breast now the gynecologist says it shall heal. I still can’t stop my walkabouts. I hit the flea markets on a Saturday. I haven’t been to Hell’s Kitchen market in years. I know vaguely where’s located but not the exact street. A guy sits on a milk crate on a street corner. I kindly ask him if he knows where the Hell’s Kitchen flea market is. He says he’s not from New York, but my boobs are gorgeous. I laugh. Usually they praise my green eyes or how I match my clothing, and I take the compliments kindly. But if they pick on my body parts I turn into a vicious wildcat.
This time, I laugh and I say, ‘Thank you! Not only are they nice, but they are health and are all mine.’

July 6^th, 2014
New York

Dear Commander in Chief

Please forgive me if my language skills will fail me at times and cause merriment in you. It is not intended, but I come from a faraway land and I am a stranger to your customs and fancies. I write to you hoping you will find a way of solving my matter positively in a win-win situation and not cause further damage and puzzlement.
I am one of your humble subjects of inquestitation. Way back in early March my eyeglass was knocked from me, stomped upon, lenses broken, its brackets all twisted by my ex-paramour gone again berserk at the Armory Show Pavilion. I was myself demolished and defrayed nervously, emotionally and psychiatrically that I was put in a wheel chair to make my entrance at the ER hospital room. There two of your employees came and wrote my bad situation down and then life took me on the path to recovery out of my domestic violence residue and I waited to see about my eyeglass but nothing happened for quite a while, so I bought new.
Then a detective called! A Hamlet Aberdeen left a message saying to call the precinct! At last, help is on its way! At last, someone listens! I was very much impressed as I told him my gratitude he denied it completely. Before talking to this detective, I made many complaints at the precinct in my immigrant infested neighborhood but all I got was sniggerings and biggerings. They never did squat about my situation. I showered them with complaints but never ever one showed up ever never ever ever! Left me thinking I was still in the old country where justice is dead under a pile of musty dung.
When Detective Aberdeen Shining Armor came! I was impressed from the minute I stepped in your precinct! I told him I never met a detective. He smiled and said well, now I saw four. I do not have enough words to describe you and commend you since we have an ancestral saying and it is true here too in America it is true, that De la cap se-mpute peştele which roughly is: “The fish gets funky from the head!” I can’t wait to meet you! I am sure if your fine employees were so courteous and polite, what about you, the mind behind this fine team? I have never seen such fine speciments. All mussellar in tight T-shirts with their long American legs, like in the movies, on the table! Sergeants, like in the movies, were typing diligently at their carbon copies. That was amazing how it was and it was not like in the movies! In the movies, the detectives always jump in cars and drive away in a rush. At your precinct, when Detective Aberdeen gave me the Precinct Grand Tour pointed out one lonesome car key up on the billboard. It is a miracle that anything gets done! Dousens of detectives and one car!
Commander in Chief, you need a fundraiser! Make a calling for bikes and scooters, roller blades and skateboards! If the city’s millionaires won’t throw in money for enough cars, ask the poor population to pitch in! My rescuer should get to the rescue full speed! I called him to go and get my perpetrator from the other borough he was arrested for other maltratreatments he bestowed on me, but by the time, four hours later, that Detective Aberdeen arrived on his roller blades, he already bounded and fleed!
This will not do, I said to myself. This has to be brought to the public attention! These brave courteous men need help! Me, a humble immigrant, I can do only so much! In addition, my head was abuzz with ideas.
Commander in Chief, your staff changed my life. Especially Detective Aberdeen. He gave me back hope. He gave me backspine; he gave me pride in humanity. I wrote very exquisite erotic literature thanks to this man, Commander in Chief! I had such erotic daydreams that I said, America at last!
It was a grand feeling mutual.
Alas, Commander in Chief, all fine things end in shingles!
Detective Aberdeen succumbed under the large load of suitcases and bickering of his detective partner and I wonder who else?—Maybe you gave him the evil eye since he spent too many long days on my suitcase instead of catching heavier perpetrators and violators? But Detective Aberdeen, I vouch with my heart, is a man of vision and, may I say, television. Television! He saw the core problem in my suitcase and extricated it and hold it up as a flasklight of Statue of Liberty shining thru the darkness! Detective Aberdeen is my hero. He saw in my suitcase the malaise of the entire Nation. He identified it! He pinpointed: Here is a small woman of grand will who escaped dying of AIDS thru condom slippage and condom brokage and condom peelage off the HIV positive dripping faucet prick and she could have been infested, she could have been dying! but life protected her to bear witness! And here she is now bearing witness that there’s no finer man than Detective Aberdeen in all the precincts in the world!
Buy him a scooter!
I do not know what is appropriate and fraternal because I am all mixed up in America you have to be professional; you cannot fraternize and buddyrize when you go to the precincts. Therefore, I do not know, can I offer my tax returns to you to buy Detective Aberdeen a super-scooter and a voice mail while my suitcase is still open?
It is a distressful situation.
Voice mail is not in the precinct. The phones are from the James Bond Series. But we are not. It is hard to watch how fellow detectives scribble down my erotic messages for Detective Aberdeen. How they report courteously over the phone that Detective Aberdeen is taking a leek! Detective Aberdeen is coming only on Friday! Detective Aberdeen actually is on vacation scootering in Bahamas; comes back next Saturday. Detective Aberdeen has been seen a minute ago! But where is Detective Aberdeen? At times, it looks like he is hostage in his own precinct, all gagged up and tied with ropes, and cannot talk on the phone. A fine situation! A man who fought the terrorists is afraid of my anxious self, wanting to know about her suitcase!
Commander in Chief, here is a hundred check from my tax returns! Buy the voice mail! Let him screen his calls. Don’t let this situation fester! I can see him running away down the stairs in the basement when the phone rings: Here is the dear old lady calling again about her eyeglass! Alternatively, picking up the phone, pretending he can’t hear my squeaking voice asking about my suitcase! Dropping the receiver!
Buy the voicemail and then he effortlessly can think about other suitcases and delete my annoying messages efficiently without losing any brainpower.
We, as a Nation, will be much better served!
Otherwise, I fell in love with your precinct, as I said. I feel like I could move in. Needs badly a woman’s hand. Some curtains here and there, dusting, mopping, some flower bushes to play cops and robbers with the victims more efficiently. If I may suggest you need larger badges and shinier ones. In my old country, though the militia was vehiculing on donkeys, their uniform was more splendors: lots and lots of tassels and pompons, golden, red and emerald green! And they’d salute their superiors!
Please consider implementing this healthy attitude! They should all salute! Snap the heels and up goes the arm to the hat! What is this nonsense with public service? Order and discipline! You are the Commander in Chief!
And the hats are unimpressive here! Ostrich plumes would look smashing! Or peacock feathers! The Elton John style! It can be done very cheaply, I assure you!
But let me not get carried away!
Therefore, in these few words I mean to say how keep up the good work, Commander in Chief, father of such brave terrorist hunters and domestic violence victim protectors.
Please let me know if the check bounces so that I can pay in food stamps, and don’t let Detective Aberdeen hide-and-seek each time the phone rings.
The Nation needs him for a new detective series and bless my heart if I come sane out of this bedlam of a suitcase I will be the one to write it with your help and guidance, Commander in Chief, with your help and abbreviations.
May you be in good health and close retirement!

All our love with you and yours and Detective Aberdeen’s above all,

Ludmila Popovics,
Old Sexy Biddy Ex- Brighton Beach Sunbather [Now Bahamas Islands Cruiser—perhaps I bump into Detective Aberdeen and his scooter dressed as a palm or coconut tree!
Shush!]

P.S. We could have a rummage sale, Commander in Chief: with all the typerighters we can sell at a high price antiques. Please consider me to organizer it!
Let’s have a banner: Befriend Your Precinct! Community Gives Back to Precinct Rummage Sale!
Let me know!!!

10/25/2006

New York City

The Banning of Remembrances

Insistently I try to follow new rules: 

No more past, no more ghosts, take people for what they are, not what they remind you of.
In the present, in the present, that’s all that is, the present. 

No more layers of factual history, of moods, of sentiments past, no, just the present.
When you walk along these suburban streets under enormous trees, on the sidewalk uneven from protruding ancient roots, or step on the thick grass along the path to make space for your friend, when you admire the mansions, the red tower of the firehouse, don’t drift remembering the years you lived here, now just a city visitor.
When you pick mulberries, don’t go back in time.
Don’t remember the Black Sea village where hungrily, a runaway teenager on the cusp of womanhood, you and your husband-to-be, lowered the branches so you can pick the ripe mulberries.
How you ate hungrily black mulberries, shooing away the chicken that were picking the fallen ones from the cracked earth, the smell of chicken droppings cackling sarcastic at your great romance.
Mulberries cause diarrhea.

As you hide in the shade of the tree picking, eating dust and car pollution, chase away the little girl you were, up in the trees, sitting in the trees for hours, at ease, a bird in her nest, your hands stained dark red, don’t remember your mother scolding you ruined your white dress.
Just the now, just your new friend picking fruit in a plastic bag, appeasing her own fears: Oh, is she greedy? she worries. Does she steal from the birds? What will they eat now, the birds? Well, they have plenty of mulberries on the top of the tree where my friend can’t reach.
What will I do with my new life, in which remembrances are enemies? Where there is no fog of nostalgia, no recognition of Oh, I’ve seen this before! Oh, you remind me of so and so!
Life now will be like sight with new prescription glasses, perhaps.
Clear vision, no vagueness.
Except new glasses always give me headaches.

March 2008

Tonight We’re Coming out of Our Tombs, We’re Crossing the Death River

Halloween. 

Carl and I are in SoHo to watch the crowd spectacle. Carl is an actor friend of mine. The best way to see the costumes close up is to go an hour before the parade in the area where dressed up revelers line up and wait for the parade to commence, so they can march and show off.
The wind blows and the crowd coils, a mincing machine crowd, we brush, roll, push against each other in this human collimator, startled by close ups of puss gashes, cadaveric complexions, some blood drained pale like flour, some putrid green black with gangrene, we grind against plump French maids, goose pimpled above their garters and white knee-high stockings, batting their enormous blue eyelashes, here go the Spider Men and Bat Men and Cat Women, oh, the Cat Women with their buttocks, rocks under black spandex, the tail, a pitiful knotted rope, the knees buckling up by the end of the parade, not a good idea, Cat Woman, those high heels not a good idea, Cat Woman.
Here go pirates, brides, one with a black veil, drops of blood on her embroidered shiny atlas gown, and a sad bride, dead, with dark circles, head inclined, her tresses and veil flutter in the wind as she poses, oh, so sad a bride.
Here come the salsa dancing marchers! You are in the wrong parade, man, your drums force me to dance along but your bright feathers and sequins are in the wrong parade! You are to scare us, scare us! Why can’t you be menacing cohorts of death? Look, like these three witches with orange wigs, pointed hats, black gowns and miniskirts! Look how they have a blast charging into the audience crammed behind the police fences! That’s how you do it! You are to scare us!
Here comes General Michael Jackson, in his red coat and golden glitter, and woos softly his signature, I love you, to a kid who wants a picture with Michael, oh, Michael, save the world, save the children, Michael! Here comes Jackie Kennedy Onassis waiving in slow motion her white gloved hand, a patent leather handbag dangling from her elbow, and then Marylyn in her blonde curls and her halter white gown. Oh, you need a fan, a hair drier, a leaf blower Marylyn, so your skirts go up your leggy legs.
Look, such long legs on this Deviless, she has long white legs, her red wig with red horns, she came all the way from Harlem the Red Deviless, she walks alone people gawking at her legs!
Look, the whip lashing dominatrixes, black leathered, scare the Tea Party Aunt Hattie, who holds a tray with miniature tea china and pretty cheesecake slices, all proper with her white hair bum and white apron. Then a Barbie doll ambushes us, confined in her Barbie box, pressing her face against the plastic wall, while her Ken doll rolls her enormous box up Sixth Avenue, and oh, the squadrons of gigantic skeletons and white serpents and bats, a cloud of bats, all huge puppets assaulting the dark skies, and then humungous fish skeletons, that’s how you’ll end up too, naughty little boy, piranhas shall eat you, if you go into the water when your mama told you not to!
Oh, and here is Marie Antoinette with her cauliflower, sky-scraper high wig, and her wide, wooden apparel hips! She stops ever so graceful for pictures. Here goes Schindler’s List Mom, or what’s her name in the painting, Whistler’s Mom, and then come the Asian monster-headed warriors, kamikaze samurai, in kimono gowns of gold and shine, and then monsters galore: one-eyed monsters, and fluffy fluffy plush monsters with white baseballs for eyes, the balls running amok, shifty, shifty, and then comes opulent King of France, or Britain, in his red mantle trimmed with a rich white fur leopard collar, his face is a skull and his hand is skeletal. Oh, majestic King, parading solemnly, you are dead, dead, dead. Why did you kill all your eight wives?!
And then come the bores from the movies, the Mad Hatters and the Star War Jedi and Princess Leas and the Elvises, many Elvises, wig and pompadour and diamonded belts, and the District Nine aliens and the Shout painting’s masks and the Sponge Bobs and Chilean miners, lots of Chilean miners, the 30 rescued miners multiplied to hundreds, and clock faces with angel wings, and the cohorts of dancers paying tribute to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, man, two large groups, man, two, what bores.
And here are the drag queens, one has a golden phone receiver grafted on her wig blonde, the coil wire hangs dangling about, and a power plug couple comes, one has two penises, and one has two anuses and when they plug into each other, oh, how they twist in the agony of pleasure, oh, how they like it and oh, how we laugh! Then the ghoulish couples, white faced, a white strand in their black hair, the man in English tailcoats, the woman, long hair, black eye circles, all lace and finery, walk together solemnly.
Another couple parades in white dainty gauze shrouds, his eyeglasses lenses iridescent holographs. ‘Who are you, who are you?!’ I ask him, ‘so elegant and so absurd a man?’Hhe shrugs sweetly as his pair drags him away, ‘This is what one year of marriage turned me into,’ he shrugs sweetly.
Here go two bemused clowns, in such delightful costumes with various dangling silky bags, sheltered under an enormous umbrella with kitchenware things hanging from it, handing out business cards, let us come to your parties! Let us entertain you! let us earn a living! There come gothy Edward Scissorhands, there are many Edward Scissors, the Jonny Depp teenage misfits, scissors, scissors are my hands and my hair is a bush I hide shy under, and they all charge into us, the  screaming bystanders.
Some just walk in the parade, talking bored on their cell phones, doing nothing to scare us, and so many in cheap boring costumes from Wal-Mart. No, man, no, you’re insulting the audience! Make an effort! and they walk, walk not sure if they should have fun or not. No, man, no!
Next year I’m gonna go in the parade myself, this time I chickened out when Carl said I can’t have a large ruffled skirt in the parade, the crows would tear it apart, so crowdy a crowd. No, no, man, next year I’ll have a large pink dress! Larger than Marie Antoinette’s.
Look at the old ladies, four white ghostly spirits, they charge and wiggle their jazz hands and they say together wooo! wooo! and I am happy to play getting scared by them, and I am happy that they are old ladies, in their sixties, fifties, and they are spirits and they go in the parade and they scare us, wooo, wooo, woooo!
Life is here, yes, I am bountiful with you, my New York, tonight I am resplendent with you my America, tonight!
Carl has a plush rabbit, he tears its neck off, its red and violet entrails hang from the ripped neck. Carl is a tall hat gentleman, with a pipe and a tailcoat and military bravery medals, and has cardboard eyeglasses with scary painted eyes and he is a moody disgruntled gentleman. ‘What are you looking at?!’ he snaps at passers by, ‘What are you looking at?!’ he snaps and they love it, ‘Let me take a picture! take a picture! take a picture with you, grouchy Mister!’
We take the subway and emerge on Sixth Avenue and 14^th Street, prime location. We hang from fences, we can see over the heads of sidewalk crowds.
Every sidewalk is unnecessarily fenced up, policemen at every corner.
Carl says they practice anti-terrorism drills on us. ‘Crowd control they enjoy, fascists,’ Carl calls them fascists. ‘What has become America,’ he moans.
We are unable to get out of the sidewalks, at each corner all fenced up, unnecessarily. We are locked up.
Here comes a Russell Brand with his hair teased up. He screams in a high pitch voice, British accent, ‘Where are our fucking liberties, America? The fucking liberties, we should cross the street, mate!’ I first think he really wants to cross the street and I respond, ‘Yeah, man, we should cross the street, what is this? There is no traffic jam, few cars, let us cross the street!’ I quite shout worked up, ‘We should cross!’ and I expect Carl, the revolutionary who when he works as a bus tour guide tells the tourists on Wall Street that, ‘These robbers get away with theft, gentlemen!’ I expect him to shout along, and the Russell Brand to shout along, but I realize Russell Brand just does his comedy shtick, man, for cheap laughs, and Carl says some might get arrested if we shout. But then at least the rest of the crowd would be able to cross the street, he says.
I want to cross, it makes no sense to see all four street corners fenced up! ‘Let us go home, man.’ ‘Let us cross! Let us cross!’ the crowd coalesces in a booming choir, ‘Let us cross!’ the cameras flash flash, but the camera flashing is not the point, the point is we shouting at the top of our lungs, ‘Let us cross, let us cross, let us cross!’ and the police doesn’t seem to even hear or see us, impassibly motioning the cars thru the intersection.
We tire, the choir dies. That’s how we are, we get tired, we do get tired. Revolution gets tiresome. Drained, we are quiet. Only then one, two, three, as if they counted, the policemen pull carefully the iron fences aside and the crowd pushes thru the crossing, and we, Carl and I, with it, go forward.
I so love you, Downtown.
Back on the Uptown train scenery is drab. Uptowners didn’t bother to dress up. They took the kids with the pumpkin buckets to collect candy and that’s it. They are worried, they are tired, they won’t masquerade in Halloween parades, they have troubles. Bores.
The best was a white rubber glove man. He inflated rubber gloves, tied many whites in clusters, the glove fingers forming flower petals, or rooster feathers, tied bouquets on his neck, on his head, on his waist, and he was a creature of white hands floating in the moving air.
I haven’t seen pictures of him in the papers the next day. Why haven’t I seen him in the papers? Because the real thing is in the streets, man, not in the papers, not on TV, and you have to be part of it.
The real parade is Downtown, in the Village, Downtown in the Village, man. And I was part of it.

10/30/2010

 
 
Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, witnessing democracy, freedom of speech and faith, and engineering social change thru art being some of them, I’d be grateful.

New York Cityscape: MTA Miracle

for Ponytail Joe, MTA Rescue Worker

My eyeglasses are a historic landmark for me. I got them on the day that I was reborn, that is, when my paramour in a fit of public jealousy and manliness decided to grab them off my nose and squash their delicate frame, popping out the lenses. That, and other similar tokens of passion, got him in jail for one day and in anger management for six months, and a stay-away-from-her order of protection at least until fall 2008. He deserved much more than that, the detective said, at least five years for attempted murder, since he forgot to tell me he was HIV positive and twice the condom broke, but the DA’s office said they wouldn’t go for it, since I didn’t get infected, thank God.
This was on March 11, 2006. A week later I got new eyeglasses, the same brand frames back on my nose, compliments of the Crime Victims’ Bureau.
Now, summer 2007, they are still a pleasure to wear. Light, hip, they got a bit loose, though. Each time I am at the teacher’s desk looking down in the textbook they fall on the table, causing merriment in the back of the class where the slackers congregate.
Tuesday night I hurried to a rehearsal in Chinatown.
5:30-ish I am about to get out of the train, head down, stepping cautiously over the gap that so many people fell thru, but it’s a small crack, not even a palm wide and I see my eyeglasses falling down! My God, one handle was still on the train floor, I lean down to grab them, pick them up, but they continue the fall. Train leaves. I’m there on the platform, looking into the dark track bed, filthy with garbage and murky pools of rain. I can’t see a thing.
If they fell by the tracks, they’ll still be there when I get back from the rehearsal. If they fell on the tracks, good-bye, Columbus! They are squashed again, this time for good. Why is no one here? Where is the damn info booth? No info booth. Maybe it’s on the uptown platform. Go there. I can’t. I have to rush to the theater.
All thru the rehearsal, I couldn’t think about anything else but the eyeglasses. Perhaps it is a good thing they had an accident. It’s time to move on. No more memories. Move on. New eyeglasses. What are you talking about? It will be at least $500! You promised yourself a new life on your birthday, a new digital camera! You donated your film camera to the nonprofit American Opera team! These are your eyeglasses. You should have gone to the optician’s and tightened them up. You should have worn a string to hold them on your neck. Yeah, like old country accountants! I’m hip! Way hip. You can barely see! Buy a flashlight from the street vendors. It’s Chinatown, how much can that cost? You go back there and ask the MTA guys to get them for you! Remember that guy once on the blue line in Penn Station? He realized his golden diamond stud earring just fell off his ear on the tracks and he raised hell and they called the guys and they jumped in the pit and got him his earring! But who are these guys? I looked around for a policeman, but there wasn't any, neither in the station nor on the street. Too hot. No matter what, go get your eyeglasses back, or at least make sure they are dead. They are your eyeglasses.
So at nine I went to the booth, approached a policeman who was guarding a worker taking the money out of the ticket machine. He didn’t want to talk to me, had his bulletproof vest on, directed me majestically to the information booth guy, though he saw too well that no one was there. A good five minutes later he shows up. Grumpy. It’s Chinatown. It’s a Chinese man. I fear he doesn’t understand me at all.
He does, but how should I know? Most people can’t speak English in this part of town. He is frowning. He had enough of this noise and heat. But I’m there and I won’t go away. Give me my eyeglasses! He calls, the trains go by, metal noise screeching, people coming and going. I’m still here, give me my eyeglasses! He talks on his antiquated phone. “Where was this?” “On the downtown 6 line platform, by the street elevator.” “They’ll come in half an hour or an hour. You either go there, wait for them on the bench, or come back later and pick them up from here.” “No, sir. I’ll go there and stay until they come.” I’m prepared to wait for hours. Three ladies on the bench discuss a girlfriend, a jealous woman, who threw a fit and of course, the guy left her, she is like that. Train comes, they go. I peer into the gutter again. I can’t see a thing. The janitor sweeps the platform. “I lost my eyeglasses.” “Did you call them?” “Yes.” “Don’t go down there. The train won’t stop. Don’t go down there.” “I won’t.” I’m not an idiot!
Not even 15 minutes passed, two stocky guys with orange mat vests show up with mega huge flashlights.
One, gray ponytail, the other, crew cut. “Are you here for me? For my eyeglasses?” I asked eagerly. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“They fell down here, by this pillar.” “Are you sure?” “Yes.” “When was this?” “At 5:30.” “5:30?! They are gone by now,” says the Crew Cut. “Why should they be gone by now?” “Some kid saw them and jumped in the pit and took them.” “What for?” “Just for fun, saw them glittering in the mud, picked them.”
But the Ponytail, didn’t discourage me, did his job, worked his flashlight like a movie spotlight. All we could see were plastic bottles, cans, papers, pools of squalor. The Crew Cut went farther down the track, though I told them, “It was near this pillar here, or at the most that one there, before the turnstile. I remember I had to walk very little to get out of the train station.” Nothing. “I don’t know how you will see them, because they have slim black square wire frames. They are very delicate...”
Ponytail moves ahead one more column, then he gets his round belly on the floor! He forays into the mud and darkness. On the bench, a young couple. Instead of minding their romance, the young curly blond man is amused by my adventures! We were a sight to behold, Ponytail on his belly with flashlight in the track pit, me hopping about in my blue summer dress.
Train comes honking ablast. Stop the filming. Train leaves station. Action! Back on the belly. “I found them!” announces Ponytail. “Where? Where?” A passenger points excited, “Look, they are there! Look there!!!” “Please, please be very gentle with them, they are so fragile!” Now they’ll get squashed! They are brave, faithful eyeglasses! They survived the trains! And now they will get squashed.
Crew Cut comes with his long stick that has some gray pincers at one end. “Please, don’t destroy them!” He lowers the stick in the pit, and lightly raises it again. My eyeglasses! My dear, dear eyeglasses unharmed. Muddy! Crawling with germs! Soaked in disgusting squalor, the lenses with grit splashes. But my eyeglasses! I wrap them in a lump of napkins from the beef and mushroom on rice for $4.50 from the frowning Nazi vendor.
“You guys, I thank you so much. I can’t take you for a beer,” I don’t know why it seemed the right thing to say. Teachers don’t go out for beers with students, they might get sued for sexual harassment, so why should MTA workers have it easier? “but I will write you a poem. ‘The MTA Miracle Poem.’ What is your name? Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that kind of poem!” Pony says he’s Joe. Crew Cut I don’t know what he said or if he said anything. “Can I e-mail my poem to you? Or mail it?” “It will never get to us...” “Then where is your office?” “On Chambers.” “What is your office name? What are you exactly?” “Good question. I guess we are the emergency intervention unit, aren’t we?” “Yeah.” “Thanks again, and I turned around, not knowing if I should shake hands or not, might be misinterpreted again...
Behind me, I heard Crew Cut, “I’d like new kneecaps, that’s what I would like. Six pairs of new kneecaps.” Were it for Crew Cut I’ve never gotten back my preciouses.
At home, I washed them with soap and peroxide and sprayed them with Lysol, and washed them again. I always fold them when I get into the subway station now, first thing. Before the train arrives, I put them in my purse. Look at the gap in terror. Swallower of eyeglasses!
I stopped by the info booth tonight, and asked the worker, “Remember me?” I pointed to my eyeglasses. “Thank you.” He looked morosely at me.
I’ll go take Joe out for a beer, what the heck. I need friends like him. No bitching, get the job done, no raining on distressed people’s hopeful parades.
 New York City
September 17, 2013

 
 
Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, witnessing democracy, freedom of speech and faith, and engineering social change thru art being some of them, I’d be grateful.

Switching from Corporate to Community Work To Make Bucharest A Pleasant Home, Void of Stray Dogs and Abundant in Green Spaces

Since bad news travels fast, I fear you’ve heard about Bucharest, the capital of Romania, in the context of the four-year-old child killed a few days ago by stray dogs in a park. I fear you think Bucharest is a horrible place.
Let it be said that there are people who have struggled to make it a better space. In the summer of 2011 while visiting back in Romania I wanted to meet shakers and movers who tried to make a difference against terrible odds, and here is one of them.

Ella Veres: We’re in Victoria Square, in a Starbucks, of all places, with Alina Kasprovschi, executive director of Bucharest Community Foundation.
Alina Kasprovschi: First, let me clarify how did we arrive at the idea of creating a community work foundation in Bucharest? It was a happy meeting of our desires to act and a national program that is developing this year focusing on community work foundations. I don’t know if you are familiar with this term? A community work foundation is an organization that gathers local resources and then redistributes them to local improvement projects, not necessarily our own projects, that is we help others with their community work projects, teach them how to create one, or others that already exist and need our support, be it financial or volunteer work, or experts like accountants, IT workers, physicians, and I’ll give you specific examples.
I’m aware that in the U.S.A. and Canada each locality has its own community foundation that deals with local issues and doesn’t wait for the mayor’s office, like we do, or E.U., to solve our problems.
It’s a gamble to establish such a community foundation in Bucharest, since it’s a large, divided city, each individual here is busy with his job, his family, and his small circle of friends outside of which he has no interest. Caught in the heavy traffic he curses, ‘Damn, I’ll be late again! And this awful dust and pollution! No green spaces! I’m powerless about all this. Well, then I’ll isolate in my own cocoon and I’ll try and go on with my life, ignoring what’s going on in this damn city.’
This is what we’d like to change, so people start involving themselves in community work. Our mission statement is to invest the time, money and energy of Bucharestians in our community, so we feel at home here, because we don’t anymore. Many of us have to stay here because this is where money is made, there are many large companies and work opportunity, but for a young family it’s not advisable to raise children in Bucharest. You have to because you have no choice, but otherwise, no. So this is what we’d like to change.
I’ll tell you a story that I love telling: I assume you heard of Habitat for Humanity? They build homes for people who can’t afford to have a decent house, they live crammed in one apartment or small house full of mold or other problems. People who have an income but not large enough to take a bank loan to buy a house, and this situation… Just the mere thought that they live seven people in one room and how horrible that is curtails their wings, their development. So Habitat for Humanity puts these people together with other volunteers, neighbors, friends, relatives, and they build their new house together. Habitat for Humanity gives them construction materials, the town hall donates the land, and they have to pay back in installments, interest-free, the money going into other construction projects for other poor people’s homes. Why I’m saying that it inspired me, is that three years ago I worked in a large American company, and we had a team building with Habitat for Humanity while we built a house. I loved it. I’ve never built anything in my life, only Ikea furniture, I feared I’d ruin people’s materials and I’d be of no help, but instead I found myself surrounded with positive energy generated by my fellow office workers. We knew each other from work, we made money together, but as human beings we were never together, so seeing with our own eyes what was our contribution, brought us very close together.
When you work in a large company, I had this feeling myself, that’s why I didn’t want to work anymore in a large company, you keep on asking yourself, ‘Okay, but what am I doing actually? What is the use of what I’m doing in this world, besides that, okay, the company value grows, and the company bond/share price grows on Wall Street, so on so forth, but what do I actually leave behind me in this world?’ and I wasn’t satisfied at all about that, though I worked very much and I had a lot of money and much professional satisfaction, but as a human being, no personal satisfaction whatsoever.
So then I decided I’d gather my friends and build a house thru Habitat for Humanity. It was the first time in Romania that someone donated their personal time, and didn’t participate thru a team building workshop. We paid our hotel, our overalls, our gloves and hardhats. After two days of working together it was an extraordinary feeling to have done something palpable and looked with our heads leaned back at the raised house and think, ‘Oh, I’ve never thought I’d be able to do such a thing!’ And I proceeded to do this for an entire summer. I kept on fetching my friends to build houses. Then this idea ka-chinged/this bell rang in my head…
This was happening in Bacău County, so we’d also drive five hours by car, we’d leave on a Friday morning at 6 a.m., stop at gas station, everything was dark and deserted, while we were all cheery that we go build houses. It was very strange to realize that people go at 9 a.m. to do office work, all morose, ‘Oh, I’m so very sleepy!’ while here we were at 6 a.m. and no one was whining sleepy though we went to hammer nails and paint walls using paint rollers.
That’s when I decided this is what I want to do in life: I want to do good deeds for people, and I want to put people together to do good deeds. And I thought about people exactly like myself: corporate workers, who keep on working while thinking, ‘I’d like to do something else. But I don’t know where, or when, so I’ll keep on plodding along with my life, and if something crosses my path, then alright, if not, it shall remain just a dream, like many other unfulfilled dreams.’
So when I… I have a child, today he is one year and two months, so in a way it’s his birthday since we still count the months. So when I gave birth I said, ‘Alright, I want to take advantage of the maternity leave,’ Romanian state pays two years of maternity leave, which is extraordinary compared with the U.S.A. where as far as I know is only about 10 weeks, so I said, ‘Okay, this is a period in which I can experiment. I can try one project and if it works out, then I’ll keep at it, if not, well, besides giving birth to a child, I also birthed a foundation.’
It was perfect timing because the community foundation movement was just looking for people who could fit their mission, so I started working out of the maternity ward! Skype conferencing with the other group members, before giving birth, then I stopped talking for about two weeks, and I discovered, ‘Look, how great it is that I have time to stay home to take care of the baby, and is so much better than taking him to a nursery school or leave him with a baby sitter, while I can also work.’ My previous job wouldn’t have allowed me to do this. I had to work a lot of overtime for that company, travel a lot abroad, from my p.o.v. it was an unacceptable way of raising my child. This was the most important thing, that I could raise my family and not sacrifice it for my profession.
Okay, so last year we got started. We understood the concept, that we are a kind of brokers of good causes, we look for those good causes and then we pair them with people that can give them support. We started gathering money, we didn’t want to put our own money, but we got smaller amounts of money from other people like us, and I do believe that our concept will work, even if Bucharest is a large, agitated city. It’s quite an effort to gather money from individuals and not go to a company and ask for sponsorship. But we wanted to do it this way, even if economically is not that efficient, because we wanted to see what support we have from the community.
Besides asking people for their money we also polled them on several questions, but the main ones were: what are the things they’d like changed in Bucharest, and what would they be willing to invest: money, time, energy, or their contact network.
So we chose five projects we’ll work on during our first year: the foremost by far was volunteering for the community. Exactly like we did with Habitat for Humanity, people want to invest two hours and when they look behind be able to say, ‘Wow! I’ve built something! I can see the difference!’ This was a recurring answer.
Then we’ll deal with children issues. There are many problems in this field: from education to, let alone I don’t even talk about abandoned children, but what happens to children when their parents work 12-hour shifts and they’re with the baby sitter or in an after-school program, lacking the kind of education we’d wish for them.
Another project that raised interest was creating green spaces, ecological cleaning, so on, and the fourth project is, very visible in Bucharest, probably you’ve noticed it, stray dogs, community dogs. Many persons said it was important and they’d get involved, but well, some said, ‘I personally want to work on this! I personally, with my very hands, want to kill them and turn them into gloves!’ Others would say, ‘No! I want to find shelters or families who could adopt them!’ The opinions vary, people are very passionate/fiery on this issue, which is why I think the dog problem continues, because people could never agree what we want to do with these dogs, and while we still can’t agree with each other, they keep on multiplying more and more and become an even huger nuisance.
Okay, so out of these five topics we chose four. Our first project we work now is…  
EV: But let’s talk a bit more about these dogs. I see them everywhere sprawled on the sidewalks in the sunshine.
AK: We’ll get to the dogs too. Our first project is called ‘Volunteering Bursa’ thru which we go to people like us, corporate workforce, who’d like to do something, but don’t know where, don’t know how, and we ask them, ‘Okay, in what field would you like to volunteer and for how many hours?’ Then we find them a project, not ours, but one that’s already running. We found out there are very many of them in Bucharest, and we had no clue they existed. It’s amazing how many are and how diverse and how beautiful they are, but nobody knows about them. So that’s what we want to do, connect people with these projects. We are in the phase of visiting and figuring out their needs. They are so diverse, from social problems of children, old people who need help, to health, ecology, animal rights, women’s rights, culture, art, architecture, urbanism. We found about 12 fields, which will help with matching volunteers to something they take real interest in.
Then we want to launch a project that will stretch for several years, that will have several rounds of financing, we call it ‘100 Tiny Ideas Can Change a Large City’. The idea is to find small projects that we can help develop by matching them with sponsors. We’d like to create blogs for them, so that people can read about the experiences of those who get involved with community work and how this impacts on their lives. Why is it important to do this? To educate the population. I believe it’s also a matter of education in Romania.
The third project is, there are many in London, and I heard also in Germany, called ‘Vegetable Gardens in Parks’. In London, I don’t know if you’ve heard, there are vegetable gardens in parks where, you might even have to pay an entrance fee, you can see how a tomato grows. People take their children over the weekend and hoe the tomatoes, and explain the children that, ‘Vegetables don’t grow in supermarket, and look what do the bees do, and the butterflies,’ so on, and then other topics connect with this, healthy food, how to cook it and so on.
Now we arrived at the dog project. Such divergent views, but everybody agrees upon that it’s not okay to have loads of stray dogs in the streets. So then what should we do? We arrived at the conclusion that we can’t have extreme solutions, like killing all of them. They did it in Botoşani, one night someone killed all the dogs in town. It was an inhumane act which you don’t want to repeat, no matter how upset you might be that a dog bit you it’s not acceptable to think about exterminating all the 100,000 dogs that roam in Bucharest. What would the simultaneous death of 100,000 dogs mean? It’s unacceptable.
But on the other hand they can’t continue being on the streets and multiplying, so on. So we had to look at the bottom of the problem, what’s the cause of it, since at present many dogs are fixed, and still puppies show up. Where do these puppies originate from?! If you take a look at them the majority have earrings, which signifies that they had been fixed. Veterinarians estimate that a street dog lives maximum five years. So in theory they should stop being a nuisance in five years, yet we struggle with this problem for the last 20 years.
Speaking with several animal protection organizations we found out that the puppies appear because people who own dogs don’t fix them, and they throw their new litters on the streets. So if we’d round up all the community dogs off the street, come spring we’ll have the problem again because dog owners will throw the new puppies in the streets, and they turn into community/stray dogs again and again. So we created a project to go to the source of the puppy problem, to convince yard dog owners to fix them. Well, they have various convictions that a dog shouldn’t be sterilized because then it doesn’t bite anymore and doesn’t protect the house anymore, turns fat and lazy, so we, together with a veterinarian, have to explain them it’s not so. Plus though we have free sterilizing services, still they don’t take advantage of them because they think that for sure it costs something.
We’ll have communication campaigns in which we’ll go door to door with our volunteers and explain that everything is free, and they’d get rid of the problem of throwing non-stop puppies in the streets. Let alone how many puppies die crashed by cars. And how many end up at veterinarian clinics. Puppies are thrown in the clinic yards over the fence, since it’s a veterinarian clinic, isn’t it, they have to love them, and so on.
We have a family friend who is a veterinarian. She is overwhelmed with despair. Each spring and fall, every morning she opens the gate and finds a crate of puppies, some barely born, and being veterinarian she loves animals and can’t kill them all, even that okay, euthanasia is a humane solution, well, it is and it isn’t, so all kinds of artificial solutions are floated, like international adoptions. But you can’t adopt thousands of dogs. And if you send them for adoption and the problem reappears next season, what have we done then?! This is our next project, we’re still researching, when are the dogs making puppies, when is the best time to sterilize them, so in spring we’ll roll our communication project to convince people to sterilize their dogs.
EV: Could you connect me with your veterinarian friend?
AK: Sure.
EV: I’ve never seen a stray dog in New York, or in London.
AK: From what I’ve seen on TV dogs are euthanized there. And probably is okay to euthanize 100 stray dogs, but we have 100,000 dogs! And many people are attached to their dogs, many live in apartment blocks. They take care of them, they sterilize them. It’s our case too, we have dogs, but I can’t take 50 of them in. I also have a cat, and a child… But it’s alright. If someone would come up and say they must be euthanized, which it actually happened. There are all kinds of absurd situations, like when people hear the hingherii/dogcatchers/dog-killers/flayers are coming, they hide the dogs in the apartment building, then they let them out again. It’s a horrific hunt/chase. People feel they are at war with the town hall, it simply doesn’t work, aside of the question of morality and justice, it doesn’t work. People will always find a solution to hide the dogs even if they don’t keep them in their house and after a day they show up again.
EV: So there still are hingheri/dogcatchers/dog-killers/flayers?
AK: Sure. But now they are not allowed to euthanize them. When was Băsescu the Bucharest’s mayor? In 2,000, around then. He won the elections because he promised to sterilize the dogs, so on, but in a year he changed his mind, he said: euthanasia, all dogs had to die. So what happened was that the dogcatchers/dog-killers/flayers/hingheri came, you had 24 hours to pick up your dog from the shelter, which didn’t quite work out, because until you figured out where was your dog, they didn’t quite wait for 24 hours, they’d euthanize them promptly upon arrival. All kinds of alarmed arguments and rumors broke loose. That dogs were killed by bludgeoning them up with bats. Everybody felt under siege, ‘Let’s protect our dogs! Let’s bribe the hingheri/dogcatchers/dog-killers/flayers so they don’t come, or announce us when they’ll come so we know to hide our dogs timely!’
Again, it was not a civilized solution, and it just didn’t work at all. So, they might be sterilized, but still here they are in the street.
EV: I never thought about what happens to them in shelters. I thought people adopted them.
AK: I watch a lot of TV and I know that they have very strict criteria. If the animal is showing signs of illness or aggression, they don’t have funding to deal with it, they euthanize it. Half of the animals ending in shelters in the U.S.A. are euthanized, which is again, a lot. And the adoption system is much more developed than in Romania. Here the problem is that you don’t have 100,000 people in Bucharest to adopt them all. They would have adopted them by now. There’s supply but no demand, economically/marketwise doesn’t work. [Gently laughs]
EV: We should move from dog issues now.
AK: Sorry.
EV: The fault is but mine. Could you recall any family model that made you want a more meaningful life? Or an anti-model?
AK: All I can say is that I was born in a country where isn’t much community work involvement. I think of my family as a family of kind people.
EV: Were you born in Bucharest?
AK: No, I attended university and settled in Bucharest, but I’m from Galaţi. My parents often let kids from the orphanage come to our house, and they’d give them stuff, but it wasn’t a constant thing, and we, their own children, weren’t coerced into following their example.
What happened was that before ’90 orphans were not allowed to get out of orphanages. They were like jails. You know how the conditions were, in two words: horrific, dreadful. [Gently laughs embarrassed] Then after ’90 they were allowed to go out during day, and returned in the evening to sleep. But since there were all kinds of shortages, they had no food, they started to beg. They’d knock on doors in apartment buildings and beg for food, for clothing. I remember that we became attached to some kids that came to us, and my mother called them to come constantly. She placed them at our table and gave them good clothing, not rubbish that she’d throw to the garbage anyway. And I’d give them school supplies.
But it’s not that it made a deep impression on me. I just discovered on my own when I was a teenager that I liked being kind to people. It makes me feel good. It’s in a way a selfish feeling. I nurture my positive energy by doing good deeds for people. This is how I function, without being able to say why or how. The more I do it, the better I feel, so were I to make a profession out of it, life would be beautiful. It’s every working person’s dream.
On the other hand I’ll never make the money I made working for a multi-national corporation working in a foundation, for you want to use the foundation money on good deeds, not on team-building trips abroad. We are three people working full time and we want to keep it as slim as possible, with a minimal overheard. We got our laptops as donations, our headquarter is in a beautiful villa, you’d think, God, we have plenty of money to afford it, but we were given office space by the Romanian American Foundation. They let us use their water and the internet, so we don’t have to pay anything. We try to find all kinds of ways of keeping it on a shoe string so we can use the money truly for the community.
EV: How did the family react when you informed them you’re done with corporatism?
AK: Everybody is okay with it. My father is a doctor. For him his profession, that he likes, means money and status. ‘Be careful what you do. Think: you have a nice position!’ He is more materialistic. My husband is very supportive of me. He is one of the ten persons involved in the foundation. He works in a PR company, and he helps us very much by connecting us with people. He is the one who supports us financially, since during this period I receive an amount of money from the state, but I work as a volunteer for the foundation. I’m in a totally different income bracket than a year ago.
EV: Haven’t you exhausted your contacts? ‘Oh, dear me, here she comes again!’
AK: No, no. They’d come to me saying, ‘I’d like to do something, I have money but I don’t know whom to give it to.’ They’d come to me like to their good-deed adviser, and they keep on coming. I try not to wear them down. When I see they lack interest I don’t force myself on them. Not everybody takes an interest in it, it’s alright.
It’s true, now, being a stay-at-home mom, and developing this foundation, and taking care of the kitchen, I don’t have much time for friends, but nor did I have time before to hang out in bars and restaurants, since I worked 12 hours a day, so it’s not like I lost my friends because I’m preoccupied by community work.
Some laugh at me, ‘Well, now, you got your insurance to go to Heaven.’ Or, ‘You’re an idealist. You’ll see pretty soon reality.’ Or, ‘People are mean, everybody just takes care of himself.’ And ‘Why do you need to rescue Bucharest?’ and such… But I don’t feel any need to rescue Bucharest, Bucharest doesn’t exist, it’s an entity without a soul, it’s us who make Bucharest.
Once we were arguing about what happens to Bucharest because they demolish the city, they build suspended highways, and there are many initiative groups and foundations that mount protests and they asked us, ‘What is your position on this matter?’ My answer was, ‘I don’t care much about the buildings, but about the people inside and outside the buildings. That’s where my interest is.’ A country might be utterly run down, but if its people are united, that’s the real richness, beyond statistics on income, and so on. It’s important how united are its people.
EV: As if there’s movement along the lines you march yourself. Or do you experience insularity?
AK: Not at all. Or, I do feel insular, but because there are many little islands close to each other and we’re just discovering each other now. Ten years ago few people did anything, Romanians didn’t get involved in community work. It was rather foreigners who came with aid. But nowadays many local people have a lot of good ideas. Only many stay at that stage, of good idea, or small project that only 20 persons heard of it. It’s a beautiful idea, but we can help it grow.
EV: So, the future?
AK: I think this will work out well. Not because I hope and wish so, but because I talked to many people, at events like Street Delivery we were talking about earlier, and we saw there is a common denominator, and many people we didn’t know, offered their contact info so we keep them informed about developments and they tell us it’s very interesting, and shoot us looks of doubt, ‘You’re idealistic. It won’t work.’ but with a positive, hopeful doubt, like they’d like it to happen, but they are in disbelief that it shall. There is real potential for people getting involved in community work, all they need is a movement to carry them over.
I asked someone how should we attract more people, and we were advised to, ‘Take baby steps, don’t mention rescuing Bucharest, because it’s a scary, daunting task, so far off, and they’ll flee in horror, better mind their own business. But if you tell them, ‘Look today I need you as a volunteer for two hours,’ and tomorrow, ‘I’d like a bit of money for another thing,’ then next week, ‘Would you bring your friends to plant trees?’ it’s not that scary any longer and slowly, slowly people realize that they are working for themselves, not for others.’ They don’t amass insurance points for Heaven, but indeed they do something for their own lives, and it’s a different way of spending your free time, than the usual mall, movie, club hopping, so on. It’s a way of feeling good about yourself.
EV: They all seem to mention the Heaven Insurance Policy…
AK: I don’t know how things are concerning Heaven, if this is your question.
EV: I do believe it is.
AK: I don’t know, I’m preoccupied about what I do here. Later I’ll figure it out if it indeed exists, if... I’m preoccupied by the present. I don’t want to see what shall happen from now in 50 years.
EV: Even so, how is your Utopia, how would Heaven look like?
AK: How would Heaven look like? Aside from my spiritual beliefs, an utopian society is a society that all resources, and I’m not referring only to money and food, but also energy, and time, are used exactly for what they are needed and not squandered. And there is a very good connectivity between people, between entities, since there’s talk about what are we doing for nature, or better said, against nature, and what happens with the climate warming and urban sprawling, so on.
Yes, Heaven is that state of equilibrium, of balance in which we all find our place where we are needed and where we can give the most. Utopia would be… yes… how it would be if everybody has, and not necessarily a communist society in which everybody has equal shares, but a society in which no one has overwhelmingly more, or the entities that have too much, willingly redistribute their wealth where it’s needed.
Utopian speaking, I’d like to see our resources going in the right direction, where they are needed and make things work.
EV: So people who are successful financially in their profession, you try to remind them of… All the media noise, so very loud about VIPs. Everything seems to be about money and the people who have it. That they are dubious, arrogant, they isolate themselves, and yet you have the belief that this is untrue… Do tell me: How do you change the tide of their bad press.
AK: Well, I don’t believe that anyone is born bad. And I also don’t believe that a person who has money turns into a bad man, or that making money is a bad thing, and it must be that you made it in a dubious way. I believe that people who have money are all the time besieged by demands and everybody expects that those who have money should solve their problems while they stau cu ochii în soare/bask in the sunshine, without moving a finger, and money should just shower down on them from somewhere. Well, that’s not alright.
I think a different approach is needed for moneyed people, so they see what is their gain, what’s in it for them. That’s why we say in our mission statement that we invest money, time, and energy, and not that we donate them, because really it’s an investment, and these people who have money can see palpable ways how their life changes if they do good deeds in a wise way. Support sustainable projects, that lead to an ulterior development.
As for the press, well, I gave up watching TV, not just because it’s unhealthy for my child to stare at the TV screen, but even before I arrived at the conclusion that if you watch TV you see the entire country is a disaster and nothing works, and everything is bankrupt, and we shall die of hunger tomorrow morning, and IMF will buy us out, if they didn’t already. At times I wonder if all those conspiracy theory of international order are true. But it’s better for me not to even know the truth, so I can live my life the best I can. In the end it’s within my power to do my best, apart from what the government wants, how much money is in our country, how much money we have to pay back to IMF. I think there are resources and values and capital in this country that can make things work. If we focus only on what doesn’t work, and we dissect and we split hairs into four, which is customary on TV, how horrible all is, and why nothing works, were we to look on the other side, how many good things do happen, there would be a different energy that would make things happen.
So I choose to network with people who do just that, focus on what works, on what do we want to build together, what is our responsibility and within our power to do. Street Delivery is such a project, I don’t know if you are familiar with it?
EV:  Like a street fair of good deeds?
AK: The idea is that the street is shut for cars and open for pedestrians, trying to make Bucharest a friendlier place. At Cărtureşti, they being the organizers, they bring in not necessarily foundations and non-profits, but all kind of projects and people who make you feel better in this city, from food to art, theater, music, so on.
We always say our target audience is Cărtureşti fans, people who read, who are interested about what is going on, who want to go places and feel good, creating their oasis of goodness within a desert/waste land of nothing working, badly paved roads and so on. These are the kind of people I choose to be in touch, and it might be an isolationist policy, I might not have an overall view, but what I’ve discovered is that looking only this direction, I see more and more people, and literally I have such wonderful encounters that at times I’m speechless when I realize we’re so many thinking the same way, and this gives me power to keep on going.
Well, now everybody discuses why half of the high school students failed the graduation exams, and our education system is a disaster, and how it would be better to leave the country. I have no clue if this would be better, but when I look at all the things that we could take care of ourselves, without waiting for the government to deal with, or whomever, to solve our problems, and rescue us, I think us individually we could do a lot of good things.
At times I do get scared, ‘What if I’m heading the wrong way? What if when I’m fifty I’ll realize I took the wrong turn and this is it, my life ends, what would I do then?!’
EV: You’d have about 20, 30 more years left though.
AK: Sure, but I might realize this only on the last day of my life, and this scares me. It’s rather against the tide what I’m doing. Well, when I get scared, then I say, ‘Thank you very much. I indeed got scared, now it’s time to get on with my work,’ which is a good sign.
EV: It’s a great thing that your husband is supportive of you.
AK: Indeed. Were I to have to argue about it with him, or justify myself, or be a single mom, probably I wouldn’t… Then our extended family is very helpful. Now my child is with my husband’s father, who is very happy to help us with this, so I never have the feeling that I have to sacrifice something to do what I do. This is very important.
EV: Having in mind that you lived in the corporate culture, you know how to dress, how to put yourself together, and interact so they don’t think you’re dubious. But still how you deal with it. I speak out of personal experience. Something made me think about wealth and kindness at length: Yesterday I met one of my high school friends. I live in America, but I’m a poor person by American standards. I’m an artist that, like you, doesn’t want to have a large overhead, and I operate on a slim, slim, slim budget, so can I maintain my life style, so I can do what I like without interferences.
My high school friend is a construction engineer and has her own company, together with her husband. And they are successful, yet honest people. She tells me they have auctions, I’m not very clear how this works here, but my understanding is that the government auctions its projects, and though they bid a lower price, the government needles them with all kinds of trifles, while others who bid twice as much, win the auction, since they bribe someone in the government.
But in spite of the fact that they maintain their honesty, they are prosperous people. And she told me, ‘Look, my son wanted us to buy him a Mercedes, though I didn’t want a conspicuous Mercedes. Yesterday we went with our shinny Mercedes to drive my mother-in-law to a village in Oltenia. I was awfully embarrassed, just awfully embarrassed, knowing how poor people were in that area.’
So she felt guilty that they were prosperous.
As we were walking in the Peasant Museum area and I told her, ‘How beautiful are these villas. Incredible what sophisticated people lived once here!’ It was strange that she said not that indeed, as I was under the impression that there lived people who were intellectuals, and professionals, who worked hard for generations, but that, ‘All this richness was made on the peasants’ back, they were exploited la sânge/to the bone. Even the museum was created to honor the peasants’ upheaval of 1907.’ I was a bit unsettled. Money is dirty.
Also you know, she owns a company, she needs to keep up her perfect looks. She goes to manicure, to hair salon, wears stylish shoes. I was in a summery dress with flip flops. This is how we go about it in New York. And my hairdo, as you see, is avant-garde, shower and go, no time for hair salons, and suddenly I felt self-conscious, ‘How does she feel about walking with me on her side?’ and I’d think about our income disparity, and things that shouldn’t be thought about in a friendship. I was thinking, ‘Is she embarrassed by me?’ But she actually had a great time! While I was agitated, ‘Well, now that she creates an event for me in her home town, now I’m to go to the manicure and hair salon, so she can be proud of me?!’
Do you have this kind of interior debate? Do you show up in jeans when you approach your potential sponsors?
AK: I do have this kind of interior debate. I know too well how much appearances matter in the corporate world, though it always annoyed me, since it’s a superficial matter. It was awfully annoying that I had to dress in a certain way, like a uniform, since I’m just as bright when I’m wearing a pajama. This is how I was raised. My father is the type of distracted savant, he is one of the… now he retired, but he was one of the best doctors in Galaţi, in the entire geographical region, in Moldavia, in his field. They’d send him patients from as far as Iaşi, saying, ‘You must go to that doctor only for your tests before surgery!’ so on, but on the street if you saw him, nu dădeai doi bani pe el/you’d not think much of him/you’d take him for a beggar/looser. He’d say, ‘What matters is what’s in my head. I don’t give a hoot of what people think about me.’ So I think I grew a bit like this.
But ending up in a corporation I conformed and I became a woman who wears high heels and goes to manicures and hair salons before an important meeting, knowing I had to look impeccable. So I’m torn now. I enjoy looking well put together but I’m not at ease. It’s not the real me. I’m comfortable like this, in a T-shirt and jeans, but indeed when I go to an important meeting, I give up the T-shirt and jeans and it’s alright, this is our convention, no problem. The way we agreed to speak Romanian and not French, so I accept I have to dress in this way. It’s a matter of standards, and it’s okay.
It helps me, comparatively to a person who worked all her life for a foundation, in a non-commercial environment, that I can understand the other side. When a person considers giving me money, he doesn’t do it because I ask him, or because my cause is a good cause, but because he resonates or because he gains something, ‘What’s in it for me?’ you know. Not necessarily that there is an exchange, but that I make them feel better if they give money.
I was thinking awhile ago, that our foundation should be very professional, run exactly like a company, efficient, professional, that sets some goals and pursues them. Not functioning on a whim, like, ‘Oh, well, today I don’t feel like doing this,’ so on. This is a big problem with donors in Romania, no one informs them how the money was spent, they never receive an update, nothing. There was a lot of arguing when with the 2010 flooding. A lot of people were raising money for help, but then later no one knew what happened with that money. ‘We used them for the flooding efforts, thank you very much.’ But we’re talking about millions of Euros. I want our foundation to be very responsible and accountable. If you give me 50 lei, I shall tell you what we’ve done with those 50 lei. Not that, ‘My thanks. I’ll give you a call next year when we’ll need money again.’ This is our principle: transparency, responsibility. Which I might have not had, were I to go straight from college to working for a foundation.
EV: Thank you. If there are any questions I’ve failed to ask you…
AK: Well, I’m passionate about what I do, and often I can’t tell if the one who listens to me sees a clear red thread running thru my speech. Well, there is a detail I’d like to add, they often ask me, ‘Okay, how did this idea come to you? You were all the time away, in meetings, when did you have time to even think things out?’
I always remember with joy how three or two years ago, two years ago, we were on vacation, on the beach, your mind free of the day by day worries, and it came to me, while reading Cousteau’s biography. Jean Jacques Cousteau, the sea explorer. He says there how when he was 35 years old, two children, having an ordinary job, so on, and one day someone invited him, he loved swimming, so he was invited to dive into the sea and test an autonomous diver swimming costume. You know how they used to be, like they were on a space ship, about 50 kilograms heavy, made of iron, and there was a hose thru which the oxygen came. Well, this was more like what we know nowadays, everybody is scuba diving with those things on their back. And he says how when he got in the water, he went for a weekend, and when he looked around in the water, he discovered a world he had no clue it existed, and his entire life changed.
So I often think about how I was on the beach, we were in Costa Rica on our exotic honeymoon. That white sand and those palm trees, everything perfect… and it hit me, ‘It’s not absolutely obligatory to lead a linear life, to keep on working in this corporation, like it or not, and when I retire I shall do what I really like, take my grandchildren to the swimming pool. No, something can show up and everything changes radically!’ and for me it was that moment. What does motivate me personally? And so, after three days...
EV: Did you inform your husband promptly?
AK: Well, it was a long vacation; we had time to discuss matters. Usually on previous vacations we’d try to settle in for three days, enjoy it for one day, then get depressed for the last two days because our holiday ends so quickly. Then we had enough time to thoroughly look at how it would really work out financially, since with our corporate-worker mindset we kept on focusing on financial projections. It seemed feasible. But then we returned to work, and we didn’t have time for much thinking. I wanted to have a baby, and it seemed incompatible to give birth to a baby and start a new project at the same time, it seemed to me you can’t put so much energy in two matters…
EV: One more question: how did it feel to be a Romanian hire for a multi-national corporation? Did you feel exploited, or less than your American counterparts?
AK: I never had the feeling that I’m not their equal. That’s what I liked very much. Well, sure, the corporate bullshit, ‘We’re one large family,’ blah blah blah, but when they restructure the company, the HR announces you your job is gone. But overall I enjoyed being their equal and able to speak to the company vice-president on the same footing, and he’d listen to my opinion and if it was a valid one, he’d act on it, if not, he’d tell me so, without firing me.
It was utterly different than a Romanian company where you had to get past his vigilant secretary to even talk to him, and you’d shake with fear when the director summoned you, what might he have to tell you, and you kept your head lowered, don’t ever contradict him, so on. I didn’t encounter such behavior in this American company. It was a straightforward work relationship and, in the end, efficient, because this is what’s all about, not that if we like it or not, but if it functions.
For me it was an opportunity to work in a multi-national company, as opposed to a Romanian company. Clearly I had many benefits, my salary was larger, the experience I learned, all that training and workshops, I still benefit from now. The most important thing I received from this company during the five years I stayed with it was travel. They had offices all over the world so I traveled more than I’ll even be able to travel to the end of my life. I’ve seen, I don’t even know how many continents. Alright, I’d go to the airport, hotel, then office, and if I was lucky I’d go an hour on the streets in the night, but still it was an extraordinary experience. This is how I’ve seen New York too.
EV: Thank you.
AK: I thank you. I’ve rather talked my head off.

Update: I wrote Alina to see if the foundation is still active, knowing how hard it is for them, and yes, they continue to do their good work. They have new projects, some of their initial ones were put aside, as their efforts got structured.

Here are the links to interviews with several other wonderful people who likewise struggle to make Bucharest a better place:

 

On Altruistic Garbage Picking at National Level, Charitable Head Shaving, Hard Existentialist Questions, and Nightmares of Teeth Falling and Dogs Jumping Off Balconies

The Lessons of Rescuing Centuries-Old, Wondrously Painted, Wooden Churches from Decay

Skinning Alive Frescos Is What We’d Been Forced to Do

Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, witnessing democracy, freedom of speech and faith, and engineering social change thru art being one of them, I’d be grateful.

 

New York
September 5^th, 2013