The Current Status In My Memoir About Family
I had been aware of this issue for a long time, but what’s a long term, anyway, when you are 83? So, let’s just agree on a few decades, yeah, that’s the ticket! WTF happened? Where did they go? Why do I not hear from them? Yes, some are dear to me, acknowledge my very existence, respond to emails, call me, and are truly integrated into my life and well-being. Those are my second cousins, none of the first, but the second ones. Allison, Sharon, Gerry, and…and… and as Bugs Bunny used to end his cartoons with, “That’s All Folks.”
I have had the occasional email from one or two others, but it is usually about me sending them a note about what I am accomplishing with my memoir about family, my rock and roll memoir, or this more personal side of my memoir about family, or about them finding an old picture to send me, with little conversation beyond that. If I ask how you are or what’s new with you, I do not get a reply. So, it seems that other than the three charming ladies, who are my second cousins in hierarchy, but first in my heart, the rest of the family could not care squat if I were alive or dead!
In My Memoir About Family, These Were The Good Times
From my earliest years, when memory can recall such events, I remember the love shown at family gatherings. These usually took place at my Uncle Charlie’s “Pinch Your Cheek” Haibloom’s home. The first thing I remember about his home was that all of the houses had the same stairs going up, and under the stairs was an entrance to a lower apartment. Both the stairs and the balcony at the top were adorned with the most beautiful array of pebble stones I had ever seen up to that time, as a four-year-old (approximate age).
My Uncle Charlie In My Memoir About Family
Once inside Charlie’s “Pebbled Castle” and after his “cheeky welcome,” the rest of the family would surround my mother and me, inquiring about our well-being, asking how we were, and quickly sharing the latest family gossip, always well-meaning and never malicious. My memoir about family covers this in some detail, explaining why I preferred this to life at home. Depending on my father’s mood swing, from his manic-depressive state, he would either glad-hand all or sullenly shrink into the background, which best suited me at that time.
Next to greet me, as I wrote in my memoir about family, was my lovely aunt Francis, a sophisticated and charming woman who adored me. If Charlie, by the nature of lending us his home for our family circle, was the king, then Francis, by her warmth and love, was the queen. In that same generation was the most dapper gentleman in our family, my uncle Harry Schwartzberg, brother to my loving aunt Josie, who, as I write this and think about her, brings tears to my eyes.
Harry was a bookie, and that meant he was, as the mob guys would say, “he’s with us.” Aside from being the best-dressed member of our clan, with my father the worst, wearing, for example, a striped shirt, with checkered pants, and his belt pulled up near his chest as tight as he could make it, and looking like Ed Grimley, played by Martin Short, on the original Saturday Night Live. One of my favorite memories of Uncle Harry, the bookie, was when he took me to Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay for some cheesecake, where he was a well-known fixture, and probably took his bets there as well, although I am guessing at that.
Harry’s sister was my Aunt Josie, the mother of my loving cousins, Helen, Joan, who were twins, Donald, and Violet. Josie was adorable. All she could show was love, and she showered it on me profusely. She never could do enough for me, and I was a regular visitor at her house, usually stopping there, following a visit to my Grandmother, Lena Derman, who was also a fixture at our family gatherings. Only hearing the stories later in life from my cousin Allison did I find out how Josie’s husband used to beat her, until she finally divorced him.
The twins were special to me, as was Helen’s husband, Ian, who I was very fond of as an adult. Helen died way too young, and Joan had a serious mental problem until eventually she required hospitalization. Donald also died too young and was a hero of mine, due to his being with the 2nd Battalion Marines, who during World War Two, were the ones who first landed on all of the Japanese island beachheads. He later told me a story about how he stopped a young man in Brownsville, Brooklyn, his patrolman’s beat, and removed a machete from his hands. When I was 14 or 15, he got me out of a scrape with the police, as I was accused of joyriding with a pal, who, unbeknownst to me, had stolen the vehicle.
Charlie’s children, Robert, who also died way too young, and Martin, also showed me great love and affection, and spent almost as much time with me at the family gatherings as my mom did watching my every move. I remember Martin showing me his pipes, and he and Robert both had the same ability, as my mother’s brothers did, that whatever gibberish I was spouting as a little child, they would bend their heads, look me in the eye, and listen with an expression of earnest interest in my babbling. Too bad that, as a child, I was unable to communicate how bad my father’s treatment of me was. If so, I think my life may have had a different turn.
I loved the Twins, as well as Violet and Donald, and I had a special relationship with my cousin Violet. I understood from discussions with Allison, my dear cousin, recently, that while Vi was loving towards me, she was quite the opposite towards her mother and sisters. Maybe a streak of her father ran through her, as I was told that she would hit her mother as her father did.
While I never saw my uncle Herb as much as some of the others in the family, due to his mostly residing in other states, because of his job placement as a pathologist, Herb and Mary were my favorites in the family, and we became very close in my adult years, right up to his death at nearly 100 years old.
What Led Up To My Dysfunctional Family Stories
The worst thing that occurred to me at a family gathering, and surely not a candidate for any of my dysfunctional family stories, was when, at the age of 16, I told my mother that I had a new girlfriend. Her name was Diane, and she had an Italian last name that I cannot remember after all these decades. The first words out of my mom’s mouth were: “What, she’s a Telena?” I don’t know if this was a literal translation of the word “Italian” in Yiddish, or more likely a local Yiddish dialect or slang. Nevertheless, mom was taken aback, nothing heavy, but more like a show of surprise. After a bit of conversation, she was good with it, especially since ten years later, my first wife was Italian.
What Brought Me To Write This Entry To My Memoir About Family
I decided to write about this for two reasons: The first, which is simple, I miss the years when I was surrounded by so many people who loved me. They showed me love at a time that, before and after the family gatherings, I would be at home with my immediate dysfunctional family, my parents. It was a respite from my abusive father and passive-aggressive mother, locked into her existence due to her failure to comprehend that she had other real choices. When I had asked my mom, as a young adult, why she stayed with my father, she replied, “I did it for you.” If that is not passive-aggressive, what is? I then replied, “Mom, if you truly did it for me, you would have left him.”
The second reason I wrote this is my own feelings of being abandoned, once again, by family. The first time, as I have previously written, was my parents’. This time I write about the rest of us. Was it my fault, their fault, my father’s fault, who they detested, and that rubbed off on me? Was I too wild, too grandiose in my success, or maybe, in my own bouts with depression following my mom’s death, did I ignore them following that? Maybe it was distance, since we all lived in different states, and the family today, in general, is not close beyond their immediate kin. I really don’t know, but it still hurts that it is so.
That is why this entry in my memoir about family belongs beside my rock and roll memoir, because the public life and the private life were never really separate. The same man who later lived through the music business, the tours, the artists, and the wild rock and roll stories also carried these older issues inside him. This is not only a rock memoir about success, survival, and backstage history. It is also a place for the quieter and more painful dysfunctional family stories that shaped the man before the noise began, and why my memoir about family remains so close to the bone.
Footnote
This final note in my memoir about family is also part of why the book matters to me. Why do I write, and how did I come to be able to do so with whatever ability I may have? The answer, I feel, is genetics: ISADORE DERMAN, my grandad on my mom’s side, who I loved from afar. He died ten years or so before I was born. He was also a writer, and when he wrote letters to my mom while she was traveling, you could actually feel his warmth and love for her as you read them. When I post my stories and images online, I use this quote: “I’ve never claimed to be an author, but I can tell a damn good story.” Well, Grandpa Derman, “I do it for you,” to paraphrase my mom’s line, and maybe because of genetics.
A letter from Grandpa Isadore to my mom, his daughter:
