IF YOU EVER NEED ME,
I WON’T BE FAR AWAY
by
Bruce Farrell Rosen
Smashwords Edition
* * * * *
Published on Smashwords by:
Alma Rose Publishing
San Francisco
~ CA
2443 Fillmore Street, No. 338
San Francisco, CA 94115
If You Ever Need Me, I Won’t Be Far Away
Copyright 2011 by Bruce
Farrell Rosen
Front and back cover photos by Susan Rosen
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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* * * * *
For Mom
* * * * *
Table of Contents
Campbellton, New Brunswick, Northern Canada
If You Ever Need Me, I Won’t Be Far Away
* * * * *
I see her best when I close my eyes. She was Alma to a few, Lorraine to many, and grandmother to me. I sit, eyes closed, and concentrate, as one minute becomes ten and ten become one. She was Alma the girl, Alma the woman, Alma the lover, Alma the mother. And she was Lorraine the seer, Lorraine the healer, Lorraine the mystic, Lorraine the intangible. It is no surprise she resides in this place, where the empirical flirts with the spiritual.
Sometimes I’ll see her when I am in an elevator, or while I am walking, or when I am preoccupied. She is disguised as rose buds and smoke, a scent she inhabited in life and clung to in death. This smell, perhaps ordinary to many, awakens my potential and purpose. It is my mantra, my catalyst, perpetuating cycles of thought leading back to that one brief moment.
* * * * *
Birth
is a beginning
And death is a destination
And life is a
journey;
From childhood to maturity
And youth to age;
From
innocence to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion
And then,
perhaps, to wisdom;
From weakness to strength
Or strength to
weakness––
And, often, back again;
From health to
sickness
And back, we pray, to health again;
From offense to
forgiveness
From loneliness to love!
From joy to gratitude
From
pain to compassion
And grief to understanding
From fear to
faith;
From defeat to defeat to defeat––
Until looking
backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies, not at some high
place along the way
But having made the journey,
Stage by
stage,
A sacred pilgrimage;
Birth is a beginning
And death a
destination
And life is a journey;
A sacred pilgrimage––
To
life’s everlasting
The poem “Birth is a Beginning,” by Rabbi Alvin Fine, appears with the permission of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, New York, N.Y.; and by the consent of the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues, London, England.
* * * * *
There have been a few key people in my life that have been anchors during the writing of these pages. I thank Susan Rosen for her openness and acceptance of the deep feelings that I have expressed in these pages, many of them about her. And it means a lot to me that she loves this book. Though our paths have diverged, I trust and respect her totally. And I have gratitude to her for many things, especially our wonderful sons. She is also the photographer of the front and back cover photos.
Gwen Jones has been a source of healing for me over the past several years. She has been there through many turbulent moments (and many joyful ones), often simply listening when I had much to say, providing a kind and compassionate smile, allowing me to enter the serenity of her personal space. Her practice of Network Chiropractic--her healing touch--has been calming and liberating.
I thank my two sons, Michael and Jonathan, just for being Michael and Jonathan. But, in particular, I thank them for always reminding me that I must finish this book, to not let too much time pass before going back to it.
I thank my sister, Heidi, for her insights, and she often reminds me of my mom. She is a profound woman, a sister and true friend.
I offer my thanks to Marlowe Rafelle for her attention to detail in the proofing of the manuscript, as well as the questions that she asked as a result of her careful reading. She is excellent.
I owe an enormous thank you to my editor, Simon Hayes, for his deeply intuitive reading of this book. It is almost as if he had written it himself.
A big thank you to Isabella Michon who has been key in the preparation of the materials that bring this book to the public. She has been a true partner in this project.
I have profound appreciation for the tireless work of Jeffrey Reynolds of Liquid Pictures. He was incredibly competent and professional in translating the changes of the final edit to print.
The requirements of my “day job” in the financial world are demanding, and I wouldn’t have been able to write freely in the evening if it were not for the absolute “bedrock” support of my assistant, Mary DuSablon. And she was instrumental in providing research for the writing. Many thanks to Mary.
And, of course, the publication of this book owes so much to the insight, experience, intelligence, friendship of Donald S. Ellis. He is extraordinary. Don, I am grateful that our paths have connected.
Bruce Farrell Rosen
* * * * *
It is an interesting phenomena of memory that through recollection we are clearer about “who we were” than “who we are.” As we think back over our lives—the music, the feelings and the places where we stood; the scent of perfume, a flower, bus exhaust, the sweet scent of hashish at a concert, the taste of a kiss that triggers the passion of love—we gain objectivity of who we were, our ambitions, fears, longings—our essential qualities. One of the reasons that I must visit London every chance I get is because of the “London scent” that I ingested when, at the age of eighteen, my mom (with little means) made a high school graduation trip to Europe possible for me. It was a surprise that she could make this trip happen, and I fell in Love with London above anywhere else, the scent a combination of bus and car exhaust, Indian aromas wafting through the air, strong unfiltered tobacco, warm beer, British accents dripping with an almost edible flavor, all set against a backdrop of the red buildings of Chelsea and Knightsbridge, the green of Hyde, St. James, Green Parks. I fell in love with this place; and there will always be the eighteen year old in me discovering London for the first time, every time I return, and return I must till the end of my time.
It has always been a fact of my life that I have endeavored to record the sights, sounds, fragrances and tonal qualities of my experience. The voice of my departed mom is as clear to me in memory as it was audible during her lifetime. I hear the voices of my children at younger ages, Michael telling me with pure sweetness at the age of eight that he would like a sip of water as we walked through Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco; Jonathan laughing and dancing, singing along with me to “Catch the Wind” by Donavan. I used to tease him that trying to capture him and hold onto him for a little extra time was like “trying to catch the wind.” Music always touched me in deep ways; in these pages I strive to tell what it was like to hear some of the fabled rock bands when they arrived, the feeling of who I was when the lights went out, the pounding rhythms of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” starting the show. How well I know that 16 year old, perhaps much more so than this person in his mid-50’s today. It is true that such is always the case, and that the person I am today will be more clearly revealed in a few years time.
In these pages I have sought to be true to the person that I have been, because in clearly knowing who we were, we gain a better understanding of who we are. I will be forever changed by the night a man broke into our home and tried to rape my mom, my father out of town. I must have screamed at the top of my lungs, because it chased the man away, but my recollection is that I wasn’t creating any sound at all. I do know and understand that boy, and how that boy was affected in that moment. I’ll never forget where I was—who I was—when my boyhood idol, Sandy Koufax, pitched a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs, that September night in 1965. I idolized the man––living in a neighborhood where there were, virtually, no Jews; he represented heroism, dignity, to me––and I think the experience of that “perfect game” as broadcast by Vin Scully—his echoing, resonating voice spiritual in a deeply baseball way—affected me forever. How does one not remember who they were, and how they changed, that night in 1964 when the Beatles burst on the scene on the stage of the Ed Sullivan show? So much of my life after that was affected by the perfect harmonies of John and Paul, the scents, the sounds, the kisses, the joy and sadness infused with the DNA of the music of the Beatles.
As the story unfolds, I sought to understand myself through memory, but to also understand memory through being true to the self that I am today. I strive for honesty in the present and the past. This is a book of philosophy, understanding our actions, their cause and effect against the notion of free will or determinism. We discover Eastern philosophy, spirituality, premonition, love of family, loyalty of friendship, loss, hope, belief, redemption, paying a price for choices, the joy of sport, music, and the desire to understand the events that unfold around us during these tumultuous times. It is a book that strives to understand responsibility, personal boundaries, the notion of regret and whether it is necessary to regret. Ultimately, it is a book about joy, the memory of joy, the joy that we carry with us, joy in the present. Ultimately, I believe this book is guided by simple love; my hope for readers is that they will rediscover themselves, perhaps understand themselves through memory, and heal their wounds as they read these pages.
Bruce Farrell Rosen
* * * * *
I really didn’t have to ask her out for a glass of wine after the play that night. We could have parted with a compassionate handshake, suggestive of some sort of recognition that there is a kinship here, a kind of knowing of one another that would seem improbable given that we had just met several hours ago when I walked through those Steinway doors in Midtown Manhattan. She was there to audition a few pianos for me, a concert pianist in her younger days, her delicate, symphony hall touch hardly diminished by aging hands and the grinding pressures of having to retain her prominent position as a leader in the annual tally of pianos sold, dollars delivered to the company.
I had come from San Francisco to buy a piano for my son; Michael was in New Hampshire at a summer music composition camp and would be attending the Oberlin Conservatory in the fall on a music scholarship. He had just performed a stirring Shostakovich a couple of weeks earlier, in his chamber orchestra, had received a standing ovation from the Marin Academy audience; and in a matter of just a few months would be able to pursue music virtually full time at the Conservatory.
He had worked so damn hard in school, and I so much wanted to reward him with a Steinway piano, something he would treasure for the rest of his life. The ability to buy that piano had not come easy to me. I had not been born with a silver or even silver plated spoon, but had become pretty successful at managing bond money, particularly tax-exempt bond money for all sorts of clients, the very affluent as well as those who needed to save a little on taxes. I had worked painfully hard to develop this clientele, starting at a small municipal bond firm on receiving a graduate degree in International Relations at San Francisco State. I had written a thesis on terrorism, a popular subject in the years to come. I had started out cold-calling about 10 hours a day, and after about a year had some pretty nice relationships with some families. Twenty-four years later, many of these families have become like family to me.
My approach was always to err on the conservative side, and it served me well over the years. Indeed, the money didn’t come easy, but come it did. Nothing was ever taken for granted, and as I walked through those doors into that opulent Steinway showroom, there was a pride, a joy, a type of satisfaction that I had never quite known, the sense that I could give something so profound to this young man who demanded so little of me. I was filled with love for him as we auditioned pianos.
•
We sampled pianos, but there was a sort of hypnosis at work. I wanted to know her a bit better—her playing seduced me and her voice charmed me. I offered her the ticket to the play that night, the ticket having just fallen in my lap from a friend who at the last minute would not be able to go. I didn’t have to offer her that ticket; I could have gone alone, and she didn’t have to accept. But a few hours later she did accept, we did go together, and we did drink that wine.
It was a ruby-red Italian that we drank that night, July 23rd, 2005, at an Italian outdoor café, on a little side street just off the theater district. The night felt like velvet, the humidity not oppressive, almost a kind of trade wind lending a softness, a tranquility to the jagged edges of this intense place. We each finished our glasses of wine, ordering seconds with a salad. We drank the seconds, shared the salad, our forks sort of bumping into each other all over the plate, the city of New York becoming a masterpiece.
I had never had an affair nor had gone in search of one—but my passion for this woman was overwhelming, a charm that was so intoxicating. I felt intensely happy that night, and there was a cathartic release of emotion as I poured out to her everything that I was feeling; and I had no idea that this much had been bottled up inside. There was a feeling of awakening to something that had been dormant or sleeping within me for a long time, certainly since before my mom passed in 1999. I surrendered to this feeling in the moment, tried to prolong it as long as it might last, wanted to be courageous and allow myself to feel it. But in short time the edges of my soul began to hurt, because Susan, my wife, was at home, impervious to the effects of a woman on her husband.
•
In the years before my mom died, Susan and I had been busy raising two boys, and we were giving it everything that we had. Neither of us had been raised with much money, but the success that I was having in the bond business, along with her steady pharmacist’s income permitted us to buy a home in the costly city of San Francisco, as well as put these two boys through the area’s better schools, which meant private. We recognized a talent for music in my older son, Michael, and supplemented his education with music training at the S. F. Music Conservatory. Our younger son, Jonathan, had shown an uncanny ability to memorize sentences, moved like a dancer, and was passionate and dramatic in virtually everything he did. We enrolled him in the American Conservatory Theater’s Young Conservatory for children.
Susan and I felt a deep kinship with one another, and we blanketed our boys in a protective cocoon filled with gratitude for the blessings of this family. We felt a kind of love that most parents know—selflessness, a desire to be present and enjoy the moments before us, a recognition that life doesn’t get any sweeter than these cherished times when a family is together.
The presence of my mom in the life of our family added a depth, richness and guidance to our lives that I tried to embrace as much as I could while she was alive. So when she died of lung cancer on September 7,1999, the cavity in my heart and gut would be too much to comprehend. God, I do know, truly does give us just as much and no more than we can handle at any moment in time. The loss of my mom will take a lifetime to digest, so profound was her influence.
How might one take in and grasp in the moment and immediate aftermath of her death the gravity and meaning of her life and loss? I could only absorb it in doses; and however large these doses seemed, they are pieces of a much larger hole that will be amortized over a lifetime. As I write this today, eight years later, sadly estranged from my lovely wife, Susan, looking over the city and the San Francisco Bay, I continue to make meaning of my mom’s life and passing. I endeavor to consider the life that she would want (and does want) me to live, and try to keep my heart as open as I possibly can so that I can feel her presence.
There is an ebullience, a joy, an overflowing fountain of compassion that my mom brought to this world, and it touched so many souls. The more that I am able to remain open and not be weighed down by the gravity of work, or guilt, or regret, or responsibility (though highly responsible I cannot help but be), the deeper I am able to connect with the gifts that come from my mom, an appreciation for everything that life puts in our pathway, the smooth rides and the struggles. And to the extent that I am able to remain open to life, to not hide from truth, to be present in the company of others and to really listen, I am able to live a kind of joy, which is the inheritance from my mom. Of course, the expansion that does come from being awake allows one to hear the voices of those deeply cherished, so I continue to experience in unit doses the grief of her loss.
Absorbing the loss of my mom took a toll on our marriage, as I retreated to places within myself to which only I could go. I could go to this inner place of comfort, but I had to go alone; Sue couldn’t find me in this foreign territory. I believe that I would have enjoyed the comfort of company in this foreign soil; perhaps it would not have seemed so solitary. But she couldn’t find me. I cannot blame her for this; deeply did she grieve as well. We continued to pour ourselves into our boys all the more, and as we did perhaps a bit of intimacy was sacrificed.
•
Indeed, the wine had gone a bit to my head. The sultry breeze enveloping this section of Manhattan began to feel even more tropical. We had been laughing with gusto, and “M” had a kind of effervescence that seemed to bring me out of myself. Suddenly, everything seemed to be infused with energy and truth. The play we had seen that night was called “Doubt,” and on that warm, sultry night in New York, I discovered a bit of myself in her. There was a similarity in her smile to that of my mom, and the way she laughed from the soul, with abandon, also reminded me of my mom’s joy in laughter. Yes, the play we saw that night was called “Doubt,” but in this moment I did not afford myself the luxury of self-doubt; there was no way to doubt the moment.
Beatlemania
I was born in 1955, and experienced as a young teenager the tail end of the 1960s, but the full effect of the ’70s. I’ll never forget that night in 1964 when my father—vehemently overriding my bit of whining to his suggestion––demanded (practically threatening a strapping) that my brother and I come into the den and listen to this new group, The Beatles, being introduced on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I did like Ed Sullivan’s shows, but I was doing something else at the moment and didn’t want to be bothered. My dad really insisted and he really threatened. So we entered the room, just in time for the introduction. The Beatles had obviously been a phenomenon in England, and had caught on in the U.S. But it took that one Ed Sullivan appearance to really do the damage. Nothing was the same in this country after that performance. The insanely shrieking girls and entranced boys shown in the audience will be forever emblazoned in my consciousness.
Beatlemania catapulted the country into an excited state that involved the lives of virtually every teenager in the country. The country so desperately needed a bit of fun, the assassination of John F. Kennedy having occurred just a few months before. From the moment of that first Ed Sullivan appearance, I was hooked. I had already had a fascination with things British, and was always charmed when I met an English lad my age or happened to be introduced to a movie filmed in England. But, boy, this Beatles thing really put me over the top.
I started out loving McCartney, and though I never lost the affection, I moved into a lifelong appreciation for all things John Lennon. And, as I got older, the Lennon fascination and enjoyment continued to grow. Sure, I enjoyed “Penny Lane,” but nothing could match “Strawberry Fields” for sheer inner revelation. “Hey Jude” was great, really great, but has there ever been a more profound moment in the history of music than those opening chords to “A Day in the Life,” followed by the vibrating, intoning vocals of Lennon starting, “I read the news today, oh boy.”
I could go on for pages about the Beatles, and no doubt there will be much to say about them as I ponder my life, so great was their influence on me. The meaning of John Lennon for me now, though, in this context, is that his music was essentially an aphrodisiac in the budding passion with this New York woman.
•
I had recently seen the Lennon musical in San Francisco with my family, it having played in the city before heading to Broadway. And I heard that some changes had been made to the New York show that made the performances even stronger, some superfluous stuff had apparently been removed. As we were drinking that second glass of wine I called the concierge at my hotel to see if she might obtain a couple of tickets to the show. She took my cell phone number and promised to call me back either way. It was late at night, so I assumed that all of her connections would be shut down for the night. However, she came through. And as we were finishing that second glass of wine, the concierge informed me that she had obtained third-row tickets for the next day’s performance.
I met my New York friend there the following day and we were entranced by the music and memories. She is a few years older than myself, and it dredged up for her a lot of feelings and thoughts that she hadn’t experienced in many years, so involved had she been in her adult life performing piano concerts and selling. Tears welled in her eyes during the performance, memories of her precious sister whom she had lost at a very young age, forcing themselves on her consciousness. And memories of happy things as well—the sheer innocence, naiveté and joy of the music overtaking both of us.
I appreciated being with her that afternoon, experiencing the music and feelings again, and I felt something else as well, a sort of respect that she had been a few years older than me when this music was happening; that she was even more a product of that era. There was something that very much turned me on about that fact. Indeed, the whole experience of being with her was taking on the quality of a dream, where time seems to exist in a different dimension than it usually does in an ordinary day. And as much as I was enjoying these moments, this sort of letting go, how on earth could I not acknowledge or forget that I was married, and that Susan and I did very much love one another?
The two worlds coexisted for a moment, but I had a foreboding that these two worlds could not and must not coexist for very long. Yet, there was this passion over which I did not seem to have much control. I had always been (while not a control freak) a person certainly in control of my behavior. What had happened here? I simply could not understand it myself. I seemed to be losing boundaries. But how not to? I started feeling things so intensely that I did not know what to do with the feelings. Was it she? Was it I? Was this just the time and place, the weather a perfect conduit, to let myself out, to just allow something deep within to be released?
We took a ride on New York harbor that night, the Statue of Liberty a beacon of freedom in the offing. Perhaps there had been a kind of liberation for me that night, a brave willingness to just let myself out, damn the consequences. This realization, though, did not come lightly; there was no doubting my love for Susan, my love and responsibility for family, the pain that I was feeling on the other side of this liberation.
Alma Lorraine Rush Rosen
My mother, Alma Lorraine Rush Rosen, was born January 2, 1934, to Abraham and Mary Rush, delivered by a midwife in a cramped upstairs flat in the Chinatown district of Toronto, Canada. She was the youngest of six children, three older brothers and two sisters having come before her. She was the youngest by several years, and it had been a foregone conclusion that there would not be any more children after number five. These were the depression years, and Alma was an unexpected addition to a family of three very tough brothers, each one a paper boy who, at one time or another, successfully fought off the intrusions of neighborhood bullies intent on stealing their money, newspapers and corners.
The brothers were tough, but they had to be. Anti-Semitism was not confined to Europe, and if Jews were being blamed in Germany for the downfall of their society, there was, no doubt, a stench of this mentality in pockets all across North America. The Rush sisters grew to be extremely attractive: Yettie a buxom redhead, Sarah, a green-eyed blonde who had the local royalty chasing after her; but Alma took the prize for beauty. She could pass for many nationalities. Italians claimed her as their own; Spaniards would swear that she was from that culture’s Sephardim; and she had an Egyptian or Middle-Eastern look as well. Her complexion was of smooth olive, a figure that was just unbelievable, and large brown eyes, almost biblical in appearance, the eyes of a seer.
At the age of 17, Alma entered the Miss Toronto beauty pageant and was one of the top two or three runners-up. Many thought that there had to have been a bribe for her not to have come in first, so absolutely stunning was she. Her brothers were friends with some pretty well-known prizefighters, and one in particular—a guy who went on to become a world champion—would have given just about anything to date her. But Alma’s parents were protective and they would have none of it. It was, however, a tough life for her growing up. Abe, her father, was a tyrant of a man, but he had to be to keep Isaac, Dave and Meyer in line.
Abe was of Russian stock, his grandfather having been a bootmaker to the Czar, and his wife, Mary, of a more delicate, Austrian lineage. Theirs had been, as so many in those days, a matchmaker marriage. The union worked for many years—six children had to be raised—but over time the oppressive nature of this Russian tailor left Mary pleading for some time alone. She just couldn’t take the terror anymore. It is because of this that there is some question about Alma’s parentage. Abraham had left Mary some time around a year before Alma was born, and didn’t return until she was about a month or two old. He went off to Vancouver to sow some oats, Mary remaining behind to support the family—with the help of her sons and their paperboy money—as a seamstress. Abe would send some funds back from time to time, just enough to keep everything afloat. In any event, many in the know suggest strongly that while Abe was gone, Mary fell in love with an Egyptian psychic, the girl with the Mediterranean features so different from her siblings belonging to him. Indeed, the timing of Abe’s travels would suggest that this could very well be the case.
When Alma was quite young, perhaps six or seven years old, she befriended a couple of elder English sisters. These sisters claimed to be psychic, and saw in the young Alma a very profound spiritualism, an old soul. They discovered in Alma a kind of clairvoyance that they had not seen in anyone before. They readily admitted to the young girl that she had an astounding gift—one far deeper than their own—and wanted to help her develop it. They did this by showing Alma the art of tea-leaf reading, helping her to decipher the meanings of the images that she would discover in the cup. She began to tell these ladies facts of their own lives that were astounding to them. In short time she began to do this for others. She read for her brothers and sisters; she was so good that word got out and people were willing to pay her money—tough to come by in those years—for a reading.
She read for her mother one day and that would be it for a while, as far as the readings would go. Her information was so precise and accurate that Mary became frightened for her daughter. She saw the downside in this—that her daughter might become exploited or worse for this gift—and she told Alma in no uncertain terms that she had to keep this gift to herself for a while. No more readings. So she stopped the readings, but that didn’t mean that her psychic gift lay dormant.
One day her father asked if she would like to go along to help him collect rents, the family now owning an apartment house. She thought that would be fun. As Abraham came to the part of a dark alley where he would turn toward the apartment house, Alma said, “Pa, don’t go out there, please don’t; there is a man hiding and he is going to try and kill you with something.” Her father scoffed and began to open the door. And as he did, a man with a crowbar came from behind with just that weapon Alma had seen in her mind. She screamed, and as she did Abraham looked up to discover the man with the weapon. He was able to slam the door and take off, perhaps just in time to save his life.
When Larry first laid eyes on Alma, he had to have her, so he pursued her—eventually winning The Prize. I am the result of his success. Approximately 1959, California.
Alma Rush around age 20.
By the age of 18, Alma couldn’t take it anymore, she had to get away from this family, Her brothers were very, very tough and there always seemed to be some sort of trouble following at least one of them at almost any time. And her father, whose protectiveness bordered on cruelty. Not to mention the protectiveness of her brothers. The break came on a weekend trip, when Mary asked if Alma would accompany her on a trip to Montreal to visit a noteworthy reader of cards, Gertie Rosen. Gertie, A French Jew with roots dating to the origins of Montreal, was well known in Montreal as a very good fortuneteller. Mary had thought that it would be a nice getaway for mother and daughter, so they went off to see Gertie at 100 Villeneuve Street in what was at the time a Jewish and Greek neighborhood of Montreal. She lived across the street from Saul’s pharmacy on one side, his best seller a medicine called 222s, an over-the-counter painkiller composed mainly of codeine. Directly across the street on the other side was the neighborhood store—Rifka’s—smelling of everything sweet and sour.
Gertie had a live-in person who helped her cook and clean, named Bella. Bella looked as the name sounds. She was a very large woman, with a kind of pimply birthmark from which one would always try to look away. The kitchen always smelled like a mixture of borsht, tongue, herring and oily, overcooked chicken soup. Gertie was married to Max, but they slept in separate bedrooms. When he was home, he would greet the guests for Gertie, and when he wasn’t home, he ran one of the leading taxicab companies in Montreal. He was a redhead of Polish descent, and they had two sons and a daughter—Larry was the oldest, followed by Sollie and their daughter, Vivian. When he wasn’t driving taxis for his father, Larry played jazz clarinet and saxophone in some local bands. He looked very much like his father, perhaps about five-feet, six-inches tall, thin, with wiry, red hair, kinky, curly. He had fallen asleep the previous night in soiled clothes. And when he awoke late the next morning, he got up to discover one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen.
He came upon Alma, waiting in the parlor to see his mother. He spoke to her and had to have her. She wasn’t interested at first, he was not a very attractive sight in soiled clothes with a pale complexion. But Larry made sure he obtained her phone number, and within a few days was off to Toronto to woo this beauty. Alma wasn’t that attracted, but she needed to get away. Within a few months, they eloped, Alma’s father and brothers searching every motel from Toronto to Montreal for them. They vowed to “kill the bastard” if they could find him. Find him they couldn’t, and a few years later, on March 6, 1955, I was born in Toronto’s Mt. Sinai Hospital.
•
The story of my birth, as told to me many times by my mother when I was growing up, made it into the significant medical record books of the time. The pregnancy had been physically very difficult for her, and as sensitive as she was as an intuitive, she was equally vulnerable to major episodes of illness. She had been diagnosed with a heart murmur in her teens, and was also quite susceptible to serious colds, the flu and pneumonia. She had to be hospitalized a few times during the term. When labor started, it was accompanied by some serious hemorrhaging.
As the bleeding continued, the labor became ever more painful; it started to become apparent that the mother or the child and possibly both might not make it through this alive. The doctors told Larry that they might not be able to save the mother and the baby, and that one might have to be sacrificed. “Obviously, save the mother, save the mother,” he pleaded. “We’ll do all that we can,” was the response.
Alma had slipped into a kind of coma, an unconsciousness, and in this state she was visited by a middle-aged doctor, speaking in a calm, but serious and measured voice. “Alma,” he said, “There is a button next to you and I want you to push it. You are bleeding quite seriously, and that button will bring the nurses. Push the button and everything will be okay. You are about to have a boy, and he will be a very special boy. So press the button now.”
Alma pressed the button, and almost immediately on doing so a frenzy of activity occurred around her, the lives of her and her baby very much in jeopardy. “Thank you doctor, thank you so much for your help,” she started. But there was only a team of nurses in the room, and there, apparently, had not been a doctor in the room speaking to her at all. “Alma, you are delirious,” one of the nurses said to her. “Where did the doctor go?” Alma replied.
“There hasn’t been a doctor in this room; you were in here alone for a while. And you are a very, very lucky woman that you pushed that button. You have been bleeding very seriously, but it looks as though we have been able to control it. You might have died.”
“I know that there was a doctor there—he is the one who told me to push the button.” “You are imagining it, Alma, but you are very fortunate tonight, very fortunate tonight,” came the answer. I almost didn’t make it that night, and the same is true of my mom.
Apparently, a whole team of doctors was called into that Mt. Sinai delivery room that night. They were there to watch the top doctors attempt to save the lives of mother and baby. My birth was a case of placenta previa, where the placenta precedes the baby—there being no fluid for delivery. Infant death due to suffocation or other causes is a real possibility in this state of affairs, and given the weakened condition of mother, the loss of both might have happened.
* * * * *
March 19th, 2007
My mom lived to tell me this story many times as I was growing up, and as I sit here tonight, reflecting on my life, and looking on the darkened San Francisco Bay, the lights of the city sparkling like diamonds in the foreground, and the elemental, illuminated Golden Gate Bridge—draped in pearls of light—I feel an intense anxiety in my neck and stomach. Sue and I are separated from one another, and I can’t quite diagnose the reasons for it. There is some sort of force at work that seems to have demagnetized our magnetic attraction. I love her deeply, but it had become unbearably intense since the revelations of New York City. At least in this apartment to which I have moved I do not have to explain what I am feeling and whether or not I am feeling. I am alone, but there is quiet. And over the past several months I have so desperately needed some quiet.
•
Michael is in college, and Jonathan will be a college freshman in the fall. Sue and I have been in emotional agony since the New York City revelations, so perhaps it was just better to leave while Jonathan was still home, rather than when the house was totally empty. The loneliness aches, my having been so much a part of the family for the last 20 years. Though the quiet is sometimes deafening, there are other moments when I drink in the space and quiet. I often miss Susan, but if I walk to the house to see her, I experience our separation acutely. I look into her eyes and witness a biblical depth; I often told her that I thought that she might have been Ruth from the Old Testament in a past life. She is one of the top and most-respected pharmacists in the city. She read all the right books, and raised the boys with the kind of love and tenderness—bringing out the best in them and providing structure and kindness in large doses—that affords them the opportunity to love deeply in their lives, to live full lives filled with compassion.
Yet, we are not together, and might not ever be together in the same way again. This causes me great pain. But as I sit here at this moment, I just don’t feel that I can put the eggshells back together. Something happened, and I can’t say what it is. Perhaps I know, and I tell myself that I really don’t know. Maybe I love her deeply, but I am not in love. Perhaps we make way too much out of being in love, as a society. We dwell on the romance, but forget the need for friendship. Sue and I will be friends till death do us part, but I hadn’t felt the romantic spark for quite a long time. Maybe it is possible that romance and friendship can also exist till death do us part. Maybe that will yet happen with Sue again. Perhaps it won’t. Maybe there is another love in store for me in this life; I just don’t know. The uncertainty can be liberating, but the lack of stability and predictability can be quite painful. Romance can be a drug, and I am not interested in filling my void with any kind of ephemeral drug of passion or any other kind. I guess I’ll have to just wait and see. That is all I really know at this moment—except that I feel quite sad and I miss my mom.
There are many messages—some might call them psychic realizations—that my mom presented to me over my life about my own life. For me, though, these were truths. When she saw something clearly, I just took it as fact. And I always took her advice when she told me of a particular direction that I should take. Many of her clients would listen to her advice, feel that she was probably correct, then willfully follow their own desires. Many of these people—several have become clients of mine in my own business—have relayed to me over the years since her death that they often realized the errors of their ways when they deviated from her advice, and were even more inclined to strictly adhere to her words when she saw something clearly.
•
A tea-leaf reading might last five minutes if there was not much to see, or if there was perhaps one significant point that needed to be revealed. She would never labor over a teacup just to give people their money’s worth. Other readings might last 45 minutes or longer. And, of course, she always left room for questions at the end. There were a few times—one in particular that she told me about—when she would look into a cup, see something quite unsavory about the person and then just put the cup back down, saying, “You’ll have to go to some one else; I just can’t read you.” In the particular instance of which she made me aware, she had seen a serious crime the person was about to commit. In telling the person that they would have to go to someone else, she added, “My advice to you is not to do it. That is all I will say.” The person, the way my mom told it, became as “white as a ghost.” She never told me what she saw in that particular person’s teacup, but I know from her tone of voice that it was very, very serious. I didn’t probe her.
Mom’s Psychic Consultant business card.
Lorraine Rose was her professional name. She would often read for the poor and “down and out” people for free, but would receive with tips some handsome payments from the glamorous and wealthy who could afford it. On one particular occasion when I came to her home in Canyon Country, a high-desert community about 30 minutes north of the San Fernando Valley, to visit her on break from attending college at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she had just finished talking to someone who must have been quite interesting, either that or the conversation had been provocative or funny, given the expression on her face. I had been out having a couple of beers with friends and walked in the door around midnight. “What are you thinking about, Mom?” I asked her. “Who were you just talking to? Anything happen? What were you talking about?” “Oh, nothing special,” she said with a bit of a wry smile. “Oh something happened; just tell me,” I pushed. “Come on, Mom, who were you talking to?” “Well Marlon Brando just asked me out on a date,” she replied. (My mom and dad had been separated for a number of years.)
My father had left the house in Los Angeles to go back to Canada when I was 16, the year 1971. I am the eldest of four kids, and at that point, my youngest sibling, Heidi, was nine; Elliot, the next youngest, was 11; and Jeff, 15 months junior to myself, was 15. Lorraine Rush raised us without any additional support, solely from her readings. She had always read as sort of a hobby for friends, but when my father left, it became—like it or not—her livelihood. Her reputation spread quickly without the help of advertising. She was very humble, and didn’t want any notoriety. Although, and within a few years she was reading for the rich and famous (though quite confidentially).
Marlon Brando had apparently been coming to her for help with his love life, and there was a Japanese woman for whom he had some deep feelings. Lorraine Rose had been advising Mr. Brando with respect to this woman, but in the process he was developing an affection for her. These conversations had been going on for some time, and (having been at school) I really had no clue that this was happening. My sister, Heidi, living at home had known the whole story for some time, and later brought me up to speed on the nature of their conversations. I really don’t know if they ever went out on a date; she never told me, though I did ask. I do know, though, that he had come to the house for a reading, and that she had gone to his home to read for him as well. Most of the sessions took place on the phone, and they took place for quite some time after I went back to college.
A few years earlier than the Brando conversation, I was also home visiting from college. I had been sitting on the back patio, looking at the mountains in the distance, when I walked back into the house to see a very elegantly dressed, highly attractive woman getting up to leave after a reading. Just after she left I asked, “Mom, who was that? Wow, what a knockout!” She nonchalantly answered that it was the actress Yvette Mimieux. “What did you see in her cup?” I asked, the randy college student getting the best of me. “You know I can’t tell you that,” she answered, and very quietly went on about her business, washing the day’s build-up of teacups.
•
The most profound message that my mother ever gave to me in a tea-leaf reading concerned something no less than my destiny. As a philosophy major in college, I spent many hours discussing and grappling with the questions of free will versus determinism, fate versus chance, the role of choice versus inaction. At this stage of my life, I have come to the belief that, as human beings, we do have choice; we can choose to act or not act. We have volition, will power and can choose to exercise it or not. The existentialists believed that our destinies are the product of our free will, and that we create our futures through our own actions for better or worse. I do believe this to a point, but I have no doubt that there is something else at work, something over which we have little control.