JOURNAL

NOW I’ll write in my journal, my sort-of autobiography. I’ve been saving it for years; now it’s time to just SAY it…

About my stroke: after a while I said Bye-bye, doctors. I knew that if I had a ‘medical life’ it would be annoying: pills, testing, offices… 

I could go gently instead. And you know what? It works! I’d be thinking long and hard about what the stroke WAS… and by singing, and breathing: BREATHING!

Yes, it’s long and hard, that stroke, and I have to admit it, it still creeps up, I still feel it deeply within my body. And my voice is different, and my movement… A dancer helps me – and it’s really magic, I just MOVE… and I play shakuhachi too, oh YES, that beautiful Japanese bamboo flute!

I think back on what the stroke has offered, OFFERED:

Somehow life has come alive after it’s been sleeping all these years!

But I won’t TALK about it yet – it really feels sacred. It’ll come out soon enough in this journal; the stroke will eventually say ah-HA! …and YES!

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This is a picture of me. Helga – my mother, or ‘Mommy’ – loved small photographs like these. In the photo I look slightly confused.

Helga! She had a German accent with a slightly British lilt to it – her teacher had been a British fellow. Yes, she was German, and Jewish. 

In 1937 she and her parents fled from the Nazis to the USA, leaving behind a catastrophic ruin: the Nazis killed her grandmother, her young cousins, her uncles – seven of them dead. That’s her in the picture, with Uncle Kurt and Aunt Dina and Grandma Julie – they were all killed by gas or bullets.

It’s funny, but while we were kids Mommy never talked about who was killed. I think she was worried about us crying, or our anger, or who knows what emotional crevasse would open up. You can read about Helga and see lots of photos at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.org/ …search for ‘Helga Bujakowski.’

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This afternoon a HUGE militaristic parade will appear: pretty damn silly, but also frightening. Tanks, jet planes, you name it: it costs millions and millions of dollars. 

Well, my Daddy – Philip – was OLD when I came along. He was born in 1890, and yes, he lived through WW1. He was drafted, spent the year in France cleaning up dead bodies, listening to the bombs exploding every night. He said that one night 987 shells went off. And he had really bad headaches almost every day.

My Dad was a musician, and a composer. He played alto sax in a ‘premier’ parade and later became the conductor, once the war was over. Here he is, leading the ‘Pershing’s Own’ battered band in NYC, 1919:

He led parades of MUSIC – not the fascistic modern displays of bombs and tanks.

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The days slipped by, and gradually it became spring. Green, green! Ah, that color – a PARTICULAR light green – and I fall into a deep happiness!

It started with a kids’ book – I must have been seven years old. The book-cover showed a light green scarf blowing in the wind, blowing away, and it was somehow a MAGICAL light green.

Oh I remember, I remember, not just the colors but the SCENTS that I felt as a child, a sweet burning in the nose: lilies of the valley, rugosas, plums…

and the shining, shining sun…

Yes, I remember it.

We walked and walked around New York, at least me and my Daddy. And I tricycled with my sister Vivien – she was one year older than I was. There was something about the smell of the city, the exhaust, the steam coming up, the stench of wine… strangely, it felt beautiful!

Yes, we moved to a suburb, for Daddy’s huge variety of sicknesses. I went to a private school (poor choice!) and became a nerd, an unathletic but smart nerd. Ha, and I was a dancer, I just loved dancing class. And I got mumps, German measles, you name it. ALL the kids seemed to get ‘childhood diseases,’ although they didn’t stay out of school very long.

But I did, I stayed home for a comfortable long stretch and I loved it! I would fall into 103º dreams, they were vaguely threatening. For instance there was an imaginary sadistic old dentist who was trying to slip me a ‘secret’ form of ether – but strangely, I kind of LIKED that dreamworld.

I got to skip school for at least a week, no more pressures, not much homework, and I could think again about what the future would bring: firemen, astronauts… wait, no, I dreamed of becoming a writer, and a COMPOSER!

My mother completely changed herself when I was sick: she was totally compassionate, and became wonderful! Yes, Mommy went to work: cooking German ‘healing’ food (cinnamon and rice), or bringing me toys and books, or taking my temperature many, many times. And I just lay there, or slept, or watched TV… and as the years went by I could read and write in bed: YES!

Helga was above all CARING.

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Wake up, it’s 3:30 AM, I wake up smiling, drinking coffee, smoking cannabis, and writing writing WRITING. It’s an URGE, the need to be writing…

I was divorced in about 2000, then I got married again, and divorced again – whew! Yes, I have been divorced now for 10 years or more. I’ve had the stroke for all that time, the limping, the trying to talk, the endless pain – now it’s going away, going away… Well, almost: I don’t think it will ever completely go away, but that’s OK.

I live in a small rental apartment at the edge of the woods. It’s quiet and sublime. The light edges into my apartment: a golden light. As I’ve said many times already, it’s MAGIC. 

I walk in the woods for hours. It doesn’t matter what the weather is. The sound of the animals is WHOLE; the woods are oozing and dripping.

I get home again, pick up the shakuhachi flute, turn on the electric piano, and PLAY. All right, I’ll smoke more cannabis, so the fuck what: the ‘stroke-pain’ goes away!

Then writing. I just have to write, it’s in my bones. Yes, I want to get down to my journal, the REAL stuff, the pain and suffering, and the stroke – it NEEDS to be expressed.

Pain and suffering. And weirdly, the stroke can be delightfully SURPRISING! I didn’t cry, that wasn’t the exact feeling…

Well, it’ll come out later!

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Before Daddy got sick, in 1960 or so, I went out walking with him. He pointed out cathedrals he’d played at, or where composers had lived, or conductors. We walked S-L-O-W-L-Y, but it was fun! He eventually carried a ‘shillelagh’ cane, made of gnarled Irish wood. And of course he wore a necktie or bowtie, ALWAYS, and sometimes a beret.

So first we moved to the suburbs, Douglaston. We lived in a small and somewhat crumbling house from the twenties, and we walked less often now: he had his heart attack, and I was scared shitless! We walked once to ‘the Club,’ a la-di-da restaurant nearby; I ordered a ‘Shirley Temple’ and he drank first one whiskey, then another. I was just six or seven years old, and I had to really work to get him home.

So we lived in Douglaston for a year, then we moved to a ‘nice house’ out in Port Washington, right near a ‘very good’ hospital. It was really a tacky split-level, super quiet, and it contained a BAR, in bright multicolors – it’s no wonder Philip liked it! The TV is showing just a little, opening up the slat door just below the bar:

‘The burbs,’ with wall-paneling, sparkling ceilings, etc.: he hung up his various prizes, and romantic American paintings, and a bust of him… well, you name it. And he walked a little, limping around the block, sometimes pulled by our quick miniature dachshund. He looked strange indeed, an old man walking slowly, dressed in a ragged suit and tie.

Yes, Daddy HAD a great career. He was in New York City his whole life, headed the music department at New York University, conducted for YEARS on the radio in the thirties, had terrific orchestral conductors who led his compositions…

…but to me, a boy, he was VERY old-fashioned.

And sure, I felt embarrassed: ‘Oh Daddy!’ 

But I felt glad at what my father was musically THINKING. The notes came through him daily, the beautiful notes and melodies, and he smiled with a YES! Oh, there’s lots of his music that I don’t really like: that’s OK. But SOME of his stuff cuts through clouds, cuts right through them, like the light at sunrise.

Yep, I consider myself very, VERY lucky: Daddy spent his boyhood WITHOUT cars, WITHOUT airplanes. And he told me all about it, sitting in a white plastic re-enhanced Victorian armchair, with a drink… ah, the wonderful quiet days…

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MEN invented cars and airplanes. They basically ruined the 20th and 21st century. I’m seventy-one years old, have gotten rid of the car, don’t fly planes any more, and I TRY to get what is green and growing: that is LIFE! I walk a lot, a WHOLE lot, and sing, and think; and I can thank my Daddy for that, I really can!

Early on he kept appointment books for giving many at-home piano and voice lessons, all about walking, and trains, and horses. Here he is in 1907, age seventeen – and page after page of ads for ‘horseshoers:’

There wasn’t a war then… or at least we BELIEVED that.

My Dad:

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Memories of the OTHER father, Helga’s ‘Hans’ and WW2 –

Hans Adolf Bujakowki, ‘Gushi,’ and Helga: two parents and a daughter ran to the US from Germany in 1937. Except for Hans, ALL seven of his family were murdered by Nazis: a mother, two brothers, their wives, and two tiny kids.

And Hans wasn’t really Hans anymore, he changed his name to Henry A. Boyer, after the actor Charles Boyer. And that’s DOCTOR Henry A. Boyer: he was an obstetrician and gynecologist.

I guess we called him Grandpa, I really don’t remember – he was pretty damn depressed, died in 1964 in his sixties, with tobacco-yellowed fingers. Yes, our ‘friendship’ was strained, he didn’t know HOW to behave. Oh, he had known how to DO the various German hobbies – violin, film, model trains – but somehow these hobbies were gone now. When he died I inherited his spectacular ‘HO’ train set, set up in our basement. We turned the lights out and the cars lit up, with the wonderful sounds and smell! I also inherited his big brass microscope, from the nineteen-twenties.

Gushi was very different, VERY different: she knew how to smile! She brought us amazing homemade almond cookies, and puzzles, even geological rocks. And she was a swimmer, a tennis player, and a golfer. She also smashed cars up, SEVERAL cars, one against our own slightly wrecked garage. My father got a LITTLE angry the way he usually did, he limped nervously and ALMOST shouted.

Here’s Gushi, with Vivien in 1952:

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So we moved to the suburbs and I didn’t like it. Every house had an antenna, every house cast a night-time blue TV-light.

I was in seventh or eighth grade when the Atlantic Monthly covered ‘hippies.’ Ah! I NEEDED that, people who weren’t attached to TV. 

And I DO feel somewhat like a hippie today: long hair and beard, no car, rented apartment, play flute in the living room, walk walk walk… It’s kind of like it used to be…

And it’s strange, very strange indeed. If I hadn’t gotten ‘the stroke,’ I think I would be depressed right now.

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At first we went to the Metropolitan Opera House, the old one, before Lincoln Center. I loved it, the dusty, dripping, oozing of the 19th century. College students lined up for ultra-cheap tickets, or for reading scores. ‘Libretto, get your libretto!’ the old salesmen would yell. Then the students would stand, without sitting, on the 7^th story balcony, shouting ‘Bravo!’ as SOON as an aria was over. Ah, those were the days! 

The Metropolitan Opera House came back as one of the most highfalutin Lincoln Center businesses, a fancy dressed-up realm that made one think of Leonard’s Bar-mitzvah in Great Neck. Oh well.

Yes, we were in the burbs now, and ‘Mommy’ had to drive in to NYC; Daddy was too old.

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Every morning I write, yes indeed! I wake up early, around 3 AM. It is quiet out here. Then the birds start making sounds, and the light starts pouring in… It is COMPLETELY different each morning…

For instance I am just remembering Helga singing:

‘Wash hands und sit down, wash hands und sit down!’ Then a long pause, then: ‘Wash hands und sit down, wash hands und sit down!’

That’s how Mommy called us to dinner every night – it was three SUNG notes, always the same. Daddy limped slowly away from his desk; we showed up unhurriedly at the large oval table, from the thirties; it even had CHAIRS from the thirties, reassembled recently with rather disgusting plastic cushions. The usual dinner was lamb chops, overcooked, and frozen greens, again overcooked… but Daddy loved it: ‘Delicious!’

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I want this journal to keep being a journal, not anything else, not a neat story… it will be built on all kinds of memories…

I suppose I should throw in a little about my father, his history – I’ll keep it short! I’ll start with what the composer Milton Babbitt has to say:

And Bernard ‘Benny’ Herrmann, who was also his student and wrote the music for Psycho and Vertigo and a million other movies, had this to say:

So Philip met Helga, who was working for a master’s degree in music at NYU. She was a shy woman, except maybe once or twice a year when she’d switch gears and suddenly become impossibly hard to figure out – I know that about her! She was briefly married to a young conscientious objector, but I think she fell DEEPLY in love with Philip. Yep, she got divorced, and then she got married again.

And here’s what they looked like at the end:

As a boy, what WAS it about my father’s music that I ‘sort-of loved’ so much? I mean, he was old, and his music from the thirties had started to fade away…

…and I really disliked the ‘church music’ he wrote. This little boy had one word for it: YUCK.

But the OTHER music he wrote: ahhh! It was sometimes smiling, sometimes funny… but it often had a deep, deep feeling of sorrow from the War.

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You know what? I just love it here, in Portland Maine. I’ve been living here for 15 or so years, and it feels just like a NEST. The sea, the sun, the Victorian houses – it’s like my old smiling father! 

And I’m getting to know, for the first time, people my own age – they are wise! Especially the women, alone with their long-dead partners: they are shrewd, sharp-witted and SANE. I’m just beginning to learn.

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Trains! When I was a kid we absolutely loved them, and my parents loved them too – especially Daddy. In fact, he toured as a leader of the famous ‘Pershing’s Band,’ by railroad at the end of WW1… and the ‘Railroad Administration’ treated him like a prince!

When I was a kid trains were right at the height of things. We took a ‘railroad vacation’ to Florida – I loved it! Yes, on longer trips the train was idyllic – even had good food! In North by Northwest Eva Marie Saint puts down the railroad menu and tells Cary Grant, downright sexily, that she’ll get ‘the brook trout – a little trouty, but quite good.’

That was long before hundreds of railroad companies consolidated into Amtrak. Oh well.

The railroad comes by a couple of times a day, close to my apartment. There are four passenger cars and one ‘business’ car. They are just about empty. Yes, after the fifties and sixties it was no longer glamorous, and the ‘country railroad’ kept to a back burner. Individual autos were everywhere, EVERYWHERE. Sad.

I’m going to ride a train to Missouri to see my daughter, Sierra. Not a plane, not a car – just a plain old railroad! Yes! 

My father was JUST like me: he gave up driving and stayed that way – even when I’d scoffingly say ‘oh Daddy!’

I made fun of him, and now I love it.

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My mother, Mommy, Helga – ah! She was actually the driving force. It was a peculiar force, but a driving one…