ON THE STREET WHERE I LIVED©

ON THE STREET WHERE I LIVED©

By Linda Lee Greene, February 3, 2019

 

On West Second Avenue between Oregon and Perry Streets in Columbus, Ohio where I lived as a kid, many of its people were still connected closely to their immigrant roots. They wore their forebears like an extra coat of skin. It was undeniable in their eyes, their hair, their body movements, and in their language. While the broken English of their first-generation immigrant ancestors had been replaced with second- and third-generation, Americanized English, still there remained a not-quite-faded-away influence of their old country’s native tongue, especially in their usage of colloquialisms and idioms characteristic of their foreign origins.

“Mama Mia,” sailed almost hourly through the open summer windows from the house on the corner of the alley across the way from us. Like ours, it was a tall, white, multi-storied, frame house, but unlike ours, it was bursting at the seams with three generations of beautiful olive-skinned and brunette persons of Italian lineage. Immediately following his high school graduation, the oldest male-child of the family disappeared one day into a Catholic seminary to study for the priesthood. My naïve Protestant eyes watched agog from my bedroom window that overlooked the roof of our front porch when on some weekends he was home to visit in his crisp, black clerical-garb and newly-acquired bent-headed air.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” was more commonly heard on the nimble lips of our Irish neighbors. In them I saw fragments of my mother and much of her kin: red hair, pale skin, rugged individualism. Not only did our Italian and our Irish friends share the same religion, but they also increased the city’s population year upon year upon year. Rather than outdoor chairs and tables like those on our front porch, theirs overflowed with baby carriages and strollers that bloomed seasonally like flowers in a perennial garden. Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, a comfortable walk from us, was their anchor to our neighborhood. Its religious services still draw worshippers to it from both near and far. Those people with their strong sense of family and connection to their church left a profound mark on me, one that shapes me to this day.

An enormous brick monstrosity on the corner of my street one block west of us housed a beer bottling operation and was a mooring of the German people among us, those historical brewers of beer who in large part had created Columbus. We were reminded of just how oppressive living in the air-space of a brewery can be as minute-by-minute it spewed its noxious fumes into the atmosphere. The sound I most identify with my German friends-of-old is the “Oom pah pah,” of their folk music that pumped aggressively through the airwaves of our neighborhood. When I hear that sound now, I want to jump to my feet and dance, as I did back then on the sidewalks fronting their houses.

Across the back alley from us lived a family in which the mother and father were deaf and therefore unable to speak, while all of their many children had perfect hearing and speech. That phenomenon of biology fascinated me, and bewildered me at the same time. I just couldn’t reconcile in my mind how offspring could emerge so unlike their parents. While their life was underpinned by silence in many ways, they were a joyous and yes, a chatty group, their quick fingers flicking noisily in the parent’s mysterious sign language.

On the street where I lived, mystery abounded in the diversity of its people. There was always some intrigue to unravel, a weird and wonderful culture to experience, a fascinating tradition to appreciate, and never was there discrimination of any kind among us. We were just people living among people, and it was a good thing!       

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/

Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

My Talking Heart: An Introduction by Linda Lee Greene

Once upon a time a very long time ago, I had a dream—not the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s overcoming injustice kind of dream, but the kind of dream we have while we are sleeping, when our conscious mind turns off for the day, and the fairies and devils of our unconscious mind come out to play, or to make mayhem, or to implant a message that might be crucial to our lives. Upon awakening, the dream to which I refer latched on to me and wouldn’t let go—not that it hounded me, but it did show up unsolicited from time to time, as it still does. I have the very real sense that it contains a lesson I need to learn, and over the years I’ve entertained various ideas of what that might be, but none that seemed plausible. The dream went like this:

I was at an art show, or an art gallery, or perhaps an art museum. The backdrop isn’t unusual in my case since in my waking life, I am an artist and have occasion to frequent places where artwork is displayed. Although other people were in attendance, I felt completely alone in the room, alone and lost in the paintings on exhibit, as is also normal for me. My spirit took flight from my body and walked barefoot and bare-headed among the grasses and trees of landscapes, dipped naked toes in the cool clear flow of streams and rivers in waterscapes, and sucked sweet juices of peaches and pears arranged in crystal bowls in still lifes. A painting of a man across the span of the room caught my eye—no, it was more than that. I don’t suggest that it called to me, or beckoned me. But I somehow knew I was supposed to go to it and stand before it at full attention.

It was a painting of a holy man, a bronzed face, dark dips and depressions beneath pronounced cheekbones and ancient eyes, near-black beard and hair touching his white tunic. The garment fell from his shoulders and ballooned open at his chest, and caught again in closure at his waist. In the center of his chest sat his exposed heart. I remember thinking in my dream that it was a duplicate of photos I had seen of the Catholic Jesus assuming the same pose—the same face, the same exposed heart.

I am not a Jesus person, or a Buddha or a Mohammad person, nor any other holy-man or holy-woman person. I adhere to no specific genre of religion, therefore I wondered why this particular image caught me so—when suddenly, the heart moved and expanded as if to sigh, and then a pair of lips parted in its center, a mouth that opened and spoke to me. I couldn’t make out the words. I just couldn’t hear them or even to intuit the message that heart had for me. But today, I have an idea of the lesson the talking heart conveyed to me, one I was unable to absorb then, because I wasn’t ready yet. I think the heart said to me, “Talk, Linda. Open up and communicate. Be vulnerable. Tell your story. Let people know you. They are waiting out there, waiting for you to connect with them sincerely.”

This is a tough mandate the talking heart laid upon me. I don’t talk about myself easily, at least not the unmasked me. I’m going to give it my best shot, though, in a series of writings I am calling “My Talking Heart.” Today is the introduction; the next one will be chapter one, and then chapter two, and on and on. I hope you hear me in my musings. And if you do, won’t you let me know, please?