Shelter From the Storm

About a year ago, consumed with troubles that filled me with fear and trepidation and overwhelmed with demons that haunted me day and night,  I finally hit upon a title, “Shelter From the Storm”  that would articulate my need to seek a safe haven, secure and safely removed from the all the storms and tribulations of my life.

Two weeks later, Sandy struck New York City.

I think back to that one summer day in Bayside where I grew up in the 1950’s, crouching in the hallway of our garden apartment with my mother and sister as thunder and lightning reverberated around us.  It was the only place in our tiny apartment without windows and despite my mother’s terror, we were safe.

Searching for that place ever since, I think of all the ways I have found it.

Going into myself, my deepest self, my memories which serve me well , in sheltering armor from the DNA of my  great-grandparents crossing the frozen tundra of Eastern Europe, and eating apple crumb pie with whip cream and sipping hot chocolate in a pastry emporium , I am safe, for the moment, from the turmoil.

Sandy was a storm of ferocious intensity and those who heeded instructions and sought higher ground were safe.  Shelter became a movable feast.  A woman in Fresh Meadows engages in fraud and files a bogus claim after Sandy in order to seek shelter in a hotel in Long Island City, infinitely inferior to her home on a tree lined street in Northeastern, Queens.  She trades one shelter for another and when caught, ends up in the hoosegow; an even more inferior shelter, on the city’s dime.

Speaking your thoughts out loud during Stalinist Russia put your life at risk.  Keeping one’s own counsel became a shelter and Illness becomes a gift.  The evil boss has tentacles, but the massive doors are shut as I go through radiation therapy.  It is impenetrable to her commands.  Phones do not ring in that room.  I am at peace.

What is safety?  Who has won?

Robinson Cano puts his foot on the bag before the outfielder’s ball reaches the first baseman.  Safe!

Sometimes one’s aura is one’s protection.  A man sleeps securely on a street that I walk down in the morning, a chiffon lime green quilt covering him.  Construction slats above, vents from a pipe against a building and an elegant footstool delineates the boundaries of his shelter.  A guest sleeps in a child’s stroller; possessions lining a concrete barrier.  From day to day, no one touches it.

As a child, I remember putting all my dolls with their clothes and forks, knives, cups and trinkets and other items into my play baby carriage, covering it all with a blanket and wheeling it into the living room so I could keep them safe.  I needed to protect them.

My dolls were safe in that same garden apartment in Bayside, where all those years ago, my mother and sister and I had found “Shelter From the Storm”.