"I think Autumn is more soft-spoken than Winter. It likes to whistle beneath its breath. You can tune out the sounds of Winter by piling things high against it -blankets, bowls of soup, hats pulled down- but the sounds of Autumn follow you everywhere, whispering. And whistling. Tiny tales, that’s what Autumn tells. Stories told the way dreams tell stories, with beginnings middles and ends which keep getting swapped around, until they are all equally neither beginnings middles nor ends. Something about the Autumn sky at dusk is full of the past, but not the past which you’ve gladly forgotten. This is the past which you are aching to remember. With a real ache, an almost terrible ache. Not as a bad as a toothache, perhaps. More like a headache, after too much alcohol. Or a heartache, after too much love."

the drum the cake the messiah     Sharswood Elementary School in South Philly, on 4th Street near the Delaware River, was where I went to kindergarten. My mother was a brand new 4th grade teacher at Sharswood. She went to work as a substitute teacher a year after my younger brother was born. Sharswood was her first full time position. She loved her job, and the school kids loved her. Not only did she teach the regular classes but she also played the piano at the recitals. Her mother’s maiden sister, Aunt Josephine, taught her to play the piano and a few years down the road Aunt Josephine would teach my brother and me as well, once we moved to our own house on 21st Street and got a baby grand piano for our living room. In my kindergarten days we still lived in the apartment over my Grandfather’s grocery store. My father had been raised in the apartment over the store on the corner of 10th and Jackson Streets. Then in the 1940’s my grandparents had bought the house across the street and a little ways down the block, at 943 Jackson Street. When we weren’t in the apartment we were at my Grandmother’s house. We spent as much time with her as we did with our own mother. She cooked great meals for everyone. Plus she had a tv set which sat in a cabinet on the floor, a little black and white screen safe inside a big wooden console, and in the late 50’s that’s where we watched cartoons. My mother loved doing art projects with her school kids and many times she’d bring the projects home for me and I’d do them. I remember making one of Columbus’ little ships out of clay. And once, when I was older, I made a volcano and then Mom would put some stuff in the top and light it and it gave off great sparkles. I loved doing artwork. Once our teacher in the kindergarten at Sharswood School taught us how to make little drums. I drew intricate designs on my drum. I don’t know where I got the idea for the designs. They were intertwining, two lines which crossed over one another in repeating patterns and went around the drum and joined up right where they started. And they weren’t just lines, they were shapes, and they looked like they could be some kind of long curving creatures that moved in waves. 

Maybe I had seen something like it on a cartoon. I was fascinated by it and long after the other kids had finished their drums, I was still working on mine. I think I only used a few simple colors, but I remember that the main colors were blue and white. My teacher said, “Joey, that’s very beautiful. I’ll hang it up on the wall outside our classroom so everyone in the school can see it,” but I said, “No, I’m bringing my drum home, I’m keeping it in my bedroom and it will always stay with me.” “Don’t you want everyone in the school to see your drum?,” she said. I was very firm in my decision. Nothing would part me from my drum. My teacher, who was an old kind woman who never tried to order me around, was very surprised and for some reason she wouldn’t stop asking me to hang up the drum on the wall in the school hall. The idea began to seem terrible to me. I thought about my drum being all alone on the wall, with no one to watch over it. All those kids would be going past it all day long. And what would happen at night time? They’d turn off all the lights, and my drum would be hanging there in the dark in that scary silent school. I began to get angry. “No!,” I said, and I might’ve even shouted at this nice old woman. She didn’t know what to do. Everybody in the room, all the children, had stopped what they were doing. My teacher was completely surprised. She had never expected this sort of thing. She really didnt know what to do. I imagine I looked at her rather fiercely. It was the end of the school day. “Well, we’ll see what your mother has to say about this,” she said. The bell rang, and now I was standing in the hallway where I always waited for my mother to come get me, but I was hanging on to my drum with great resolve and all my classmates were standing around me waiting to see what would happen and the teacher stood by my side waiting. When my mother arrived the teacher explained what was going on and my mother took her side. She tried to convince me to give up my drum. First she tried to reason with me, and then she threatened force. She whispered in my ear what she would do. But I wouldn’t budge. Finally she grabbed the drum and took it from me. I had to let go. I was afraid it would break if I didn’t. 

She gave the drum to my teacher. But my teacher did not look at me with a look of triumph. She wasn’t that sort of woman. I held her eye and she stared into my eyes with a look that said, “I really don’t understand you at all.” Maybe there was even a sort of fear in her eyes. I said to my mother, “I will never forgive you,” and I stomped out ahead of her. She made her apologies to my teacher even as she hurried to catch up with me. When we got back to Jackson Street we went straight to my Grandmother’s house. We often ate dinner there. Soon my Dad would be back from work. My two aunts still lived in the house. I burst through the front door and ran right to my Grandmother and buried my face in her dress and cried hot tears. When my Grandmom asked what was wrong my mother said, “Oh, it’s nothing,” and went upstairs. My Aunt Jan took my mother’s side. “Joey, why didn’t you just let your teacher have the drum? You’re so obstinate!” But my Grandmom took me in the little kitchen in the back and gave me some cake and a glass of milk. Afterwards, I wouldn’t even look at my mother. Sometimes I’d see her looking at me, but I’d just look away. When my Dad came back from work he said, “What’s wrong with you, Joey?,” but my Mom just waved her hand and he let it go. What I wanted most of all was to look at the design I’d drawn on my drum. I wanted to sit down on the couch in my Grandmom’s living room with my drum in my lap and turn the drum round and round and just look at the design. And my Mom always had plenty of crayons for us. Maybe I could get my crayons and keep drawing on the design. Maybe after a while I could even add more colors in. This was Friday, so it wasn’t till Monday that I was able to stand in the school hallway and look at my drum which had been put high up on the wall so kids couldn’t reach it. But from that far away I couldn’t see the design the way I wanted to. You had to be able to hold the drum in your hands, you had to be able to turn it over and over and then you could study the design. When they finally gave my drum back to me I told them I didn’t want it anymore. I threw it down and walked away. 

When I was twenty two years old I went to Jerusalem, and when I came home it was almost winter. I didn’t want to be back in Philadelphia, but here I was. That New Year’s Eve we all went out and I got drunk on whiskey I kept in a canteen I'd gotten in Israel. Somebody gave me a pill, some sort of drug, and I was staggering and saying "Who is the Messiah?" and nobody could calm me down. I was sliding downhill from wall to wall and breaking things up. They tried slugging me and finally I ran away and in the deep cold of that night I walked through the rough neighborhoods of South Philly where a white man would never go on foot and I remember, as I started to sober up, seeing my boots on the pavement and putting one boot in front of the other as I hiked and at last came to Center City. I saw a girl across the street, she was standing in front of a dark shop window and she was crying. She pointed to the window and she said to me, “That’s a plane tree, and there’s the mommy and the daddy and there’s the child. They're a family. They're all on the plane tree.” The store sold expensive women’s clothes. A few well dressed mannequins were on the other side of the glass. The girl’s name was Suzanne. She told me a painful story about her father and about their terrible fights. I told her I had come back from Jerusalem. She said, “I just love that dress.” In the window there was a dress with an intertwining design which I’d seen many times and in many places and which I remembered now was similar to what I’d once drawn on my kindergarten drum. I told her the story and Suzanne said, “You saw the messiah. As plainly as you see me right now. The messiah is what brings us together. All of us together on the plane tree." She said, "It's the family. You and me, we're on the plane tree together. We'll have the child and we'll be a family.” Then she said, "We'll buy a green car. I have the money." Later that night I abandoned her. I told her I'd bring her back to her father's house but she wouldn't go. So I walked away. As I began the long hike south in the pre-dawn hour I kept looking back over my shoulder. The growing light of day seemed to make her memory less and less real. Life would never be easy for her. She was peering into a different world. Yet it's the same world we're all looking at. Like the stars at night. They were always there for her. Only we don't see them in the daytime. And they form intricate intertwining patterns which repeat, which begin and go forth and go round our universe and return to where they begin in one great circle. With the Earth at its center, like a child's drum. Late the next day, New Year's Day, I hiked around Center City, empty and dismal after the parade, cold night once again returning, and what I remember is how the litter blew across the pavements.