JOCKEYS & SARATOGA SPRINGS NEW YORK RACE TRACK

June 8, 2024September 6, 2025 ~ LouLou ~ 4 Comments

After several summers in Saratoga Springs, I discovered I loved thoroughbred horseracing. All my life I’ve been a performing arts spectator. I never watched any sports on television and only attended baseball games when my father needed a companion. The art of performance led me to experience the racetrack as live theater.

The racetrack is a stage, the jockeys are the actors, and the men and women that fill the bleachers, the picnic grounds, the Turf Club, and the private boxes are the audience. The racehorse is the star celebrity.

The tickets for admission, like any show, are based on your seating. You can walk through the gates for $3.00 or buy a box for $100,000 a year. The collage of human emotions, drama, suspense, and danger are key components to good theater.

Gambling personifies the Shakespearean twist of the racetrack. High rollers and drugstore cowboys wager to win. Some men walk out with a grocery cart of recycled cans; some walk out with enough money to buy a racehorse. They leave by the same gate, and the next day, they return for more. But why, I ask, is thoroughbred racing not considered an all-around American sport? Why don’t jockeys get athletic respect? These two spheres of lightning truth struck me while I trampled through the mud one rainy August day at Saratoga Racetrack.

I asked around for opinions. The Governor’s bodyguard remarked that it was a good question. He did not think gambling was the reason because people always bet on sports. He thought maybe that it was because, as kids, we don’t learn to race horses, like baseball and football. The public is naïve about jockeys because they have never raced. Another answer I heard was that 200,000 fans fill a ballgame on any given day and that those numbers don’t compare with horseracing.

I’m not a gambler, and I don’t ride very well, but I am a drama whore. I took my notebook to the jocks’ room to ask the jockeys what they thought about this irregularity in sports. Jose Santos had a few minutes to spare.

“Jose, do you feel like America thinks of you as an athlete?”

“We don’t get the respect that we should. I think it’s the gambling. This is the greatest racetrack in America, and there is gambling in every sport, but when you come to the track, you see it right there, and people cannot avoid it. Pound for pound, we are more fit than most athletes.”

I asked Jose what he does aside from riding. He jogs three miles every day and walks for a mile. He reminded me that if he goes down with the horse, his strength is what gets him back up again. Another misconception is that jockeys only ride for 2 minutes. Well, the race is 2 minutes, but they ride every day of the year. They do not take breaks.

“How does the public perceive you?” I asked.

“In Europe, they are treated like movie stars. Over here the jockey is just another person, and in sports, the jockey is low. I wish we had more respect, but we don’t get the publicity.”

This feels like the guts of the truth; our little minds like to align with other like minds. The leaders of the pack go to football and baseball, and the media follows behind.

Jose remarked that he only felt real enthusiasm and support when he won the Triple Crown. Otherwise, they get a little column in the paper with the results. “The Racing Form is 100 pages, and nothing is written about us.”

“What if there was a Jockey Magazine?”

“Well, that would be great. Then, the companies would be interested, and we’d get sponsors. When I go out to the park and run, I wear Nikes too.” He chuckled.

“Have they ever approached you for sponsorship?”

“No, I don’t expect they will.”

A few days later, I found Jerry Bailey before a race. It was a cinch to get into the jocks’ room in those days. That was before Elliott Spitzer sipped all the fizz out of Saratoga Race Track. These days the Press can’t walk inside the Jocks’ room. Jerry hopped onto a counter and extended his hand.

“How are you?”

“Great, Jerry, thank you for meeting me.”

“Sure.”

“Jerry, I’m very interested in the lack of sports sponsorship offered jockeys. Why do you think that is?

“Because no one is promoting us. If you don’t do anything to promote us, how does anyone know? They have bobbleheads and gimmicks like that, but there isn’t even a Jockey Calendar. Excuse me now; I’ve got to ride a race.”

Of all the risk-takers and entrepreneurs in the world, horse racing is the champion in all categories. If I decided to understand the business, attend every race, meet every owner, jockey, and trainer, there’s no chance I’d understand anything more because I do not love the horse the way a jockey does, and you can’t fool the horse!

During the Hall of Fame Induction presentation at Saratoga a few years back, D. Wayne Lucas made a speech that drew a full house of gregarious applause. This is an excerpt:

“You ride a great horse, and the owner wakes up the next day and decides to switch to Bailey. The adversity is gut-wrenching, bringing you to your knees and humbling, whether you’re a rider, trainer, owner, or breeder. There’s one thing that will keep you going, and that is simply your attitude. Attitude is the most important decision you make every day. Make it early, and make sure you make the right one. You will have a very full and very peaceful life.”

Maybe it’s time for a Jocks Nike, call it the Two Minute Nike.

SWIMMING WITH GANGSTERS

June 8, 2024June 8, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Ella blew out tunes like a smoke stack, and her face drew more sweat with each soulful sound. By the second song, the sweat was pouring down her face and into that gorge like cleavage that heaved with each breath. I was a child and didn’t understand the emotions that distorted her eyes and mouth. Ella, crowned by a sizzling hot spotlight overhead, transmitted every flaw and feeling on her face. I hadn’t seen a singer suffer before. I looked up at my mother and started crying.

“ What’s wrong sweetheart?”

“ I’m afraid she’s going to die.”

My mother whispered assurances that Ella was not going to die. I kept crying. She then excused us from our table and I followed her into the Powder Room. She sat me on a chaise lounge and wiped my tears. The expansiveness of the Powder room, compared to the ones today, was like being in someone’s bedroom. Soft cushioned chairs, a long dressing table speckled with ashtrays, perfumes, and miniature toiletries. We stayed there until Ella finished her show. Mom didn’t show her disappointment, she rarely showed despairing emotions, or caused me to feel ashamed of my behavior. Looking back fifty years later, I’m reminded of my mother’s selflessness and how a legend can drop down your path, and you don’t even know it.

Again, looking back fifty years later, my succession of travel diaries is dim by comparison to the Vegas memories. Swirling amongst the élan of prohibition era abandonment, gangsters were the Rothschilds, the royalty of the scene, and the non-members loved it. That’s why the women behaved Roaring Twenties ZaZu Pitts and Louise Brooks emancipated. Everyone was free of their wrappings and responsibilities. They were partying with the men they’d first met on screen, played by Bogart, Robinson, and Cagney. I remember them now as being childlike. The outsiders may have been living the childhood stolen by WWII and the Depression. Their veiled heroes were gangsters who’d been breaking the rules since being ripped from their mother’s breast.

Then, one day the in 1963, the Rat Pack landed in Vegas, wearing black Tuxedos and intercepted the public’s fancy imitations of living vicariously. Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, and Frank Sinatra invited Vegas to drink, make love, and gamble. And they did. If you find anyone over seventy in Vegas today, ask them about the Rat Pack, Johnny Roselli, or Jack Entratter, and you’ll know I’m not exaggerating. Vegas was the time of their lives. The drugs were minor, an upper or a downer to sleep, but no one came to Vegas to OD or commit suicide. The deaths were in the desert, between the gangsters’. This was all before Tony Spilotro got wheels on his greed and went speeding into his own death. TO BE CONTINUED

AT THE COPA ROOM

May 10, 2024May 11, 2024 ~ LouLou

DON’T GIVE UP OVER FORECLOSURE

May 2, 2024May 2, 2024 ~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

I won the 4.5-year lawsuit against the bank’s foreclosure of my Follies House. She will sell at market value. I toast with my FB friends, who hung in as I wedged against impossible odds with your patience and comfort. !!!!!!. The photo is from 2000 when we bought her. An enormous hug to my real estate broker, Scott Varley (aka Superman), and my attorney, who had educated and believed in me when I did not!

ROSH HASHANAH 2023.

September 16, 2023 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

VULNERABLE…. weakness and emotionally exposed, failure. Otherwise the moment of courage to rise and understand our fragility without self-degrading,. Excerpt from Rabbi at Temple Ebet Emeth.

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THE ARC OF WAITING

August 22, 2023August 22, 2023 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

As children, our waiting depends on how long it takes Mom and Dad to finish what they’re doing and pay attention to our needs. It takes hold of us, like a fever, and we resort to nudging them, whining, even sobbing, If we are made to wait longer than we expected. During the school year, I waited all semester for the summer. In Los Angeles that meant it was hot enough to go swimming in the ocean.

When I lived in Hollywood, I rode two buses, to get to Santa Monica. The second bus dropped me off on Ocean Avenue, above Santa Monica Beach. I ran down the ramp that connects to Pacific Coast Highway and headed north to Sorrento Beach. I jumped into the sand running to find the place where my schoolmates clustered: in a caravan of towels, beach chairs, radios, and brown bag lunches. I couldn’t just run to the ocean, I had to sit and talk and have something cold to drink, and then I made myself wait until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Then I ran down to the shore, and embraced the waves, tumbling inside their grasp until I lost my breath, and floated into abandonment.

After I moved to Santa Fe I stopped thinking about the ocean, I had to remove the memories from my thoughts, so I could continue to experience this spark of New Mexico. The dry sage ocean of pink soil, and radiant blue sky that pinches your eyes when you’re driving, the sunlight, the warmth of a desert night, and the white snow on pink adobe rooftops. It had postcard perfection, even with fallen leaves spread like trash everywhere, the trees almost naked, and the dead plants in the garden. I tried not to think of the ocean, the look of the sea from watery suntanned eyelids, or from the bluff at Del Mar, or the splashing of waves around my shoulders as I tumbled beneath the surface.

I waited, as I did as a teenager, for that time to come in the fall of 2010, so I could return to the sea. I stood at the water’s edge in Del Mar, it was like summer without all the kids screaming, barking dogs, volleyball and paddle board games, lifeguards thrashing the beach in their jeeps shouting, ‘no dogs off the leashes, no glassware, and no surfing today’. They were missing, and so were the parade of beach runners, and surfers. In fact, I was the only one swimming, on that first day at the beach. Before I went into the water, I reclined on a big black boulder and faced the sea, letting my eyes wander amongst the scenes of the beach on a Tuesday afternoon. In front of me was an older man with graying hair, in a beach chair reading. He must be retired, he looked perfected adapt to his spot about five feet from the shoreline. I thought about retirement, and how I still cannot come to grips with spending my days on park benches or in cafes watching younger men and women live.

There was one swimmer, on a bogey board, he was far out, and floating along, and I wished I’d brought mine with me, but it was in Rudy’s van. The last time I used it was when I lived in Solana Beach in 1997. I also wished I had a new bathing suit, because the one I was wearing was too loose, and the neck straps were tied together in a knot so I could swim without losing my top. The sun baked my body, and I let it without abatement, without shading my limbs or wearing a hat, just enough sunscreen to keep the rays from trotting over my lily-white skin. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, the waiting suddenly felt so imperial, so much so that I began to think about waiting as an aphrodisiac or something like a good cocktail that you have to make last for hours, while you wait for that moment that makes you feel immortal, childlike, and emancipated.

I felt the beach flies, and the tang of salt water on my lips, and when the seagulls swarmed above the water’s surface, like so many beads of a necklace, I thought, that this is about the most beautiful day I could have, and it’s all because I WAITED. I didn’t give up on the ocean, or my place in it, or believing that I would have my day in the sand, under a faded denim blue sky, with cotton ball clouds floating above me. I baked until the sweat drenched my pours, and then I raised myself up and walked slowly to the edge of the water. The surf made tiny breaks not enough to shatter my body warmth and I felt the first sting of the water on my feet, and then my knees., I submerged and found that the best way to celebrate this day was to keep flopping backward on top of each wave as it crashed, and I did this for a dozen rounds, until I felt giddy, submissive, and dented with the surf. That waiting thing again, meant something that I should write about because all of us are waiting for the election, the economy to recover, wars to end, streets to be safe and our real estate to be worth something again. We are all waiting for this big change so we can feel secure and optimistic about the future. There is something useful about waiting, something predisposed, that gives us the support and substance we need, so when the waiting is over, and we are all flush with optimism again, it will feel like the first time. It will overwhelm us with power and joy, like the ocean.

THE ART OF LOVE

July 21, 2023August 31, 2023 ~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

Nicholas Ray (Photo credit: www_ukberri_net)

THIS WEEK LANDS ON poets, writers, musicians, photographers, directors, visual artists, composers, choreographers, actors and the untitled and unrecognized that squeeze in between. Kipling, Salinger ( my all-time favorite) The Rolling Stones, Mozart, Chopin, Opera, Salsa, Beatles, Stieglitz, Nicholas Ray, Kandinsky, Johnny Mercer, Martha Graham Balanchine, and James Dean. I left out about seventy-five of my favorites.

Composition VI (1913) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)They were all lovers before they were artists.

OUR ARTISTS IN HEART travel mentally and physically through life with all the windows open; awaiting a sight, sound, or feeling that draws them to their art. The feelings are what count on our life ledger. I have to thank Billy, my first love at fifteen. He was an artist of music, Gothic charcoal sketches, comic humor, and life. He opened my window to the arts.

That life ledger is always in the red because an appetite of feelings, and emotions eventually depreciates the spirit. Some of us rise above, and the flow of printed green paper comforts that spirit, but emotions continue to dominate all the success.

I have to write this in short sequence, as I am moving between a rigid reckoning of a forever ending TO ONE MY LOVES.

To be continued later.

EXCERPT FROM MY NEXT BOOK. UNKNOWN TITLE

July 3, 2022July 3, 2022 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

Page 525. Terrified to post this but it is Sunday and I’m brave on Sunday. The book is fiction, first-person, and close third person so you’ll need a jogging suit to read. Based on true events.

Greta let the moment of the village rescue stay with her, like a new pet for as long as she could hold on to its beneficial ointment, away from what she calls her immersion into self. She gives me examples that illustrate her obsession with matching outfits in her closet.

It’s a bedroom she converted into a dressing room. There’s a single bed against one wall, a cabinet where she stores the winter boots, and an eight-drawer French nouveau dresser and mirror. She sits on a chair facing the windows so she can watch the trees live through sun, wind, rain, and snow. Across from the chair is the bed. She diligently arranged her summer pastel skinny jeans on the bed, and next to that row she arranged the T-shirts, camisoles, and shorts. It’s quite practical considering Greta as she has admitted to me half a dozen times, that she was born without common sense or practicality. At the base of the bed, she lined up her shoes, the slip-ons, the flats, the pumps stuffed with tissue paper to preserve their shape, and the wedges. After a breach of sanity, she goes into this room and visualizes outfits and color matching like someone might play chess. ‘ It does have a purpose, this way I visualize without wrangling with hangers and you know it just takes too much time when you’re in a closet.

‘”These days I look at them as if they belonged to someone else, I mean the red suede with gold heels that I wore on a New Year’s Eve of gaiety and not since, the black velvet pumps that always make me feel dainty and light. What care I give to all these garments when in the other part of the house, Dodger was descending into a financial coma.”

Greta did not acknowledge the few months before his departure that he was riddled with abject unfulfilling tasks, bills, and construction jobs that no longer fed him purpose and accomplishment. She did not notice that his slacking posture on the front porch, head lowered and staring out without any body movement was a sign, she in fact despised it and walked away. In the last few months, all of this seemed to rise up like a curtain before a play, in a theater and she witnessed his insolence and his silent howl for help.

The irony of her activity is that she doesn’t go to the events that she plans on going to wear the outfits.

UKRAINIAN LIVES MATTER TO POLAND

March 14, 2022March 14, 2022 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

MONDAY MARCH 12,

Some domestic and global tragedies diminish in our consciousness as weeks go by. Just as the news turns their stories from our southern border crisis, Covid pandemic, inflation, and other unsolved problems.

Ukraine defending their country against the vicious unprovoked genocidal attack by Putin is not going in this direction. It is more explosive and brutal each day and the response by NATO and the USA seems to be in pandemonium. You hear, “ Everything is on the table.” “Nothing is off the table.” I understand strategic covert operations are classified, still, this leaves me asking, shouldn’t they be beyond discussion by now? If I continue to vacillate on a decision, it only exacerbates the consequences.

I’m watching more interviews. So far, I’ve seen about forty. Not one of the Ukrainians on camera shed tears, a blaring recognition of their bravery, courage, and ancestry.

MARCH 13, 2022

I LISTEN TO UKRAINIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC https://www.pandora.com/station/play/123965540132723942 or the blues, it seems unjust to bob around to the Stones or club music. It is day seventeen, and everyone knows now what that implies. You don’t have to explain it, and if you do, then I’d move away from that conversation. Did you hear about the eight-year-old boy who walked five hundred miles to join his parents in Poland? He made it and here is his photo.

WHAT ABOUT THE WOMAN hours away from giving birth when the bomb struck the Maternity Hospital and was carried away bleeding on a stretcher? She gave birth to a baby girl and is recovering.

MARCH 14, 2022 Today, I learned that both mother and child died.

STRAIGHT OUT OF A WAR MOVIE is the elderly couple who did not hesitate to face four Russian soldiers who broke thru the gate to their property, rifles aimed at their defiant threatening souls, and ordered them off their property shouting obscenities. The soldiers retreated.

Several weeks ago a Ukrainian soldier blew up a bridge to prevent the convoy from crossing over, knowing he would die.

The interviews and comments from man, woman, and child harmonized ” I’ll fight them with my last breath.”

POSTCARD FROM IRELAND

February 13, 2021February 18, 2021 ~ LouLou ~ 3 Comments

It was a day like today, just after the rain soaked every blade of grass, and the world looked squeaky clean as if it had been mopped with God’s soap. I was sleeping in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar berth on a ferryboat that swayed like a rubber raft. I was awakened by a knock at the door. “Ma’am. We’re here.” I looked at the young man questionably.“Ireland,” he added and shut the door. “We’re here?” I twisted myself round in the blanket and raised my chin to the porthole.Oh my God– It exists. Look at that tiny little village and the little harbor and the colors.

I landed at the Port of Rosshaven from London where I’d spent two nights in a room the size of a cigarette holder. I loved London as much as I could in two short days; carrying thirty-five pounds of clothes. Part of one day I spent packaging up half my wardrobe to ship back. The plan was to spend one month in Ireland. Other than that, my itinerary was unplanned. In those days, I leveraged myself to the outskirts of foolery.I gathered my Northface garment duffle, shoulder bag, and departed the ferry. It was Sept. 5, 1987, and I was thirty-something, recently separated from a career in commercial real estate and my pad in the Bankers Hill neighborhood of San Diego. Everything went into storage so I would be free to conquer whatever it was I thought I was conquering.

That first day I made my way to the picturesque village of Kinsale. The tourist office made the reservation for me and suggested that I rent a car. No need, I thought. I’d get around on my own for a while. She slapped a map of Ireland on the desk and pointed to several towns and then counted the miles between each town. “The buses stop running in September because all the tourists have gone home. You be wee on your own.” “ Well, I’ll look into it tomorrow. I’ll just get a cab to the Bed and Breakfast tonight.”

That night ended faster than any in my life. I woke up and decided to stay another. I could not part with the warmth of the Innkeeper’s country kitchen and the canary yellow bedroom, or the county road, the red barn and the miles and miles of rollercoaster hills cushioned in that indescribable Irish green. Her house was a quintessential B & B, blushing with the right bedding, Irish linen, French and English antiques and contemporary restaurant-grade kitchen.

I remember the Innkeeper drove a BMW, and her house sparkled as if it had been photographed earlier. That first day I walked into dreamland, and I did not come out until I left Ireland. This was my first solo trip to Europe. I began with Ireland because my friend, Kenny, insisted I go find the Casey in me. That’s my mother’s maiden name. Everyone thought I should be institutionalized for taking off like I did; mid-career on the rise and all of that.

That first evening I walked into town and ate at the restaurant the Innkeeper recommended. I wish I could remember the name of the place. It’s written in my journal, but the journal is in Taos, NM. Anyway, that dinner still rates in the top ten of all dinners, including all those four-star French Michelin Chateau feasts I found my way to later on in the trip. I hit a dozen villages between Clare, Kerry and Limerick. I took a seaweed bath at the seashore of Ballybunion, stayed in a folk singers

luxury hotel for a week because he wanted me to bring his tape back to America, attended an Irish wedding and the racetrack in Dublin. I watched the Farmers Matchmaking Festival in Lisdoonvarna and climbed the hill to the Cliffs of Mohr. On my hike up to the cliffs, I passed a man gardening in his front yard. He stopped and began to chat. His house was so beautifully Irish, handcrafted in brick and stone with acres of fertile land as his back yard. I told him it was the most beautiful home I had ever seen. He turned around in his rubber boots, leaned against his pitchfork, and said, “America, that’s where I want to go.” He said he would give me his house if I would take him with me. We talked for a long time about what matters, and as we parted I remember what he said, “Send me a postcard from America.”

THE LISTS OF LIFE

September 12, 2015September 12, 2015 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

WHAT ARE THESE LISTS... the long list is the list you started as a youth without even knowing you were making plans for your future. This is the list that does not have to be in writing, keyed in a Blackberry or posted on the calendar.

The long list is about cutting out, shocking the system and coming back unharmed. It is an exceptional adventure sensation we visualize while waiting for a flight at the airport, for the neighbor to turn off the leaf blower, for the light to turn green.

All of the things we monitor in our lives, like the need to have a cavity filled or checking the coolant level is multiplying and that short list is so long we rarely have time to consider the long list. None of those items will make any difference in ten years, not one.

The short list is a big obstacle in the way of the long list. By the time we get to the long list, we may be crippled by fear, turned into a sofa shouting grumpy cynic or, worse than all the above, we may have forgotten what we wanted.

Waiting too long to start an adventure on the long list is looking at me in the face. It is September, this is the month of change. It is going to be autumn, and if you live in a seasonal climate, it is going to land on your front porch. Before the fall is scooped up in garbage bags and placed by the dumpster, my next adventure is moving to the short list.

SARATOGA SPRINGS BATTLEFIELD 2010- OFF THE LONG LIST

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WRITING MY WAY HOME.

April 7, 2015 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

This is a previous post (2011) that I am re posting for new readers.

MY FAMILY history was brought to life in an unpublished memoir. The stories lived on during a long arduous journey of research and trying to get published. Sometimes I read pages to get close to my parents. I squeeze in between them like a ghost, hear their voices, and see their expressions. If I remove the outside world, the hum of the hotel air-condoning , the delivery trucks, and speeding motorcycles, I can remember swimming in the pool with my mother. I see her bathing cap strap pulled down across her chin, her red lipstick, and her one-piece strapless bathing suit. I can see her freckles, and her long slender arms backstroking as she swam.

Early in 1960 my father decided to build a swimming pool in the backyard of our house on Thurston Circle. I had just completed swimming lessons and asked my father for a pool. Years later he told the story: “My little girl asked for a pool, and I built her one.” I think he built the pool for my mother. He was under investigation with the FBI and Department of Justice, and spent most days in court defending himself against a deportation order to Russia. Subpoenas, arrests, and trials were routine events that tied my parents together against a world of misunderstanding. After eleven years of nail biting suspense, my mother just wore out. The pool was built with the intention of removing my mother’s anxiety and sadness. My father designed the shape of the pool around the original pool at the Garden of Allah, a highly scandalous Hollywood hotel apartment that attracted starlets and gangsters in the early 30’s. I know this tiny detail from photographs I’ve seen of the Garden pool. More obscure details surrounding the building of our pool were found reading his FBI files.

My father accused the pool contractor of being an informant for the government. One sunny afternoon he marched him out of the house. I was hiding behind a drape when the confrontation broke out. I recall the big shouldered contractor running from my father’s threats. Most likely an FBI agent was parked outside and followed the man after he scampered out.

The pool was finally completed in mid 1961. There are photographs of my mother and I in the pool; her smile is radiant and naturally composed. She and I swam everyday. My father loved to swim too, but he was busy with court proceedings and meetings. Before the year ended my mother filed for divorce, the house burnt down, and I was released from childhood. I don’t regret those events any longer. They were steps that shaped my character, and what brings me back to the topic of growing up with gangsters.

The best memories of my childhood are in swimming pools and restaurants with gangsters and gamblers. They were part of the family, and when they were around my father was on very good behavior, and my mother defenseless against their irresistible humor, pranks, and generosity. She just sort of glided in and out of activities, and helped me ride the vibrations. She didn’t laugh out of herself like I do, and she rarely yelled. The older I get, the less I seem to be like her. Maybe the passage of life experiences determines which parent you will take after. Had I married and had children, maybe I’d be more like her. Since I get into all kinds of tricky situations, and throw the dice, I need my father’s strength more.

Over the years, I have forgotten some of the dead reckoning discoveries I made about our family history. Still nothing compares to reading about my Aunt Gertie. She was my father’s sister. Until I read about her in the FBI file, I didn’t know she existed. I haven’t figured out why my father left her out of our life. According to the FBI files she was a remarkably loyal sister. Gertie was the one who confronted the federal agents when they arrived at the family home in Winnipeg, Canada. She pushed my grandmother out of the interview, and spoke for the family. The agents showed her a recent photograph of my father. She told them that her brother left home when he was twelve and they had not seen him since. She could not verify the identity of the photograph because almost twenty years had passed. The agents left without any evidence and continued to search for the birthplace of my father. Every time he was arrested, he entered a different birthplace. He named Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles. His origins were discovered through a letter that his mother had written when he was fifteen and confined to a boys reformatory. The letter was turned over to the FBI, and that is how they discovered his parents lived in Winnipeg. The government could not deport my father to Russia without verification from his family. Eventually my father won the battle. He was granted citizenship in 1966, two weeks after my mother died.

Gertie died after my father. I don’t know if they corresponded over the years. I have learned enough about my father to know he was protecting her from further harassment. Maybe if my father lived longer they would be coming after me.