Here I sit...

waiting for the home health nurse to help me change my ostomy bag. Could do it myself, but simply don't feel ready. Yesterday afternoon, almost had a crisis, but headed it off.  Need one more turn with the helper. I am simply not used to doing this, not a part of my life. But I still have about two hours before she arrives.

I find myself, in my spare time, going to Google maps and looking at areas of the Bronx where I could have had friends or which were mostly Jewish communities when I was growing up. I look at the street pictures and see the whole thing, the kids, the families, the single people who in their own way were "different" or outcasts. A whole world. So why did it end? It had to, our parents had gone as far as they could go, economically and emotionally. We were happy there as kids, but at the same time, taught that for us, there had to be something "better" in the outside world to strive for. Yes, we had to achieve more---certainly economically more then our parents. And that meant better homes, jobs, etc. If your were in your late teens or early twenties in the sixties, so many things were opening up in areas different from where we were raised, Rents in Manhattan were cheap---it was easy to find places to live---by oneself---there. And then, by 1967, came the "sexual revolution" which meant and in a minute, women who left college unmarried, and were considered in some circles, "desperate" now could live freely, experiment with more than one lover, and be considered the "vanguard" of the new liberty. In four years, the women who were engaged by the time they finished their four years of college, or getting married the moment they left college had gone from being scene as "successes" to women who needed to shelter themselves too much. In 1962, if you heard about a couple unmarried, living together, eyebrows would have been raised---now, it was a very normal thing. This could not take place in the "safe" Jewish communities of the Bronx and Brooklyn, where they had been raised---it needed a new space---like Manhattan. 

 And our parents grew old and frightened as "others" moved into their neighborhood with different mores. Some moved to old age communities in Florida or to safer parts of the Bronx, like Riverdale. Landlords wanted more and more rent, and rent laws favored the families that had moved into those buildings in the 30's, 40's 50's. It was a world which had to end---its children provided it with no future.