A D Journal 2012

    Teddy was wrong when he told me ten years ago at my mother’s funeral that we were the last two of the Sarti clan. I was wrong for thinking when Ted died in 2010 that I was the last. But now I am truly the last of the clan now that Uncle Pete (Big Pete) is gone. He died Monday of complications from cancer – a cancer that should have killed him in the late 1990s, when doctors predicted he had only a few months to live. He fooled them, he lived another dozen years. Big Pete wasn’t really a Sarti. But he married so early into the clan he might as well have been the sixth son my grandfather never had, marrying Alice who was special to all of us. His house became a center of family social activities, especially after my grandfather passed away in 1966. But he had already become deeply enmeshed in family functions from when he married Alice in 1958 when my grandfather’s house was the center of the Sarti world. Big Pete was part of that 1950s vision of a bright ne...

  I didn’t remember until last night that Peter met Alice at Curtis Wright in Lodi. He was stuck in a largely nowhere department and she was secretary to the big boss. Big Pete’s son, little Peter, always thought this was funny, saying the boss didn’t want to upset his best secretary. So, instead of laying Big Pete off originally planned, he transferred Pete to a position in a different department. “He offered my father a job in the computer department,” Little Peter said. This was in the late 1950s. Nobody knew just how computers would change the world. It certainly changed Big Pete’s life. Like Bloomberg, Big Pete learned computers early and later transferred those skills to Wall Street where he would rise from the ground floor to become the executive vice president of a major investment firm. Unlike Bloomberg, however, Big Pete never lost touched with humanity, keeping his ties to the old world and his family and ours. I once compared Big Pete and my aunt Alice t...

   The hedges look like green cupcakes, white on top where the new snow melts. The moisture drips into the dark depths of the still-green, which sags only slightly. I keep thinking of the trees in my yard after the freak snow storm last October, and how branches cracked one after another, whole limbs falling down into the yard. They are still there – now covered in snow, leaves withered, while I recover from eye surgery that keeps me from sawing them into smaller pieces to cart away. The doctors say I shouldn’t exercise or do anything strenuous or else I might lose the eyesight surgery restored. But labor and exercise have always been a kind of meditation. Sometimes, I lost myself jogging when back in Passaic . And working nights as a donut baker, I could feel the texture of the dough as I worked it, and know when I finally get back to the point where I can use the saw, cutting wood would serve me as well. I need to feel warm of it where the blade cuts through th...

  This is one of those years where everything is the 40th anniversary of something important in my life. But it amazes me that had a stayed married to my first wife, we would be celebrating our 40th anniversary today. Well, maybe celebrating is a little too drastic a word, since it was a farce back then designed to lure the judge into keeping me out of jail “Look, your honor, Al’s respectable now, he’s married and everything,” my famous mob lawyer might have told him. But in some ways, my first wife is one of my best friends, someone who raised my kid right, even if at times over those four long decades, I had to come to her rescue more than once. It’s the role I play, even when I don’t mean to. For most of the 1970s, I wanted nothing more than to get back together with her. Then, when we reconnected in the 1980s, we both realized that I made a better friend than a husband, and that I could be counted on to remain loyal to her in that way for the rest of our lives. ...

  Life doesn’t get much stranger than it has over the last few days, starting with my water heater exploding. On Tuesday, I spent just enough time in the main office to suffer through a meeting in which it became clear she was did not intend to talk to me or even look at me, perhaps noticing me noticing the intense flirting going on between her and the owner at the top of the table. The usual office gossips reported on party for the magazine like fashion reporters, claiming she dressed up, making my decision not attend all the wiser. If she can put on a show at the meeting, how much worse might it have been in her own environment, when she clearly knows how much it bothers me? She has the routine down to a fine science. Our once temporary boss said she asked the owner for a raise about four weeks ago. He doesn’t think she got it from what she’s said to him. I suspect she did, which would explain the good relations between her and the owner. In leaving the main offic...

   They put in the new phones yesterday at both the main office and its annex, a final step that will require the annex editor to move to the main office. What started at an act of revenge against her for daring to ask for a raise turned into a plan of action that can’t possibly end up well. Management sees the annex editor as the last of the unexploited workers they have to put under their thumb before they get on with their real business of imposing our pay cut to pay for their new magazine. This exploitation has taken a toll on the staff. Fran, perhaps the most exploited of all the workers, went into surgery yesterday for a collapsed lung. She worked on and on, hacking the whole time, but did not see a doctor until she collapsed. And even then, she brought a laptop computer to the hospital with her, returning to the office too early after her release to cause a relapse. Yannet is slated for surgery as well, the woman who answers the phones, sends advertisers the...

  The owner called it “The perfect storm” quoting some TV commentator from a few years ago – referring then to a series of storms that led up to a major disaster.   In this case, she meant her ill health and a pregnancy that would shortly put the editor out on maternity leave. She told us she had breast cancer and would need to undergo surgery, As if adding to a bad situation, Fran -- our jack of all trades person on the first floor – would not be coming in. Last week she had to be rushed to emergency room after suffering a collapsed lung. She was having a relapse because she had turned to work too soon, and even while in the hospital had been doing work. Our editor in chief, who was pregnant again, told the owner she would not work “like a mule” risking the loss of the baby, just because the owner wanted to her to produce more. Lynette, our receptionist, is waiting to have her Gaul Blatter removed, and said she can’t wait forever to have it done, and so she will...