Janet Berliner

Truth is, I’ve had a rough time this year. This decade. A lot of pain for little gain. Too many pills and too much introspection. Too many times when I’ve stopped trying—almost; too much thought given to what it means to succeed as an artist in a tough and competitive world and what it takes to keep trying.

The obvious answers come easily to the tongue: persistence, luck, talent, luck, knowing the right people, luck. What I need to remember to mention is that, as per the advice given in the hit song from the Broadway musical the Broadway musical “Damn Yankees,” you gotta have heart.

“You’ve gotta have heart
All you really need is heart
When the odds are sayin’
you’ll never win
That’s when the grin should start
You’ve gotta have hope
Mustn’t sit around and mope
Nothin’s half as bad as it may appear
Wait’ll next year and hope
When your luck is battin’ zero
Get your chin up off the floor
Mister you can be a hero
You can open any door, there’s nothin’ to it but to do it
You’ve gotta have heart
Miles ‘n miles n’ miles of heart
Oh, it’s fine to be a genius of course
But keep that old horse
Before the cart
First you’ve gotta have…….HEART. ”

Thanks to my ten-year-old grandson, Max DeSantis, I’ll never forget it again.

Here’s why.

He’s obsessed by the stage, most particularly musicals. He’s been performing a lot, given his youth. He’s talented and he’s cute.

Here. Judge for yourselves. The first one’s a headshot, the second a recent snapshot he sent to me along with the following poem:

I AM

I am Max who acts.
I wonder if I will make a show.
I hear singing at auditions.
I see people dancing in the breeze.
I want to be in the musical.
I am Max who acts.

I pretend that I made the show.
I feel confident that I will become successful.
I touch the music sheets.
I worry that I did not do well.
I cry when I don’t succeed.
I am Max who acts.

I understand that I will have other chances.
I say I will try again some day.
I dream that I will become famous.
I try to do better.
I hope that I am awesome enough.
I am Max who acts.

by Janet Berliner

Last night I took a bath.

No big deal, you say?

Actually, it’s a huge deal for me. At the end of 2003, they wanted to pull the plug on me. Four years ago, I came home palsied, unable to eat or go to toilet on my own, and unable to walk or write my name.

It’s been a long journey from there to getting into that tub unaided: The realisation of a dream.

I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook next to the tub and fashioned a little boat, which I floated in the water. Watching it, my mind drifted to a much larger tub — the Caribbean Sea. It’s 1993: My Rasta friend, David, bends his knees, folding his seven-foot frame almost in half so that he can give me an odd-shaped, bandana-wrapped package he holds in both hands like an offering. I have been fighting a medical crisis and am not strong enough to stand up and greet him. In fact, I have hardly moved from my straw wing-chair in close to a month, except to bathe and be carried to the balcony to watch sailboats move across the Caribbean sunsets over Egmont Bay.

I take the package from him and thank him in little more than a whisper.

David rises to his full height, enhanced to nearly eight feet by the dreadlocks piled high on his head and covered by a striped green, red and yellow knitted cap, the colors of Jamaica.

He bestows upon me one of his rare smiles and raises his arms into the air. “We dance again soon.” He turns in a circle. Poised, elegant, proud of his stature and of the healing arts for which he had been named King David by the inner islanders who live around Mount Sinai, at the edge of the Grand Etang Rain Forest.

I manage a smile, remembering our dance in the sultry early morning hours at Fantasia 2000 to Bob Marley’s “Get Up Stand Up.” Me, a 5’2″ fifty year old political exile from South Africa, being held up in the air at eye-level by David, a seven foot Rasta with the bearing of a king. He swirls around. We sing Marley’s political lyrics and are equally captive to the music and to the air scented by the sea and the blooming flamboyant trees that hang over the beach and the nightclub.

The contents of the bandana in my lap feel soft to the touch. “Fresh sweet Trini figs to heal you,” David says.

Could it be?

For the year before my illness, I have lived in the West Indies. I have searched forests and marketplaces for figs. The figs of my memory, small and pear-shaped, green on the outside — or the deep purple color of eggplants — with sweet-tasting flesh and seeds that crunch like Grape Nuts and taste like moist brown sugar. Sometimes I think that my entire life has been a search for the tropical and subtropical tree of the mulberry family that bears figs. Ficus carica. A search for the figs and Passion Flowers, the nasturtiums and freesias and wild avocados of my youth. Not just so that I can write of them, but so that I can touch and smell and taste them, the way I did as a child hiding, dreaming, in the lush profusion of an African garden.

In Grenada, I found more than twenty varieties of what the locals call figs, but they were not what I wanted. Those were bananas, everything from four-inch finger-bananas to plantains. Except for the fruity bananas, the islanders use them mostly in stews, to thicken them as we might use potatoes. I could not have known that what I sought was only to be found in Trinidad, 80 kilometers and an overnight ferry ride away.

David smiles. “I go now,” he says.

“Go to come back,” I answer my voice already stronger.

“Come soon,” he says, and is gone. Striding down a road without signposts toward the Sugar Mill where tonight, as on all Friday nights, there will be dancing and loving and fighting in the light of a yellow moon.

I undo the knot in the scarf and the figs tumble forth. I pick one up, smell it, and bite into it. As I savor its sweetness, I remember my first visit to Grenada…

…The Amazing Grace is an old freighter that was built to service the lighthouses along the Scottish coast and the islands of the North Sea. She’s steel-hulled, but her cabins and decks are primarily wood. In total, she holds about 200 passengers and crew, and her construction makes her perfect for visiting the small islands that large cruise ships can’t get near. Windjammer Barefoot Cruises used the Grace to supply its fleet of tall ships that sailed the Caribbean, but she also carried passengers looking for a less formal cruise experience.

As you left each island, generally at sunset, the strains of the song “Amazing Grace” filled the air, tugging at your heartstrings. I found a place alone each time and stayed there until dark. There is nothing more starlit than the Caribbean night sky. Each time I see it, out at sea, I feel at one with the grandeur of the universe. Intellectual doubts vanish, and I do not doubt the presence of a higher Power.

The Grace was scheduled to arrive in Grenada at dawn of the thirteenth day of our trip. All I knew about the island I had learned from books. It had been owned by the Portuguese, the French, and the British. The name started out as Concepción. The French changed it to Granada, the British to Grenade. Independence turned it into Grenada.

I learned that the island was small, twelve by twenty-five miles. It was known for its spices, its rain forest, its friendly people, it’s American Medical School, and its recent flirtation with Communism, which culminated in an attempt by Cuba to take the island and a rescue (not an invasion) by British and American forces. The currency is EC (Eastern Caribbean) $s.

The morning we arrived in Grenada, I awoke when the engines cut, and went to my porthole. We had stopped some distance from the island, yet close enough for me to see the U-shaped harbor and surroundings.

What I was looking at was like a miniature Monte Carlo. A rainbow of brightly colored tin and wooden houses, small hotels, and provision stores meandered from the top of several hills down to the business and restaurant district, which fringed the water. Fort George, like Monte Carlo’s famed Castle-Fort, crested the top of the left-hand hill. Below it, hidden from view on the far side of the hill, lay the central marketplace. Looming over that, at the top of Church Street, stood a cathedral whose bells pealed melodically and often. At the top of the opposite hill, replacing Monte Carlo’s Casinos, was a burned-out gun emplacement that spoke of the island’s recent revolution.

I was enchanted.

An hour or so later, the ship made its way into a harbor deep enough to take its hull. Eschewing tours, I found my way to Grand Anse, the longest, softest, whitest strip of beach I’d seen since South Africa, and there I stayed until the sun reached for the horizon.
I was not wearing a watch, but I knew from the position of the sun that I had better hurry if I was going to make it to the ship in time for departure. Since I had anticipated leaving the beach in plenty of time, I had not provided myself with enough money for a taxi back, so I walked through the Ramada Hotel’s gardens and foyer, stopped to ask my way to the bus stop, and hurried to the road.

After ten minutes, I asked the next person wandering by how often the buses came. “This be Sunday,” he said. “No schedule. Some time they come, some time they don’t. Better do this.”

He made the international sign of hitchhikers and laughed, apparently at my expression of dismay.

“Don’t worry. No body hurt you,” he said, pronouncing the word nobody as two, the same way he had done with sometime.

Realizing that I had no choice, I thumbed a ride with the next car. The driver stopped, stepped out of the car, and opened the passenger side. “Don’t worry,” he said, his voice deep and musical. “Here we consider it our duty to give anyone who doesn’t want to foot it a ride.”

I got into the car and examined the person I hoped would be my rescuer and not some maniacal killer of stranded women. He was extremely handsome, well over six feet tall, and wore a suit, something I hadn’t seen in the islands outside of hotel and bank personnel.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“The Grace, if it’s not too late.”

He glanced at his watch. “No problem,” he said. “You have thirty minutes. It only takes ten.”

No problem, I thought, trying to relax. No worries.

He introduced himself as Winston Whyte, politician and poet, and handed me his card. Within a few minutes, we were chatting freely.

“So you’re a poet,” I said.

My skepticism must have been evident. “I really am,” he responded. “I’ll prove it to you.”

Ignoring my time constraint, he pulled up at the side of what was already a narrow road and walked around to his trunk. Here it comes, I thought. Soon I’d really have no problem. No worries.

Fortunately for me, he did not return with a blunt instrument in his hand. What he clutched was the page proof of a manuscript, in its last stage of pre-production. He handed it to me and I glanced quickly at his bio, which described him and his old friend Son Mitchell, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as “High Yellow.” Winston’s color, it said, was due to the fact that his grandmother had been an Arawak princess. I glanced up at him. To me, his skin looked like café au lait.

“That is the only copy I have,” he said. He slowed down at the gate that led to the Grace. “By the time you come back, I’ll be a properly published writer.”
“Come back? Are you so sure I will?”

He laughed heartily. “You’ll go to come back,” he said. “Soon.”

I’m booking passage on a ship for the fall of 2009, wheelchair, oxygen, and all. It’s an outrageous dream that includes selling several books before then–some written, others in progress. But hey, I took a bath yesterday, so anything is possible.

A combination of physical difficulties and crazed deadlines have forced me to decide to forego writing a regular blog post, so instead, here’s a fun story I wrote to rid myself of a recurring dream.–Janet Berliner 

     She is fifteen when the dreams invade her nights.

     By the time she is not-quite forty, the dreams are like lovers she hates, but cannot live without–frightening her as much by their absence as by their presence.  She finds a new therapist, buys a new notebook, records again the details of the dreams . . . 

     . . . she is moving slowly down the corridor of her grandmother’s pre-war Riverside apartment.  She knows that she is dreaming.  At first, everything around her is black and white, then the edges soften, running into each other like wet paint.  She waits for the greyness to come, to release her body from gravity’s constraints.  She can almost touch the sensations free flight will bring–sensual, warm, safe–like love without risk. 

     She is floating now.  She cannot see the end of the passageway, yet she knows with certainty that she will soon be outside.

     Outside.  Color and sunshine.  She hovers at the crest of a tier of rolling lawns, trying to delay her journey to the bottom, anticipating the flight with pleasure, its end with dread.

     But she is not the master of her body.  Setting aside all thought of what is to come, she concentrates on the scent of freesias drifting from the field below, on the poppies and forget-me-nots blooming wild as far as the horizon.  Forgetting, she allows herself to be happy–

     She is in a room, a conference room, standing before what appears to be a tribunal.  At the head of the table sits a woman dressed in black and white.  There is nothing muted about this scene, or about the woman, yet the dreamer cannot see her features, hidden in shadow beneath a wide-brimmed black straw hat.

     The dreamer is frightened.  The people in the room are all talking at once, talking at her.  Why is she on trial, being judged? She feels herself growing smaller and smaller–

     Lilliputian, she returns to the sunlight.  The door of the tribunal is shut behind her and she feels safe again, surrounded by color.  Though she does not really recognize anything, she knows she is in a small beach community she visited once as a child.  The knowledge comes from the smell of the salt in the air, the texture of the sea breeze, the crunch of sand beneath her feet.

     She looks down and sees that she is wearing a flowing white dress, embellished with lace and seed pearls.  She is carrying a basket on her arm, a picnic basket filled with flowers.  She is sixteen or seventeen, perhaps a little older.

     A young couple strolls along the other side of the street.  Their movements parallel hers.  They know her and she knows them, but they do not acknowledge her as they walk toward the ocean.

     When she reaches the beach, she stops.  A low, concrete divider, no more than four fingers wide, separates the street from the beach. 

     Without looking at her, the two young people step over the retaining wall and head into the water.  She watches them go, sad but unwilling to make a move to join them.  She is frightened again.  Something tells her a tidal wave is coming, and she feels eyes burning into the back of her neck.

     Dreaming still, she recalls another dream–a nightmare–remembering it in such infinite detail that she thinks she might be having a dream within a dream–

     She is swimming in the oily water of a busy harbor.  She has no idea how she got there.  All she knows is that she feels like the ancient mariner, condemned to the water forever.  She is surrounded by immense ships–tankers and cruise ships.  They are black and white.  She knows she will not drown, yet she has the sense that if she breathes in too deeply she will not be able to exhale again.  Ever–

     Back on the beach in the sunlight, she turns at last to identify the eyes staring at her.

     Behind her, she can see a semi-circle of concrete.  In its center, under a striped umbrella, a woman bends over a telescope.  Her hat identifies her as the woman from the tribunal.

     “You’re invading my privacy,” the dreamer says.

     When the woman does not respond, the dreamer moves closer.

     “How dare you!”  She is shouting.  “You’re intruding on my life.  You have no right!”

     The woman looks up and smiles.  She moves into the sunlight, but even then her features are blurred.  She beckons with a gloved hand.

     The dreamer moves to her side and turns to look at the ocean.

     The tidal wave has begun.  It moves in slow-motion.  Though the dreamer is terrified, she keeps thinking how beautiful it is.  The woman has stepped back but the dreamer stays on, watching the wave rise, curl, flatten, rise, curl, flatten.  It moves across the beach in a perfect sine curve, avoiding the couple, sweeping the dreamer into the water.

     For a moment, she enjoys being at the mercy of the ocean.  She tries to relax and move with the wave.  Then the current tugs at her legs and she knows that if she wants to survive she is going to have to fight her way to shore.  She can hear people shouting for help.  She sees a man and a boy, a father and son.  The boy’s head is bobbing in and out of the water, just beyond the man’s reach.  She struggles to find bottom with her toes, to test the depth of the water, but the sand moves too fast beneath her feet.  Her energy is flagging.  If she tries to help the man, the boy, she will drown.

     She makes it to the beach.  Lying on an incline in the safe part of the sine curve, she tries not to listen to the cries for help.  She covers her ears with her hands.  Hearing them still, she begins to scream . . .

     Her screams wake her from the nightmare.  Her pillow is wet with her own tears.  No one is there to hear her scream–to comfort her.  She lies alone in the dark, replaying the dream.  She can remember each detail, but she cannot identify the woman. 

     She takes out her notebook and records the details of the dreams for her new therapist, the one her mother chose.  Her mother calls to remind her about the appointment.

     “This one is well-trained,” she says.  “And he’s single.” 

     The therapist is well-trained.  And clever.  And proud of his cleverness.  It takes him no time at all to identify the dream-figures.

     The woman pays him.  Thanks him.  Leaves. 

     The dreams do not return.

     At dawn on her fortieth birthday, the ex-dreamer stands on a cliff in Half Moon Bay.  She can see two bodies on the beach below and a striped umbrella.  As she raises her arms and begs the greyness to come, she wonders if, this time, someone will hear her scream.