A candle for happiness.

This is a short homage to my late husband, Elliot who died 14 years ago today. I lit a memorial candle at sundown yesterday and it will continue to burn until sundown today. It is interesting about those candles, because they begin to flicker in the last few hours. Just as our memories flicker with the passage of time and life flickers near its end.

Elliot was possibly the most loving man I've ever known since my father. He had a soft and gentle inner core that was at complete odds with the masculine ideal of the last century. He grew up in Brooklyn in a middle class Jewish family who came over in the diaspora from Eastern Europe between the two world wars. His father was also a very dear man, an optician with a serious gambling habit. His mother was a great beauty of limited intellect. She was smart but not wise.

Elliot was identified as gifted with an IQ of over 140. When the school recommended that he be transferred to a school for the gifted his mother said no. Why? because he had persuaded her he would miss his friends. The one thing he really needed was to be moved away from his friends. This was his chance but Rose didn't recognize it. At twelve he was already starting to gravitate to the wrong people.

By 15 Elliot was trying to be cool, talk tough and do drugs. It was the sixties and doing drugs was pretty commonplace. The turmoil over his father's gambling losses was so severe that nobody was noticing the trouble Elliot was getting into.
The more angry Rose was with Paul the more she clung to the myth of her beautiful sons. She would indulge them, encourage rivalry between them, and try to make allies of them against their father. She smothered those "beautiful" boys with her need to be needed and both were escaping reality at every opportunity.

Paul lost their home and his optometry business to gambling and their lives went from posh to poor in a matter of months. The humiliation was huge and the sons ran away into the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Rose became the classic enabler, covering for Paul and rescuing Allan and Elliot from school truancy, from jail, and from themselves. Alan managed to finish his apprenticeship and became an Optometrist, but Elliot being younger, slipped through the cracks and never finished college due to the drugs.

By the early seventies, Paul had opened a new small optometry business with the help of a Shylock, and in return he become the Shylock's bagman. Alan functioned briefly as an optometrist while Elliot worked in clubs, partied and narrowly escaped being drafted to Vietnam due to drug addiction.

As I arrived in New York to begin Grad school, Elliot began bouncing in and out of drug programs and apprenticing in the Film Industry as a negative matcher. I had some serious problems of my own. Our paths didn't cross until 1974 when I was Assistant Editor to Laurence Solomon and he was a Negative Matcher with Jim Lenkowski whose cutting rooms were in the suite next to ours. We worked in the Brill Building which had become a film industry headquarters, after a glorious past as Tin Pan Alley in an earlier era.

I met Elliot when I brought our edited footage to him for negative cutting. He was a gorgeous, Semitic looking, dark haired, quick witted Al Pacino type of guy with very mischievous eyes. He was brash and very Brooklyn. He apparently thought I was a fox, but was told to "forget it" by his boss. Over time we became work friends, having lunches together and sharing our stories. We were each seeing other people but it became very clear that we liked being with each other more. We also confessed that we were both in recovery programs: he for drug and me for alcohol addiction. No wonder we had so much in common. We shared the struggles of trying to climb back into normalcy from lives of dependency and escapism. With that confession, our fate was sealed, we belonged together. It was a love of such passion and tenderness there was no turning back. We went to our recovery meetings together, shared our deepest feelings, our fears and our dreams and we laughed. We laughed a lot.

We shared the love of a lifetime with all of the intensity of recovering addicts. Addicts become addicts most frequently due to a heightened sensitivity and intensity of emotion. We are at odds with the social norms and we use substances to damp down our feelings. The world is almost unendurable unless we encounter others who share those feelings. We found life beautiful when we were together. So we married in 1976. It was the beginning of my happiest period. It was the beginning of a new innocence based in trust and sobriety. It was the start of a commitment that included having a baby, buying a house, and settling down to a good life together. We gave each other the courage to believe in ourselves. I will never regret loving and marrying Elliot. It was a gift. Most people never have such an experience.

I was never so happy in my life.

To this memory I pen my remembrance. To this love I dedicate my candle.

There follow other memories. But later for that.