December 31, 2013
When I was in my last year in law school and dating Bill, I accepted an invitation from my cousins in Mexico City and Puebla to visit them over the holidays. Bill was deep in work during a particularly arduous December for trust and estate lawyers trying to meet clients' demands before December 31. While Bill had never been to Mexico, he dealt with many Mexican clients and was eager to know the country. So we agreed that after Christmas, we would leave for Mexico, I arriving before him in Puebla, spending a few days in the area and ending in Mexico City.
My Mexican relatives are products of the diaspora of refugees from the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. My mother's first cousin, Andrès Garcia Gabin, had fought for the ill-fated Spanish Republic and, fleeing over the French border when Franco's armies swept all before them in the last weeks of the war, found himself in a French internment camp. The French were not eager to take in Spanish refugee soldiers as my cousin told it, but Mexico accepted 60,000 refugee Spaniards. My cousin was shipped to Mexico's hinterlands, where he found himself on what was a virtual chain gang, and from which he ran away to Puebla.
In Puebla he met Sira Vélez, a golden-eyed mestiza from a more or less middle-class family from Cholula. The Spanish bloodline was reinforced, and their children: Maruja, Andrés Jr., and Jorge were strongly identified with Spain. Andrés came to visit my parents while I was in law school and invited me to visit him in Mexico City, known as the "D.F." ("Federal District") for short. I spent the post-Christmas holidays that year with Andrés and his partner, Luis Antonio Morales, a young man from a Puerto Rican family whose father had worked for the U.S. State Department all over Latin America.
Andrés and Luis had been a couple for fifteen years at least by the time I first visited them. Andrés was an architect who took private commissions as well as working under contract for Volkswagen, trying to bridge the cultural differences between the Mexicans and the Germans.
The Mexicans, migrants from small villages, would return to their villages for all the local feasts, not returning to work until Tuesday or Wednesday, which drove the Volkswagen managers wild. Only by offering the latest large appliances to employees with the best attendance records, was the problem brought under control. If the Mexican worker was nursing a hangover on Monday, the human resources manager would call the home. When the wife answered and explained her husband was too ill to go to work, the manager would tell her he was sorry to hear that, as that meant her family would be disqualified from a chance at the latest refrigerator-freezer. Five minutes after the call ended, the man was dressing for work.
Andrés and Luis lived in an affluent colonia, a suburb known as Lomas de Tarango. The house had been designed by Andrés in the style of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, with broad, brightly-colored wall planes inside and out. The two men also owned a mountain getaway about an hour from the D.F., in Villalpina, a favorite spot for professional rock climbers to settle.
Maruja, the eldest of the three siblings, lived a rather conventional life in Puebla with her husband and three children. She was an accountant, who worked for her parents' business, which manufactured curtain tassels, a surprisingly profitable business run out of Andrés and Sira's home at 1714-A Calle Cinco Poniente (West Fifth Street).
Jorge, the youngest of the children, had at one time been a semi-professional soccer player. He was engaged to Betty, the daughter of a gasoline station owner in the Sierra, a prosperous businessman in Tetziutlán. It was to Jorge that Bill and I were first entrusted when we made our way to Puebla.
Jorge had planned that we would go to the rancho belonging to Betty's family for two nights, December 30 and December 31, returning to Puebla on New Year's Day. He had also made noises about our going to the beach at Veracruz, to which Bill was very much looking forward. However, once I arrived in Puebla, it became obvious that Jorge's plans for us had been organized to suit Jorge and not with us in mind.
When Bill arrived he was happy to see my mother's cousins and eager to go to the beach to start what he thought would be a last weekend of the year by the Gulf of Mexico the next day. Instead, Jorge took us to Tetziutlán by way of a very odd seafood restaurant in the mountains.
The restaurant was not odd because it was in the mountains and served seafood, although that was curious. The restaurant was odd because in one of the private rooms was an enormous oil painting of Adolf Hitler standing at the head of the table where his Cabinet met in the Reichstag, the members of the Cabinet surrounding him. I was reminded of the pro-Nazi figures in Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, which our trip was beginning to resemble.
When we got to Tetziutlán, we smelled it before we saw it. Betty's father was not only the owner of the gasoline concessions, he was also a dealer in new and used tires. The used tires were burned to some purpose outside Tetziutlán, and the odor could be picked up several miles away. (The same is true with regard to the smell of industrial chicken processing in Fayettevillle, Arkansas, but that's another story.) We drove up to the house belonging to Betty's family and were escorted in.
The family consisted of Betty's father and mother and numerous aunts, all dressed in funereal black, none speaking a word of English. The only person who spoke any English at all was Betty's brother, who had been on a buying trip to Akron, Ohio. The conversational potential of that event was limited, even for someone usually as good at small talk as Bill was. After the meet and greet was over, we were taken to a hotel in the town. As we were not yet married, there was no question of Betty's family housing us.
The hotel was a windowless blockhouse with a central atrium and no windows to the outside. When we walked around the town looking for somewhere to eat, all we could find were pulquerías, low-class bars selling a cheap spirit made of cactus, pulque. (It is said to be inebriating but nutritious.)
We found a simple parrillada, a no frills restaurant featuring only grilled goat and beef, and went back to the hotel to confer.
We quickly came to agreement that we would leave Tetziutlán the next day, first thing in the morning after taking our leave of Jorge and Betty. We had figured out that we could take three buses back to Puebla and that it would be an adventure. We would meet Jorge and Betty in the zócalo, the central plaza in Puebla and return to Andrés and Sira's house, with them none the wiser. We made a reservation at the Hotel San Vicente, next to Puebla's cathedral and a dinner reservation at Carlos and Charlie's, a chain restaurant in Puebla.
The next morning I took Jorge aside and explained Bill was unhappy and that I had to leave with him so that we would spend the night in Puebla, meeting up with Jorge and Betty on New Year's Day. After an initial reservation, Jorge realized the plan was foolproof and he would be free of any responsibility for entertaining us, and that was that. We boarded the first bus and the happy couple waved us away.
What followed was a magical mystery tour through the Mexico few tourists see. At each stop, the bus --which was traveling in the early morning-- picked up one more young Mexicana dressed in a glitzy mini-dress, more-or-less matching shoes and earrings. The little transistor radio blared ranchera music raucously. As the bus swayed along the non-barricaded mountain roads, the Christmas ornaments dangling from the rearview mirror swung in time with its swerves. It took us three or four hours to make it to Puebla on the rickety yellow schoolbuses turned into public transport , but the experience was unforgettably Mexican and worthwhile.
We checked into the Hotel San Vicente, and I called my mother. I had called her for advice from Tetziutlán, asking how best to handle the situation from the point of view of her first cousin and his wife, with whom she was close. To her credit, she strongly advised us to get out of there and confirmed my sense that her cousin would be unhappy to know Jorge had put his pleasure before his guests'. Once settled in the San Vicente, we could relax and contemplate New Year's Eve there.
We couldn't find anywhere that looked any more appetizing to spend New Year's Eve in than Carlos and Charlie's. There's a large Lebanese population in Puebla, which has its own Centro Libanés, a large catering hall. Anyone who could pay the cost of the evening could enjoy a New Year's Eve celebration inside, but the cultural cocktail offered was a bridge too far. We decided to keep our reservation at Carlos and Charlie's.
The evening went as might be predicted: all Carlos and Charlie's offer young hostesses wearing banderillas, gun cartridge holders large enough to cram with shot glasses for tequila. The menu features tourist-style Mexican food and there are mariachis. Mariachi music is so loud, it reminds me of the old joke about the Salvation Army: First they tell you about hell, then they tell you what it sounds like. Eating our meal to the noise of mariachis playing at full volume beside our chairs was not our idea of a good time --although the mariachis seemed to think that we thought it was.
The point was, we had escaped what would have no doubt been a still more hair-raising New Year's Eve in Tetziutlán. The next day we met Jorge and Betty (who married not too much later) and. asked by Sira and Andrés how we liked Tetziutlán and the Sierra, said only the nicest things.
January 2 we returned to the D.F., where Andrés and Luis became our hosts for the next few days. We were treated to true Mexican hospitality: meals cooked by their maid and served in the beautiful formal dining room of their house, with its beautiful 18th century portrait of Christ bearing a crown of thorns and other fine works of art, visits to Mexico City's great museums, and most unexpected of all, the Epiphany Evening party at the María Isabel Hilton, in the "Pink Zone", Mexico City's Fifth Avenue. At the dinner all the contestants from Latin America for the "Miss World" title were the guests of honor. Luis, who ran the state of Texas' office in Mexico City squired that year's Miss Texas, Laura Haring who went on to win the "Miss World." title and go on to make movies ("Mulholland Drive" and "Lambada", notably). She autographed for Bill a photo taken of the group at the table . He always smiled when he told this part of the story and I still have the photo, with its autograph "Love, Laura Haring".
Earlier, told of what had happened to us at the hands of his brother, my cousin Andrés rolled his eyes and snorted, "My brother! Tetziutlán is the armpit of Mexico!"
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 30, 2013
New Year's Eve In Rome
December 30, 2013
"Throw something out the window and make a lot of noise, as the Italians do", is my advice to a friend in Zurich, as we approach New Year's Eve. Completely unsuitable counsel, but one that brings back a flood of memories of the week between Christmas and New Year's that Bill and I spent in Rome, some twenty years ago.
We were staying in a package hotel near the north end of the Villa Borghese, a long walk from the center of the city. We would walk through the gardens a good twenty minutes, taking in, as we approached Rome's heart, the equestrian police. With their tricornered hats and long capes, they looked like something out of Lampedusa's "The Leopard", fusty and antiquated. We had made a few reservations at the restaurants in Rome known for fine dining, "Nino's", and "Da Mario", although a little place near our hotel turned out to be surprisingly good. For New Year's Eve, we had booked at "La Rosetta", a luxurious venue hard to get a reservation in.
The experience that night was all it was cracked up to be, although we discovered we were atypical of the clientele, which featured quite a few elegantly dressed older Romans squiring considerably younger ones dressed fetchingly. It could have been a scene out of "La Dolce Vita". There was an air of decadence and its perdurability in the Eternal City: Older men prefer younger women and younger women prefer money. It was ever thus.
Afterwards we had an experience that evoked another Rome. It brings to mind something I heard this week at church, about the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Christianity, another legacy of Rome.
For those, like me, new to the concepts, the idea is that the nativity of Christ has a vertical and a horizontal dimension. In its verticality, Christ came down from heaven and gave man a way of salvation from the world; in its horizontal aspect, that fact should move the sincere Christian to activity in keeping with the message, acts of goodness towards his fellow man. The confluence of the two is joy.
To return to my tale, after dinner, as the tolling of midnight approached, we went to the Trevi Fountain, which was comfortably thronged. We mounted the steps of a church adjoining to get a better view of the Trevi horses and watch the scene. On the steps were a small group of older Italians, there to do likewise. They had bottles of wine and plastic cups in their hands.
When the church bells tolled 2014, a riotous clatter was heard, as people in the vicinity shouted "Auguri!", threw old things out the window and banged pots. The people around us kissed each other, and we did the same. After a moment, we felt our arms jostled: an elderly couple, part of a larger group of Romans standing on the steps, passed us each a plastic cup of white wine.
I remember being so touched by their gesture. They were old enough, I thought, to have lived through the Second World War and its hardships. Perhaps they recognized we were Americans, perhaps they would have been generous to anyone standing on the steps with them that momentous night. Under Rome's clement skies that night, at that moment, we were united by our common humanity.
The vertical meeting the horizontal, or just a small generosity inspired by a festive moment? The feeling I had was so strong I remember it years later, although I cannot tell you why.
"Throw something out the window and make a lot of noise, as the Italians do", is my advice to a friend in Zurich, as we approach New Year's Eve. Completely unsuitable counsel, but one that brings back a flood of memories of the week between Christmas and New Year's that Bill and I spent in Rome, some twenty years ago.
We were staying in a package hotel near the north end of the Villa Borghese, a long walk from the center of the city. We would walk through the gardens a good twenty minutes, taking in, as we approached Rome's heart, the equestrian police. With their tricornered hats and long capes, they looked like something out of Lampedusa's "The Leopard", fusty and antiquated. We had made a few reservations at the restaurants in Rome known for fine dining, "Nino's", and "Da Mario", although a little place near our hotel turned out to be surprisingly good. For New Year's Eve, we had booked at "La Rosetta", a luxurious venue hard to get a reservation in.
The experience that night was all it was cracked up to be, although we discovered we were atypical of the clientele, which featured quite a few elegantly dressed older Romans squiring considerably younger ones dressed fetchingly. It could have been a scene out of "La Dolce Vita". There was an air of decadence and its perdurability in the Eternal City: Older men prefer younger women and younger women prefer money. It was ever thus.
Afterwards we had an experience that evoked another Rome. It brings to mind something I heard this week at church, about the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Christianity, another legacy of Rome.
For those, like me, new to the concepts, the idea is that the nativity of Christ has a vertical and a horizontal dimension. In its verticality, Christ came down from heaven and gave man a way of salvation from the world; in its horizontal aspect, that fact should move the sincere Christian to activity in keeping with the message, acts of goodness towards his fellow man. The confluence of the two is joy.
To return to my tale, after dinner, as the tolling of midnight approached, we went to the Trevi Fountain, which was comfortably thronged. We mounted the steps of a church adjoining to get a better view of the Trevi horses and watch the scene. On the steps were a small group of older Italians, there to do likewise. They had bottles of wine and plastic cups in their hands.
When the church bells tolled 2014, a riotous clatter was heard, as people in the vicinity shouted "Auguri!", threw old things out the window and banged pots. The people around us kissed each other, and we did the same. After a moment, we felt our arms jostled: an elderly couple, part of a larger group of Romans standing on the steps, passed us each a plastic cup of white wine.
I remember being so touched by their gesture. They were old enough, I thought, to have lived through the Second World War and its hardships. Perhaps they recognized we were Americans, perhaps they would have been generous to anyone standing on the steps with them that momentous night. Under Rome's clement skies that night, at that moment, we were united by our common humanity.
The vertical meeting the horizontal, or just a small generosity inspired by a festive moment? The feeling I had was so strong I remember it years later, although I cannot tell you why.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Bucks County Car Follies
December 28, 2013
"You drive" --two words that strike fear in my heart, a fear I am doing my best to master. Everytime I go out with a car, though, something happens to make me wonder whether I will ever feel at ease behind the wheel.
I have just returned from a day and a half driving to and from Lambertville, New Jersey, New Hope and Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Beau traveled with me, in the passenger seat in front, strapped in with a seat belt for dogs that attaches to that inside the car. He has adjusted easily to being in the car, although he naturally does not like having his motions restricted. My adjustment is more problematic.
As I rent cars, each car is different, so I worry: "Does this one have headlights that go on automatically?" "How does the seat adjust and how much in any direction?" "How does the automatic transmission work?" Once on the road, the worries mount: The GPS directions contradict what I found on MapQuest; the instructions are asking me to turn into the left lane, but the cars in that lane are not giving me an opening; "What does' turn left and bear to the right' mean?"
Notwithstanding, I make it to New Hope without incident. I have booked two nights at the Ramada, which allows dogs, and has a large restaurant and bar. The Ramada is also home to "The Razz Room", a top cabaret venue in Bucks County where Andrea Marcovicci, Tom Wopat and K.T. Sullivan, among others, have played. I am in New Hope to visit with a former colleague from City government and to investigate whether it has any appeal for me as an alternative domicile to Manhattan. My former colleague and his partner moved to New Hope eleven years ago and neither has ever regretted leaving Manhattan, each having abandoned their New York careers and downshifted. It is good to see them both --after eleven years we all bear time's marks, but are the same at the core.
My friends take me to a restaurant in Lambertville, just across the bridge over the canal from New Hope. The meal is convivial, but I am back in my room by 9:00 p.m. Beau is patiently waiting for me, having behaved well in my absence, which is gratifying.
The problem is, the room in the Ramada is on the first floor, and reminds me of the hotel room Anton Chigurh (the monstrous killer in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men) rampaged in. It has an industrial deodorant smell, the ground floor windows have shoddy blinds and curtains. The carpet, too, is industrial quality, the toiletries the cheapest available to hotels. The bed is immaculate, though, the crisp white sheets and many pillows very comfortable for Beau and me to lie on. I watch a PBS documentary about composer Marvin Hamlisch in the "American Masters" series and drift off to sleep.
By two a.m. I am retching over the toilet bowl --I have food poisoning. My stomach expels every bit of food and drink I consumed, and then some. Perhaps I sleep two hours between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., when I call the receptionist to beg her to have someone bring me two slices of dry wheat toast and two bottles of water. A hot shower and a shampoo make me presentable, but I feel awful. Staying another day in that room --perhaps it is a "sick" room? --is out of the question. Once presentable I ask the hotel clerk whether I could cancel my extra night's booking, which I paid for in advance. She agrees, and I am so glad.
I pile Beau and his belongings, along with mine into the car, strapping him into the seatbelt once more. I call my friends and let them know I would feel better sleeping in my own bed and promise to keep in touch. The day is brilliantly sunny --a gift, as another worry I had about driving to Bucks County on the last weekend of 2013 was that the weather would be foul. I decide I would like to see a bit of Doylestown before departing Bucks County and head south on Route 202.
I have no trouble getting to Doylestown, the GPS' directions are direct for once. I arrive at the beginning of South Main Street, and park in a virtually empty lot by the CVS . Then I try to remove Beau's seat belt, with taking it off over his head giving me difficulty. But I have a bigger problem: I forgot to turn the car into "Park". As a result, when I accidentally hit the accelerator, the car, parked by a curb by a grassy knoll, lifts itself over the curb and onto the knoll. I go into reverse, and almost hit a car idling perpendicular to me. Fortunately, I was able to stop the car in time.
After I have the car in "Park" and Beau out of his seat belt and wearing a leash, we exit the car and I take a look at the front: the bumper covers have snapped out of position. "What will this cost to fix?" is the first thought I have. A woman who took in my "close shave" a few minutes before, is parked in a red Mini Cooper two spots away from me. "You're shaken, but not hurt, that's the main thing", she says kindly.
I drive Beau and me home, arriving by 5:30 p.m. I park in front of a fire hydrant (another worry: will I get a ticket?) and run Beau and our luggage upstairs. I return and get in the car (which is thankfully unticketed), setting the GPS for the Budget Rent A Car depot at La Guardia airport. I make it there without too much difficulty. The question is: how will the change in the car's state be handled?
I pull up to the first spot available for car return and a handsome young man from the Caribbean comes up, wearing a lovely smile. I think I dealt with him when I picked up the car the day before, and greet him warmly. I tell him right away that because I jumped a curb, the bumper covers snapped out of alignment. I also cajole, saying "It's Christmas --could you help me out?"
He is able to snap the two bumper covers back into place. "I'll let it slide", he tells me. I shake his hand and palm $10 into his. Life is good.
As for Bucks County, it's so American, so traditional, I'm scared off. I know Bette Davis and Celeste Holm and their husbands drove out there between shows in "All About Eve", and that Claude Rains had a farm there; that New Hope is home to the famous "Bucks County Playhouse", where out-of-town tryouts for many great shows were done. Doylestown is the county seat and a pretty town, too.
It's all just too bucolic. When I rounded the exit ramp off the George Washington Bridge and took in Riverside Drive, I felt the corpuscles in my blood stream surge. Gingerbread houses and Shetland ponies are beautiful, but I am to glad to be reminded of New York's edge, its keenness and intensity, in comparison to Bucks County. --And I'm glad to see my own bed again.
"You drive" --two words that strike fear in my heart, a fear I am doing my best to master. Everytime I go out with a car, though, something happens to make me wonder whether I will ever feel at ease behind the wheel.
I have just returned from a day and a half driving to and from Lambertville, New Jersey, New Hope and Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Beau traveled with me, in the passenger seat in front, strapped in with a seat belt for dogs that attaches to that inside the car. He has adjusted easily to being in the car, although he naturally does not like having his motions restricted. My adjustment is more problematic.
As I rent cars, each car is different, so I worry: "Does this one have headlights that go on automatically?" "How does the seat adjust and how much in any direction?" "How does the automatic transmission work?" Once on the road, the worries mount: The GPS directions contradict what I found on MapQuest; the instructions are asking me to turn into the left lane, but the cars in that lane are not giving me an opening; "What does' turn left and bear to the right' mean?"
Notwithstanding, I make it to New Hope without incident. I have booked two nights at the Ramada, which allows dogs, and has a large restaurant and bar. The Ramada is also home to "The Razz Room", a top cabaret venue in Bucks County where Andrea Marcovicci, Tom Wopat and K.T. Sullivan, among others, have played. I am in New Hope to visit with a former colleague from City government and to investigate whether it has any appeal for me as an alternative domicile to Manhattan. My former colleague and his partner moved to New Hope eleven years ago and neither has ever regretted leaving Manhattan, each having abandoned their New York careers and downshifted. It is good to see them both --after eleven years we all bear time's marks, but are the same at the core.
My friends take me to a restaurant in Lambertville, just across the bridge over the canal from New Hope. The meal is convivial, but I am back in my room by 9:00 p.m. Beau is patiently waiting for me, having behaved well in my absence, which is gratifying.
The problem is, the room in the Ramada is on the first floor, and reminds me of the hotel room Anton Chigurh (the monstrous killer in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men) rampaged in. It has an industrial deodorant smell, the ground floor windows have shoddy blinds and curtains. The carpet, too, is industrial quality, the toiletries the cheapest available to hotels. The bed is immaculate, though, the crisp white sheets and many pillows very comfortable for Beau and me to lie on. I watch a PBS documentary about composer Marvin Hamlisch in the "American Masters" series and drift off to sleep.
By two a.m. I am retching over the toilet bowl --I have food poisoning. My stomach expels every bit of food and drink I consumed, and then some. Perhaps I sleep two hours between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m., when I call the receptionist to beg her to have someone bring me two slices of dry wheat toast and two bottles of water. A hot shower and a shampoo make me presentable, but I feel awful. Staying another day in that room --perhaps it is a "sick" room? --is out of the question. Once presentable I ask the hotel clerk whether I could cancel my extra night's booking, which I paid for in advance. She agrees, and I am so glad.
I pile Beau and his belongings, along with mine into the car, strapping him into the seatbelt once more. I call my friends and let them know I would feel better sleeping in my own bed and promise to keep in touch. The day is brilliantly sunny --a gift, as another worry I had about driving to Bucks County on the last weekend of 2013 was that the weather would be foul. I decide I would like to see a bit of Doylestown before departing Bucks County and head south on Route 202.
I have no trouble getting to Doylestown, the GPS' directions are direct for once. I arrive at the beginning of South Main Street, and park in a virtually empty lot by the CVS . Then I try to remove Beau's seat belt, with taking it off over his head giving me difficulty. But I have a bigger problem: I forgot to turn the car into "Park". As a result, when I accidentally hit the accelerator, the car, parked by a curb by a grassy knoll, lifts itself over the curb and onto the knoll. I go into reverse, and almost hit a car idling perpendicular to me. Fortunately, I was able to stop the car in time.
After I have the car in "Park" and Beau out of his seat belt and wearing a leash, we exit the car and I take a look at the front: the bumper covers have snapped out of position. "What will this cost to fix?" is the first thought I have. A woman who took in my "close shave" a few minutes before, is parked in a red Mini Cooper two spots away from me. "You're shaken, but not hurt, that's the main thing", she says kindly.
I drive Beau and me home, arriving by 5:30 p.m. I park in front of a fire hydrant (another worry: will I get a ticket?) and run Beau and our luggage upstairs. I return and get in the car (which is thankfully unticketed), setting the GPS for the Budget Rent A Car depot at La Guardia airport. I make it there without too much difficulty. The question is: how will the change in the car's state be handled?
I pull up to the first spot available for car return and a handsome young man from the Caribbean comes up, wearing a lovely smile. I think I dealt with him when I picked up the car the day before, and greet him warmly. I tell him right away that because I jumped a curb, the bumper covers snapped out of alignment. I also cajole, saying "It's Christmas --could you help me out?"
He is able to snap the two bumper covers back into place. "I'll let it slide", he tells me. I shake his hand and palm $10 into his. Life is good.
As for Bucks County, it's so American, so traditional, I'm scared off. I know Bette Davis and Celeste Holm and their husbands drove out there between shows in "All About Eve", and that Claude Rains had a farm there; that New Hope is home to the famous "Bucks County Playhouse", where out-of-town tryouts for many great shows were done. Doylestown is the county seat and a pretty town, too.
It's all just too bucolic. When I rounded the exit ramp off the George Washington Bridge and took in Riverside Drive, I felt the corpuscles in my blood stream surge. Gingerbread houses and Shetland ponies are beautiful, but I am to glad to be reminded of New York's edge, its keenness and intensity, in comparison to Bucks County. --And I'm glad to see my own bed again.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
The Beginning Of The Christmas Season
December 26, 2013
In the United Kingdom, today is "Boxing Day", traditionally, the day servants and tradesmen received gifts from their employers. It extends Christmas one more day, while in the United States, December 26 is a back-to-work day for most.
Come dusk on Christmas Day, many feel a certain emotional deflation: the champagne and wine have been drunk, the meal eaten, the living room is a sea of torn wrapping paper, and most people think they spent more than they intended. The bills will come in January, and it is now undeniably winter.
In New York, where the temperatures are in the low thirties, the winter light bounces off the buildings, the limestone ones in particular. It's a far cry from the heat of Jerusalem.
However, Christmas hasn't ended. In fact, it's just begun --for Christians, at any rate. Father Rafferty, the priest who celebrated Christmas Mass in "Ascension" parish, my parish, yesterday morning, made it a point to explain this fine point of the liturgical calendar before delivering the final blessing and dismissal. I'm glad he said it, the thought Christmas isn't a one-day wonder comforts me.
Christmas was a simple and solo affair for the most part. Beau and I arose at 7:30 a.m., and I let him run a good ways, even admitting him to the dog run for the first time in his life. He was bemused by the scene, with so many dogs larger --and smaller--greeting him with the canine equivalent of a punch in the face: putting their maws on his neck and forcing him down onto the ground. Within fifteen minutes he was bathed in dust, and I knew he would get a bath before bed. (I also resolved to find him more polite friends.)
Beau having romped, I still had enough time to return him home and cycle to 97th Street and back along Riverside Drive before Mass. The weather was gelid! Even colder with the wind blowing in my face as I sped along; but perversely, I enjoyed the furious pedaling I indulged myself in: on Christmas Day, I could be heedless along a road usually choked with speeding cars. I went to Mass, then bought my Christmas dinner at West Side Market, which was doing a good business. "Harvest Soup", a creamy, burnt orange concoction, paired with a cheesy foccacia, followed by polenta topped with parmesan cheese into which I mixed arugula. Dessert was chocolate pudding. Nursery food all, but not unsuitable.
Today was for cleaning up the last of the papers dislodged by the move-out Beau's advent mandated. I had to go to midtown for a variety of reasons, then to the vicinity of Zabar's, and then 96th Street. I was laden with bags of items that had to be delivered, exchanged, returned for credit. When I returned home, all I wanted to do was to ramble with Beau in Riverside Park.
I put his new buckle-closure collar and leash on --the latter 6' in length. We descended to the street, out the building, across Broadway and headed for Riverside Park. Beau's excitement makes him criss-cross the streets diagonally: I think it's because he doesn't want to miss anything, he wants to take it all in. On the Drive he became even more animated, scampering, picking up sticks and carrying them in his mouth, while keeping up his pace, which a musician would recognize as prestissimo. Down the stairs to the heart of the park we went. Here Beau let loose in explosive bursts of energy, leaping his height and bounding. Is there anything as joyful as a happy puppy giving vent to his animal spirits?
My late friend, Jon Messmann, the writer of "adult" westerns I've mentioned before, once pointed out a phrase of Emerson's that applies here. "All the world loves a lover" Jon said, has more than one meaning. Conventionally, it's taken to mean that the general public is well-disposed to those in love. However, it can also be meant to say that a person happy in the grip of a passion --for another, for his work-- gives joy to those who perceive his condition.
The expression describes my feeling at the moment perfectly, although I would add Keats' A thing of beauty is a joy forever to my considerations:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
For those of us susceptible, beautiful things --people, animals, things --imprint themselves on our memories and live there. Surely that is what Keats was saying in his poem.
Today, though, in an age that rejects the ideal of "beauty", it is more likely that someone will say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". --But that is to miss the point. For those responsive to beauty, the encounter with the perceived thing embodying the inherent nature of the beautiful --its quiddity-- is a profoundly joyous experience.
I find Beau so lovely. --Looking at him, I can understand why, in the 19th century, young men courting women were called beaux, why a paradigm of all the virtues of a type is called a beau ideal. Permitting myself to revel in the little dog's beauty and love of life is good for my soul.
In the United Kingdom, today is "Boxing Day", traditionally, the day servants and tradesmen received gifts from their employers. It extends Christmas one more day, while in the United States, December 26 is a back-to-work day for most.
Come dusk on Christmas Day, many feel a certain emotional deflation: the champagne and wine have been drunk, the meal eaten, the living room is a sea of torn wrapping paper, and most people think they spent more than they intended. The bills will come in January, and it is now undeniably winter.
In New York, where the temperatures are in the low thirties, the winter light bounces off the buildings, the limestone ones in particular. It's a far cry from the heat of Jerusalem.
However, Christmas hasn't ended. In fact, it's just begun --for Christians, at any rate. Father Rafferty, the priest who celebrated Christmas Mass in "Ascension" parish, my parish, yesterday morning, made it a point to explain this fine point of the liturgical calendar before delivering the final blessing and dismissal. I'm glad he said it, the thought Christmas isn't a one-day wonder comforts me.
Christmas was a simple and solo affair for the most part. Beau and I arose at 7:30 a.m., and I let him run a good ways, even admitting him to the dog run for the first time in his life. He was bemused by the scene, with so many dogs larger --and smaller--greeting him with the canine equivalent of a punch in the face: putting their maws on his neck and forcing him down onto the ground. Within fifteen minutes he was bathed in dust, and I knew he would get a bath before bed. (I also resolved to find him more polite friends.)
Beau having romped, I still had enough time to return him home and cycle to 97th Street and back along Riverside Drive before Mass. The weather was gelid! Even colder with the wind blowing in my face as I sped along; but perversely, I enjoyed the furious pedaling I indulged myself in: on Christmas Day, I could be heedless along a road usually choked with speeding cars. I went to Mass, then bought my Christmas dinner at West Side Market, which was doing a good business. "Harvest Soup", a creamy, burnt orange concoction, paired with a cheesy foccacia, followed by polenta topped with parmesan cheese into which I mixed arugula. Dessert was chocolate pudding. Nursery food all, but not unsuitable.
Today was for cleaning up the last of the papers dislodged by the move-out Beau's advent mandated. I had to go to midtown for a variety of reasons, then to the vicinity of Zabar's, and then 96th Street. I was laden with bags of items that had to be delivered, exchanged, returned for credit. When I returned home, all I wanted to do was to ramble with Beau in Riverside Park.
I put his new buckle-closure collar and leash on --the latter 6' in length. We descended to the street, out the building, across Broadway and headed for Riverside Park. Beau's excitement makes him criss-cross the streets diagonally: I think it's because he doesn't want to miss anything, he wants to take it all in. On the Drive he became even more animated, scampering, picking up sticks and carrying them in his mouth, while keeping up his pace, which a musician would recognize as prestissimo. Down the stairs to the heart of the park we went. Here Beau let loose in explosive bursts of energy, leaping his height and bounding. Is there anything as joyful as a happy puppy giving vent to his animal spirits?
My late friend, Jon Messmann, the writer of "adult" westerns I've mentioned before, once pointed out a phrase of Emerson's that applies here. "All the world loves a lover" Jon said, has more than one meaning. Conventionally, it's taken to mean that the general public is well-disposed to those in love. However, it can also be meant to say that a person happy in the grip of a passion --for another, for his work-- gives joy to those who perceive his condition.
The expression describes my feeling at the moment perfectly, although I would add Keats' A thing of beauty is a joy forever to my considerations:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
For those of us susceptible, beautiful things --people, animals, things --imprint themselves on our memories and live there. Surely that is what Keats was saying in his poem.
Today, though, in an age that rejects the ideal of "beauty", it is more likely that someone will say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". --But that is to miss the point. For those responsive to beauty, the encounter with the perceived thing embodying the inherent nature of the beautiful --its quiddity-- is a profoundly joyous experience.
I find Beau so lovely. --Looking at him, I can understand why, in the 19th century, young men courting women were called beaux, why a paradigm of all the virtues of a type is called a beau ideal. Permitting myself to revel in the little dog's beauty and love of life is good for my soul.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
A Map For A Foreign Country
Christmas 2013
Christmas Eve, after my day's activities were done --the holiday envelopes given out, the wassail proffered to and appreciated by Katy and Tucker, the laundry put in drawers, Beau fed and walked and happy in his crate-- I sat on the carpet in the living room and watched one of my favorite Christmas movies, "Bridget Jones' Diary".
For the uninitiated, "Jones" is about a thirty-two year old woman working a clerical job at a London publishing house and still unhappily single. In the end she finds happiness, but the road to Mr. Right is full of speed bumps and potholes. Numerous jokes send-up Christmas sweaters and ties, department store product demonstrators, parties with a "tarts and vicars" theme, and the English custom of wearing paper crowns to celebrate the holiday.
Of course "Jones" --as her treacherously seductive boss, Daniel Cleaver, calls her --thinks happiness is being in love and being loved. At thirty-two (the age I married), I thought so too --and it was.
Now I'm alone and the question seems irrelevant to my present existence. Bill and I didn't have children: our relationship was bilateral, by choice. It was deeply fulfilling and rather extraordinary, I've come to realize. So many people are stuck in relationships that bring them no happiness; or they dry out emotionally, never having been presented with the chance to know the happiness another man or woman can provide (if only for a time). So my circumstances are exceptionally lucky, even if I would give anything not be in the position of being prompted to make the reflection by the fact of Bill's absence.
I was thinking today that having no children and no family to speak of (my sister and I are not close, and my one cousin is fading fast), Bill's death sent me to a strange place, a minority enclave. Husbands lose wives, and vice versa, but in most cases there are children and relatives. My own inclinations being cerebral and solitary, it could be said that I forgot to take the possibility I'd be alone into consideration. Rather like the story of Freud looking at himself closely in the mirror one day and shockingly, seeing a stranger staring back at him. He was an old man who didn't recognize himself.
I don't think that's the case. I doubt I'd have made a very good mother: I never had the slightest maternal instinct. I'm grateful that I lived in the United States at a time when women were no longer obliged to reproduce or face life in the narrow, deplored subculture of the childless. Still, most healthy, gainfully employed Americans marry and have children. And having children gives life a common dimension many people think the natural order of things --and build lives around. The happily married nulliparous (the medical term for "non-childbearing"), experience nothing comparable: no concerns about what might be unsuitable on the Internet, no family vacations, back-to-school shopping expeditions. The closest similarity might be the demands a dog makes, but the differing motivations for choosing to make a home for a child versus a pet stop further comparison right there.
Still further out of the mainstream is the widow or widower, particularly the childless ones, like me. I'm not unhappy, but I'm odd, because I'm not part of a pair. Relative to most people, I live in a foreign country, I now realize, but it's one for which I have no map, I have to make it up as I go along.
Who might my models be? Thoreau? I do like his assertion "I want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life." Words to live by, whether you're twenty or sixty, married or alone.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Christmas Eve, after my day's activities were done --the holiday envelopes given out, the wassail proffered to and appreciated by Katy and Tucker, the laundry put in drawers, Beau fed and walked and happy in his crate-- I sat on the carpet in the living room and watched one of my favorite Christmas movies, "Bridget Jones' Diary".
For the uninitiated, "Jones" is about a thirty-two year old woman working a clerical job at a London publishing house and still unhappily single. In the end she finds happiness, but the road to Mr. Right is full of speed bumps and potholes. Numerous jokes send-up Christmas sweaters and ties, department store product demonstrators, parties with a "tarts and vicars" theme, and the English custom of wearing paper crowns to celebrate the holiday.
Of course "Jones" --as her treacherously seductive boss, Daniel Cleaver, calls her --thinks happiness is being in love and being loved. At thirty-two (the age I married), I thought so too --and it was.
Now I'm alone and the question seems irrelevant to my present existence. Bill and I didn't have children: our relationship was bilateral, by choice. It was deeply fulfilling and rather extraordinary, I've come to realize. So many people are stuck in relationships that bring them no happiness; or they dry out emotionally, never having been presented with the chance to know the happiness another man or woman can provide (if only for a time). So my circumstances are exceptionally lucky, even if I would give anything not be in the position of being prompted to make the reflection by the fact of Bill's absence.
I was thinking today that having no children and no family to speak of (my sister and I are not close, and my one cousin is fading fast), Bill's death sent me to a strange place, a minority enclave. Husbands lose wives, and vice versa, but in most cases there are children and relatives. My own inclinations being cerebral and solitary, it could be said that I forgot to take the possibility I'd be alone into consideration. Rather like the story of Freud looking at himself closely in the mirror one day and shockingly, seeing a stranger staring back at him. He was an old man who didn't recognize himself.
I don't think that's the case. I doubt I'd have made a very good mother: I never had the slightest maternal instinct. I'm grateful that I lived in the United States at a time when women were no longer obliged to reproduce or face life in the narrow, deplored subculture of the childless. Still, most healthy, gainfully employed Americans marry and have children. And having children gives life a common dimension many people think the natural order of things --and build lives around. The happily married nulliparous (the medical term for "non-childbearing"), experience nothing comparable: no concerns about what might be unsuitable on the Internet, no family vacations, back-to-school shopping expeditions. The closest similarity might be the demands a dog makes, but the differing motivations for choosing to make a home for a child versus a pet stop further comparison right there.
Still further out of the mainstream is the widow or widower, particularly the childless ones, like me. I'm not unhappy, but I'm odd, because I'm not part of a pair. Relative to most people, I live in a foreign country, I now realize, but it's one for which I have no map, I have to make it up as I go along.
Who might my models be? Thoreau? I do like his assertion "I want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life." Words to live by, whether you're twenty or sixty, married or alone.
Merry Christmas everyone!
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Finding Joy In The Empty Spaces
December 24, 2013
Today I only had to interact with five people: the doorman, my driving coach, the seller of long-playing records who helped me vacate my apartment of much of its clutter; and three neighbors.
My turn behind the wheel started at 8:30 a.m. and went well: I mimicked part of the route to New Hope, Pennsylvania I'll drive Friday morning. I am trying to get Beau used to being in a car, and by and large succeeding, although today, on the longest drive, he was sick twice. Fortunately, the driving instructor loves dogs, so it was not a problem.
The doorman on duty is the longest-serving in the building and the most professional of all the staff that work the door, notwithstanding his lack of English skills. Were he competent in English, he would be working a building in the 10021 zip code, the one with the highest per capita income in the country. He and I always speak in Spanish, so I can't fault him, although I can understand the frustration of residents without Spanish-language skills obliged to make sense of his heavily-accented and limited English.
The long-playing record seller was in a good mood today, riffing on the two million dollars paid to Will Ferrell for "Anchorman 2". He was out on the street trying to make a few dollars from last-minute shoppers, hanging out with an older African-American man who sometimes brings him things to sell alongside the LPs. His mood was upbeat.
Two of my neighbors were perfectly pleasant; the third, a retired physical education instructor who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment with her husband, a singer in classical music choruses, was her usual needling self. I encountered her in the basement laundry room, washing laundry with her husband beside her. After I put my wash in the dryer and started to leave, she made a remark about the time a year ago when I rang her bell looking for a lost laundry card I thought she might have picked up by mistake. I guess my faux pas (the card had about $40 on it and I was upset to have mislaid it) still rankles. (Someone told me she and her husband once had a knock-down drag-out fight in the laundry room, so maybe I got off lucky.)
Life with others is not easy. Which is why it is particularly enjoyable to be here tonight with almost no one here. When the building's full complement of owners and renters are going through their daily routines, it's a hive of gossip and malice under the surface pleasantness, particularly in December.
During the holiday season everyone is already on edge, waiting for news of the maintenance increase in January. When the annual memorandum from the management company makes the request that staff not be forgotten amid the general gift-giving, owners remember 1. how expensive it was to pay out gifts last year; and, 2. the defects of individual building staff (whose names I've changed below):
"I don't want Felipe 'high fiv-ing' me when I'm trying to get to work in the morning", says one.
Regarding the same doorman, another says "I don't want Felipe calling me amiga --I'm not his 'amiga'!"
"Armando stood there talking to --that Hispanic guy who works in the Columbia building down the street-- looking right at me, while I tried to get my luggage out of the taxi", chirps another.
"Jesus told me the Super won't let him walk the luggage cart to the elevator anymore" says one of his fans, referring to the rerouting of a peripatetic doorman who prefers to walk around the lobby to standing at the door keeping an eye on the street.
After the first snow, a dog-owner wails "Did you ever see how much salt they put on the sidewalk? I told Jorge "Look at how much you're using. He said 'It's very little.' Ha!"
"The Super's drunk on the job."
"The Super hires his relatives --it's a mafia."
"The Super does outside jobs on company time."
Not that the staff doesn't have its beefs with residents:
"I don't like her --she accused me to Felipe of stealing her packages from the Package Room" says one.
"I don't like him --his dogs always do their 'business' on the floor in front of the elevator and he pretends not to notice --then I have to clean it up. For once, could he look behind him?"
A retired couple, recently moved in, tells me that "The streets are not as clean as 'Lincoln Center'."
(--Well, the prices aren't as high, either.)
In brief, this building is an island of complaint.
But tonight, I listen to the Eton College Choir carol "Hark The Herald Angels Sing" and wait for my laundry to dry and for the clock to strike seven. I have promised Tucker and Katy, the young people from Vermont who have been selling Christmas trees around the corner day and night for a month now, that I will give them "wassail" and Christmas dainties before they pack up the last of their equipment and head for home.
Christmas --it's all about finding joy in the empty spaces.
Today I only had to interact with five people: the doorman, my driving coach, the seller of long-playing records who helped me vacate my apartment of much of its clutter; and three neighbors.
My turn behind the wheel started at 8:30 a.m. and went well: I mimicked part of the route to New Hope, Pennsylvania I'll drive Friday morning. I am trying to get Beau used to being in a car, and by and large succeeding, although today, on the longest drive, he was sick twice. Fortunately, the driving instructor loves dogs, so it was not a problem.
The doorman on duty is the longest-serving in the building and the most professional of all the staff that work the door, notwithstanding his lack of English skills. Were he competent in English, he would be working a building in the 10021 zip code, the one with the highest per capita income in the country. He and I always speak in Spanish, so I can't fault him, although I can understand the frustration of residents without Spanish-language skills obliged to make sense of his heavily-accented and limited English.
The long-playing record seller was in a good mood today, riffing on the two million dollars paid to Will Ferrell for "Anchorman 2". He was out on the street trying to make a few dollars from last-minute shoppers, hanging out with an older African-American man who sometimes brings him things to sell alongside the LPs. His mood was upbeat.
Two of my neighbors were perfectly pleasant; the third, a retired physical education instructor who lives in a rent-stabilized apartment with her husband, a singer in classical music choruses, was her usual needling self. I encountered her in the basement laundry room, washing laundry with her husband beside her. After I put my wash in the dryer and started to leave, she made a remark about the time a year ago when I rang her bell looking for a lost laundry card I thought she might have picked up by mistake. I guess my faux pas (the card had about $40 on it and I was upset to have mislaid it) still rankles. (Someone told me she and her husband once had a knock-down drag-out fight in the laundry room, so maybe I got off lucky.)
Life with others is not easy. Which is why it is particularly enjoyable to be here tonight with almost no one here. When the building's full complement of owners and renters are going through their daily routines, it's a hive of gossip and malice under the surface pleasantness, particularly in December.
During the holiday season everyone is already on edge, waiting for news of the maintenance increase in January. When the annual memorandum from the management company makes the request that staff not be forgotten amid the general gift-giving, owners remember 1. how expensive it was to pay out gifts last year; and, 2. the defects of individual building staff (whose names I've changed below):
"I don't want Felipe 'high fiv-ing' me when I'm trying to get to work in the morning", says one.
Regarding the same doorman, another says "I don't want Felipe calling me amiga --I'm not his 'amiga'!"
"Armando stood there talking to --that Hispanic guy who works in the Columbia building down the street-- looking right at me, while I tried to get my luggage out of the taxi", chirps another.
"Jesus told me the Super won't let him walk the luggage cart to the elevator anymore" says one of his fans, referring to the rerouting of a peripatetic doorman who prefers to walk around the lobby to standing at the door keeping an eye on the street.
After the first snow, a dog-owner wails "Did you ever see how much salt they put on the sidewalk? I told Jorge "Look at how much you're using. He said 'It's very little.' Ha!"
"The Super's drunk on the job."
"The Super hires his relatives --it's a mafia."
"The Super does outside jobs on company time."
Not that the staff doesn't have its beefs with residents:
"I don't like her --she accused me to Felipe of stealing her packages from the Package Room" says one.
"I don't like him --his dogs always do their 'business' on the floor in front of the elevator and he pretends not to notice --then I have to clean it up. For once, could he look behind him?"
A retired couple, recently moved in, tells me that "The streets are not as clean as 'Lincoln Center'."
(--Well, the prices aren't as high, either.)
In brief, this building is an island of complaint.
But tonight, I listen to the Eton College Choir carol "Hark The Herald Angels Sing" and wait for my laundry to dry and for the clock to strike seven. I have promised Tucker and Katy, the young people from Vermont who have been selling Christmas trees around the corner day and night for a month now, that I will give them "wassail" and Christmas dainties before they pack up the last of their equipment and head for home.
Christmas --it's all about finding joy in the empty spaces.
Monday, December 23, 2013
Expectantly Waiting
December 23, 2013
Eight days from now, tens of thousands of revelers in Times Square, as well as the millions of people watching around the globe, will be waiting for the ball atop a building there to drop, heralding the coming of New Year 2014.
I will be at home waiting, too, but for another kind of ball to drop --Beau's.
Beau's testicles have not dropped completely yet. One is palpable, but the other has gone missing. Some say spaniels' testicles drop later than other breeds, although the veterinarian never heard such a thing. He does say that it is a genetic defect carried in the mother's genes, but he is not making a final diagnosis just yet. He is willing to wait another four months (when Beau will be eight months old) to see if in that time the question resolves itself.
Dogs are usually neutered at six months, but as Beau is sweet-natured, there's also no rush to remove his testes. Notwithstanding, Beau's hormones are working their way into his bloodstream: he now jumps up and grabs one of my calves with his front paws and gives the calf a couple of bumps before I shake him off. I'm flattered (I'm in effect Jocasta to his Oedipus), but it's can't continue. Whenever it happens, I'm to throw him on his back, to teach him his manners.
Having had his second round of distemper shots, Beau is now free to meet other dogs, and to play with them. He still needs two more vaccinations (for bordatella and Lyme disease), but he no longer has to be confined at home.
Accordingly, we walk to PETCO to return a giant sausage I'd bought on suggestion of the trainer who came by last Sunday. The meat is too rich for Beau, so I'm training him with kibble and biscuits, which is much easier on his digestive tract, and ultimately on me. I am constantly cleaning messes off the floor, and laundering clothes and towels --but that's a part of country life with dogs, if not horses (even more work).
Although today is a red-letter day for Beau, it's not the best day to celebrate the fact: it has been pouring rain all day. Nonetheless, we walk the twenty blocks back and forth to PETCO, returning soaked to the skin. Beau soldiers manfully through the deep puddles, the drenching rain and wind, although his efforts to tuck inside building doorways tell me he can't wait to get home.
Finally we make it back home and I tie him up to a staircase's finial while I enter the apartment to obtain towels to dry him off with. Now he breaks: he cries pitifully, and I race to get him towels --and biscuits, to reward his steadfastness in the wet. Once next to him, I drop to the floor and start toweling him vigorously: within moments he is his feisty self again, trying to take the towel away and wiggling furiously as I dry off his armpits --could he be ticklish?
Beau weighs over fifteen pounds now, at four months of age. He ought to reach forty pounds when full grown, at about a year old. Four months before he may be operated on for purposes of locating and removing his testicles. If the testicles have not descended by then, the surgery will be major.
It sounds odd to say it, but if they don't drop, they could be anywhere. Beau might have to be cut from (to use a sailing metaphor) stem to stern, so the doctors can find where exactly the gonads are lodged. It will also be a longer healing period than a normal neutering procedure. Not to mention considerably more expensive.
That's why it was a good idea to buy dog insurance. Notwithstanding, I hope major surgery won't be necessary. That is why, for possibly a total of four months, I will be expectantly waiting for Beau's balls to drop. In the grand scheme of things, that seems much more important than anything happening in Times Square in eight days.
Eight days from now, tens of thousands of revelers in Times Square, as well as the millions of people watching around the globe, will be waiting for the ball atop a building there to drop, heralding the coming of New Year 2014.
I will be at home waiting, too, but for another kind of ball to drop --Beau's.
Beau's testicles have not dropped completely yet. One is palpable, but the other has gone missing. Some say spaniels' testicles drop later than other breeds, although the veterinarian never heard such a thing. He does say that it is a genetic defect carried in the mother's genes, but he is not making a final diagnosis just yet. He is willing to wait another four months (when Beau will be eight months old) to see if in that time the question resolves itself.
Dogs are usually neutered at six months, but as Beau is sweet-natured, there's also no rush to remove his testes. Notwithstanding, Beau's hormones are working their way into his bloodstream: he now jumps up and grabs one of my calves with his front paws and gives the calf a couple of bumps before I shake him off. I'm flattered (I'm in effect Jocasta to his Oedipus), but it's can't continue. Whenever it happens, I'm to throw him on his back, to teach him his manners.
Having had his second round of distemper shots, Beau is now free to meet other dogs, and to play with them. He still needs two more vaccinations (for bordatella and Lyme disease), but he no longer has to be confined at home.
Accordingly, we walk to PETCO to return a giant sausage I'd bought on suggestion of the trainer who came by last Sunday. The meat is too rich for Beau, so I'm training him with kibble and biscuits, which is much easier on his digestive tract, and ultimately on me. I am constantly cleaning messes off the floor, and laundering clothes and towels --but that's a part of country life with dogs, if not horses (even more work).
Although today is a red-letter day for Beau, it's not the best day to celebrate the fact: it has been pouring rain all day. Nonetheless, we walk the twenty blocks back and forth to PETCO, returning soaked to the skin. Beau soldiers manfully through the deep puddles, the drenching rain and wind, although his efforts to tuck inside building doorways tell me he can't wait to get home.
Finally we make it back home and I tie him up to a staircase's finial while I enter the apartment to obtain towels to dry him off with. Now he breaks: he cries pitifully, and I race to get him towels --and biscuits, to reward his steadfastness in the wet. Once next to him, I drop to the floor and start toweling him vigorously: within moments he is his feisty self again, trying to take the towel away and wiggling furiously as I dry off his armpits --could he be ticklish?
Beau weighs over fifteen pounds now, at four months of age. He ought to reach forty pounds when full grown, at about a year old. Four months before he may be operated on for purposes of locating and removing his testicles. If the testicles have not descended by then, the surgery will be major.
It sounds odd to say it, but if they don't drop, they could be anywhere. Beau might have to be cut from (to use a sailing metaphor) stem to stern, so the doctors can find where exactly the gonads are lodged. It will also be a longer healing period than a normal neutering procedure. Not to mention considerably more expensive.
That's why it was a good idea to buy dog insurance. Notwithstanding, I hope major surgery won't be necessary. That is why, for possibly a total of four months, I will be expectantly waiting for Beau's balls to drop. In the grand scheme of things, that seems much more important than anything happening in Times Square in eight days.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
In Praise Of Older Women
December 18, 2013
One week to Christmas, five days from Beau's last vaccination and the end of his quarantine.
I have been wresting him from our connubial bed every morning at about 6:40 a.m. to get him downstairs while his bladder is full, that he might enjoy emptying it outside. Pisser c'est la jouissance du chaste, Louis Jouvet, the storied French actor said once: Pissing is the pleasure of the chaste. If that is so, dogs must be near sainthood.
I rise, dress, forego washing and take Beau downstairs in my arms, only releasing him after our morning doorman has opened the door to the exterior world. Minutes later Beau releases his brimming bladder. I praise him elaborately, he recognizes how special I think what he has done is, and we return home so I can make myself a cup of tea, feed him and go out once more.
We walk to Riverside Park and there he must restrain himself: he cannot meet another dog yet. Monday he will receive the second round of "canine distemper" shots and be free to trawl dogdom. Until then, he must be monk-like. (The only exceptions are dogs I am certain have been fully inoculated.)
Our walk is necessarily abbreviated, but with the snow roundabout, it makes for exciting climbing up and down snowdrifts. Home again, he settles into our routine, which involves me "bribing" him with treats in the form of extra beads of "kibble" throughout the day. I have to try to restore some sense of order to the home I unpacked two weeks ago, with my computer equipment taking up digs in a large closet.
It takes all day to complete the task, between conversations with the Internet service provider, the printer manufacturer and the router company. By day's end, I have managed to empty the apartment of a good bit of paper and created a makeshift office, from which I write now. It is much nicer than writing from the living room rug, and less unsightly.
A neighbor, the owner of a dog boarding and walking enterprise, comes over for dinner at seven, bringing with her her fully-inoculated, eleven-year old Beagle, "Sadie". And here, I get my reward for the day's hard work: Beau is besotted with her. He follows her around, allows her to nestle in his crate, tries to kiss her: "Yes!" he puts his mouth to her lips, which looks like a kiss to me. My more canine-saavy friend says he's probably just trying to figure out what she had for dinner, but I like to think both may be true. --If he didn't think it was worth eating, he would not have put his mouth where he did.
I am very pleased at Beau's unbounded interest in his first female. Being a "grand dame", she is, naturally, protective of her amour propre, and corrects any inappropriateness of Beau's with a Beagle's sonorous bay. She is, still , a lovely Beagle, with enormous pools for eyes and high cheekbones, and quite active. Beau seems oblivious to the age difference.
Sadie is unflappable, and Beau's instincts are to be gentle. It might be the Marschalin and the Rosenkavalier. The liaison won't last: Beau will meet other bitches starting Monday, and Sadie may not hold Beau's interest. Tonight, however, their love is as pungent as eiswein, wine made of grapes frozen by the first frost, but still sweet.
One week to Christmas, five days from Beau's last vaccination and the end of his quarantine.
I have been wresting him from our connubial bed every morning at about 6:40 a.m. to get him downstairs while his bladder is full, that he might enjoy emptying it outside. Pisser c'est la jouissance du chaste, Louis Jouvet, the storied French actor said once: Pissing is the pleasure of the chaste. If that is so, dogs must be near sainthood.
I rise, dress, forego washing and take Beau downstairs in my arms, only releasing him after our morning doorman has opened the door to the exterior world. Minutes later Beau releases his brimming bladder. I praise him elaborately, he recognizes how special I think what he has done is, and we return home so I can make myself a cup of tea, feed him and go out once more.
We walk to Riverside Park and there he must restrain himself: he cannot meet another dog yet. Monday he will receive the second round of "canine distemper" shots and be free to trawl dogdom. Until then, he must be monk-like. (The only exceptions are dogs I am certain have been fully inoculated.)
Our walk is necessarily abbreviated, but with the snow roundabout, it makes for exciting climbing up and down snowdrifts. Home again, he settles into our routine, which involves me "bribing" him with treats in the form of extra beads of "kibble" throughout the day. I have to try to restore some sense of order to the home I unpacked two weeks ago, with my computer equipment taking up digs in a large closet.
It takes all day to complete the task, between conversations with the Internet service provider, the printer manufacturer and the router company. By day's end, I have managed to empty the apartment of a good bit of paper and created a makeshift office, from which I write now. It is much nicer than writing from the living room rug, and less unsightly.
A neighbor, the owner of a dog boarding and walking enterprise, comes over for dinner at seven, bringing with her her fully-inoculated, eleven-year old Beagle, "Sadie". And here, I get my reward for the day's hard work: Beau is besotted with her. He follows her around, allows her to nestle in his crate, tries to kiss her: "Yes!" he puts his mouth to her lips, which looks like a kiss to me. My more canine-saavy friend says he's probably just trying to figure out what she had for dinner, but I like to think both may be true. --If he didn't think it was worth eating, he would not have put his mouth where he did.
I am very pleased at Beau's unbounded interest in his first female. Being a "grand dame", she is, naturally, protective of her amour propre, and corrects any inappropriateness of Beau's with a Beagle's sonorous bay. She is, still , a lovely Beagle, with enormous pools for eyes and high cheekbones, and quite active. Beau seems oblivious to the age difference.
Sadie is unflappable, and Beau's instincts are to be gentle. It might be the Marschalin and the Rosenkavalier. The liaison won't last: Beau will meet other bitches starting Monday, and Sadie may not hold Beau's interest. Tonight, however, their love is as pungent as eiswein, wine made of grapes frozen by the first frost, but still sweet.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Exercise Class and the American Idiom
December 17, 2013
Being a firm believer in mens sans in corpora sano, when the weather is inclement, I dig into my pocket to pay for exercise classes, something I am usually loathe to do. I used to run, or jog --finding one of the sport's key attractions the minimal investment required. When my knees and my back began to caution me about continuing to pursue my hobby, I switched to cycling. However, once the streets are slick, that becomes inadvisable. So I bought a package of exercise classes at the local "spinning" studio, which has stationary bicycle classes throughout the day.
I was first introduced to "spinning" by a Swiss friend, an enthusiast, who used to take classes at the oddly named "Holmes Place" gym on the top floor of Jemoli, Zurich's equivalent of Bergdorf Goodman. Being Zurich, the gym was impeccable, the staff so good-looking they could have been catalogue models. The class was run by an athletic German woman in her 20s, who spoke through a headset in soothing tones, as she entreated us to give our all through the circuit of pedal sequences on and off the bicycle seats.
The experience could not have been more different in my local Upper West Side gym. There, the class is held on the second floor of a two story building known in the real estate world here as a "tax payer": a two-story building on which the owner of the land and structure can't see his way to financing development, but whose rents cover the city's tax bill. My cycling class is above Silver Moon Bakery on Broadway and 105th Street, and shares space with a yoga center which operates alongside.
The contrast in the yogic and "spinning" approaches to health need not be elaborated on. What is notable about my "spinning" class is more than its energetic contrast to asanas and meditation. It is its particularly American style, a style I would describe as far more obstreperous than the Swiss.
Both of the classes I have attended are "taught" by young women in the their twenties who teach twice a week. They both have loud voices, and both are built sturdily: One is an aspiring Broadway ingenue; the other a tall young woman whose hair has been tonsured so that all that is left of her foliculae is the top, which she has gathered into a pony tail, rather in the fashion of a Buddhist monk.
The resemblance with disciples of Gautama Buddha ends there, at least in class. Like her opposite number the singer, both young woman wear headphone-style microphones through which they shout their commands. The classes last 45 minutes and are meant to simulate a hilly bicycle ride of the same length,with successively higher hills being attained until mid-way, the class moves into progressively lower gear and back to the pace at which it started.
While the instructor is calling out the changes, rock music with a steady backbeat blasts from the stereo system. The idea is to stimulate students to follow the music's beat, all the while pushing themselves harder and harder, so that stationary exercise actually achieves a level of cardiovascular challenge comparable to that of an ordinary bicycle.
The experience seems to me quintessentially American, particularly in the idiom used by the instructors.
The "teacher" (that label is affixed to the bicycle in the front of the bank of twenty in four rows in the room in which we work) exhorts us by shouting out various phrases meant to inspire us not to spare ourselves, but which, to me, have a faintly pornographic flavor:
"Show me what you've got!"
"Whooooo!"
"Give it to me!"
"I know I can ask more, because you have it in you!"
"Turn it up another notch! And if you feel you can, push it up one more!"
"Push through the pain!"
"Yeah!"
And, of course, these catch-phrases are not unique to the "spinning" class: they are staples of sports team managers throughout the land.
The enthusiasm, too, is lost on me. Enthusiasm is a quintessential American characteristic, one I usually believe a positive characteristic of my countrymen. Unlike Switzerland, where among elites to act blasé is the prevailing mode of self-presentation, Americans put their backs into everything they do.
I would quote that famous Englishman with an American mother, Winston Churchilll, in support of the benefits of embracing the attitude:
The secret of a successful life is the ability to go from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm.
However, in the gym, in the cramped space, looking out onto the mess the last two snowstorms have created on Broadway, I can't feel very enthusiastic.
I generally keep the pace and increase the resistance, but making my legs revolve at speeds resembling those of the cartoon-character Road Runner in flight is not my cup of tea.
When someone offers a "spinning class" with Beethoven playing in the background I'll be much more enthusiastic.
Being a firm believer in mens sans in corpora sano, when the weather is inclement, I dig into my pocket to pay for exercise classes, something I am usually loathe to do. I used to run, or jog --finding one of the sport's key attractions the minimal investment required. When my knees and my back began to caution me about continuing to pursue my hobby, I switched to cycling. However, once the streets are slick, that becomes inadvisable. So I bought a package of exercise classes at the local "spinning" studio, which has stationary bicycle classes throughout the day.
I was first introduced to "spinning" by a Swiss friend, an enthusiast, who used to take classes at the oddly named "Holmes Place" gym on the top floor of Jemoli, Zurich's equivalent of Bergdorf Goodman. Being Zurich, the gym was impeccable, the staff so good-looking they could have been catalogue models. The class was run by an athletic German woman in her 20s, who spoke through a headset in soothing tones, as she entreated us to give our all through the circuit of pedal sequences on and off the bicycle seats.
The experience could not have been more different in my local Upper West Side gym. There, the class is held on the second floor of a two story building known in the real estate world here as a "tax payer": a two-story building on which the owner of the land and structure can't see his way to financing development, but whose rents cover the city's tax bill. My cycling class is above Silver Moon Bakery on Broadway and 105th Street, and shares space with a yoga center which operates alongside.
The contrast in the yogic and "spinning" approaches to health need not be elaborated on. What is notable about my "spinning" class is more than its energetic contrast to asanas and meditation. It is its particularly American style, a style I would describe as far more obstreperous than the Swiss.
Both of the classes I have attended are "taught" by young women in the their twenties who teach twice a week. They both have loud voices, and both are built sturdily: One is an aspiring Broadway ingenue; the other a tall young woman whose hair has been tonsured so that all that is left of her foliculae is the top, which she has gathered into a pony tail, rather in the fashion of a Buddhist monk.
The resemblance with disciples of Gautama Buddha ends there, at least in class. Like her opposite number the singer, both young woman wear headphone-style microphones through which they shout their commands. The classes last 45 minutes and are meant to simulate a hilly bicycle ride of the same length,with successively higher hills being attained until mid-way, the class moves into progressively lower gear and back to the pace at which it started.
While the instructor is calling out the changes, rock music with a steady backbeat blasts from the stereo system. The idea is to stimulate students to follow the music's beat, all the while pushing themselves harder and harder, so that stationary exercise actually achieves a level of cardiovascular challenge comparable to that of an ordinary bicycle.
The experience seems to me quintessentially American, particularly in the idiom used by the instructors.
The "teacher" (that label is affixed to the bicycle in the front of the bank of twenty in four rows in the room in which we work) exhorts us by shouting out various phrases meant to inspire us not to spare ourselves, but which, to me, have a faintly pornographic flavor:
"Show me what you've got!"
"Whooooo!"
"Give it to me!"
"I know I can ask more, because you have it in you!"
"Turn it up another notch! And if you feel you can, push it up one more!"
"Push through the pain!"
"Yeah!"
And, of course, these catch-phrases are not unique to the "spinning" class: they are staples of sports team managers throughout the land.
The enthusiasm, too, is lost on me. Enthusiasm is a quintessential American characteristic, one I usually believe a positive characteristic of my countrymen. Unlike Switzerland, where among elites to act blasé is the prevailing mode of self-presentation, Americans put their backs into everything they do.
I would quote that famous Englishman with an American mother, Winston Churchilll, in support of the benefits of embracing the attitude:
The secret of a successful life is the ability to go from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm.
However, in the gym, in the cramped space, looking out onto the mess the last two snowstorms have created on Broadway, I can't feel very enthusiastic.
I generally keep the pace and increase the resistance, but making my legs revolve at speeds resembling those of the cartoon-character Road Runner in flight is not my cup of tea.
When someone offers a "spinning class" with Beethoven playing in the background I'll be much more enthusiastic.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Joyfully Out Of Step With The World
December 16, 2013
As Christmas approaches, I find pleasure in remembering all the incidents of Christmas seasons past which speak to my contrarian streak.
One thing I have always enjoyed about New York City is that although the Christmas season may be a national preoccupation throughout the 50 states and U.S. territories, in New York City someone --in most cases, a fair number-- will be participating in the holiday season in idiosyncratic ways.
My late husband, Bill Barbeosch, found Christmas shopping a particular nightmare, because many clients would call with last-minute tax-planning requests in December, days before the deadline for implementing new tax structures. Our first dates during the season often had me helping Bill to find where to buy the gifts he was asked for by his family, which has a tradition of exchanging Christmas lists. Thinking about the incoming Mexican tax law change while simultaneously trying to figure out where to find the latest trendy perfume, was not Bill's idea of a good time. Fortunately, what stores were carrying what was the sort of thing I was usually up on, so, improbably, our relationship deepened as together, we endeavored to find the "Cabbage Patch" doll, or "VCR Plus" or Elizabeth Taylor's new perfume, "Passion" --whatever the American middle class' consumerist hopes were pinned on that year.
If Bill had to shop all day on a weekend (the other, he would be working a full day in the office), he wasn't going to suffer the experience without respite, however. In one of our first conversations about making a shopping foray together, he announced to me a discovery that would provide refuge from the frenzied crowds for years to come: the $8 glass of Tättinger champagne "Caviarteria" --around the corner from the Delmonico on Park Avenue and 59th Street, in the heart of Manhattan's retail district-- offered during the holidays. "I went out at lunch looking for something for my mother when I found a light lunch and a glass of champagne for under $30", he said. --From then on, we always looked forward to a break there from our Christmas shopping exertions.
Christmas shopping could have been an Olympic sport as practiced in New York before the advent of online shopping. On account of the press of work, we always pushed the task to the last weekend before Christmas, which added a further level of arduousness to the challenge of buying each person what they wanted. One year, trying to find "VCR Plus" --one of the first devices that allowed TV programs to be taped at home in the absence of the owner-- was like jumping hurdles: no matter how many stores we reached, it was unavailable, so we had to go on to the next outlet on our list. Late in the day, we finally found a store in the West 40s that had "VCR Plus". -But there was one complication: Bill had rented a car for Christmas week, which we were using to pick up presents, buy our contribution to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners and to get to them. When we found the electronics dealer that had "VCR Plus" in stock, we had to double park in front of the store because all the parking was taken. Bill asked me to sit in the car while he rushed in and consummated the purchase, which I did.
The only problem with that was that I did not drive at the time, and if a policeman working motor vehicle duty came by ticketing illegally parked cars, I could not move the car. Unfortunately, one did. In my panic at the thought of our getting a ticket while trying to buy Christmas presents for family, I pled vainly with the policeman who began writing a ticket in due course, my explanation and protests notwithstanding.
Then I lost my temper and said a choice word to the man in blue --who immediately said he would take me down to the precinct and charge me with disorderly conduct. Instantly, I became the most abject, tearful and sorrowful female within a five-mile radius. Fortunately, the policeman let me off with just a warning --and handed me the parking ticket.
Perhaps because I find the pressure of the Christmas season so intense, I am glad that New York is home to many, many people for whom it is not normal to celebrate Christmas with family: performers, hotel staff, grocers that specialize in not closing on holidays (my own never closes). Two writers, speaking of the liberating effect living in this rarefied world can have, said it this way:
I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.
Jack Kerouac
A dark New York noon, the sky a gray silhouette. A storm is blanketing the city, Ten inches of the stuff, and still the subways are on schedule, the Times stacked high in the newsstands…Even the corner vendor is there for you, Fagin-like, fingerless gloves spearing kabobs, boilers billowing smoke like cauldrons.
The Northeast is on its knees, says the weatherman. But the city is impervious, defending its dreamers like a castle.
Kurt Wenzel
"Lit Life"
Random House 2001
I raced against time in the middle of a blizzard one Christmas Eve a few years ago. I wanted to buy Bill his Christmas present, a ceramic teapot in the shape of Winston Churchil's head, with the famous "V" sign formed by his fingers molded to the side of his head, one of them creating the teapot's spout. I had seen this bit of Churchilliana at Myers of Keswick, the grocery store on Hudson Street near 14th that caters to U.K. natives homesick for pork pies, Scotch eggs and others staples of the British diet. I hadn't had the time to actually buy the the piece for Bill, and here it was Christmas Eve afternoon, with the snow coming down heavily, and Bill still at the office.
I called the grocery before I left our home in Morningside Heights and raced to 14th Street and Seventh Avenue by subway, walking as fast as I knew how to get there before Myers of Keswick closed promptly at 6:30 p.m. I arrived at 6:25 p.m., triumphant. --Not only did I buy the Churchill teapot, but I brought home some pork pies and a plum pudding, too.
Happily carrying my haul, I decided to eschew the subway in favor of the bus, and walked to Greenwich and Horatio Streets, the first stop on the M11 bus, which travels northward to Morniingside Heights. There used to be a Spanish restaurant on the corner, El Faro, established in 1927, now closed by the City for health violations. The entrance had a step that had to be breached to enter, which created an alcove to wait in when the weather was particularly bad. I don't remember having to wait long, though, the bus visible lumbering through the white powder only a few minutes after I found my niche in the alcove. The bus was entirely empty, save for the driver.
I got on and enjoyed what amounted to private chauffeur service most of the way home. The bus rumbled through Chelsea and the Garment Center, through Hell's Kitchen and past Columbus Circle. It was only near Lincoln Center that anyone at all got on.
The streetlights illuminated the bus' way as the darkness deepened: the city was white and silent and empty. I felt a great mad joy, the kind you feel when you are joyfully out of step with the world, but happy in your own.
As Christmas approaches, I find pleasure in remembering all the incidents of Christmas seasons past which speak to my contrarian streak.
One thing I have always enjoyed about New York City is that although the Christmas season may be a national preoccupation throughout the 50 states and U.S. territories, in New York City someone --in most cases, a fair number-- will be participating in the holiday season in idiosyncratic ways.
My late husband, Bill Barbeosch, found Christmas shopping a particular nightmare, because many clients would call with last-minute tax-planning requests in December, days before the deadline for implementing new tax structures. Our first dates during the season often had me helping Bill to find where to buy the gifts he was asked for by his family, which has a tradition of exchanging Christmas lists. Thinking about the incoming Mexican tax law change while simultaneously trying to figure out where to find the latest trendy perfume, was not Bill's idea of a good time. Fortunately, what stores were carrying what was the sort of thing I was usually up on, so, improbably, our relationship deepened as together, we endeavored to find the "Cabbage Patch" doll, or "VCR Plus" or Elizabeth Taylor's new perfume, "Passion" --whatever the American middle class' consumerist hopes were pinned on that year.
If Bill had to shop all day on a weekend (the other, he would be working a full day in the office), he wasn't going to suffer the experience without respite, however. In one of our first conversations about making a shopping foray together, he announced to me a discovery that would provide refuge from the frenzied crowds for years to come: the $8 glass of Tättinger champagne "Caviarteria" --around the corner from the Delmonico on Park Avenue and 59th Street, in the heart of Manhattan's retail district-- offered during the holidays. "I went out at lunch looking for something for my mother when I found a light lunch and a glass of champagne for under $30", he said. --From then on, we always looked forward to a break there from our Christmas shopping exertions.
Christmas shopping could have been an Olympic sport as practiced in New York before the advent of online shopping. On account of the press of work, we always pushed the task to the last weekend before Christmas, which added a further level of arduousness to the challenge of buying each person what they wanted. One year, trying to find "VCR Plus" --one of the first devices that allowed TV programs to be taped at home in the absence of the owner-- was like jumping hurdles: no matter how many stores we reached, it was unavailable, so we had to go on to the next outlet on our list. Late in the day, we finally found a store in the West 40s that had "VCR Plus". -But there was one complication: Bill had rented a car for Christmas week, which we were using to pick up presents, buy our contribution to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners and to get to them. When we found the electronics dealer that had "VCR Plus" in stock, we had to double park in front of the store because all the parking was taken. Bill asked me to sit in the car while he rushed in and consummated the purchase, which I did.
The only problem with that was that I did not drive at the time, and if a policeman working motor vehicle duty came by ticketing illegally parked cars, I could not move the car. Unfortunately, one did. In my panic at the thought of our getting a ticket while trying to buy Christmas presents for family, I pled vainly with the policeman who began writing a ticket in due course, my explanation and protests notwithstanding.
Then I lost my temper and said a choice word to the man in blue --who immediately said he would take me down to the precinct and charge me with disorderly conduct. Instantly, I became the most abject, tearful and sorrowful female within a five-mile radius. Fortunately, the policeman let me off with just a warning --and handed me the parking ticket.
Perhaps because I find the pressure of the Christmas season so intense, I am glad that New York is home to many, many people for whom it is not normal to celebrate Christmas with family: performers, hotel staff, grocers that specialize in not closing on holidays (my own never closes). Two writers, speaking of the liberating effect living in this rarefied world can have, said it this way:
I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.
Jack Kerouac
A dark New York noon, the sky a gray silhouette. A storm is blanketing the city, Ten inches of the stuff, and still the subways are on schedule, the Times stacked high in the newsstands…Even the corner vendor is there for you, Fagin-like, fingerless gloves spearing kabobs, boilers billowing smoke like cauldrons.
The Northeast is on its knees, says the weatherman. But the city is impervious, defending its dreamers like a castle.
Kurt Wenzel
"Lit Life"
Random House 2001
I raced against time in the middle of a blizzard one Christmas Eve a few years ago. I wanted to buy Bill his Christmas present, a ceramic teapot in the shape of Winston Churchil's head, with the famous "V" sign formed by his fingers molded to the side of his head, one of them creating the teapot's spout. I had seen this bit of Churchilliana at Myers of Keswick, the grocery store on Hudson Street near 14th that caters to U.K. natives homesick for pork pies, Scotch eggs and others staples of the British diet. I hadn't had the time to actually buy the the piece for Bill, and here it was Christmas Eve afternoon, with the snow coming down heavily, and Bill still at the office.
I called the grocery before I left our home in Morningside Heights and raced to 14th Street and Seventh Avenue by subway, walking as fast as I knew how to get there before Myers of Keswick closed promptly at 6:30 p.m. I arrived at 6:25 p.m., triumphant. --Not only did I buy the Churchill teapot, but I brought home some pork pies and a plum pudding, too.
Happily carrying my haul, I decided to eschew the subway in favor of the bus, and walked to Greenwich and Horatio Streets, the first stop on the M11 bus, which travels northward to Morniingside Heights. There used to be a Spanish restaurant on the corner, El Faro, established in 1927, now closed by the City for health violations. The entrance had a step that had to be breached to enter, which created an alcove to wait in when the weather was particularly bad. I don't remember having to wait long, though, the bus visible lumbering through the white powder only a few minutes after I found my niche in the alcove. The bus was entirely empty, save for the driver.
I got on and enjoyed what amounted to private chauffeur service most of the way home. The bus rumbled through Chelsea and the Garment Center, through Hell's Kitchen and past Columbus Circle. It was only near Lincoln Center that anyone at all got on.
The streetlights illuminated the bus' way as the darkness deepened: the city was white and silent and empty. I felt a great mad joy, the kind you feel when you are joyfully out of step with the world, but happy in your own.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
First Snowfall
December 14, 2013
Three to five inches of snow are covering New York. I have been planning to visit a sale of dog coats and blankets at an apartment off Central Park West, a few blocks away. Beauregard needs a coat for winter, and I am guessing that the offerings of Northward Hound will surpass those I've seen at Petland and Petco.
However, getting to 108th off Central Park West in the midst of a snowstorm is made more difficult by the near-ubiquitous sowing of salt over the sidewalks, a knee-jerk reaction of building superintendents. The salt burns the paws of dogs, although owners use shea butter ointments, or, famously, Musher's Wax to protect dog paws. Notwithstanding, anyone with a dog will opt for walking in the street, or in my case, picking up the dog and carrying it over the unavoidably salty sections.
This isn't as easy as it might seem, particularly when you're carrying a hot cup of tea in a styrofoam cup in one hand, holding the leash in the other. Beau resists being carried, and at one point he is suspended head down facing the sidewalk, but we get to the apartment in relatively short order.
The two women behind Northward Hound are New Hampshire natives who also board dogs at a horse farm half the year while continuing to sell their products online. It is not difficult to find a lovely coat for Beau and two blankets he can travel with.
On the way back, I choose to go via Central Park North, then turn into Morningside Park, which is when Beau experiences has his first outdoor romp. The park is virtually deserted and the blanket of snow made for a rambunctious puppy. Beau is warm enough, and the park is free of traffic, except for a flock of Canadian geese frolicking in the park's pond. I don't mind the cold, but the birds' pleasure in the freezing water marks them off from homo sapiens, and dogs, too. Beau does not register their existence, preferring to enjoy the white stuff, and respite from my martinet demand that he "heel", whenever we walk on the sidewalks and streets.
Beau is fourteen weeks old, and he has been penned and confined at my home since he was born. So it is a joy to see him carom from one end to the other of the leash's reach. At the end of the walk he bounds up the many steps ascending to Morningside Drive with ease --I am also thinking he will sleep once we are home, having tired himself out thoroughly on this first outing.
Sure enough, once home, I layout the largest of the new blankets on the floor, coax Beau onto it, then cover him with the smaller. In moments, he is sound asleep.
Why should the pleasure of this little dog please me so? It says something about my nature, which finds satisfaction in nurturing animals more than humans. Dogs are less complicated than people, even if they can't tell you exactly what they're thinking. And their affection is so genuine, so immediately expressed (--as is their displeasure, too).
I think it's also that dogs are more forgiving than people. In the four weeks Beau has been my charge, I've disciplined him ceaselessly, to the purpose of training him before he is full grown, when the physical demands would be perhaps beyond my abilities. I have had him on the shortest of leashes, pulled up by the neck on our brief walks; I have forced him off tray tables, bottom bookcase shelves; I have stuck my hand down his throat to extract some piece of newspaper he has chewed; I have pulled his lips back to look at his teeth, and I have shoved him into his crate when I have to go out and he will not willingly go.
Yet no matter: the tempest over, he comes up and licks my face. What human being is capable of such generosity of spirit?
Three to five inches of snow are covering New York. I have been planning to visit a sale of dog coats and blankets at an apartment off Central Park West, a few blocks away. Beauregard needs a coat for winter, and I am guessing that the offerings of Northward Hound will surpass those I've seen at Petland and Petco.
However, getting to 108th off Central Park West in the midst of a snowstorm is made more difficult by the near-ubiquitous sowing of salt over the sidewalks, a knee-jerk reaction of building superintendents. The salt burns the paws of dogs, although owners use shea butter ointments, or, famously, Musher's Wax to protect dog paws. Notwithstanding, anyone with a dog will opt for walking in the street, or in my case, picking up the dog and carrying it over the unavoidably salty sections.
This isn't as easy as it might seem, particularly when you're carrying a hot cup of tea in a styrofoam cup in one hand, holding the leash in the other. Beau resists being carried, and at one point he is suspended head down facing the sidewalk, but we get to the apartment in relatively short order.
The two women behind Northward Hound are New Hampshire natives who also board dogs at a horse farm half the year while continuing to sell their products online. It is not difficult to find a lovely coat for Beau and two blankets he can travel with.
On the way back, I choose to go via Central Park North, then turn into Morningside Park, which is when Beau experiences has his first outdoor romp. The park is virtually deserted and the blanket of snow made for a rambunctious puppy. Beau is warm enough, and the park is free of traffic, except for a flock of Canadian geese frolicking in the park's pond. I don't mind the cold, but the birds' pleasure in the freezing water marks them off from homo sapiens, and dogs, too. Beau does not register their existence, preferring to enjoy the white stuff, and respite from my martinet demand that he "heel", whenever we walk on the sidewalks and streets.
Beau is fourteen weeks old, and he has been penned and confined at my home since he was born. So it is a joy to see him carom from one end to the other of the leash's reach. At the end of the walk he bounds up the many steps ascending to Morningside Drive with ease --I am also thinking he will sleep once we are home, having tired himself out thoroughly on this first outing.
Sure enough, once home, I layout the largest of the new blankets on the floor, coax Beau onto it, then cover him with the smaller. In moments, he is sound asleep.
Why should the pleasure of this little dog please me so? It says something about my nature, which finds satisfaction in nurturing animals more than humans. Dogs are less complicated than people, even if they can't tell you exactly what they're thinking. And their affection is so genuine, so immediately expressed (--as is their displeasure, too).
I think it's also that dogs are more forgiving than people. In the four weeks Beau has been my charge, I've disciplined him ceaselessly, to the purpose of training him before he is full grown, when the physical demands would be perhaps beyond my abilities. I have had him on the shortest of leashes, pulled up by the neck on our brief walks; I have forced him off tray tables, bottom bookcase shelves; I have stuck my hand down his throat to extract some piece of newspaper he has chewed; I have pulled his lips back to look at his teeth, and I have shoved him into his crate when I have to go out and he will not willingly go.
Yet no matter: the tempest over, he comes up and licks my face. What human being is capable of such generosity of spirit?
Friday, December 13, 2013
Christmas Presentiments
December 13, 2013
This afternoon I sent out a dozen Christmas cards to France, to those who welcomed me in the village of Caunes-Minervois this summer.
I took pleasure in sending out the cards, choosing a particular card for each of my new acquaintances, hoping to lend a more personal touch to the mailing than sending the same to all.
Yet even as I was writing the cards, I was dreading having to send the remaining cards on my list. There is no season like Christmas for bringing feelings of obligation to the fore.
I have one friend overseas who always sends me the same card, a standard, rather pedestrian card from her law firm, postage paid for, no doubt, by the firm. (I send her her card not to her office, but to her home on my own dime.)
Former colleagues of my late husband send me cards in his memory, which I appreciate. The trust and estate bar of which he was a part is a close-knit community, and those practitioners who Bill dealt with were really friends, not just professional associates. They know the ways and days of families and are united by an esprit de corps based not on how much money they make (which is a fraction of their corporate colleagues), but how well they serve their clients. A good trust and estate lawyer is discreet in soliciting his clients' confidences, silent as the tomb in keeping them and sharp in his perception and protection of his clients' interests. It is the interaction with clients who have inherited or achieved material success and make contributions of their wealth to their communities that makes the work interesting and fulfilling to practitioners. Every one of the lawyers and private bankers I am thinking of feels proud of the contribution to society their work establishing charitable foundations, helping parents teach their children about the responsibilities of money, and protecting future generations provides. They are honorable men and women.
All of these send out at least a few hundred cards every holiday season. The idea of it befogs my consciousness. No one thinks anyone with a holiday card list of a few hundred sends the cards out expecting anyone to think an intimate exchange is intended. It is a form of marketing; at a minimum, of keeping in the good graces of someone who may, in the future, require the services of the sender of the card, or may refer someone. So my sentimentality about the cards sent by Bill's former colleagues is perhaps misplaced.
What if, however, the same card on the list of five hundred recipients is sent to me, not because I am going to ever need the services of one of Bill's former colleagues, but "for old time's sake"?
As we grow older and start to lose people we grew up with, went to school with, worked with amicably for a happy term, that connection can be taken less and less for granted. I am more and more aware that my perspective on the world is the product of the generation I was born into, the place I was raised, the places I went to school and worked. I long more and more to encounter new people as bright, as optimistic, as funny, and as willing to work hard to achieve a result as those who were my cohorts and classmates. Yet I find few outside my small milieu: Is the pool of them dying out, eclipsed by a new set of values with little resemblance to my own? Or were they always rare?
I am fond of recollecting the St. Crispin's Day speech of young King Henry V in the eponymous play. It speaks of "we happy few", those the young prince Hal, now become King Henry, exhorts to give their all, that they might be able to look back and recognize the specialness of that "band of brothers" who fought together on the fateful day. Stendahl used "to the happy few" as the epigraph closing his novel, "The Charterhouse of Parma". There I first encountered the phrase and took it for a signpost about what relationships among friends are meant to be.
For all that we allow ourselves at Christmas, the Christmas joy often misplaced is to give vent to our feelings of association with those we bonded with long ago. I've been struck by the outpouring of grief that Peter Kaplan's death has given rise to since it was announced the day after Thanksgiving. Kaplan, who edited The New York Observer for fifteen years, and in so doing, taught a generation of journalists how to write a news story with verve and finesse, was widely beloved and admired. In the very cynical profession of journalism in a very cynical town, New York, that is extraordinary. Yet Kaplan never ascended to the heights of the profession, preferring instead to edit a small paper, mentor writers and raise a family in Larchmont, in New York's northern suburbs.
"Life is all about relationships, nothing else", another editor and writer, Jon Messmann, a friend, told me once. Jon was, by turns, a violinist, a cartoonist, an editor of Paulist pamphlets on the Catholic faith, and the country's biggest selling writer of adult westerns. ("Stories where the cowboy does more than kiss his horse", he used to say.) Most of us won't be famous, won't be recognized, won't be rich or celebrated --although those of you reading this probably feel deep inside that you work hard, abide by the law and live honorably --and wouldn't it be nice if someone noticed?
At Christmas, we all need to give ourselves --and each other-- a break. Write that card, make that phone call --we're all we have. --And that's more than enough, because in doing so, we recognize ourselves in each other, acknowledging our connection --whether it grew out of sharing an office or sitting next to each other the first year of law school. The exterior world may change before our eyes, but our internal world will remain constant so long as we remember how vital our relationships are and take the time to honor them.
And that's not sentimental nonsense. Whatever the materialists say, for a good many of us those connections born in the classroom or the workplace are capable of spiritual dimension. It's not publicly articulated (to do so would be mawkish), but gestures of friendship feed our need to affiliate. "Yes" (to return to the topic of Christmas cards), I'm sent the card because I'm on a list that dates back to when Bill was a fellow practitioner; but the sender remembers when he and Bill were in law school together, just starting out, with no sense of how their lives would turn out. "We didn't do too badly", the man, now managing partner of a major firm, said to me not too long ago, remembering Bill.
And he said it with a sense of shared pride, this sharp as a whip New York lawyer who sends me one of his five hundred holiday cards every year.
This afternoon I sent out a dozen Christmas cards to France, to those who welcomed me in the village of Caunes-Minervois this summer.
I took pleasure in sending out the cards, choosing a particular card for each of my new acquaintances, hoping to lend a more personal touch to the mailing than sending the same to all.
Yet even as I was writing the cards, I was dreading having to send the remaining cards on my list. There is no season like Christmas for bringing feelings of obligation to the fore.
I have one friend overseas who always sends me the same card, a standard, rather pedestrian card from her law firm, postage paid for, no doubt, by the firm. (I send her her card not to her office, but to her home on my own dime.)
Former colleagues of my late husband send me cards in his memory, which I appreciate. The trust and estate bar of which he was a part is a close-knit community, and those practitioners who Bill dealt with were really friends, not just professional associates. They know the ways and days of families and are united by an esprit de corps based not on how much money they make (which is a fraction of their corporate colleagues), but how well they serve their clients. A good trust and estate lawyer is discreet in soliciting his clients' confidences, silent as the tomb in keeping them and sharp in his perception and protection of his clients' interests. It is the interaction with clients who have inherited or achieved material success and make contributions of their wealth to their communities that makes the work interesting and fulfilling to practitioners. Every one of the lawyers and private bankers I am thinking of feels proud of the contribution to society their work establishing charitable foundations, helping parents teach their children about the responsibilities of money, and protecting future generations provides. They are honorable men and women.
All of these send out at least a few hundred cards every holiday season. The idea of it befogs my consciousness. No one thinks anyone with a holiday card list of a few hundred sends the cards out expecting anyone to think an intimate exchange is intended. It is a form of marketing; at a minimum, of keeping in the good graces of someone who may, in the future, require the services of the sender of the card, or may refer someone. So my sentimentality about the cards sent by Bill's former colleagues is perhaps misplaced.
What if, however, the same card on the list of five hundred recipients is sent to me, not because I am going to ever need the services of one of Bill's former colleagues, but "for old time's sake"?
As we grow older and start to lose people we grew up with, went to school with, worked with amicably for a happy term, that connection can be taken less and less for granted. I am more and more aware that my perspective on the world is the product of the generation I was born into, the place I was raised, the places I went to school and worked. I long more and more to encounter new people as bright, as optimistic, as funny, and as willing to work hard to achieve a result as those who were my cohorts and classmates. Yet I find few outside my small milieu: Is the pool of them dying out, eclipsed by a new set of values with little resemblance to my own? Or were they always rare?
I am fond of recollecting the St. Crispin's Day speech of young King Henry V in the eponymous play. It speaks of "we happy few", those the young prince Hal, now become King Henry, exhorts to give their all, that they might be able to look back and recognize the specialness of that "band of brothers" who fought together on the fateful day. Stendahl used "to the happy few" as the epigraph closing his novel, "The Charterhouse of Parma". There I first encountered the phrase and took it for a signpost about what relationships among friends are meant to be.
For all that we allow ourselves at Christmas, the Christmas joy often misplaced is to give vent to our feelings of association with those we bonded with long ago. I've been struck by the outpouring of grief that Peter Kaplan's death has given rise to since it was announced the day after Thanksgiving. Kaplan, who edited The New York Observer for fifteen years, and in so doing, taught a generation of journalists how to write a news story with verve and finesse, was widely beloved and admired. In the very cynical profession of journalism in a very cynical town, New York, that is extraordinary. Yet Kaplan never ascended to the heights of the profession, preferring instead to edit a small paper, mentor writers and raise a family in Larchmont, in New York's northern suburbs.
"Life is all about relationships, nothing else", another editor and writer, Jon Messmann, a friend, told me once. Jon was, by turns, a violinist, a cartoonist, an editor of Paulist pamphlets on the Catholic faith, and the country's biggest selling writer of adult westerns. ("Stories where the cowboy does more than kiss his horse", he used to say.) Most of us won't be famous, won't be recognized, won't be rich or celebrated --although those of you reading this probably feel deep inside that you work hard, abide by the law and live honorably --and wouldn't it be nice if someone noticed?
At Christmas, we all need to give ourselves --and each other-- a break. Write that card, make that phone call --we're all we have. --And that's more than enough, because in doing so, we recognize ourselves in each other, acknowledging our connection --whether it grew out of sharing an office or sitting next to each other the first year of law school. The exterior world may change before our eyes, but our internal world will remain constant so long as we remember how vital our relationships are and take the time to honor them.
And that's not sentimental nonsense. Whatever the materialists say, for a good many of us those connections born in the classroom or the workplace are capable of spiritual dimension. It's not publicly articulated (to do so would be mawkish), but gestures of friendship feed our need to affiliate. "Yes" (to return to the topic of Christmas cards), I'm sent the card because I'm on a list that dates back to when Bill was a fellow practitioner; but the sender remembers when he and Bill were in law school together, just starting out, with no sense of how their lives would turn out. "We didn't do too badly", the man, now managing partner of a major firm, said to me not too long ago, remembering Bill.
And he said it with a sense of shared pride, this sharp as a whip New York lawyer who sends me one of his five hundred holiday cards every year.
Friday, December 6, 2013
Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor
December 6, 2013
John Cheever, the fiction writer, worked for many years as a short story writer for The New Yorker. He is remembered for stories about WASP life like, "The Sorrows of Gin", a classic "Cheever story". It is the tale of a Connecticut couple whose missing liquor they mistakenly chalk up to bibulous housekeepers rather than the real culprit, their young daughter: She has been pouring the gin down the sink for their own good.
The Cheever story I remember this time of year, though, is "Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor", the tale of Charlie Leary, a Park Avenue elevator operator working Christmas. Charlie replies to every "Merry Christmas!" from his charges with, "Christmas is a sad season when you're poor. I live alone and don't have any family." Which he embellishes to six children in all, "four living...two in the grave...Mrs. Leary's a cripple", with predictably generous responses from the hearers of his sad tale.
Late in the day, after too many egg nogs, Charlie plays "feel the elevator drop" with an elderly resident who panics, and complains to the superintendent on duty. The super fires Charlie, who loads his haul into bags and takes it to his furnished room, where he indeed lives alone, as he said originally. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, however, he feels expansive: he takes the presents he doesn't want for himself and the extra food to his landlady, a single mother with three young children.
The family has feasted on a turkey supplied by the local Democratic organization and they have already gotten many presents; but Charlie's landlady plays along with the tipsy Charlie until he departs. She then tells her kids to wrap up the presents Charlie just brought: they're going to take them to the Dekkers on Hudson Street, a family even poorer than they are. As the story ends, the landlady's apprehension of the spiritual strength conferred by acts of charity is layered with another, equally, trenchant insight:
Now you kids help me get this stuff together. "Hurry, hurry, hurry", she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence only for a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn't rest, she couldn't rest.
Of course, the window of opportunity for acts of charity never closes, although at Christmas we may take better to being reminded of the fact. For me, the difference between my own situation and that of those less fortunate was brought home to me today by the visit of my cleaning lady of twenty years, "Savi".
Savi (her family was originally from India) came to New York from British Guyana not too much before she began working for me. I enjoy her company and listening to her lilting English. She will often begin a sentence with "Hear now--" a Guyanese idiom for getting a listener's attention --then tell me what's on her mind --"Could we have an earthquake here?" "When will the next election be?" Savi became a U.S. citizen recently, and she wants to be up on current events.
Today she told me she had pains in her right foot, pains so bad she could only walk on the side of her foot. She had been to the public hospital in Elmhurst, Queens twice in the last month for tests, but she had no idea what the tests were for, because she could not understand her doctor, a Chinese physician with the last name "Chung".
She showed me the MRI requisition, which suggested a concern that Savi's pains might be due to a deep-vein thrombosis, potentially fatal, if untreated. When I asked her whether she had been given a prescription for a blood thinner, she told me she hadn't, that she had only been told to take two tablets of aspirin. She had, however, been told to come back for a third MRI the following week.
I called the hospital's radiology department and was quickly told the law protecting the confidentiality of patient information, HIPAA, meant no information could be given over the telephone if I was not the patient. With Savi's consent I impersonated her. I got the sense that some of the hospital personnel I spoke with were suspicious of the ruse, but as Savi supplied me with her medical identification number, I was able to get closer and closer to identifying which "Dr. Chung" was Savi's treating physician. (There are several on staff at Elmuhurst Hospital.) He was, of course, not there, but the receptionist took both my number and Savi's, to provide the maximum number of opportunities for Dr. Chung to reach Savi.
The message I left with the receptionist, "If you are worried I may have a deep-vein thrombosis, why am I not on a blood thinner?", hopefully got the doctor's attention. Hopefully, he and Savi have been able to speak over the telephone about what the test results actually show and whether she is at risk for deep-vein thrombosis. And hopefully, they will understand each other's versions of English.
By the time in mid-afternoon Dr. Chung called my number, Savi had already left for home. I was out, so Dr. Chung left a message: it was nearly unintelligible. Chinese is clearly Dr Chung's first language, and English a distant second. Dr. Chung said he would call the other number, that much I understood. How much of what he had to tell her would Savi?
Christmas is a sad season for the poor.
John Cheever, the fiction writer, worked for many years as a short story writer for The New Yorker. He is remembered for stories about WASP life like, "The Sorrows of Gin", a classic "Cheever story". It is the tale of a Connecticut couple whose missing liquor they mistakenly chalk up to bibulous housekeepers rather than the real culprit, their young daughter: She has been pouring the gin down the sink for their own good.
The Cheever story I remember this time of year, though, is "Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor", the tale of Charlie Leary, a Park Avenue elevator operator working Christmas. Charlie replies to every "Merry Christmas!" from his charges with, "Christmas is a sad season when you're poor. I live alone and don't have any family." Which he embellishes to six children in all, "four living...two in the grave...Mrs. Leary's a cripple", with predictably generous responses from the hearers of his sad tale.
Late in the day, after too many egg nogs, Charlie plays "feel the elevator drop" with an elderly resident who panics, and complains to the superintendent on duty. The super fires Charlie, who loads his haul into bags and takes it to his furnished room, where he indeed lives alone, as he said originally. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, however, he feels expansive: he takes the presents he doesn't want for himself and the extra food to his landlady, a single mother with three young children.
The family has feasted on a turkey supplied by the local Democratic organization and they have already gotten many presents; but Charlie's landlady plays along with the tipsy Charlie until he departs. She then tells her kids to wrap up the presents Charlie just brought: they're going to take them to the Dekkers on Hudson Street, a family even poorer than they are. As the story ends, the landlady's apprehension of the spiritual strength conferred by acts of charity is layered with another, equally, trenchant insight:
Now you kids help me get this stuff together. "Hurry, hurry, hurry", she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence only for a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn't rest, she couldn't rest.
Of course, the window of opportunity for acts of charity never closes, although at Christmas we may take better to being reminded of the fact. For me, the difference between my own situation and that of those less fortunate was brought home to me today by the visit of my cleaning lady of twenty years, "Savi".
Savi (her family was originally from India) came to New York from British Guyana not too much before she began working for me. I enjoy her company and listening to her lilting English. She will often begin a sentence with "Hear now--" a Guyanese idiom for getting a listener's attention --then tell me what's on her mind --"Could we have an earthquake here?" "When will the next election be?" Savi became a U.S. citizen recently, and she wants to be up on current events.
Today she told me she had pains in her right foot, pains so bad she could only walk on the side of her foot. She had been to the public hospital in Elmhurst, Queens twice in the last month for tests, but she had no idea what the tests were for, because she could not understand her doctor, a Chinese physician with the last name "Chung".
She showed me the MRI requisition, which suggested a concern that Savi's pains might be due to a deep-vein thrombosis, potentially fatal, if untreated. When I asked her whether she had been given a prescription for a blood thinner, she told me she hadn't, that she had only been told to take two tablets of aspirin. She had, however, been told to come back for a third MRI the following week.
I called the hospital's radiology department and was quickly told the law protecting the confidentiality of patient information, HIPAA, meant no information could be given over the telephone if I was not the patient. With Savi's consent I impersonated her. I got the sense that some of the hospital personnel I spoke with were suspicious of the ruse, but as Savi supplied me with her medical identification number, I was able to get closer and closer to identifying which "Dr. Chung" was Savi's treating physician. (There are several on staff at Elmuhurst Hospital.) He was, of course, not there, but the receptionist took both my number and Savi's, to provide the maximum number of opportunities for Dr. Chung to reach Savi.
The message I left with the receptionist, "If you are worried I may have a deep-vein thrombosis, why am I not on a blood thinner?", hopefully got the doctor's attention. Hopefully, he and Savi have been able to speak over the telephone about what the test results actually show and whether she is at risk for deep-vein thrombosis. And hopefully, they will understand each other's versions of English.
Christmas is a sad season for the poor.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Beau Upends My Life
December 5, 2013
What is love? It is a warm feeling another being provokes in you that keeps getting warmer and warmer. Of course, it can be felt for an animal as well as a human being, witness the outpouring of emotion at the injury and resulting death of the chestnut colt Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner.
All of which is a preamble to my public admission of love for Beauregard, my thirteen-week old Boykin Spaniel puppy. How else to explain that I have just committed myself to several thousand dollars of storage expense to remove from my apartment any item that Beau might find low enough to the ground to chew on through his puppyhood. Not to mention the $350 I am into for the cleaning of three rugs Beau made luxurious Wee-Wee Pads of: and the several hundred Wee-Wee pads, the food, the toys to help him teethe; the visits to the veterinarian and the pet insurance.
Within a few days of Beau's arrival, it became obvious my stately home was an obstacle course for Beau: one he willingly negotiated, my piled up sheets and towels, my computer cables hurdles Beau easily vaulted. Additionally, my wood floors are stained Jacobean, a black-brown into which Beau blended so well that at night it was difficult to find him. When I caught Beau chewing the baseboard moldings, I knew it was time to strip the apartment bare so he would have space to run around and I to keep track of his whereabouts.
I began on Monday. The apartment has been home to furniture that, while not museum-quality, I lovingly collected. When in 1989, I and Bill Barbeosch, my late husband, first moved in, the apartment had been recently renovated in the cheapest possible way by the landlord become cooperative corporation sponsor. I oversaw every renovation to save money and gradually turned what could uncharitably be called "a dump", into something more attractive. The high ceilings are an advantage and the retention of the original 1909 elements (floor, transom window, remnants of the original gaslights), are features harkening to the beginning of apartment life in New York City. In particular, the style of building (designed by the Blum Brothers) is quintessentially "Columbia University area", a plan of development spurred by the university's move to Morningside Heights at about the same time the New York City subway was engineered and built.
In the 1980s, at the same time that this building and other Beaux Arts buildings in the area were becoming cooperatives, former commercial lofts downtown were becoming the residences to boast of. I never liked the contemporary minimalist aesthetic, all angles and aluminum surfaces; and downtown, with so few green spaces, has always been a place to visit, not live. So in my free time, I turned myself to the task of furnishing a home with period influences.
Over time, the apartment was furnished with the catch of my trawls: a pair of French Directoire chairs, a bureau plat that did triple-duty as a dining room table, giant vide-poche and desk; a pot-bellied reproduction bureau commode found at an estate sale run by the friend of a man obsessed with the decorative arts produced under the reigns of the Sun-King, Louis XV and Louis XVI. The man was a theatrical designer; his obsession with the ancien regime was such that his apartment was a virtual Collyer Brothers à la française. The sale, run in the deceased's nicotine-encrusted one-bedroom apartment on 106th and West End Avenue, netted two chandeliers and countless bibelots in addition to the bureau, in which I kept table linens.
Thanks to Beau, it all had to go. The home of almost twenty-five years had to be broken up. I would never had had the emotional strength to discard the memories of my conjugal life; or, to anticipate the consequences on the apartment of my own demise, had Beau not necessitated it. Thankfully, a local book-and-record album seller, who has been helping me move articles in and out of the apartment through the years, agreed to take on the job of packing up the apartment.
We started early Monday morning and finished this morning, Thursday, at 11 o'clock, working Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday until 10 o'clock or later. The movers arrived this morning at nine-thirty: they packed the memories of twenty-five years in my new storage space a few blocks away within ninety minutes.
The result? The apartment looks like a loft.
--And if designing a new, minimalist home around a puppy's needs isn't proof of love, I don't know what is.
What is love? It is a warm feeling another being provokes in you that keeps getting warmer and warmer. Of course, it can be felt for an animal as well as a human being, witness the outpouring of emotion at the injury and resulting death of the chestnut colt Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner.
All of which is a preamble to my public admission of love for Beauregard, my thirteen-week old Boykin Spaniel puppy. How else to explain that I have just committed myself to several thousand dollars of storage expense to remove from my apartment any item that Beau might find low enough to the ground to chew on through his puppyhood. Not to mention the $350 I am into for the cleaning of three rugs Beau made luxurious Wee-Wee Pads of: and the several hundred Wee-Wee pads, the food, the toys to help him teethe; the visits to the veterinarian and the pet insurance.
Within a few days of Beau's arrival, it became obvious my stately home was an obstacle course for Beau: one he willingly negotiated, my piled up sheets and towels, my computer cables hurdles Beau easily vaulted. Additionally, my wood floors are stained Jacobean, a black-brown into which Beau blended so well that at night it was difficult to find him. When I caught Beau chewing the baseboard moldings, I knew it was time to strip the apartment bare so he would have space to run around and I to keep track of his whereabouts.
I began on Monday. The apartment has been home to furniture that, while not museum-quality, I lovingly collected. When in 1989, I and Bill Barbeosch, my late husband, first moved in, the apartment had been recently renovated in the cheapest possible way by the landlord become cooperative corporation sponsor. I oversaw every renovation to save money and gradually turned what could uncharitably be called "a dump", into something more attractive. The high ceilings are an advantage and the retention of the original 1909 elements (floor, transom window, remnants of the original gaslights), are features harkening to the beginning of apartment life in New York City. In particular, the style of building (designed by the Blum Brothers) is quintessentially "Columbia University area", a plan of development spurred by the university's move to Morningside Heights at about the same time the New York City subway was engineered and built.
In the 1980s, at the same time that this building and other Beaux Arts buildings in the area were becoming cooperatives, former commercial lofts downtown were becoming the residences to boast of. I never liked the contemporary minimalist aesthetic, all angles and aluminum surfaces; and downtown, with so few green spaces, has always been a place to visit, not live. So in my free time, I turned myself to the task of furnishing a home with period influences.
Over time, the apartment was furnished with the catch of my trawls: a pair of French Directoire chairs, a bureau plat that did triple-duty as a dining room table, giant vide-poche and desk; a pot-bellied reproduction bureau commode found at an estate sale run by the friend of a man obsessed with the decorative arts produced under the reigns of the Sun-King, Louis XV and Louis XVI. The man was a theatrical designer; his obsession with the ancien regime was such that his apartment was a virtual Collyer Brothers à la française. The sale, run in the deceased's nicotine-encrusted one-bedroom apartment on 106th and West End Avenue, netted two chandeliers and countless bibelots in addition to the bureau, in which I kept table linens.
Thanks to Beau, it all had to go. The home of almost twenty-five years had to be broken up. I would never had had the emotional strength to discard the memories of my conjugal life; or, to anticipate the consequences on the apartment of my own demise, had Beau not necessitated it. Thankfully, a local book-and-record album seller, who has been helping me move articles in and out of the apartment through the years, agreed to take on the job of packing up the apartment.
We started early Monday morning and finished this morning, Thursday, at 11 o'clock, working Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday until 10 o'clock or later. The movers arrived this morning at nine-thirty: they packed the memories of twenty-five years in my new storage space a few blocks away within ninety minutes.
The result? The apartment looks like a loft.
--And if designing a new, minimalist home around a puppy's needs isn't proof of love, I don't know what is.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
New York, New York Thanksgiving Day 2013
November 28, 2013
It occurs to me, thinking about the number of allusions I have made to the neighborhoods of Manhattan that shaped me, that so many of those neighborhoods either do not exist anymore, or have lost their neighborhood character.
Robert Moses destroyed working-class the neighborhoods of the Bronx around the Cross Bronx Expressway and other thoroughfares to northern New York. The exigencies of maintaining an economically sustainable city are doing the rest in 2013.
Yorkville, that German and Central European area whose hub was 86th Street from Third Avenue to the East River, is gone, replaced by high-rises that face each other like plates in a dishwasher. Gone is Elk Candy, that temple of the art of marzipan; Gone is Ideal Restaurant, right next door, with its Yankee Pot Roast and baked beans. Gone is Café Geiger and Die Kleine Konditorei, two high-toned German restaurant-cafés modeled on the Viennese. Gone are the German and German-Jewish bakeries, patronized by one and all, selling stollen, danish, kuchen, French crullers and apple turnovers. My parents were great fans of all of this viennoiserie, preferring them to the exquisite pastries to be had from the fine French patisseries: Dumas and Bonté in particular. (Dumas was on Lexington between 92nd and 93rd, while Bonté was on Third Avenue in the 60s.)
Gone are the German-Jewish owned shops on the Upper West Side: glaziers, hardware store owners, liquor shops, delicatessens. Gone are the cafeterías owned by Cubans that dotted Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Gone are the all-night bagel bakeries, gone are most of the Italian pastry shops, with their ice--ees, cremolata, and spumoni (--although di Roberti's on First Avenue between 11th and 12th is still doing a good business).
Gone is the life of the distinct villages of Manhattan. What has replaced them are units commercial and residential managed to extract the maximum profitability. After 9/11/2001 the future of New York became conclusively verticalized: more apartments in high-rises built by eager developers would be purchased by young people in the highest-paying jobs in law and investment banking; purchased by more people seeking either to escape onerous taxes in foreign jurisdictions or very wealthy individuals.
The logic is unassailable: New York has endured "boom and bust" cycles throughout its history, and any city manager who can find a way to meet the payroll for the uniformed services and keep the city safe is going to keep New York attractive to cooperative and condominium owners. The price of paying that bill and skirting the fiscal crises that almost brought New York to its knees is a city where the middle-class (let alone the unsubsidized working class) is disappearing.
Walking in Central Park yesterday and taking in the view of Upper Fifth Avenue from about 100th Street, I was struck by the sight of a new, super-tall high-rise apartment building with a banner at its top. The banner gives the phone number to call for "Rentals" in block letters. What is striking about the panorama of the area is that the building is so out of scale with the rest of the buildings. A bit farther on, another high-rise pushed up.
The streetscape of the metropolis has been altered and will continue to be altered, with the result that New York will be more gleaming and vertical. What I always liked about the city before its latest incarnation was that you could escape that verticality by going to one of the neighborhoods, places where people who lived in tenements and old brownstones still put out folding chairs in the summer, when they didn't sit on the stoop.
Escape from the verticality that makes New York what it is in the minds of the world is no longer the option it was: --which may explain the popularity of Brooklyn, which is much harder to navigate, but whose axis remains largely horizontal.
It occurs to me, thinking about the number of allusions I have made to the neighborhoods of Manhattan that shaped me, that so many of those neighborhoods either do not exist anymore, or have lost their neighborhood character.
Robert Moses destroyed working-class the neighborhoods of the Bronx around the Cross Bronx Expressway and other thoroughfares to northern New York. The exigencies of maintaining an economically sustainable city are doing the rest in 2013.
Yorkville, that German and Central European area whose hub was 86th Street from Third Avenue to the East River, is gone, replaced by high-rises that face each other like plates in a dishwasher. Gone is Elk Candy, that temple of the art of marzipan; Gone is Ideal Restaurant, right next door, with its Yankee Pot Roast and baked beans. Gone is Café Geiger and Die Kleine Konditorei, two high-toned German restaurant-cafés modeled on the Viennese. Gone are the German and German-Jewish bakeries, patronized by one and all, selling stollen, danish, kuchen, French crullers and apple turnovers. My parents were great fans of all of this viennoiserie, preferring them to the exquisite pastries to be had from the fine French patisseries: Dumas and Bonté in particular. (Dumas was on Lexington between 92nd and 93rd, while Bonté was on Third Avenue in the 60s.)
Gone are the German-Jewish owned shops on the Upper West Side: glaziers, hardware store owners, liquor shops, delicatessens. Gone are the cafeterías owned by Cubans that dotted Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. Gone are the all-night bagel bakeries, gone are most of the Italian pastry shops, with their ice--ees, cremolata, and spumoni (--although di Roberti's on First Avenue between 11th and 12th is still doing a good business).
Gone is the life of the distinct villages of Manhattan. What has replaced them are units commercial and residential managed to extract the maximum profitability. After 9/11/2001 the future of New York became conclusively verticalized: more apartments in high-rises built by eager developers would be purchased by young people in the highest-paying jobs in law and investment banking; purchased by more people seeking either to escape onerous taxes in foreign jurisdictions or very wealthy individuals.
The logic is unassailable: New York has endured "boom and bust" cycles throughout its history, and any city manager who can find a way to meet the payroll for the uniformed services and keep the city safe is going to keep New York attractive to cooperative and condominium owners. The price of paying that bill and skirting the fiscal crises that almost brought New York to its knees is a city where the middle-class (let alone the unsubsidized working class) is disappearing.
Walking in Central Park yesterday and taking in the view of Upper Fifth Avenue from about 100th Street, I was struck by the sight of a new, super-tall high-rise apartment building with a banner at its top. The banner gives the phone number to call for "Rentals" in block letters. What is striking about the panorama of the area is that the building is so out of scale with the rest of the buildings. A bit farther on, another high-rise pushed up.
The streetscape of the metropolis has been altered and will continue to be altered, with the result that New York will be more gleaming and vertical. What I always liked about the city before its latest incarnation was that you could escape that verticality by going to one of the neighborhoods, places where people who lived in tenements and old brownstones still put out folding chairs in the summer, when they didn't sit on the stoop.
Escape from the verticality that makes New York what it is in the minds of the world is no longer the option it was: --which may explain the popularity of Brooklyn, which is much harder to navigate, but whose axis remains largely horizontal.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Pre-Thanksgiving New York
November 27, 2013
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Chaunukkah coming, too, Manhattan is quiet. I walk to the Metropolitan Museum through Central Park, which is empty, save for a few dedicated runners and one sole cyclist. It is so pleasurable to walk through the park in the middle of the day when no one is there. Even at the 90th Street entrance to the running path along the reservoir, Fred Lebow's bronze statue stands alone. There are no cars in the park. The weather is cool and wet and I am dressed for it, so have a lovely stroll.
Arriving at the museum, I encounter a different constellation: there is a line to wait on to enter and have bags checked by the security guards; the great hall, while not wall-to-wall (as it is most days now), is still packed. I buy a ticket, but decide I will stay only briefly: The crowds at the Museum are good business for the institution, but don't suit me.
In the four bays endowed by Enid Haupt and the Information desk in the center of the hall, five beautiful seasonal floral displays once again stun my eye. Few things in the museum please me as much as these, changed weekly thanks to the bequest, allowing visitors to feast on outstanding examples of the floral arranging art.
The other artworks that are personal favorites are the 18th century pastels in the museum's collection, particularly the study of the handsome and lubricious Louis XV by Quentin de la Tour; and another of the simply ravishing Olivier Journu of Bordeaux. In his portrait, Olivier Journu wears a pale rose velvet waistcoat adorned with a corsage of matching roses in the top buttonhole: He looks amazingly like Gary Cooper in a powdered wig, his turquoise eyes and open smile beguiling and winsome.
The displays of porcelain figures in the European Decorative Arts galleries behind and to the left of the Grand Staircase are reliably empty. Bustelli, Luck, Lücke, Kändler-- the finest modelers, created delectable figures of comedia dell'arte characters --Scapin, Harlequin, Isabella, Columbine-- for the finest porcelain factories: Meissen, Höchst, Capodimonte. The figures' tiny faces are so lifelike and animated, modern versions don't compare, both because today's porcelain mixture is not quite the same, but also because the modelers of the 20th and 21st century don't have the immersion in the period from which the characters sprang that the great 18th modelers in porcelain did. They are just copyists, however skilled.
Finally, I go to see the bedroom from the Palazzo Sagredo in Venice built in 1742, a room at the end of the British Decorative Arts Galleries few people know about or take the trouble to find. The bedroom is lined with rich green silk wall coverings in a brocatelle pattern. There is an appropriately ethereal oval painting with large gilded frame, The Triumph Of Dawn Over Night by Diziani in the center of the ceiling. In the corners of the room, beautifully molded armorini, life-sized figures of winged children, flutter. If I wanted to dream of heaven, this bedroom is the one in which I believe I could summon the empyrean.
My visit over, I walk across the park again, this time leaving it via the Tennis Courts near 94th Street. These are part of my childhood: my elementary school is on 95th Street and I knew of at least one parent who played on the courts before picking up her son, David Weston, a classmate of my sister's. Mrs. Weston could have stepped out of a Claire McCardell ad: tall, slender, brunette hair swept up, red gingham shirt, navy blue trousers and needle-nose sneakers, wood tennis racket in hand, a long-haired collie on a leash.
I decide to walk down 95th Street from Central Park West to Columbus and past the school, a tiny private school founded by a Scotsman named Alexander Robertson in 1789. It was a school which had in its first classes the children of black freemen. Indeed, I had a classmate, Wendy Jones, who was of African descent, at a time (the late 1950s) when African-American children were rarely students in private schools in Manhattan. I can still remember walking with Wendy to the bus stop and noticing that her eyes were tearing as we talked. Knowing that blacks were less well-treated than other Americans, I thought that perhaps something I had said was insensitive and had provoked her tears. I asked her, and she quickly told me not to worry, that her eyes watered from the wind. (I hope that was the truth.)
The school is so small I had only six classmates in my sixth grade graduating class. The building on 95th Street feeds directly into a room that contains part of Andrew Carnegie's library, as well as a statue of Robert Burns. Beyond that room is the entrance to the Second Presbyterian Church, which was founded in 1756. It was there that we had our "Christmas Pageant" --which is now a multi-cultural holiday celebration with no religious connection.
Nonetheless, it was nice to walk by the building, which is in good condition, thanks to the building on top of the school of a luxury high-rise. The school sold the air rights and the luxury apartment building is actually consistent with those on the rest of the block and surrounding area. The present headmistress, Reverend Leslie Merlin, has been there many years, although she did not succeed James G. Spence, the Scotsman who was headmaster as well as Reverend of Second Presbyterian when I and my sister were students.
Dr. Spence was married to a Lebanese Christian (the school librarian, and a terror), with whom he had three children, Ian, Doreen, and Colin. There was also another Scottish girl, Fiona, who was in Doreen's class. In my class we had Hans Vogel, a German boy, Kathy Voinoff, (Russian descent), Susan Agay (Hungarian), Paulette Tunis (French), Wendy Metelitz, Todd Walker and Richard Kirsch (American Jewish); Cheryl Cosgrove and Christopher Norris (Amerian Protestant). Yul Brynner's niece, Laura Linda Raymond, was a class ahead of me; in my sister's class was the son of Frank Sutton, the actor who played the irascible sergeant to Jim Nabor's rube on the TV's "Gomer Pyle". Cheryl and Christopher's parents were all in show business, too.
To give you an idea what "show business" meant in those days, Paulette Tunis' mother, a beautiful woman with short black hair, sparkling light green eyes and a beautiful figure, worked as a photographer at the Copacabana, wearing a skimpy outfit to take snaps of celebrities, a big camera with a giant flash on her hip, ever at the ready. Christopher Norris, a lovely girl with long, very blond hair, was a working performer: in the second grade, she was in a musical based on Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", in which she played Mitty's daughter, "Penina". Christopher's father was a bandleader, in an era when that was still a glamorous occupation. The whole fair-haired family lived in a "classic six" apartment at The Turin, at 333 Central Park West, not far from the school. I remember visiting once, and discovering they had a white grand piano in the sunken living room, which was carpeted with a white shag rug. A white shag rug!
Cheryl Cosgrove's parents did commercials for a living. They, like Christopher's parents, were tall, slender and looked as thought they stepped out of "Look" magazine --the dads slightly tanned, in expensive suits of classic cut, the mothers tall and able to carry off the pouffed skirts that became fashionable after Dior premiered the "New Look". These parents were more sophisticated than the others, as was obvious in Christopher's case the Halloween she and I were both in the first grade, when her mother dressed her as a Playboy bunny. (I went as a hobo --each in our way shocked our first grade teacher, Mrs. de Castro, of whom more later.) Through these fancy parents I and my classmates got to attend the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, to get on TV shows that needed kids (including one with Jack Gilford, who was the first "Hysterium" in "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum"). Also, in 1962 we also got to cut an album with Vaughn Meader, the voice impersonator who began a promising career with pitch-perfect imitations of John F. Kennedy, only to have it all turn to ashes on November 22, 1963.
We lost a few of the original group through the years, so there were only seven of us by the time we graduated, in the sixth grade. Of course, I remember my teachers: Mrs. Ceath (kindergarten), Mrs. de Castro (1st grade), Mrs. Walton (3rd and 4th grades), and Mrs. Goldsmith (5th and 6th grades).
Nonetheless, it was a shock to walk past the school and see my first grade classroom through the windows, intact. The stair down to the room, the place where the teacher sat, the play area, the bookcases, were all in the same places. I even remember the corner where, if you misbehaved, you were put.
Miriam Perkins de Castro, my first grade teacher, was a high-born Maine lady in her sixties who fell in love with and married Mr. de Castro, a bald, tanned, tennis-playing Cuban, whom she always called "De". "Mrs. de" loved anything in a shade of purple, and only wore clothes in that color. She spoke in a plummy New England accent and once confessed her family were all Republicans, a daring admission in New York anytime. She was incapable of a mean thought or action. For some reason, one Christmas season, she invited my mother and my sister and I to tea at the apartment she shared with "De" at 360 Central Park West, around the corner from the school. We had Ritz crackers for the first time, and thought we had gone to heaven. "Mrs. de" had a Swedish angel chime, a four candle holder whose heat caused the tiny chimes suspended from angel figures to turn and strike small bells for so long as the tapers burned. The effect was magical, and we were rapt.
When I remember my childhood this way I think, "How wonderful New York was!" I was a child, and life was kind.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Chaunukkah coming, too, Manhattan is quiet. I walk to the Metropolitan Museum through Central Park, which is empty, save for a few dedicated runners and one sole cyclist. It is so pleasurable to walk through the park in the middle of the day when no one is there. Even at the 90th Street entrance to the running path along the reservoir, Fred Lebow's bronze statue stands alone. There are no cars in the park. The weather is cool and wet and I am dressed for it, so have a lovely stroll.
Arriving at the museum, I encounter a different constellation: there is a line to wait on to enter and have bags checked by the security guards; the great hall, while not wall-to-wall (as it is most days now), is still packed. I buy a ticket, but decide I will stay only briefly: The crowds at the Museum are good business for the institution, but don't suit me.
In the four bays endowed by Enid Haupt and the Information desk in the center of the hall, five beautiful seasonal floral displays once again stun my eye. Few things in the museum please me as much as these, changed weekly thanks to the bequest, allowing visitors to feast on outstanding examples of the floral arranging art.
The other artworks that are personal favorites are the 18th century pastels in the museum's collection, particularly the study of the handsome and lubricious Louis XV by Quentin de la Tour; and another of the simply ravishing Olivier Journu of Bordeaux. In his portrait, Olivier Journu wears a pale rose velvet waistcoat adorned with a corsage of matching roses in the top buttonhole: He looks amazingly like Gary Cooper in a powdered wig, his turquoise eyes and open smile beguiling and winsome.
The displays of porcelain figures in the European Decorative Arts galleries behind and to the left of the Grand Staircase are reliably empty. Bustelli, Luck, Lücke, Kändler-- the finest modelers, created delectable figures of comedia dell'arte characters --Scapin, Harlequin, Isabella, Columbine-- for the finest porcelain factories: Meissen, Höchst, Capodimonte. The figures' tiny faces are so lifelike and animated, modern versions don't compare, both because today's porcelain mixture is not quite the same, but also because the modelers of the 20th and 21st century don't have the immersion in the period from which the characters sprang that the great 18th modelers in porcelain did. They are just copyists, however skilled.
Finally, I go to see the bedroom from the Palazzo Sagredo in Venice built in 1742, a room at the end of the British Decorative Arts Galleries few people know about or take the trouble to find. The bedroom is lined with rich green silk wall coverings in a brocatelle pattern. There is an appropriately ethereal oval painting with large gilded frame, The Triumph Of Dawn Over Night by Diziani in the center of the ceiling. In the corners of the room, beautifully molded armorini, life-sized figures of winged children, flutter. If I wanted to dream of heaven, this bedroom is the one in which I believe I could summon the empyrean.
My visit over, I walk across the park again, this time leaving it via the Tennis Courts near 94th Street. These are part of my childhood: my elementary school is on 95th Street and I knew of at least one parent who played on the courts before picking up her son, David Weston, a classmate of my sister's. Mrs. Weston could have stepped out of a Claire McCardell ad: tall, slender, brunette hair swept up, red gingham shirt, navy blue trousers and needle-nose sneakers, wood tennis racket in hand, a long-haired collie on a leash.
I decide to walk down 95th Street from Central Park West to Columbus and past the school, a tiny private school founded by a Scotsman named Alexander Robertson in 1789. It was a school which had in its first classes the children of black freemen. Indeed, I had a classmate, Wendy Jones, who was of African descent, at a time (the late 1950s) when African-American children were rarely students in private schools in Manhattan. I can still remember walking with Wendy to the bus stop and noticing that her eyes were tearing as we talked. Knowing that blacks were less well-treated than other Americans, I thought that perhaps something I had said was insensitive and had provoked her tears. I asked her, and she quickly told me not to worry, that her eyes watered from the wind. (I hope that was the truth.)
The school is so small I had only six classmates in my sixth grade graduating class. The building on 95th Street feeds directly into a room that contains part of Andrew Carnegie's library, as well as a statue of Robert Burns. Beyond that room is the entrance to the Second Presbyterian Church, which was founded in 1756. It was there that we had our "Christmas Pageant" --which is now a multi-cultural holiday celebration with no religious connection.
Nonetheless, it was nice to walk by the building, which is in good condition, thanks to the building on top of the school of a luxury high-rise. The school sold the air rights and the luxury apartment building is actually consistent with those on the rest of the block and surrounding area. The present headmistress, Reverend Leslie Merlin, has been there many years, although she did not succeed James G. Spence, the Scotsman who was headmaster as well as Reverend of Second Presbyterian when I and my sister were students.
Dr. Spence was married to a Lebanese Christian (the school librarian, and a terror), with whom he had three children, Ian, Doreen, and Colin. There was also another Scottish girl, Fiona, who was in Doreen's class. In my class we had Hans Vogel, a German boy, Kathy Voinoff, (Russian descent), Susan Agay (Hungarian), Paulette Tunis (French), Wendy Metelitz, Todd Walker and Richard Kirsch (American Jewish); Cheryl Cosgrove and Christopher Norris (Amerian Protestant). Yul Brynner's niece, Laura Linda Raymond, was a class ahead of me; in my sister's class was the son of Frank Sutton, the actor who played the irascible sergeant to Jim Nabor's rube on the TV's "Gomer Pyle". Cheryl and Christopher's parents were all in show business, too.
To give you an idea what "show business" meant in those days, Paulette Tunis' mother, a beautiful woman with short black hair, sparkling light green eyes and a beautiful figure, worked as a photographer at the Copacabana, wearing a skimpy outfit to take snaps of celebrities, a big camera with a giant flash on her hip, ever at the ready. Christopher Norris, a lovely girl with long, very blond hair, was a working performer: in the second grade, she was in a musical based on Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", in which she played Mitty's daughter, "Penina". Christopher's father was a bandleader, in an era when that was still a glamorous occupation. The whole fair-haired family lived in a "classic six" apartment at The Turin, at 333 Central Park West, not far from the school. I remember visiting once, and discovering they had a white grand piano in the sunken living room, which was carpeted with a white shag rug. A white shag rug!
Cheryl Cosgrove's parents did commercials for a living. They, like Christopher's parents, were tall, slender and looked as thought they stepped out of "Look" magazine --the dads slightly tanned, in expensive suits of classic cut, the mothers tall and able to carry off the pouffed skirts that became fashionable after Dior premiered the "New Look". These parents were more sophisticated than the others, as was obvious in Christopher's case the Halloween she and I were both in the first grade, when her mother dressed her as a Playboy bunny. (I went as a hobo --each in our way shocked our first grade teacher, Mrs. de Castro, of whom more later.) Through these fancy parents I and my classmates got to attend the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, to get on TV shows that needed kids (including one with Jack Gilford, who was the first "Hysterium" in "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum"). Also, in 1962 we also got to cut an album with Vaughn Meader, the voice impersonator who began a promising career with pitch-perfect imitations of John F. Kennedy, only to have it all turn to ashes on November 22, 1963.
We lost a few of the original group through the years, so there were only seven of us by the time we graduated, in the sixth grade. Of course, I remember my teachers: Mrs. Ceath (kindergarten), Mrs. de Castro (1st grade), Mrs. Walton (3rd and 4th grades), and Mrs. Goldsmith (5th and 6th grades).
Nonetheless, it was a shock to walk past the school and see my first grade classroom through the windows, intact. The stair down to the room, the place where the teacher sat, the play area, the bookcases, were all in the same places. I even remember the corner where, if you misbehaved, you were put.
Miriam Perkins de Castro, my first grade teacher, was a high-born Maine lady in her sixties who fell in love with and married Mr. de Castro, a bald, tanned, tennis-playing Cuban, whom she always called "De". "Mrs. de" loved anything in a shade of purple, and only wore clothes in that color. She spoke in a plummy New England accent and once confessed her family were all Republicans, a daring admission in New York anytime. She was incapable of a mean thought or action. For some reason, one Christmas season, she invited my mother and my sister and I to tea at the apartment she shared with "De" at 360 Central Park West, around the corner from the school. We had Ritz crackers for the first time, and thought we had gone to heaven. "Mrs. de" had a Swedish angel chime, a four candle holder whose heat caused the tiny chimes suspended from angel figures to turn and strike small bells for so long as the tapers burned. The effect was magical, and we were rapt.
When I remember my childhood this way I think, "How wonderful New York was!" I was a child, and life was kind.
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