April 7, 2014
It has been a month since my last post, thanks to my decision (this time certain) to sell my apartment.
The confidence to leave New York has been a long time coming, but I am buoyed by knowing that in the United States, there is somewhere I can call "Home", even if I haven't found it yet.
For some reason, the desert appeals to me. In Lawrence of Arabia, Major Lawrence explains that he likes the desert "because it is clean". Something of the same attitude has a place in my thinking: the desert is challenging, it is beautiful, it is empty. That is why the desert fathers, starting with St. Anthony, and followed by the pillar saints, went there to meditate. Perhaps there I will find the peacefulness that New York cannot supply and that I crave.
A wise man told me that when we are young, we crave excitement; when we are old, its absence. It is not as though I don't want to be active, or experience exhilaration. In the last analysis, it comes down to too many memories of a life that is gone everywhere I look in New York. And a desire to escape from them.
Last night I had a dream that Bill and I were separated --and we shouldn't have been. The setting was Manhattan and it was in the good weather. Bill drove a red car and we had lived together, but something tore us apart and we parted company. I remember seeing him drive away, the car's top down so I could see him slowly passing out of view, before turning and returning to my tiny apartment. There I was surrounded by my things, the light streaming in through the window around five o'clock in the afternoon in summer, when New York is at its most dreamlike .
In my new digs there was an old lady on the floor where I lived who wanted me to talk to her, which kept me from returning to my apartment as soon as I wanted. When at last I got away from her, I called my friend Claudia, my law school classmate, someone who knew both me and Bill very well. The telephone I held in my hand was connected to the base by a coil, making the time of the dream the period before mobile and cell phones. It was as if I were thirty years younger and my romance with Bill was in its fieriest days.
I was frantic, telling Claudia that I wanted to reach Bill, to be with Bill, to go back to being together. My dream emotions were so strong that they woke me and ended the dream. As I began perceive that what I had felt so strongly was only a dream, I also realized how fresh our break-up seemed in my dream: I remembered Bill's special warmth of personality so intensely, it was as though he were returned from the dead. When I finally opened my eyes and fully realized I had only been dreaming, I cried to dream again, sobbing uncontrollably. It took several minutes for me to regain my composure.
So the dead live vividly in our subconscious, in a way that is not like conscious recollection. Which is why, as my dream reached its peak of intensity, it was so painful to feel Bill simultaneously so close-- yet so far. Just to increase the poignancy, as I write this, someone just called, asking for him, probably an organization to which he had contributed in the past. I had to say "He died three years ago", which compelled the man calling to tell me that he was sorry and that Bill's name would be taken off the organization's list of people to call. "Death cancels all appointments", Mark Twain said; it winnows telephone lists, too.
Leaving Manhattan will hopefully offer the opportunity for my life to take on a brighter coloration than it has over the past five years, the years of Bill's patient confrontation with his cancer and the three years that will have elapsed since his death on May 13 of 2011. So many friends have carried me to this point: Now I have to travel on my own.
Where my new home will be, I don't know. Initially, I will go to France, leaving May 28. I am taking my Boykin Spaniel puppy, "Beauregard", with me. We will spend four days in Paris, where Beau and I will dine in style: at Taillevent, Jadis and Au Vieux Comptoir, before taking the train to Montpellier on the morning of June 2. From there we will drive to Caunes-Minervois, where my new-old house awaits. I hope to have a peaceful summer, returning to New York in the fall and resuming the project of selling and emptying my apartment.
In 2015, I will be going to the desert in February and March --to Palm Springs, California actually. Bill and I travelled there four or five times, as he has a cousin who owned a hotel there, and there are now quite a few of his relatives settled there. I was born in California --in Oakland, in fact. (Oakland is the place Gertrude Stein said had "no there there".) Perhaps 2014 will be the year I explore "the big Kahuna", as it is known in political circles.
As I will be traveling and have no fixed domicile, I will be a nomad. So I close out this blog as the "Lone Wolf" is soon to become "A Nomad". That is, I plan to start a new blog under that name once I arrive in France and am able to continue the postings. To all of you who have followed the blog, my great thanks. It has been a pleasure to write for you.
Monday, April 7, 2014
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Meeting An Affordable Care Act "Navigator"
Thursday, March 6, 2014
I alluded to my need to find a health insurance plan to replace my present one in an earlier post, "A Protective, Decorative or Disguising Shell". Today I continue that consideration, armed with more knowledge, thanks to the meeting I had this morning at 9:30 a.m. with Robert Izzo, a "navigator", as those charged with helping the public find a health plan under the new Affordable Care Act regime are called.
Robert is a sixty-one year old who works for the New York State Women's Chamber of Commerce. Normally, he helps women set up small businesses. As his organization was designated to provide assistance to the uninsured and soon-to-be-uninsured in my New York City area once the Affordable Care Act became the law of the land, he is now a "navigator", providing technical assistance to those who approach the office, to which the New York State health exchange directs them. In effect he is a "Virgil", guiding visitors through the underworld of government-run health care.
Helping women set up start-ups is a positive experience; helping men and women find health care under the new regime is not. "I have asked my boss for some 'mental health' days, because I am so stressed from doing this job. I like my job helping women start businesses. Now I have people coming here, women in their sixties, crying because they've lost their health care and the new system isn't working for them", he confesses.
The metaphor of the underworld is apt, because the system is not transparent and requires sophistication and doggedness to penetrate. And for many, there is no happy ending because the new health care they can obtain is more costly and less complete than that they had before. Some individuals are subsidized and obtain health care at reasonable prices, others, not much more well-compensated for the work they do, are shut out from subsidies altogether.
"A waitress who makes $28,000 a year can get a plan that costs $465 a month and a $200 subsidy", Robert explains. "With the subsidy the monthly cost of her health care is $265.
"A guy who makes $42,000 a year gets a plan that costs $700 a month and no subsidy. If his rent is $1600 a month, he can't afford that. It's a mess."
I ask Robert to verify whether it is true that some plans are not national, but limited to, say, the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. (One of the insurance brokers I spoke to told me all the exchange plans were national in their coverage.)
"Yes, I've heard of that. You have to check the coverage details before you sign up to make sure you are getting national coverage."
Here's another "Catch-22": To find the doctors in a particular plan while working with a navigator, you have to be enrolled. Essentially you have to buy the goods sight unseen, unless the plan has a website that lists their doctors. And all the plans are "in-network" only, so if you have a rare disease and no in-network doctor is a specialist, you must pay out-of-pocket for appropriate treatment.
"I had a woman call me who said, 'I'm healthy, but if I get cancer next year, I want to be treated at Sloan-Kettering' Robert continued. "I couldn't help her. She went to Sloan-Kettering, but no one would assist her, they told her they were not the appropriate place for her to get the information she needed. Eventually, she found out that Sloan-Kettering had signed up for one plan, First Republic. --I don't know how she found that out."
Robert tells me a little about himself: he lives with two roommates in an apartment in the Columbia area. He can't afford cable so he has no television or landline, and the computer he uses is the one in his office on 135th Street and Broadway. "Can you imagine, I'm a professional, and I don't have my own computer?"
As I have decided to move, Robert sends an e-mail to someone higher up the health care bureaucracy food chain to ask how the system handles moves out-of-state. I want to know whether I can sign up for health care for the months I remain in New York, then cancel the policy, go to Europe for a few months and sign up in the state I want to settle in upon my return.
"'Life-changing events' are an exception to the rule that you can only sign up for health care during the yearly enrollment period," he tells me. "'Moving' is a life-changing event, so you could sign up for New York, stop paying if you go to Europe, move outside New York on your return and sign up in whatever state you settle in."
Having mentioned moving to him, Robert is curious about how greener the pastures are in any of the places I've explored. Talking a little more, Robert reveals he's thinking of moving out of New York.
"Is it better in North Carolina?", he asks me. I end up counseling him as to what states have no income tax, how to compare the cost of living in one locality versus another, to look out for a city or town income tax, to evaluate what the level of sales tax is.
It would not be unreasonable to speculate that the Affordable Care Act will lead to some outmigration from places, like New York City, too expensive for the middle-class to survive in. The financial squeeze is too great and Americans have always been a mobile and practical people.
"At the turn-of-the century, our ancestors left Europe for a better life in America. I feel like now our generation, the baby-boomers, are doing the same in reverse" a friend told me. She and her husband are leaving Westchester for the same reasons I will be leaving New York.
It feels odd to leave a place that my family has lived in for more than a century. It is an uprooting, no question about it. Thankfully, it's a big country and Americans respect resourcefulness and don't have prejudices against "new" people, as can be the case in other parts of the world. So I'll navigate my way out of New York: It's a relief to have decided, at last, to go.
***
Later in the day I go to visit my physical therapist, with whom I discuss my search for health care. She tells me that her health care plan covers her only in New York State, thereby confirming what Robert, the "navigator" said; and contradicting an insurance broker who, pushing the "Oxford Liberty" plan (one of the most expensive), told me "emergency coverage out-of-state is always covered".
When I arrive home, an e-mail from Robert is waiting for me: he has the answer to my question about what would happen if I sign up for health care in New York, go to Europe for the summer, and return to the U.S., but to live in another of the fifty states. It is a two-part answer:
"Yes", I can sign up for health care in another state when I return under the "moving" exception. However, if I do not keep paying the premiums to New York while I am in Europe, I will be subject to "the penalty" for not carrying health insurance. That "penalty" is the yearly $125 penalty imposed on anyone not enrolled in a health insurance plan. That penalty is anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 less than what it would cost me to keep up New York State health insurance while I am in abroad.
As none of the U.S. plans provide coverage abroad and I have to pay for travel insurance (which does not cover routine medical care, but is much cheaper) the choice is obvious: carry a New York State plan until I leave for Europe, stop paying once I leave the country and pay the penalty; then enroll in the state I settle in when I return.
***
I read in the newspapers that the Obama administration has announced a new policy providing that anyone wishing to keep their health insurance coverage may do so through 2016. However, state insurance commissioners and the insurers themselves have to be willing to continue to offer the plans. This news does not provide me with much comfort, though: my coverage is through COBRA, a program mean to bridge coverage between jobs, or to provide coverage to dependents of a someone covered under an employer plan who has died. It is a "one-off", meant to cover extraordinary events. So my health coverage is not covered under the new policy, and I have to keep looking for a health insurance plan to replace the old one.
I alluded to my need to find a health insurance plan to replace my present one in an earlier post, "A Protective, Decorative or Disguising Shell". Today I continue that consideration, armed with more knowledge, thanks to the meeting I had this morning at 9:30 a.m. with Robert Izzo, a "navigator", as those charged with helping the public find a health plan under the new Affordable Care Act regime are called.
Robert is a sixty-one year old who works for the New York State Women's Chamber of Commerce. Normally, he helps women set up small businesses. As his organization was designated to provide assistance to the uninsured and soon-to-be-uninsured in my New York City area once the Affordable Care Act became the law of the land, he is now a "navigator", providing technical assistance to those who approach the office, to which the New York State health exchange directs them. In effect he is a "Virgil", guiding visitors through the underworld of government-run health care.
Helping women set up start-ups is a positive experience; helping men and women find health care under the new regime is not. "I have asked my boss for some 'mental health' days, because I am so stressed from doing this job. I like my job helping women start businesses. Now I have people coming here, women in their sixties, crying because they've lost their health care and the new system isn't working for them", he confesses.
The metaphor of the underworld is apt, because the system is not transparent and requires sophistication and doggedness to penetrate. And for many, there is no happy ending because the new health care they can obtain is more costly and less complete than that they had before. Some individuals are subsidized and obtain health care at reasonable prices, others, not much more well-compensated for the work they do, are shut out from subsidies altogether.
"A waitress who makes $28,000 a year can get a plan that costs $465 a month and a $200 subsidy", Robert explains. "With the subsidy the monthly cost of her health care is $265.
"A guy who makes $42,000 a year gets a plan that costs $700 a month and no subsidy. If his rent is $1600 a month, he can't afford that. It's a mess."
I ask Robert to verify whether it is true that some plans are not national, but limited to, say, the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. (One of the insurance brokers I spoke to told me all the exchange plans were national in their coverage.)
"Yes, I've heard of that. You have to check the coverage details before you sign up to make sure you are getting national coverage."
Here's another "Catch-22": To find the doctors in a particular plan while working with a navigator, you have to be enrolled. Essentially you have to buy the goods sight unseen, unless the plan has a website that lists their doctors. And all the plans are "in-network" only, so if you have a rare disease and no in-network doctor is a specialist, you must pay out-of-pocket for appropriate treatment.
"I had a woman call me who said, 'I'm healthy, but if I get cancer next year, I want to be treated at Sloan-Kettering' Robert continued. "I couldn't help her. She went to Sloan-Kettering, but no one would assist her, they told her they were not the appropriate place for her to get the information she needed. Eventually, she found out that Sloan-Kettering had signed up for one plan, First Republic. --I don't know how she found that out."
Robert tells me a little about himself: he lives with two roommates in an apartment in the Columbia area. He can't afford cable so he has no television or landline, and the computer he uses is the one in his office on 135th Street and Broadway. "Can you imagine, I'm a professional, and I don't have my own computer?"
As I have decided to move, Robert sends an e-mail to someone higher up the health care bureaucracy food chain to ask how the system handles moves out-of-state. I want to know whether I can sign up for health care for the months I remain in New York, then cancel the policy, go to Europe for a few months and sign up in the state I want to settle in upon my return.
"'Life-changing events' are an exception to the rule that you can only sign up for health care during the yearly enrollment period," he tells me. "'Moving' is a life-changing event, so you could sign up for New York, stop paying if you go to Europe, move outside New York on your return and sign up in whatever state you settle in."
Having mentioned moving to him, Robert is curious about how greener the pastures are in any of the places I've explored. Talking a little more, Robert reveals he's thinking of moving out of New York.
"Is it better in North Carolina?", he asks me. I end up counseling him as to what states have no income tax, how to compare the cost of living in one locality versus another, to look out for a city or town income tax, to evaluate what the level of sales tax is.
It would not be unreasonable to speculate that the Affordable Care Act will lead to some outmigration from places, like New York City, too expensive for the middle-class to survive in. The financial squeeze is too great and Americans have always been a mobile and practical people.
"At the turn-of-the century, our ancestors left Europe for a better life in America. I feel like now our generation, the baby-boomers, are doing the same in reverse" a friend told me. She and her husband are leaving Westchester for the same reasons I will be leaving New York.
It feels odd to leave a place that my family has lived in for more than a century. It is an uprooting, no question about it. Thankfully, it's a big country and Americans respect resourcefulness and don't have prejudices against "new" people, as can be the case in other parts of the world. So I'll navigate my way out of New York: It's a relief to have decided, at last, to go.
***
Later in the day I go to visit my physical therapist, with whom I discuss my search for health care. She tells me that her health care plan covers her only in New York State, thereby confirming what Robert, the "navigator" said; and contradicting an insurance broker who, pushing the "Oxford Liberty" plan (one of the most expensive), told me "emergency coverage out-of-state is always covered".
When I arrive home, an e-mail from Robert is waiting for me: he has the answer to my question about what would happen if I sign up for health care in New York, go to Europe for the summer, and return to the U.S., but to live in another of the fifty states. It is a two-part answer:
"Yes", I can sign up for health care in another state when I return under the "moving" exception. However, if I do not keep paying the premiums to New York while I am in Europe, I will be subject to "the penalty" for not carrying health insurance. That "penalty" is the yearly $125 penalty imposed on anyone not enrolled in a health insurance plan. That penalty is anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 less than what it would cost me to keep up New York State health insurance while I am in abroad.
As none of the U.S. plans provide coverage abroad and I have to pay for travel insurance (which does not cover routine medical care, but is much cheaper) the choice is obvious: carry a New York State plan until I leave for Europe, stop paying once I leave the country and pay the penalty; then enroll in the state I settle in when I return.
***
I read in the newspapers that the Obama administration has announced a new policy providing that anyone wishing to keep their health insurance coverage may do so through 2016. However, state insurance commissioners and the insurers themselves have to be willing to continue to offer the plans. This news does not provide me with much comfort, though: my coverage is through COBRA, a program mean to bridge coverage between jobs, or to provide coverage to dependents of a someone covered under an employer plan who has died. It is a "one-off", meant to cover extraordinary events. So my health coverage is not covered under the new policy, and I have to keep looking for a health insurance plan to replace the old one.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Day Of The Jackal; Potatoes and Pickled Herring
Ash Wednesday
March 5, 2014
I made my own Mardi Gras last night. I ordered in white pizza from V&T's (a famous pizza parlor and a neighborhood institution), and bought a small cheesecake. I got a chance to watch Fred Zinneman's Day of the Jackal, a wonderful film based on the idea that there was a follow-up assassination attempt on the life of President de Gaulle after the first --which actually occurred on August 22, 1962. In the movie, OAS, an underground group of military men opposed to de Gaulle's decision to grant Algeria independence, demoralized after the first attempt's failure, entrust a cold-blooded assassin, "The Jackal", to kill de Gaulle.
The film, based on the Frederick Forsyth novel of the same name, stars Edward Fox as the Jackal, Cyril Cusack as the maker of the gun the Jackal uses in the assassination attempt, Ronald Pickup as the forger of identify papers, Michael Lonsdale as Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel and a very young Derek Jacobi as his assistant, Caron. Eric Porter plays Colonel Rodin of the OAS, the ravishing Delphine Seyrig ("Last Year At Marienbad"), is Colette de Montpellier, the aristocrat he romances. Donald Sinden is Assistant Commissioner Anthony Mallinson of Scotland Yard, who is ordered by the Prime Minister to help his French counterparts in order that the Jackal, believed to be an Englishman, may be prevented from disgracing Britain by killing de Gaulle.
The film belongs to Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale. Fox appears soon after the credits (which are set against footage of the first assassination attempt and execution of the perpetrators). Deputy Commissioner Lebel only appears later, after the French Minister of the Interior has run out of ideas for finding The Jackal. Police Commissioner Berthier, invited to the meetings by the Minister, is asked for his recommendation, at which point he says that to find the identify of The Jackal, it will take a detective. Who is his best? the Minister asks. Deputy Commissioner Lebel, comes the reply. The camera cuts away.
Lebel is first seen standing in a dovecote, tending to his pigeons. He is smiling, until his wife runs out of their house in the country to tell him that his boss, Police Commissioner Berthier, is on the phone. The investigation is conducted in absolute secrecy and under the supervision of the Minister of the Interior until the Jackal murders Colette de Montpellier, at which point Lebel is told his help is no longer needed. Only when the bureaucracy falters is Lebel recalled. The assassination is prevented, but only just barely.
The Jackal is a brilliant psychopath, Lebel is a bloodhound on his trail. "The Day Of The Jackal", is so popular because it delineates so tautly the rigor of each character's pursuit of his objective: in the Jackal's case, to execute a fantastic killing that will end his career, but leave him a millionaire; in Lebel's case, to prevent the violent death of a head of state who epitomized France's resistance in World War II and the years of progress that followed. The Jackal is flashy, but cunning; Lebel is self-effacing and relentless. In the penultimate scene, Lebel, carrying a powerful automatic weapon, bursts into the attic room where the Jackal has his lair, killing the Jackal in one violent burst of weapons fire before the Jackal can kill him. The last scene has Lebel at the graveside of the man called the Jackal, who it turns out is not Englishman Charles Calthorp, whose identity the Jackal had assumed for his last job. The Jackal's identity remains, to the end, a mystery.
***
Today being Ash Wednesday, I went for ashes at noon at my nearby church, a few blocks away. As today is a fast day, I decided to eat simply, lunch, the main meal allowed, being a boiled potato, pickled herring and onions sautéd in garlic, a dish I prepared myself.
Pickled herring and potatoes is a favorite Scandinavian dish. Herring has been popular there for centuries because it keeps for long periods when cured or pickled. It is a basic dish in cold climates because its basic preparation has taken place long before it is eaten and it can be accompanied by hot potatoes or noodles, both of which require little cooking. As it is still quite cold outside, pickled herring and a boiled potato is perfect for a cold Ash Wednesday.
At Ascension, the pews were filled to bursting and it was standing room only. Ascension supports a diverse community of Spanish speakers who are among the church's most faithful parishioners. It also serves the English-speaking community in the area. The two communities do not cross paths that often, as there is a Spanish-language Mass and there are English masses, and a only few bilingual ones on selected holy days of obligation.
So it is striking to see the range of the parishioners at the noon service: uniformed food service workers from the Dominican Republic, still wearing their hairnets over black, straight hair tied in a bun; Mexican men, Columbia students, neighborhood people, church stalwarts. A few minutes into the service, one of the two uniformed ladies finds a seat in a pew in front of me and slips her hairnet off: the gesture reflects her awareness that she is in church, not the food counter, and it touches me.
Into the space at the end of my pew, a very elderly and feeble man from the Dominican Republic and his daughter, squeeze in. The man sits next to me and asks me a question or two through the service: "Will there be Mass after the ashes are given out?" ("Yes"). What are those people on line in the central aisle doing?" ("They're taking communion.") He, like quite a few of the Hispanic men present, does not take communion. I read somewhere that many Catholic men will go to Mass, but won't confess before. Knowing they have something to confess but not doing so, they won't take communion. (Which shows respect for the Church's rule, but perhaps at their own expense.)
After, I go upstairs to the organ loft to visit with the Music Director. He had to play the organ with one foot because of surgery to a bunion. It will be a very busy day for him, as the last service will be at 7:00 p.m. The forty days of Lent have begun.
March 5, 2014
I made my own Mardi Gras last night. I ordered in white pizza from V&T's (a famous pizza parlor and a neighborhood institution), and bought a small cheesecake. I got a chance to watch Fred Zinneman's Day of the Jackal, a wonderful film based on the idea that there was a follow-up assassination attempt on the life of President de Gaulle after the first --which actually occurred on August 22, 1962. In the movie, OAS, an underground group of military men opposed to de Gaulle's decision to grant Algeria independence, demoralized after the first attempt's failure, entrust a cold-blooded assassin, "The Jackal", to kill de Gaulle.
The film, based on the Frederick Forsyth novel of the same name, stars Edward Fox as the Jackal, Cyril Cusack as the maker of the gun the Jackal uses in the assassination attempt, Ronald Pickup as the forger of identify papers, Michael Lonsdale as Deputy Commissioner Claude Lebel and a very young Derek Jacobi as his assistant, Caron. Eric Porter plays Colonel Rodin of the OAS, the ravishing Delphine Seyrig ("Last Year At Marienbad"), is Colette de Montpellier, the aristocrat he romances. Donald Sinden is Assistant Commissioner Anthony Mallinson of Scotland Yard, who is ordered by the Prime Minister to help his French counterparts in order that the Jackal, believed to be an Englishman, may be prevented from disgracing Britain by killing de Gaulle.
The film belongs to Edward Fox and Michael Lonsdale. Fox appears soon after the credits (which are set against footage of the first assassination attempt and execution of the perpetrators). Deputy Commissioner Lebel only appears later, after the French Minister of the Interior has run out of ideas for finding The Jackal. Police Commissioner Berthier, invited to the meetings by the Minister, is asked for his recommendation, at which point he says that to find the identify of The Jackal, it will take a detective. Who is his best? the Minister asks. Deputy Commissioner Lebel, comes the reply. The camera cuts away.
Lebel is first seen standing in a dovecote, tending to his pigeons. He is smiling, until his wife runs out of their house in the country to tell him that his boss, Police Commissioner Berthier, is on the phone. The investigation is conducted in absolute secrecy and under the supervision of the Minister of the Interior until the Jackal murders Colette de Montpellier, at which point Lebel is told his help is no longer needed. Only when the bureaucracy falters is Lebel recalled. The assassination is prevented, but only just barely.
The Jackal is a brilliant psychopath, Lebel is a bloodhound on his trail. "The Day Of The Jackal", is so popular because it delineates so tautly the rigor of each character's pursuit of his objective: in the Jackal's case, to execute a fantastic killing that will end his career, but leave him a millionaire; in Lebel's case, to prevent the violent death of a head of state who epitomized France's resistance in World War II and the years of progress that followed. The Jackal is flashy, but cunning; Lebel is self-effacing and relentless. In the penultimate scene, Lebel, carrying a powerful automatic weapon, bursts into the attic room where the Jackal has his lair, killing the Jackal in one violent burst of weapons fire before the Jackal can kill him. The last scene has Lebel at the graveside of the man called the Jackal, who it turns out is not Englishman Charles Calthorp, whose identity the Jackal had assumed for his last job. The Jackal's identity remains, to the end, a mystery.
***
Today being Ash Wednesday, I went for ashes at noon at my nearby church, a few blocks away. As today is a fast day, I decided to eat simply, lunch, the main meal allowed, being a boiled potato, pickled herring and onions sautéd in garlic, a dish I prepared myself.
Pickled herring and potatoes is a favorite Scandinavian dish. Herring has been popular there for centuries because it keeps for long periods when cured or pickled. It is a basic dish in cold climates because its basic preparation has taken place long before it is eaten and it can be accompanied by hot potatoes or noodles, both of which require little cooking. As it is still quite cold outside, pickled herring and a boiled potato is perfect for a cold Ash Wednesday.
At Ascension, the pews were filled to bursting and it was standing room only. Ascension supports a diverse community of Spanish speakers who are among the church's most faithful parishioners. It also serves the English-speaking community in the area. The two communities do not cross paths that often, as there is a Spanish-language Mass and there are English masses, and a only few bilingual ones on selected holy days of obligation.
So it is striking to see the range of the parishioners at the noon service: uniformed food service workers from the Dominican Republic, still wearing their hairnets over black, straight hair tied in a bun; Mexican men, Columbia students, neighborhood people, church stalwarts. A few minutes into the service, one of the two uniformed ladies finds a seat in a pew in front of me and slips her hairnet off: the gesture reflects her awareness that she is in church, not the food counter, and it touches me.
Into the space at the end of my pew, a very elderly and feeble man from the Dominican Republic and his daughter, squeeze in. The man sits next to me and asks me a question or two through the service: "Will there be Mass after the ashes are given out?" ("Yes"). What are those people on line in the central aisle doing?" ("They're taking communion.") He, like quite a few of the Hispanic men present, does not take communion. I read somewhere that many Catholic men will go to Mass, but won't confess before. Knowing they have something to confess but not doing so, they won't take communion. (Which shows respect for the Church's rule, but perhaps at their own expense.)
After, I go upstairs to the organ loft to visit with the Music Director. He had to play the organ with one foot because of surgery to a bunion. It will be a very busy day for him, as the last service will be at 7:00 p.m. The forty days of Lent have begun.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
The Cold War
March 4, 2014
When I wrote about "White Nights" a few posts ago, I was thinking about whether the fomenting crisis in the Ukraine was not the Cold War redux. Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB, fits the bill as head of "the Evil Empire" as Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union: teetotaling, treacherous, isolationist. For students of history, the invasion of the Ukraine to protect Russian citizens threatened by the government that has replaced Yanukovich, harks back to Hitler's invasion of Poland to protect German citizens supposedly under threat by Polish machinations. It is of course fitting that Poland is in the lead in calling for harsh sanctions against Russia. Poles lived Russian rule and resisted it unafraid of the hardships required to throw off Soviet domination. Whether Western Europeans will be capable of similar resolve remains to be seen.
With the temperature at seven a.m. this morning at 14 degrees, it is hard not to dwell on the hardships of life in much of Russia, where the deep freeze is the norm. In the Baltic, summer essentially ends August 15, as Bill and I learned when we booked a cruise of that sea that began on that date. Stopping for the day in Visby, a Swedish island favored by that country's wealthy (Ingmar Bergman had a home there), it is known for its roses, which were still blooming the morning we visited. By afternoon, however, we were in the midst of a hellish rainstorm which stranded us on the island overnight. Violently windy and cold weather is a norm in the north of Europe during the same days citizens of Mediterranean countries are lolling on beaches. Being raised in these climes affects the mode of thinking of people, some historians have argued. Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama's book about the role of landscape in forming the mindset of the German people, explores the idea. I don't know if someone has done a similar book about Russia and Russians, but living this frigid winter in New York, it seems likelier to me that a certain inflexibility might creep into the attitudes of people forced to live much of the year in extreme cold, a contempt for those whose day-to-day is not quite as driven by what is outside the window --the "decadent West", as I think Putin has referred to us.
In need of psychic balm after the labors of my tax season, I decided to reward myself by visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the exhibit of photographs of Charles Marville, "the official photographer of Paris", who plied his trade just before, and during, Haussmann's massive reconstruction of the city. Atget's early career overlapped with Marville's later, but the two men's work could not be more different: Atget's images have a sharpness only the improvements to the technology could have brought about, they are documentary. Marville's are "painterly", the efforts he made to create the image are visible in the photograph. This is apt, because Marville began working in the infancy of the medium, when the reliability of the entire image varied with 1. the patience of the subject to stand in front of the camera for several seconds while the image was exposed; and, 2. ability of the photographer to compensate for the lack of technical aids to convey accurately such essential backgrounds to images as clouds. For instance, some photographers took separate photos of clouds, then amalgamated them to images of the streetscapes below them to create the overall photograph they wanted.
Among the most interesting photographs in the exhibit are of public toilets. There were different styles, some enclosing the whole body, others permitting the head and shoulders of the toilets' users to be seen, the distance between consumers of the service no greater than that over a garden wall. These toilets were replaced with others providing users greater enclosure. The older ones reflect a lesser concern about bodily functions than the newer, and are a reminder that in earlier times it was not unusual for bodily functions' exertions to be carried out in the plain view of others also bowing to their bodies' demands. In French, the public toilets were called vespasiennes, in homage to Vespasian, the Roman emperor, who first made public toilets pay.
The Financial Times of last weekend contained an admiring essay by Ariella Budick, "The ghosts of Paris past", about the Marville exhibit. Funnily, I got more pleasure out of reading the article than actually seeing the exhibit. The review used two photographs from the exhibit, "Rue Estienne' (1862-65); and, "A lamppost at the entrance to the École des Beaux Arts" to illustrate it. The photographs are set against the FT's softly salmon-colored paper, giving them a greater feeling of timelessness than the Met's prints --set on white mounts-- do. Reading the reviewer's evocation of the cacophony of drills and hammers that built such monuments of "old" Paris as the Palais Garnier, I could imagine how disruptive Haussman's grand plan for the city was of the lives of the people who worked at les petits métiers --the tanners, the sellers of old clothing and furniture, the tin merchants-- all the people who served Paris' poor. Both groups were uprooted in consequence of the creation of Paris' Grands Boulevards.
One of the most interesting photographs is of the two squat pillars that marked the entrance to the old Les Halles --the food market that preceded the creation of the cathedral of glass that was itself torn down in 1971, when the market moved to Rungis, in Paris' suburbs. The two columns dated to the market's creation in 1183. When Haussmann targeted them for destruction, there was no outcry. On the other hand, when Les Halles was torn down (replaced by a modernist nightmare --a failed shopping center) it was denounced as "architectural suicide". Nonetheless, it was accomplished.
Open war between architectural preservationists and modernizers is the stuff of our times, a drama of "the heroism of modern life", as Baudelaire called it. Sometimes the preservationists overshadow the modernizers, sometimes the modernizers force preservationists to yield to the imperatives of modernizing technology. Whether we admire Haussmann's ambition or reject it as megalomania, photos of the city of Paris before and after Haussman force us to reflect on the price of modernity. Indeed, at the time of Paris' rebuilding, some critics observed that the "new" Paris was simply a place in which the wealthy disported themselves in the playground of the city's center, while the poor, rendered invisible, were pushed to its margins.
Plus ça change, plus la même chose, non?
When I wrote about "White Nights" a few posts ago, I was thinking about whether the fomenting crisis in the Ukraine was not the Cold War redux. Vladimir Putin, the former head of the KGB, fits the bill as head of "the Evil Empire" as Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union: teetotaling, treacherous, isolationist. For students of history, the invasion of the Ukraine to protect Russian citizens threatened by the government that has replaced Yanukovich, harks back to Hitler's invasion of Poland to protect German citizens supposedly under threat by Polish machinations. It is of course fitting that Poland is in the lead in calling for harsh sanctions against Russia. Poles lived Russian rule and resisted it unafraid of the hardships required to throw off Soviet domination. Whether Western Europeans will be capable of similar resolve remains to be seen.
With the temperature at seven a.m. this morning at 14 degrees, it is hard not to dwell on the hardships of life in much of Russia, where the deep freeze is the norm. In the Baltic, summer essentially ends August 15, as Bill and I learned when we booked a cruise of that sea that began on that date. Stopping for the day in Visby, a Swedish island favored by that country's wealthy (Ingmar Bergman had a home there), it is known for its roses, which were still blooming the morning we visited. By afternoon, however, we were in the midst of a hellish rainstorm which stranded us on the island overnight. Violently windy and cold weather is a norm in the north of Europe during the same days citizens of Mediterranean countries are lolling on beaches. Being raised in these climes affects the mode of thinking of people, some historians have argued. Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama's book about the role of landscape in forming the mindset of the German people, explores the idea. I don't know if someone has done a similar book about Russia and Russians, but living this frigid winter in New York, it seems likelier to me that a certain inflexibility might creep into the attitudes of people forced to live much of the year in extreme cold, a contempt for those whose day-to-day is not quite as driven by what is outside the window --the "decadent West", as I think Putin has referred to us.
In need of psychic balm after the labors of my tax season, I decided to reward myself by visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the exhibit of photographs of Charles Marville, "the official photographer of Paris", who plied his trade just before, and during, Haussmann's massive reconstruction of the city. Atget's early career overlapped with Marville's later, but the two men's work could not be more different: Atget's images have a sharpness only the improvements to the technology could have brought about, they are documentary. Marville's are "painterly", the efforts he made to create the image are visible in the photograph. This is apt, because Marville began working in the infancy of the medium, when the reliability of the entire image varied with 1. the patience of the subject to stand in front of the camera for several seconds while the image was exposed; and, 2. ability of the photographer to compensate for the lack of technical aids to convey accurately such essential backgrounds to images as clouds. For instance, some photographers took separate photos of clouds, then amalgamated them to images of the streetscapes below them to create the overall photograph they wanted.
Among the most interesting photographs in the exhibit are of public toilets. There were different styles, some enclosing the whole body, others permitting the head and shoulders of the toilets' users to be seen, the distance between consumers of the service no greater than that over a garden wall. These toilets were replaced with others providing users greater enclosure. The older ones reflect a lesser concern about bodily functions than the newer, and are a reminder that in earlier times it was not unusual for bodily functions' exertions to be carried out in the plain view of others also bowing to their bodies' demands. In French, the public toilets were called vespasiennes, in homage to Vespasian, the Roman emperor, who first made public toilets pay.
The Financial Times of last weekend contained an admiring essay by Ariella Budick, "The ghosts of Paris past", about the Marville exhibit. Funnily, I got more pleasure out of reading the article than actually seeing the exhibit. The review used two photographs from the exhibit, "Rue Estienne' (1862-65); and, "A lamppost at the entrance to the École des Beaux Arts" to illustrate it. The photographs are set against the FT's softly salmon-colored paper, giving them a greater feeling of timelessness than the Met's prints --set on white mounts-- do. Reading the reviewer's evocation of the cacophony of drills and hammers that built such monuments of "old" Paris as the Palais Garnier, I could imagine how disruptive Haussman's grand plan for the city was of the lives of the people who worked at les petits métiers --the tanners, the sellers of old clothing and furniture, the tin merchants-- all the people who served Paris' poor. Both groups were uprooted in consequence of the creation of Paris' Grands Boulevards.
One of the most interesting photographs is of the two squat pillars that marked the entrance to the old Les Halles --the food market that preceded the creation of the cathedral of glass that was itself torn down in 1971, when the market moved to Rungis, in Paris' suburbs. The two columns dated to the market's creation in 1183. When Haussmann targeted them for destruction, there was no outcry. On the other hand, when Les Halles was torn down (replaced by a modernist nightmare --a failed shopping center) it was denounced as "architectural suicide". Nonetheless, it was accomplished.
Open war between architectural preservationists and modernizers is the stuff of our times, a drama of "the heroism of modern life", as Baudelaire called it. Sometimes the preservationists overshadow the modernizers, sometimes the modernizers force preservationists to yield to the imperatives of modernizing technology. Whether we admire Haussmann's ambition or reject it as megalomania, photos of the city of Paris before and after Haussman force us to reflect on the price of modernity. Indeed, at the time of Paris' rebuilding, some critics observed that the "new" Paris was simply a place in which the wealthy disported themselves in the playground of the city's center, while the poor, rendered invisible, were pushed to its margins.
Plus ça change, plus la même chose, non?
Monday, March 3, 2014
Uplift After Taxes
March 3, 2014
I completed my taxes tonight. Not just the 2013 tax year return, but the organization of the payment of the April 15 estimated taxes which are now part of my new life as someone essentially in retirement. A feeling of depletion at tax time is not unusual: in proof of the fact, fewer children are born in the United States around January 15. That's nine months from when taxes are due.
Our local Citbank remains closed, and lately the temporary ATMs have been out of order, so tonight around nine o'clock, Beauregard and I made the walk to the nearest Citibank, which is on 96th Street and Broadway, fifteen blocks away. The temperatures are once again frigid, although the relief I feel from having completed this task quickens my step. I need to transfer funds to make sure the moneys are available when the taxman comes to get them, and not procrastinating about it will give me closure.
There is new snow on the ground in places, and on the windshields of parked cars. One wag took advantage of last night's snowfall to express himself. I passed a windshield on which his or her finger had served as chalk to the windshield's blackboard: "No More!" the graffitist had written. On the next car's windshield he had also left his mark: "Enough!" Could he or she have been referring to the snow?
Making the bank transfer took just a few minutes. Walking down to 96th Street and back, fighting the wind whipping Broadway, I fantasized of leaving everything behind and going on a world tour. I once read that Noel Coward, near collapse after too much success in the West End, took a cruise around the Asian Pacific to disappear from London for a while. I always envied him, being able to withdraw from the world for several months aboard a slow boat to China (He wrote "Mad Dogs And Englishman" during the trip.)
Alas, I am tethered to New York. However, I returned to my building to have the doorman hand me a package. It was a collection of CDs of music by the Benedictine nuns of Mary, Queen of Apostles convent, located in rural Missouri. I had heard them sing on WQXR, which has played many selections from their three recordings over the last few months.
I put Angels And Saints At Ephesus on and heard the strains of a hymn entitled "O God Of Loveliness", sung to a melody I recognized immediately. I had sung it as a child, at morning chapel at the Scotch Presbyterian private school I attended, Alexander Robertson. I struggled to remember the lyrics I sang, which were different. All I could remember was the last line of a verse "Who makes the woeful heart to sing."
Looking at the album notes I saw that the melody is known as "The Silesian Crusader's Hymn". I entered the title into the browser of my computer and got my answer. I learned the hymn as "Fairest Lord Jesus". If filing my taxes brought me low, the hymn raised me high. "The world is too much with us" sometimes, but for me, not when these nuns sing. They were the remedy for what ailed me.
Below is the verse I sang to the Silesian Crusaders' Hymn:
I completed my taxes tonight. Not just the 2013 tax year return, but the organization of the payment of the April 15 estimated taxes which are now part of my new life as someone essentially in retirement. A feeling of depletion at tax time is not unusual: in proof of the fact, fewer children are born in the United States around January 15. That's nine months from when taxes are due.
Our local Citbank remains closed, and lately the temporary ATMs have been out of order, so tonight around nine o'clock, Beauregard and I made the walk to the nearest Citibank, which is on 96th Street and Broadway, fifteen blocks away. The temperatures are once again frigid, although the relief I feel from having completed this task quickens my step. I need to transfer funds to make sure the moneys are available when the taxman comes to get them, and not procrastinating about it will give me closure.
There is new snow on the ground in places, and on the windshields of parked cars. One wag took advantage of last night's snowfall to express himself. I passed a windshield on which his or her finger had served as chalk to the windshield's blackboard: "No More!" the graffitist had written. On the next car's windshield he had also left his mark: "Enough!" Could he or she have been referring to the snow?
Making the bank transfer took just a few minutes. Walking down to 96th Street and back, fighting the wind whipping Broadway, I fantasized of leaving everything behind and going on a world tour. I once read that Noel Coward, near collapse after too much success in the West End, took a cruise around the Asian Pacific to disappear from London for a while. I always envied him, being able to withdraw from the world for several months aboard a slow boat to China (He wrote "Mad Dogs And Englishman" during the trip.)
Alas, I am tethered to New York. However, I returned to my building to have the doorman hand me a package. It was a collection of CDs of music by the Benedictine nuns of Mary, Queen of Apostles convent, located in rural Missouri. I had heard them sing on WQXR, which has played many selections from their three recordings over the last few months.
I put Angels And Saints At Ephesus on and heard the strains of a hymn entitled "O God Of Loveliness", sung to a melody I recognized immediately. I had sung it as a child, at morning chapel at the Scotch Presbyterian private school I attended, Alexander Robertson. I struggled to remember the lyrics I sang, which were different. All I could remember was the last line of a verse "Who makes the woeful heart to sing."
Looking at the album notes I saw that the melody is known as "The Silesian Crusader's Hymn". I entered the title into the browser of my computer and got my answer. I learned the hymn as "Fairest Lord Jesus". If filing my taxes brought me low, the hymn raised me high. "The world is too much with us" sometimes, but for me, not when these nuns sing. They were the remedy for what ailed me.
Below is the verse I sang to the Silesian Crusaders' Hymn:
- Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature,
- O Thou of God and man the Son,
- Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor,
- Thou, my soul’s glory, joy and crown.
- Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands,
- Robed in the blooming garb of spring;
- Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer,
- Who makes the woeful heart to sing.
- Fair is the sunshine, fairer still the moonlight,
- And all the twinkling starry host;
- Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer
- Than all the angels heaven can boast.
- All fairest beauty, heavenly and earthly,
- Wondrously, Jesus, is found in Thee;
- None can be nearer, fairer or dearer,
- Than Thou, my Savior, art to me.
- Beautiful Savior! Lord of all the nations!
- Son of God and Son of Man!
- Glory and honor, praise, adoration,
- Now and forever more be Thine.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
A Protective, Decorative or Disguising Shell
Saturday, March 1, 2014
There's a 1997 Norwegian movie called Insomnia that comes to mind as I write this. It is about a Swedish detective named Engstrom who has had to exile himself to Norway for having sex with a witness in one of his investigations. Assigned to an investigation in a village north of the Arctic Circle during the summer, when the sun never sets, the constant daylight is a metaphor for relentless exposure --of Engstrom's past, of his "foreign-ness" in Norway, of the facts in a murder investigation. The idea that constant daylight in summer is anything but delectable also turns up in White NIghts, Taylor Hackford's 1985 film about a tap dancer and a ballet dancer (Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov, respectively) trapped in the Soviet Union. The French, use the term to describe a sleepless night, which is what I am having.
The deep freeze has not kept me inside, thanks to Beauregard, although most of my friends seem to have been knocked for a loop by it. No one's keen to go out, many of my neighbors laid low with a cold or a flu, everyone complaining of how dry their skins are from the heat sent up through the pipes of their apartments. In fact, complaining has become an Olympic sport among "adults" this winter. I exclude from the definition many college students in the area, who are running in the parks wearing shorts, despite the -5 degree temperatures (with the wind chill factored in).
When I am not out with Beauregard, I am trying to figure out what health care plan I will enroll in once the COBRA I currently have runs out May 31. If Bill had lived one more year, I would have had health care coverage at a reasonable price for life; on his death I got three years of coverage at double the price we had been paying, a COBRA few who lose their spouses get for so long, even at $600 a month. Nevertheless, I'm five years away from Medicare, so for the next five years, I have to avail myself of the offerings made available by the Affordable Care Act .
The plans available comparable to the coverage I have now will cost $1000/month, a $400 increase, without factoring in that the plans allow no out-of-network reimbursement. I will lose all my present doctors, because the reimbursement rates are too low to be attractive to them. As I evaluate the plans, consulting with brokers for the plans, "navigators" (non-broker consultants), and friends who are familiar with a few of them, I am discovering that neither dentistry nor vision care will be covered in any fashion. Also, companies can charge a deductible for medications and a deductible for medical care, meaning that reaching a cap on one, doesn't stop co-pays on the other. It all adds up to an increase in my health insurance costs of at least $5,000 up front, before figuring my required contributions should I actually need medical care.
In effect, the combination of New York State and New York City taxes, increased health care costs and the increasing cost of living in New York City generally, is pushing me out of the City.
Of course, my situation isn't terrible: many are much more strained. However, the cost of the financial platform I need to live here keeps rising, while my income stays fixed. The result is that in the future, I will be more and more pressed financially. Many New Yorkers in a similar position opt to stay and reduce their lifestyle, replacing the full-price tickets they used to buy with discount ones; or go only to free concerts, going out much less frequently, curtailing restaurant, hair care, vacation and other expenses. They trawl the thrift shops the way they once did sample sales or department stores. I do.
There's a carapace I see I'm starting to develop in consequence of my new situation. I don't want to spend time in theatre crowds, even for a performance I would have given my eye teeth for once: it takes too much energy. I'd rather spend time in the park with Beau, or reading when I don't have to attend to financial matters. The time spent that way gives me the chance to plan my escape. When I'm in the park, no matter how frigid the temperatures I'm reminded of nature's beauty and that there are places elsewhere in the fifty states where I could live and start life anew.
And maybe sleep better, too.
There's a 1997 Norwegian movie called Insomnia that comes to mind as I write this. It is about a Swedish detective named Engstrom who has had to exile himself to Norway for having sex with a witness in one of his investigations. Assigned to an investigation in a village north of the Arctic Circle during the summer, when the sun never sets, the constant daylight is a metaphor for relentless exposure --of Engstrom's past, of his "foreign-ness" in Norway, of the facts in a murder investigation. The idea that constant daylight in summer is anything but delectable also turns up in White NIghts, Taylor Hackford's 1985 film about a tap dancer and a ballet dancer (Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov, respectively) trapped in the Soviet Union. The French, use the term to describe a sleepless night, which is what I am having.
The deep freeze has not kept me inside, thanks to Beauregard, although most of my friends seem to have been knocked for a loop by it. No one's keen to go out, many of my neighbors laid low with a cold or a flu, everyone complaining of how dry their skins are from the heat sent up through the pipes of their apartments. In fact, complaining has become an Olympic sport among "adults" this winter. I exclude from the definition many college students in the area, who are running in the parks wearing shorts, despite the -5 degree temperatures (with the wind chill factored in).
When I am not out with Beauregard, I am trying to figure out what health care plan I will enroll in once the COBRA I currently have runs out May 31. If Bill had lived one more year, I would have had health care coverage at a reasonable price for life; on his death I got three years of coverage at double the price we had been paying, a COBRA few who lose their spouses get for so long, even at $600 a month. Nevertheless, I'm five years away from Medicare, so for the next five years, I have to avail myself of the offerings made available by the Affordable Care Act .
The plans available comparable to the coverage I have now will cost $1000/month, a $400 increase, without factoring in that the plans allow no out-of-network reimbursement. I will lose all my present doctors, because the reimbursement rates are too low to be attractive to them. As I evaluate the plans, consulting with brokers for the plans, "navigators" (non-broker consultants), and friends who are familiar with a few of them, I am discovering that neither dentistry nor vision care will be covered in any fashion. Also, companies can charge a deductible for medications and a deductible for medical care, meaning that reaching a cap on one, doesn't stop co-pays on the other. It all adds up to an increase in my health insurance costs of at least $5,000 up front, before figuring my required contributions should I actually need medical care.
In effect, the combination of New York State and New York City taxes, increased health care costs and the increasing cost of living in New York City generally, is pushing me out of the City.
Of course, my situation isn't terrible: many are much more strained. However, the cost of the financial platform I need to live here keeps rising, while my income stays fixed. The result is that in the future, I will be more and more pressed financially. Many New Yorkers in a similar position opt to stay and reduce their lifestyle, replacing the full-price tickets they used to buy with discount ones; or go only to free concerts, going out much less frequently, curtailing restaurant, hair care, vacation and other expenses. They trawl the thrift shops the way they once did sample sales or department stores. I do.
There's a carapace I see I'm starting to develop in consequence of my new situation. I don't want to spend time in theatre crowds, even for a performance I would have given my eye teeth for once: it takes too much energy. I'd rather spend time in the park with Beau, or reading when I don't have to attend to financial matters. The time spent that way gives me the chance to plan my escape. When I'm in the park, no matter how frigid the temperatures I'm reminded of nature's beauty and that there are places elsewhere in the fifty states where I could live and start life anew.
And maybe sleep better, too.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Tired of "Edginess"
February 25, 2014
Someone who left Manhattan to live in Minneapolis and returned two years later once told me that Minneapolis had no "edge". Somebody else told me that when you leave New York for parts west, those places just don't have "edge". "Edge" I was told once, is the quality that attracts you to something, but that simultaneously, makes you afraid of the attraction. Well, I'm afraid that I'm tired of "edginess", so defined. New York has a great deal that attracts me, but its edge is beginning to feel more than I want to handle.
Case in point: Around 7:00 p.m. this evening I was on the subway returning home from a trip to 96th Street. The car I boarded was crowded, but there were still three or four seats to choose from scattered around the center of the car. I chose to sit between a large African-American woman all dressed in black and a young man in a noticeably new red baseball cap and baggy light tan trousers immaculately pressed. He was listening to hip-hop and mouthing the words.
His legs were, as is often the case with some men on the subway, spread so far apart he was taking up more than a seat, although he was far from overweight. He was also sitting slouched, legs projecting into the center of the car, further maximizing the space taken up. There was just enough space left for me to squeeze in and sit. So I shimmied onto the seat, but the wide "V" the young man had made of his legs prevented me from sitting securely.
So I said, "Honey bunch, would you move a little so I can sit?" I could not have asked more sweetly, I think.
Nothing doing.
I actually touched the side of the trousers with the fingers of my hand to put a bit of space between me and the young man, something I know most people would never dare do on a New York City subway. When I did, the young man's head shot straight up and I realized --the boy was a young woman.
Based on long experience riding the New York City subways --more than half a century-- the young woman behaved exactly as her male counterpart would have in the same circumstance. That is, she ignored me, except to mumble something under her breath I could not make out. I was, however, able to sit until I needed to get off, and when I got off I did not hear her yelling obscenities at me --which has happened over less on other subway rides.
The young woman's look was certainly edgy, but in my book, that someone looks interesting ranks second to their ability to accommodate themselves to riding on a New York City subway car with other people. That's a skill this young woman clearly does not possess.
"When the daily rudeness, the incivility and the expense of living here are not compensated for by what you get out of being here, New York isn't attractive anymore." So said another friend, who stays because he can't leave --yet.
Edginess is a young person's game. Rather than edginess, I want "Fantin La Tour moments", as the writer Mary Cantwell called them in "The Mauve-ing Of America", an article she wrote for The New York Times in 1991. In the article, Cantwell gently lampooned the "cult of the beautiful" Martha Stewart and her then-rival, Alexandra Stoddard, celebrated, evoking the name of the French painter of cut flowers in cut-glass vases.
When we are young, we want excitement. When we are older, we want peaceful moments. Or so a psychologist told me. Edginess's stock is tending lower in my eyes, while Fantin La Tour is looking better and better, there's no denying it.
Someone who left Manhattan to live in Minneapolis and returned two years later once told me that Minneapolis had no "edge". Somebody else told me that when you leave New York for parts west, those places just don't have "edge". "Edge" I was told once, is the quality that attracts you to something, but that simultaneously, makes you afraid of the attraction. Well, I'm afraid that I'm tired of "edginess", so defined. New York has a great deal that attracts me, but its edge is beginning to feel more than I want to handle.
Case in point: Around 7:00 p.m. this evening I was on the subway returning home from a trip to 96th Street. The car I boarded was crowded, but there were still three or four seats to choose from scattered around the center of the car. I chose to sit between a large African-American woman all dressed in black and a young man in a noticeably new red baseball cap and baggy light tan trousers immaculately pressed. He was listening to hip-hop and mouthing the words.
His legs were, as is often the case with some men on the subway, spread so far apart he was taking up more than a seat, although he was far from overweight. He was also sitting slouched, legs projecting into the center of the car, further maximizing the space taken up. There was just enough space left for me to squeeze in and sit. So I shimmied onto the seat, but the wide "V" the young man had made of his legs prevented me from sitting securely.
So I said, "Honey bunch, would you move a little so I can sit?" I could not have asked more sweetly, I think.
Nothing doing.
I actually touched the side of the trousers with the fingers of my hand to put a bit of space between me and the young man, something I know most people would never dare do on a New York City subway. When I did, the young man's head shot straight up and I realized --the boy was a young woman.
Based on long experience riding the New York City subways --more than half a century-- the young woman behaved exactly as her male counterpart would have in the same circumstance. That is, she ignored me, except to mumble something under her breath I could not make out. I was, however, able to sit until I needed to get off, and when I got off I did not hear her yelling obscenities at me --which has happened over less on other subway rides.
The young woman's look was certainly edgy, but in my book, that someone looks interesting ranks second to their ability to accommodate themselves to riding on a New York City subway car with other people. That's a skill this young woman clearly does not possess.
"When the daily rudeness, the incivility and the expense of living here are not compensated for by what you get out of being here, New York isn't attractive anymore." So said another friend, who stays because he can't leave --yet.
Edginess is a young person's game. Rather than edginess, I want "Fantin La Tour moments", as the writer Mary Cantwell called them in "The Mauve-ing Of America", an article she wrote for The New York Times in 1991. In the article, Cantwell gently lampooned the "cult of the beautiful" Martha Stewart and her then-rival, Alexandra Stoddard, celebrated, evoking the name of the French painter of cut flowers in cut-glass vases.
When we are young, we want excitement. When we are older, we want peaceful moments. Or so a psychologist told me. Edginess's stock is tending lower in my eyes, while Fantin La Tour is looking better and better, there's no denying it.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Simple Pleasures; Still Life With Breadcrumbs; Memoir of the Bookie's Son; and "Q"
February 24, 2014
With panic about the snow storm Wednesday mounting (some think as much as ten inches will fall), I did what any reasonable person faced with the twelfth snowstorm of the season would do: I ate and drank.
I cooked giant ravioli stuffed with chicken and herbs, then made a sauce of several cloves of garlic sautéed in Italian olive oil till crispy brown, into which I plunged the ravioli. A bunch of fresh arugula thrown in served as the salad course, chased with a half bottle of Bordeaux from Cadillac. Dessert was fresh blackberries, followed by a pint of Talenti Southern Pecan gelato garnished with Calmyra figs. I can be as austere as a Carthusian in my eating habits, but when winter hangs on too long, I am Rabelaisian.
A friend lent me two books that reflect our mutual obsession with making ends meet: Frugal Is Not Cheap, and Still Life With Breadcrumbs. The first is the memoir of an accountant who has shaken herself free of the credit-card mentality that plunges so many into a lifetime of debt; the second is former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen's novel about a 60-year old woman, a celebrated photographer, who finds her celebrity no insurance against the rising cost of living in Manhattan, taking care of her mother and raising her son alone.
As I just wrote a short story along the same lines (never having known of Still Life), it is evident that the novel's strain is part of zeitgeist of Baby Boomers. Writing about " the old" as fully-developed human beings (with lusts and yearnings) is becoming more and more acceptable. Quindlen is more skillful than I am in evoking a setting a scriptwriter could make a movie out of and she's received favorable reviews for the book in outlets as distant as London's Financial Times. She's put her stamp on later life, which has optimism and underlying resilience going for it. There are no "bad guys" to blame for the penuriousness of her heroine, unless it's her financial advisor, who failed to explain that her expenses were rising even as her income was declining. He, however, is not a character in Still Life, and I'm a killjoy to mention him.
On the other hand, in Memoir Of The Bookie's Son, a remembrance of Buckley Offitt, a Balitmore bookmaker many believed the smartest bookie in the country, Sidney Offit, his son, never asks for our indulgence. His father made the money to support Sidney, his brother Benson and their mother, by taking bets on horses, an illegal activity until the Kefauver Commission and Off-Track Betting destroyed bookies' livelihood.
Offitt, who came to New York and succeeded, brings to life the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had a unique skill handicapping horses, and made it his life's work. That is "life's work" in the way Picasso thought of painting, Hemingway of writing and Gene Krupa drumming. Arrested late in his career, he fixed a judge, the policeman giving evidence and the prosecuting attorney --without a qualm, because he believed that the laws prohibiting gambling went against human nature. However, he never took a bet again after the case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence. (Which suggests he read odds very well indeed.)
What is significant about the book is its depiction of childhood as it once was: a family matter. Sid and his brother Benson go to Baltimore schools, spend the summers at camp, and listen when their parents say something. They might read books or go to a movie, but the Baltimore they live in operates by Baltimore's rules, not those of the Internet or broadcast news or cable television or IPhones.
Sidney grows up to become a New York writer, milking his background the way Pete Hamill milked his to write his novels and memoirs. These men were grounded in the college of the streets, and having survived the course, were better adults for it. Basic lessons about how human beings will behave in variety of situations were illustrated daily, and more forcibly than any textbook.
In further contrast to Quindlen's novel, "Q", composer, musician and arranger Quincy Jones' autobiography, a widely celebrated book when it first appeared a few years ago, starts out similarly, but then vaults into the stratosphere of celebrity. It is probably true that when he was a boy, Jones and his brothers had to eat fried rats because that was the only meat his grandmother could lay hands on to feed them. Jones earned every moment of his success, but hearing him tell the story of his ascendancy doesn't make me feel he has any lesson to impart. Whereas Sidney Offitt's tale of his father --a man who always insisted "The world doesn't owe me nothin'" offers a study in character annealed in the crucible of Baltimore's back streets. Buckley's parents were Old Country in values and outlook, wanting to "fit in" in their adopted country; but their son turned to lucrative use in an illegal activity his mathematical bent, becoming in the process "his own man".
The story of his son's discovery of his father's uniqueness, and his father's uncompromising acceptance of the parameters his choice of profession obliged, makes Memoir Of The Bookie's Son more uplifting than Q's tale of ascent and stardom. Then, too, Q is about defining success by the number of flashbulbs that go off when you walk onto a stage. Memoir of the Bookie's Son is about a life conducted very much off-stage, necessarily off-stage. Buckley Offitt, "maybe the biggest bookie in the country", preferred to be invisible, preferred to be discreet, because in the business he had chosen, that preference reflected his sagacity. Memoir of the Bookie's Son is about how the way a man conducts himself becomes an example to his children, whether what he does is within or without the law. Reading it has been one of the small pleasures of this winter.
With panic about the snow storm Wednesday mounting (some think as much as ten inches will fall), I did what any reasonable person faced with the twelfth snowstorm of the season would do: I ate and drank.
I cooked giant ravioli stuffed with chicken and herbs, then made a sauce of several cloves of garlic sautéed in Italian olive oil till crispy brown, into which I plunged the ravioli. A bunch of fresh arugula thrown in served as the salad course, chased with a half bottle of Bordeaux from Cadillac. Dessert was fresh blackberries, followed by a pint of Talenti Southern Pecan gelato garnished with Calmyra figs. I can be as austere as a Carthusian in my eating habits, but when winter hangs on too long, I am Rabelaisian.
A friend lent me two books that reflect our mutual obsession with making ends meet: Frugal Is Not Cheap, and Still Life With Breadcrumbs. The first is the memoir of an accountant who has shaken herself free of the credit-card mentality that plunges so many into a lifetime of debt; the second is former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen's novel about a 60-year old woman, a celebrated photographer, who finds her celebrity no insurance against the rising cost of living in Manhattan, taking care of her mother and raising her son alone.
As I just wrote a short story along the same lines (never having known of Still Life), it is evident that the novel's strain is part of zeitgeist of Baby Boomers. Writing about " the old" as fully-developed human beings (with lusts and yearnings) is becoming more and more acceptable. Quindlen is more skillful than I am in evoking a setting a scriptwriter could make a movie out of and she's received favorable reviews for the book in outlets as distant as London's Financial Times. She's put her stamp on later life, which has optimism and underlying resilience going for it. There are no "bad guys" to blame for the penuriousness of her heroine, unless it's her financial advisor, who failed to explain that her expenses were rising even as her income was declining. He, however, is not a character in Still Life, and I'm a killjoy to mention him.
On the other hand, in Memoir Of The Bookie's Son, a remembrance of Buckley Offitt, a Balitmore bookmaker many believed the smartest bookie in the country, Sidney Offit, his son, never asks for our indulgence. His father made the money to support Sidney, his brother Benson and their mother, by taking bets on horses, an illegal activity until the Kefauver Commission and Off-Track Betting destroyed bookies' livelihood.
Offitt, who came to New York and succeeded, brings to life the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had a unique skill handicapping horses, and made it his life's work. That is "life's work" in the way Picasso thought of painting, Hemingway of writing and Gene Krupa drumming. Arrested late in his career, he fixed a judge, the policeman giving evidence and the prosecuting attorney --without a qualm, because he believed that the laws prohibiting gambling went against human nature. However, he never took a bet again after the case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence. (Which suggests he read odds very well indeed.)
What is significant about the book is its depiction of childhood as it once was: a family matter. Sid and his brother Benson go to Baltimore schools, spend the summers at camp, and listen when their parents say something. They might read books or go to a movie, but the Baltimore they live in operates by Baltimore's rules, not those of the Internet or broadcast news or cable television or IPhones.
Sidney grows up to become a New York writer, milking his background the way Pete Hamill milked his to write his novels and memoirs. These men were grounded in the college of the streets, and having survived the course, were better adults for it. Basic lessons about how human beings will behave in variety of situations were illustrated daily, and more forcibly than any textbook.
In further contrast to Quindlen's novel, "Q", composer, musician and arranger Quincy Jones' autobiography, a widely celebrated book when it first appeared a few years ago, starts out similarly, but then vaults into the stratosphere of celebrity. It is probably true that when he was a boy, Jones and his brothers had to eat fried rats because that was the only meat his grandmother could lay hands on to feed them. Jones earned every moment of his success, but hearing him tell the story of his ascendancy doesn't make me feel he has any lesson to impart. Whereas Sidney Offitt's tale of his father --a man who always insisted "The world doesn't owe me nothin'" offers a study in character annealed in the crucible of Baltimore's back streets. Buckley's parents were Old Country in values and outlook, wanting to "fit in" in their adopted country; but their son turned to lucrative use in an illegal activity his mathematical bent, becoming in the process "his own man".
The story of his son's discovery of his father's uniqueness, and his father's uncompromising acceptance of the parameters his choice of profession obliged, makes Memoir Of The Bookie's Son more uplifting than Q's tale of ascent and stardom. Then, too, Q is about defining success by the number of flashbulbs that go off when you walk onto a stage. Memoir of the Bookie's Son is about a life conducted very much off-stage, necessarily off-stage. Buckley Offitt, "maybe the biggest bookie in the country", preferred to be invisible, preferred to be discreet, because in the business he had chosen, that preference reflected his sagacity. Memoir of the Bookie's Son is about how the way a man conducts himself becomes an example to his children, whether what he does is within or without the law. Reading it has been one of the small pleasures of this winter.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
"Eminent Victorians" and "The Uncommon Reader"
February 18 2014
I had an eighth grade English teacher, Richard Peck, who used to say that "our age likes to see the feet of clay of its idols". That trend was created by one man, Lytton Strachey, whose "Eminent Victorians" offered brief biographies of "the great and the good" that punctured their magnificence. Alexander Woolcott, who included Strachey's biography of Cardinal Manning in his "Woolcott Reader", observed that what Strachey practiced was not so much biography as "ironical deflation". Woolcott includes in his anthology Strachey's brief biography of Cardinal Manning, who took holy orders in the Church of England, and died a Roman Catholic cardinal, having, in between, become a well-known champion of the Pope and London's poor.
Strachey suggests that Manning --who became archbishop of Westminster Cathedral, and thereby spiritual leader of Britain's Roman Catholics-- was astutely self-effacing. He took himself out of consideration for advancement only to emerge as the only acceptable candidate for this committee or that commission; with the result that his reputation and influence grew. In 1889 he successfully mediated the London Dock Strike, which threatened social peace there. He expanded the number of Catholic schools in London, and gave of his time tirelessly in pursuit of better conditions for the poor. He had gone to Oxford and been close friends with Gladstone, who ended his friendship with Manning after the latter's conversion. Gladstone was deeply suspicious the doctrine of "papal infallibility", promulgated by Pope Pius IX, to whom Manning owed his ascendancy. In numerous newspaper articles, he attacked the doctrine as "undemocratic"; Manning defended it, alluding to Gladstone as a friend without reference to their breach. The two men were similar in their taste for self-denial: Gladstone would visit prostitutes, hoping to convert them away from their profession. Excited by the encounters, he would then go home and flagellate himself in punishment for the urges the women aroused in him. Manning seems to have had no similar urges, but the austerity of his life made a wraith of him in old age. Strachey acknowledges all of this, but suggests that the eminence Manning achieved reflected a deep-seated ambition. That ambition was frustrated in its original direction,politics; but Manning being Manning, he found a way to fulfill his ambition for glory in a way that would never bring reproach. By the biography's end, unless you know more about Manning, he might be a Victorian Julian Sorel. It is Strachey's innovation to plant seeds of doubt about the reputations of those who once went to their deaths secure in the knowledge their reputations would stand, intact --something no eminent person in contemporary life can ever be sure of.
Alan Bennett, on the other hand, exalts Queen Elizabeth II, the subject of his 2007 novella, "The Uncommon Reader". A keen observer of the rituals that ring the British monarchy and preserve its lustre, Bennett creates a Queen who is very much as most of us imagine her: conventional, yet intellectually sharp. The two qualities never collide, Bennett lets us see, because her "job" --to travel in her dominions and to spend as much time as she can lending an air of specialness to what would otherwise be mundane plant openings, ship launchings and garden shows-- never requires her to delve deeply into the life circumstances of the people she meets, her subjects. Similarly, her subjects don't expect her to be anyone other than the person they've seen in the photographs in Majesty and other, similarly hagiographic outlets for information about the Royal Family.
Bennett takes the Queen we think we know and puts her in a place she never expected to find herself in: a mobile lending library parked outside the Palace grounds, behind the kitchens. Following one of her corgis, which has strayed, she comes upon the library truck and enters to find a young man who works in her kitchens browsing the shelves and another, the man in charge of the lending library, shelving. Acutely sensitive to the disturbance her presence causes, to be polite, she takes away a volume by Ivy Compton-Burnett --and gets hooked on reading.
The transformative power of the book is celebrated in "The Uncommon Reader". The title plays with the title of Virginia Woolf's book of essays on writing and reading "The Common Reader". In the collection, Woolf implicitly argued that reviewers ought to look at books, not from their perches as specialists, but as better-informed stand-ins for the intellectually curious, but average book-buyer, Everyman.
No one could be less Everyman than the Queen, but Bennett is able to maker her character a vessel for the idea that reading is transforming, whether you are a king or a commoner. The novella has a plot and a clever dénouement, but because I think The Uncommon Reader a book everyone ought to experience unadulterated, I will not write of it. Lots of good writers pen defenses of reading, but Bennett manages to simultaneously indulge our fantasies about the Queen while reminding us of the deep pleasures of reading, and their private nature. Being (unlike Lytton Strachey) no iconoclast, the Queen of The Uncommon Reader is one even the present incumbent could unreservedly enjoy getting to know --if she ever gets the time to read.
I had an eighth grade English teacher, Richard Peck, who used to say that "our age likes to see the feet of clay of its idols". That trend was created by one man, Lytton Strachey, whose "Eminent Victorians" offered brief biographies of "the great and the good" that punctured their magnificence. Alexander Woolcott, who included Strachey's biography of Cardinal Manning in his "Woolcott Reader", observed that what Strachey practiced was not so much biography as "ironical deflation". Woolcott includes in his anthology Strachey's brief biography of Cardinal Manning, who took holy orders in the Church of England, and died a Roman Catholic cardinal, having, in between, become a well-known champion of the Pope and London's poor.
Strachey suggests that Manning --who became archbishop of Westminster Cathedral, and thereby spiritual leader of Britain's Roman Catholics-- was astutely self-effacing. He took himself out of consideration for advancement only to emerge as the only acceptable candidate for this committee or that commission; with the result that his reputation and influence grew. In 1889 he successfully mediated the London Dock Strike, which threatened social peace there. He expanded the number of Catholic schools in London, and gave of his time tirelessly in pursuit of better conditions for the poor. He had gone to Oxford and been close friends with Gladstone, who ended his friendship with Manning after the latter's conversion. Gladstone was deeply suspicious the doctrine of "papal infallibility", promulgated by Pope Pius IX, to whom Manning owed his ascendancy. In numerous newspaper articles, he attacked the doctrine as "undemocratic"; Manning defended it, alluding to Gladstone as a friend without reference to their breach. The two men were similar in their taste for self-denial: Gladstone would visit prostitutes, hoping to convert them away from their profession. Excited by the encounters, he would then go home and flagellate himself in punishment for the urges the women aroused in him. Manning seems to have had no similar urges, but the austerity of his life made a wraith of him in old age. Strachey acknowledges all of this, but suggests that the eminence Manning achieved reflected a deep-seated ambition. That ambition was frustrated in its original direction,politics; but Manning being Manning, he found a way to fulfill his ambition for glory in a way that would never bring reproach. By the biography's end, unless you know more about Manning, he might be a Victorian Julian Sorel. It is Strachey's innovation to plant seeds of doubt about the reputations of those who once went to their deaths secure in the knowledge their reputations would stand, intact --something no eminent person in contemporary life can ever be sure of.
Alan Bennett, on the other hand, exalts Queen Elizabeth II, the subject of his 2007 novella, "The Uncommon Reader". A keen observer of the rituals that ring the British monarchy and preserve its lustre, Bennett creates a Queen who is very much as most of us imagine her: conventional, yet intellectually sharp. The two qualities never collide, Bennett lets us see, because her "job" --to travel in her dominions and to spend as much time as she can lending an air of specialness to what would otherwise be mundane plant openings, ship launchings and garden shows-- never requires her to delve deeply into the life circumstances of the people she meets, her subjects. Similarly, her subjects don't expect her to be anyone other than the person they've seen in the photographs in Majesty and other, similarly hagiographic outlets for information about the Royal Family.
Bennett takes the Queen we think we know and puts her in a place she never expected to find herself in: a mobile lending library parked outside the Palace grounds, behind the kitchens. Following one of her corgis, which has strayed, she comes upon the library truck and enters to find a young man who works in her kitchens browsing the shelves and another, the man in charge of the lending library, shelving. Acutely sensitive to the disturbance her presence causes, to be polite, she takes away a volume by Ivy Compton-Burnett --and gets hooked on reading.
The transformative power of the book is celebrated in "The Uncommon Reader". The title plays with the title of Virginia Woolf's book of essays on writing and reading "The Common Reader". In the collection, Woolf implicitly argued that reviewers ought to look at books, not from their perches as specialists, but as better-informed stand-ins for the intellectually curious, but average book-buyer, Everyman.
No one could be less Everyman than the Queen, but Bennett is able to maker her character a vessel for the idea that reading is transforming, whether you are a king or a commoner. The novella has a plot and a clever dénouement, but because I think The Uncommon Reader a book everyone ought to experience unadulterated, I will not write of it. Lots of good writers pen defenses of reading, but Bennett manages to simultaneously indulge our fantasies about the Queen while reminding us of the deep pleasures of reading, and their private nature. Being (unlike Lytton Strachey) no iconoclast, the Queen of The Uncommon Reader is one even the present incumbent could unreservedly enjoy getting to know --if she ever gets the time to read.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Comic Relief
Monday, February 17, 2014
Just when you might have thought that I was hopelessly mired in clinical depression, let me hasten to reassure you: this evening I found a way to make myself laugh --and heartily.
--I signed up on "OK Cupid", one of the no-fee dating sites available on the Web.
First off, no sooner had I begun to post my photo and supply some personal data than I began receiving "indications of interest" as they used to call them in the brokerage business. The inquiries came from men aged 37 to 70. I was most interested in the former, to tell the truth: So I began a conversation with a young Indian man who "works all the time" and whose name on the site looked like a pun meaning "not interested".
When I asked about the "tag" he didn't seem to get the joke and went on to ask me whether I was interested in finding 1. a friend; 2. a friend with "benefits"; 3. a lover; or, 4. a husband. He went on to tell me he was sensual and a sensitive lover. "Too much information!" I thought, ending the conversation.
Another man, also in his late thirties, told me that I seemed "lovely" and to "ignore the barriers". The first line of his message read "Well, om, I like your photo."
When I asked whether he had deliberately written the world "om" in allusion to the mantra "Om"; he, too didn't get the joke and told me it was "an autotype". (What's an "autotype"?) When I asked "What barriers were you thinking of?" he told me "That you are not in my favorite lounge having a drink with me." I guess he was wishing we could surmount the barriers of space and time by vaporizing there. (--Perhaps he's a "Trekkie".)
The younger generation seems not to know how to flirt. Perhaps there are too many computer engineers among them, too preoccupied with how to get something to function to realize there are nuances to pay attention to when getting a relationship "off the ground". (There's another aerospace metaphor!)
Then there are the men who write from places impossibly far away: Arizona, Florida, Princeton, New Jersey. Eight million people live in New York, some of them are men who only like women and traveling as far as Brooklyn is how far I'll go to meet one of them.
Actually, at this point I can see myself having lots of conversations of five minutes maximum with men who use the site. Despite the fact that the Internet is an unequaled tool of communication, if those who use it aren't articulate, I at least, can't take it too seriously as a source of romantic adventures.
On the other hand, after having felt as morose as I did earlier in the day, having (at least at the outset), a steady source of "nibbles" in response to my solicitation of offers of companionship, is like starring in my own situation comedy:
--The episodes are brief and the comic potential is enormous.
Just when you might have thought that I was hopelessly mired in clinical depression, let me hasten to reassure you: this evening I found a way to make myself laugh --and heartily.
--I signed up on "OK Cupid", one of the no-fee dating sites available on the Web.
First off, no sooner had I begun to post my photo and supply some personal data than I began receiving "indications of interest" as they used to call them in the brokerage business. The inquiries came from men aged 37 to 70. I was most interested in the former, to tell the truth: So I began a conversation with a young Indian man who "works all the time" and whose name on the site looked like a pun meaning "not interested".
When I asked about the "tag" he didn't seem to get the joke and went on to ask me whether I was interested in finding 1. a friend; 2. a friend with "benefits"; 3. a lover; or, 4. a husband. He went on to tell me he was sensual and a sensitive lover. "Too much information!" I thought, ending the conversation.
Another man, also in his late thirties, told me that I seemed "lovely" and to "ignore the barriers". The first line of his message read "Well, om, I like your photo."
When I asked whether he had deliberately written the world "om" in allusion to the mantra "Om"; he, too didn't get the joke and told me it was "an autotype". (What's an "autotype"?) When I asked "What barriers were you thinking of?" he told me "That you are not in my favorite lounge having a drink with me." I guess he was wishing we could surmount the barriers of space and time by vaporizing there. (--Perhaps he's a "Trekkie".)
The younger generation seems not to know how to flirt. Perhaps there are too many computer engineers among them, too preoccupied with how to get something to function to realize there are nuances to pay attention to when getting a relationship "off the ground". (There's another aerospace metaphor!)
Then there are the men who write from places impossibly far away: Arizona, Florida, Princeton, New Jersey. Eight million people live in New York, some of them are men who only like women and traveling as far as Brooklyn is how far I'll go to meet one of them.
Actually, at this point I can see myself having lots of conversations of five minutes maximum with men who use the site. Despite the fact that the Internet is an unequaled tool of communication, if those who use it aren't articulate, I at least, can't take it too seriously as a source of romantic adventures.
On the other hand, after having felt as morose as I did earlier in the day, having (at least at the outset), a steady source of "nibbles" in response to my solicitation of offers of companionship, is like starring in my own situation comedy:
--The episodes are brief and the comic potential is enormous.
Trying To Read The Signs
Sunday, February 16, 2014
I once described my personality as like a tuning fork: however lightly struck, it sounds. There's no phlegm in me --I think I'd be happier if there were. Instead, I know elation, but downcast moments, too. I long ago decided I would not medicate myself to alter my mood --it would be too boring. I believe that learning to know myself better is at least as good for me as anything that would dull my low moments' bite. So as long as I can forego drugs, I will.
Today I had an interesting experience in this regard. I passed a restless night, sleeping fitfully. So I could get a bit more rest, I played with the alarm to give myself a smaller margin of time to both walk Beau and get to Mass. I made it to Mass on time and after breakfast with a friend who also goes to the 8:15 a.m. service, dutifully gave Beau his first long walk of the day.
I tried to rest for an hour, but found myself lying on the bed, swamped by sad thoughts --which led to tears. I'd set the kitchen timer for the hour, it's soft "tick" a soothing constant. By the time the ticking stopped, I was ready to get ready to go out for the afternoon: I had a ticket for the last performance of "Twelfe Night" a triumphant rendering of the play by a same-sex cast headed by Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry.
I know the play well by now, but my great pleasure in the production compelled me to see it as many times as I could. On my way to the theatre, in my mind's eye, I could imagine the production's beginning: a Scottish actor, playing the Duke of Orsino, standing in his nightshirt, putting on purple while declaiming his love for the Countess Olivia, in deep mourning for her dead father and brother. I could also imagine Mark Rylance, appearing later, in white-face and red lipstick over elaborate Elizabethan costume, playing Olivia, mincing across the stage like a frenzied wind-up doll. To say nothing of the lovely young man who played Viola, disguising herself as "Sebastian", so as to obtain employment from the Duke. These characters and many others brought to life by the marvelous actors in the cast I can summon at will, although I thought seeing them in performance again on the last day the play would ever be performed in this production with this cast would be memorable.
So I walked towards the line of ticket holders entering early to watch the cast being costumed on stage, another of the production's wonderful conceits. As I approached the line I heard a voice behind me call "Extra ticket? Extra ticket?" I ignored the first appeal, but at the second, turned around behind me to see a middle-aged African-American man standing a few feet from the stage door. In less than five minutes, I had sold him my $25 ticket.
Once I had done so, I felt an enormous relief: I could go home and return to my cave now. I'd left the wash in the dryer, I could pick it up sooner, rather than later. I was also $25 richer. I'd identified some books of interest at the bookstore around the corner: I could now allow myself to buy them, if I chose. (The jury's still out on that.) I would be having neighbors come to watch "Downton Abbey" at nine o'clock, but because I'd be back at home three hours early I would not have to rush to walk Beau while setting up for my visitors.
In a word, I am getting to the point where, during a gloomy winter, I'd rather not be pressed for time than take in again a play I've loved. Not being pressed for time was more meaningful than the excitement of the play.
Learning to read the signs that I don't want what I used to want is becoming more and more important to me. When I don't feel happy, I can't drink to forget it --I only get sick. Mood-altering drugs aren't as appealing to me as chasing my emotions wherever they may lead. The days are sometimes hard: the minutes stretch by, my life seems a blank. However, I get rewarded for my efforts if I can find out one more thing about myself I didn't know before. Like a dog with its nose in the air, I want to pick up the scent of the track, then, having found it, follow it to its end.
I once described my personality as like a tuning fork: however lightly struck, it sounds. There's no phlegm in me --I think I'd be happier if there were. Instead, I know elation, but downcast moments, too. I long ago decided I would not medicate myself to alter my mood --it would be too boring. I believe that learning to know myself better is at least as good for me as anything that would dull my low moments' bite. So as long as I can forego drugs, I will.
Today I had an interesting experience in this regard. I passed a restless night, sleeping fitfully. So I could get a bit more rest, I played with the alarm to give myself a smaller margin of time to both walk Beau and get to Mass. I made it to Mass on time and after breakfast with a friend who also goes to the 8:15 a.m. service, dutifully gave Beau his first long walk of the day.
I tried to rest for an hour, but found myself lying on the bed, swamped by sad thoughts --which led to tears. I'd set the kitchen timer for the hour, it's soft "tick" a soothing constant. By the time the ticking stopped, I was ready to get ready to go out for the afternoon: I had a ticket for the last performance of "Twelfe Night" a triumphant rendering of the play by a same-sex cast headed by Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry.
I know the play well by now, but my great pleasure in the production compelled me to see it as many times as I could. On my way to the theatre, in my mind's eye, I could imagine the production's beginning: a Scottish actor, playing the Duke of Orsino, standing in his nightshirt, putting on purple while declaiming his love for the Countess Olivia, in deep mourning for her dead father and brother. I could also imagine Mark Rylance, appearing later, in white-face and red lipstick over elaborate Elizabethan costume, playing Olivia, mincing across the stage like a frenzied wind-up doll. To say nothing of the lovely young man who played Viola, disguising herself as "Sebastian", so as to obtain employment from the Duke. These characters and many others brought to life by the marvelous actors in the cast I can summon at will, although I thought seeing them in performance again on the last day the play would ever be performed in this production with this cast would be memorable.
So I walked towards the line of ticket holders entering early to watch the cast being costumed on stage, another of the production's wonderful conceits. As I approached the line I heard a voice behind me call "Extra ticket? Extra ticket?" I ignored the first appeal, but at the second, turned around behind me to see a middle-aged African-American man standing a few feet from the stage door. In less than five minutes, I had sold him my $25 ticket.
Once I had done so, I felt an enormous relief: I could go home and return to my cave now. I'd left the wash in the dryer, I could pick it up sooner, rather than later. I was also $25 richer. I'd identified some books of interest at the bookstore around the corner: I could now allow myself to buy them, if I chose. (The jury's still out on that.) I would be having neighbors come to watch "Downton Abbey" at nine o'clock, but because I'd be back at home three hours early I would not have to rush to walk Beau while setting up for my visitors.
In a word, I am getting to the point where, during a gloomy winter, I'd rather not be pressed for time than take in again a play I've loved. Not being pressed for time was more meaningful than the excitement of the play.
Learning to read the signs that I don't want what I used to want is becoming more and more important to me. When I don't feel happy, I can't drink to forget it --I only get sick. Mood-altering drugs aren't as appealing to me as chasing my emotions wherever they may lead. The days are sometimes hard: the minutes stretch by, my life seems a blank. However, I get rewarded for my efforts if I can find out one more thing about myself I didn't know before. Like a dog with its nose in the air, I want to pick up the scent of the track, then, having found it, follow it to its end.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Mid-Winter Carnival
Saturday, February 15, 2014
There were rose petals on the sidewalks this morning, leftovers from Valentine's Day. At first I thought they were lost dog boots, then realized the pink-red petals fell from bouquets of roses purchased to celebrate the day with a beloved.
It was 8:45 a.m. when Beau and I left the apartment, with the temperatures in the almost-balmy thirties. I had no plans for the day, but thought a trip to Central Park was in order: the last time we attempted it, in a snowstorm, we got no further than Central Park's northern border. Today the paths would be more accessible and I thought I'd enjoy looking at the vitrines on Madison Avenue.
It was treacherous walking along the Harlem Meer, lots of "black ice" making passage along the pond a constant test of balance. In the middle of the Meer, a flock of a dozen Canada geese were enjoying being far beyond the reach of man or dog.
Beau and I trudged on to the Vanderbilt Garden then towards the East Meadow and the former bridle path around the Reservoir. At the Engineer's Gate, where the running path around the reservoir is easily broached, there were already runners warming up and a table of cookies set up for them by Road Runners, whose headquarters are down the street. The runners weren't the only ones in the area, though: there were plenty of people dressed for the weather walking their dogs, as well as individual walkers and pairs of tourists.
We took the road that winds around the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art towards the Egyptian obelisk and from there headed to the Conservatory Pond. When I was a seventh grader at Hunter College High School, I had a job picking up a first grader named Susie Rupp at P.S. 6 on Madison and 81st Street and bringing her home to the brownstone she lived in with her parents and new baby brother on 74th between Fifth and Madison. On my way home, I'd often pass the Conservatory Pond, where small sailboats held sway amid the nannies, children and mothers. Today the pond was frozen solid, although the café was open and attracting trade.
We reached the Bethesda Fountain, where a large high school group from the Midwest was taking photographs. One intrepid young man scaled the fountain, the better to be photographed wearing his long wool overcoat and brimmed hat. In the Bethesda Arcade the Minton tiles were gleaming and a group of young black hymn singers were taking advantage of the acoustic to solicit contributions and perhaps, sell a few copies of their CD.
Beau and I made our way to the Bandshell, where another group of teenagers were belting out "The Star Spangled Banner" before starting a snow fight. We walked north: On the slopes there were children and parents everywhere, sledding. At all the entrances we passed, children and parents continued to enter the park, brightly colored ski gear of every sort contrasting with the color of the sleds they carried. It was a mid-winter carnival: circular purple plastic "trash can" sleds, forest green lozenges, more traditional wooden sleds with metal runners painted red.
Back on Broadway, everyone looked a bit less enthusiastic about winter than the dog owners, tourists and sledders. At 10:30 a.m. it began snowing, little flurries which had become good sized ones by 11:00 a.m. Beau and I walked all the way home, arriving by 12:15 p.m., three and a half hours later. If I hadn't made myself do it, I'd have been miserable the entire day. My exertions in the snow-covered park more than made up for not having seen Madison Avenue's vitrines.
I once read that when Warren Beatty and Madonna were dating, he observed that her mania for exercise was nothing more than a cover for depression. His advice to her was to allow herself to experience it. I think Warren was wrong.
There were rose petals on the sidewalks this morning, leftovers from Valentine's Day. At first I thought they were lost dog boots, then realized the pink-red petals fell from bouquets of roses purchased to celebrate the day with a beloved.
It was 8:45 a.m. when Beau and I left the apartment, with the temperatures in the almost-balmy thirties. I had no plans for the day, but thought a trip to Central Park was in order: the last time we attempted it, in a snowstorm, we got no further than Central Park's northern border. Today the paths would be more accessible and I thought I'd enjoy looking at the vitrines on Madison Avenue.
It was treacherous walking along the Harlem Meer, lots of "black ice" making passage along the pond a constant test of balance. In the middle of the Meer, a flock of a dozen Canada geese were enjoying being far beyond the reach of man or dog.
Beau and I trudged on to the Vanderbilt Garden then towards the East Meadow and the former bridle path around the Reservoir. At the Engineer's Gate, where the running path around the reservoir is easily broached, there were already runners warming up and a table of cookies set up for them by Road Runners, whose headquarters are down the street. The runners weren't the only ones in the area, though: there were plenty of people dressed for the weather walking their dogs, as well as individual walkers and pairs of tourists.
We took the road that winds around the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art towards the Egyptian obelisk and from there headed to the Conservatory Pond. When I was a seventh grader at Hunter College High School, I had a job picking up a first grader named Susie Rupp at P.S. 6 on Madison and 81st Street and bringing her home to the brownstone she lived in with her parents and new baby brother on 74th between Fifth and Madison. On my way home, I'd often pass the Conservatory Pond, where small sailboats held sway amid the nannies, children and mothers. Today the pond was frozen solid, although the café was open and attracting trade.
We reached the Bethesda Fountain, where a large high school group from the Midwest was taking photographs. One intrepid young man scaled the fountain, the better to be photographed wearing his long wool overcoat and brimmed hat. In the Bethesda Arcade the Minton tiles were gleaming and a group of young black hymn singers were taking advantage of the acoustic to solicit contributions and perhaps, sell a few copies of their CD.
Beau and I made our way to the Bandshell, where another group of teenagers were belting out "The Star Spangled Banner" before starting a snow fight. We walked north: On the slopes there were children and parents everywhere, sledding. At all the entrances we passed, children and parents continued to enter the park, brightly colored ski gear of every sort contrasting with the color of the sleds they carried. It was a mid-winter carnival: circular purple plastic "trash can" sleds, forest green lozenges, more traditional wooden sleds with metal runners painted red.
Back on Broadway, everyone looked a bit less enthusiastic about winter than the dog owners, tourists and sledders. At 10:30 a.m. it began snowing, little flurries which had become good sized ones by 11:00 a.m. Beau and I walked all the way home, arriving by 12:15 p.m., three and a half hours later. If I hadn't made myself do it, I'd have been miserable the entire day. My exertions in the snow-covered park more than made up for not having seen Madison Avenue's vitrines.
I once read that when Warren Beatty and Madonna were dating, he observed that her mania for exercise was nothing more than a cover for depression. His advice to her was to allow herself to experience it. I think Warren was wrong.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Frugality and Generosity
Friday, February 14, 2014
Henry David Thoreau, the Transcendentalist thinker who wrote Walden, celebrates frugality. His ideas caught on and have inspired generations of the would-be self-reliant, including me. Thoreau essentially proposed that we make our lives simpler so that they could be more meaningful, inner fulfillment replacing the quest for things, status and riches. Of course, you have to be in a position to choose, rather than be compelled to give up things to find appreciation in a simpler life: if you've always struggled to meet basic needs, the wisdom of Thoreau's philosophy may not be as apparent as it was to him.
Emerson, another Transcendentalist, wrote an essay, "Self-Reliance", and warned "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes". The warning seems, at first reading, more practical than philosophic: if, at your own expense, you have to make an investment in a completely new wardrobe in order to take up a project, you probably won't recoup it if the business fails. However, there's also a suggestion that using clothes to change the way you look to the world is inherently suspect, that it involves deception --not just of the world, but perhaps of yourself. The axiom is not a prohibition, but means to strike a cautionary note against frippery.
Ascetic religious orders have long practiced asceticism --an extreme form of frugality-- in their mode of living. Stripping away all the externals is supposed to unclutter the mind and spirit, the better to know the divine. Anyone who has ever spent any time doing the Buddhist practice of za-zen, sitting in meditation on a bare floor for a long practice, trying to empty the mind of thoughts; or anyone who has ever said a series of rosaries, knows that it is not easy, even with the best will in the world, to reach a state of inner peacefulness in the face of our restless minds and hearts. The inner release some faiths call "grace" is not easily won, or willed.
Frugality in daily life is a capacity that can be developed, although I know that, for myself, I veer towards it only to want to go in the other direction after a while. I can cook a pot of pasta and live on it for two days, but by the third, I want to enjoy richer foods. I can turn down restaurant invitations, but when neighbors and I organize a potluck, I want to bring a good bottle of Bordeaux, not mineral water.
The French will speak of a glass of champagne as "lifting the spirits" (faire remoter la morale). It doesn't work for everyone, though. Sometimes it lifts them temporarily only to bring them crashing down again, requiring a re-administration of the dose in larger numbers. And sometimes it seems nothing could possibly make better the inner forlornness many of us live with, day-in-and-day out, whether because we're sick of the lousy weather (count me among that group this winter); or for deeper, more intractable reasons.
For most of us the life we have to lead is as good a life as we're going to have --there's no fairy godmother to whisk us away to a life less ordinary. We have to find a compromise between despair and dumb optimism. (Which reminds me that a study done a few years ago found that optimists' assessments of facts were more unrealistic than those of depressives, whose assessments were largely correct.) We crawl through a dark tunnel, life, feeling our way as we go, sometimes seeing, in the far distance, enough light to move forward rapidly towards our goal --greater advancement through the tunnel-- and at other times learning we've taken a wrong turn and have to return to the last place where we were sure of our direction. Then sometimes, we think we've taken a wrong turn, which turns out to be a right one.
All we can do is try not to overburden ourselves with paraphernalia that does not serve to move us forward. Some burdens we have to carry: the child we brought into the world, the sick parent or spouse. The Transcendentalists (some of whom read the foundational texts of Eastern religions and were inspired by them) recognized that frugality in the outward modes of living can reap inner rewards more valuable than the material things foregone, an inner clarity and calm which translates into generosity, the antithesis of frugality.
I can articulate the concept, but living it is another story. Emotional generosity can be difficult for me --it's easier to be frugal with my feelings than open-handed. Growing up it was essential to discipline my emotions (of which I had more than my share) to get past them. Now that I'm at the other end of life's curve, the habit of emotional restraint can sometimes lead me to be less charitable towards others. The discipline of daily life this season --having to make an extra, prolonged effort to gird the body to face the elements, staying in more than going out-- has tested me. At home, writing here, settled for the night, I heard the phone ring: it was a neighbor who has helped me in the past, I could see from the phone's screen. I didn't want to interrupt my routine and was going to let the answering machine stand in for me, when I realized how cheap I was being with my heart. I took the call: The person on the other end was generously returning mine of earlier today after a long day shoveling out cars stuck in the snow, something he has no choice but to do to make ends meet.
Let it be a lesson to me.
Henry David Thoreau, the Transcendentalist thinker who wrote Walden, celebrates frugality. His ideas caught on and have inspired generations of the would-be self-reliant, including me. Thoreau essentially proposed that we make our lives simpler so that they could be more meaningful, inner fulfillment replacing the quest for things, status and riches. Of course, you have to be in a position to choose, rather than be compelled to give up things to find appreciation in a simpler life: if you've always struggled to meet basic needs, the wisdom of Thoreau's philosophy may not be as apparent as it was to him.
Emerson, another Transcendentalist, wrote an essay, "Self-Reliance", and warned "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes". The warning seems, at first reading, more practical than philosophic: if, at your own expense, you have to make an investment in a completely new wardrobe in order to take up a project, you probably won't recoup it if the business fails. However, there's also a suggestion that using clothes to change the way you look to the world is inherently suspect, that it involves deception --not just of the world, but perhaps of yourself. The axiom is not a prohibition, but means to strike a cautionary note against frippery.
Ascetic religious orders have long practiced asceticism --an extreme form of frugality-- in their mode of living. Stripping away all the externals is supposed to unclutter the mind and spirit, the better to know the divine. Anyone who has ever spent any time doing the Buddhist practice of za-zen, sitting in meditation on a bare floor for a long practice, trying to empty the mind of thoughts; or anyone who has ever said a series of rosaries, knows that it is not easy, even with the best will in the world, to reach a state of inner peacefulness in the face of our restless minds and hearts. The inner release some faiths call "grace" is not easily won, or willed.
Frugality in daily life is a capacity that can be developed, although I know that, for myself, I veer towards it only to want to go in the other direction after a while. I can cook a pot of pasta and live on it for two days, but by the third, I want to enjoy richer foods. I can turn down restaurant invitations, but when neighbors and I organize a potluck, I want to bring a good bottle of Bordeaux, not mineral water.
The French will speak of a glass of champagne as "lifting the spirits" (faire remoter la morale). It doesn't work for everyone, though. Sometimes it lifts them temporarily only to bring them crashing down again, requiring a re-administration of the dose in larger numbers. And sometimes it seems nothing could possibly make better the inner forlornness many of us live with, day-in-and-day out, whether because we're sick of the lousy weather (count me among that group this winter); or for deeper, more intractable reasons.
For most of us the life we have to lead is as good a life as we're going to have --there's no fairy godmother to whisk us away to a life less ordinary. We have to find a compromise between despair and dumb optimism. (Which reminds me that a study done a few years ago found that optimists' assessments of facts were more unrealistic than those of depressives, whose assessments were largely correct.) We crawl through a dark tunnel, life, feeling our way as we go, sometimes seeing, in the far distance, enough light to move forward rapidly towards our goal --greater advancement through the tunnel-- and at other times learning we've taken a wrong turn and have to return to the last place where we were sure of our direction. Then sometimes, we think we've taken a wrong turn, which turns out to be a right one.
All we can do is try not to overburden ourselves with paraphernalia that does not serve to move us forward. Some burdens we have to carry: the child we brought into the world, the sick parent or spouse. The Transcendentalists (some of whom read the foundational texts of Eastern religions and were inspired by them) recognized that frugality in the outward modes of living can reap inner rewards more valuable than the material things foregone, an inner clarity and calm which translates into generosity, the antithesis of frugality.
I can articulate the concept, but living it is another story. Emotional generosity can be difficult for me --it's easier to be frugal with my feelings than open-handed. Growing up it was essential to discipline my emotions (of which I had more than my share) to get past them. Now that I'm at the other end of life's curve, the habit of emotional restraint can sometimes lead me to be less charitable towards others. The discipline of daily life this season --having to make an extra, prolonged effort to gird the body to face the elements, staying in more than going out-- has tested me. At home, writing here, settled for the night, I heard the phone ring: it was a neighbor who has helped me in the past, I could see from the phone's screen. I didn't want to interrupt my routine and was going to let the answering machine stand in for me, when I realized how cheap I was being with my heart. I took the call: The person on the other end was generously returning mine of earlier today after a long day shoveling out cars stuck in the snow, something he has no choice but to do to make ends meet.
Let it be a lesson to me.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Facing Facts
February 13, 2014
Estragon: I can't go on like this.
Estragon: I can't go on like this.
Vladimir: That's what you think.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot
Last night I did all the laundry. I washed Beau's coat, leash and blanket, my warmest gloves, my bathrobe and the accumulated week's worth of workout wear, socks and dainties. I wanted to go for another "spinning" class this morning at 9:30 a.m., reasoning that, with 8"-12" of snow expected to fall by midnight tonight, if I didn't force myself to be active, I'd give way to depression.
So I went to bed early, and awoke a few minutes before seven, in more than enough time to exit with Beau and head for Riverside Park in a snowstorm. The flakes were fat as golf balls and they felt soft as fur. Dogs and owners, while not out in droves, were numerous enough to, again --on the occasion of the season's ninth snowstorm-- attest to the hardiness of the neighborhood's dog owners. Beau and I tromped through the piles of snow to the dog run, where Maurice, a tall bass viol player, was tending to an elderly Shetland sheepdog; and a lady (whose name I didn't catch), to "Mocha", her labra-doodle. Beau and Mocha took to each other on sight, roughhousing, rolling on the fresh snow, bounding and chasing each other all over the run. Only when Mocha managed to pull Beau's coat off did he back off and run to a corner. Safely out of harm's way there, he waited for me to retrieve his coat and take him home, which he made a "beeline" for once we were out of the run.
Having made it home early, I made it to the "spinning" class on time, leaving Beau behind in his crate, chewing on a treat. "Double header!" cried the instructor when she saw me, recognizing me from the day before. As we started the warm-up cycle she announced, "I like to match up the music to the class. So today, our theme is going to be 'love'!"
I groaned inwardly --but then, I don't pay attention to the instructors, whatever they say. I pedal at the best pace I can throughout the forty-five minutes of class, just happy I work up a sweat. The teacher calls "Can we push it harder?" as the pace escalates in the hill-climbing segment. As other members of the class --more team-spirited than I-- shout back "Yeah!", I am content to look down at my legs and pedal in time to the music, my thoughts my own, the class time going pretty quickly. When I'm through, thankfully, I do have the sense that I've fought back against the old ennui.
Because so many of us become reclusive in the face of inclement weather in winter, curtailing our social events and staying home, it's easy to let sloth take over. "I can't go on --I'll go on" often sums up my state of mind, life seeming more a matter of marking time than an adventure. My late husband, Bill, always thought of our relationship as one, so with Valentine's Day tomorrow, perhaps it's not surprising that lately, it feels as though the air has gone out of my balloon.
To bring the subject to Bill, one of the Valentine's Day cards he gave me featured a still from "City Lights", the silent film Charlie Chaplin made with the teenaged Claire Bloom. Chaplin is Everyman in love --unprepossessing, doing his best to win the heart of the beautiful Bloom by giving her a blossom, which she takes, shyly, sealing their love. "The adventure continues" Bill wrote on the inside of the card. It was what he always penned in his Valentine's Day cards to me, year after year.
Now it's almost three years since his death May 13, 2011. I'll never know what he would have looked like as he aged, although I keep aging. This winter I've lines in my face I spent forty years keeping at bay: they came over my face all at once, deep lines spread along my forehead. No amount of moisturizer or oil will make them disappear. I have to face facts: I'm sixty.
And at sixty, I meet all my obligations, I think I'm a good neighbor and I sleep well at night now. Bringing Beauregard into my life has imposed a discipline onto it I would not necessarily have exerted on my own. It's a discipline I'm coming to like, although it restricts my life. Beauregard demands that I not stay out all night, or relegate his care to others --which leads to my staying home more evenings than not. So I can no longer experience the excitement of dinner and a movie or a play or show, but I fall asleep sooner and sleep through the night. Life is simpler, and calmer.
Beau came into my life on November 13 of last year. In proof of the effect he's had on me, below, I publish the draft of a posting I began on November 7, but never made public. I'd entitled it In the Wee Small Hours Of The Morning:
The lyric above, made famous by Frank Sinatra, is my theme song tonight. Just substitute the gender, and you have it.
It doesn't make a lot of sense, it's more than two and a half years and I've almost forgotten, but just when I think I'll have an uneventful night, the blank, black hours stretch out across my consciousness and flagellate my spirits. It's a good thing that, as my life stands now, I rarely have to be in a specific place early in the morning, as I can't predict when I'll fall asleep or that I'll sleep through the night. I am blessed, though, to be able to sleep late enough, whenever I get to sleep.
When I awake, purged of the emotions that beset me, I can return to my routines. Churchill spoke of a "black dog", in describing his depressions: mine nips at my heels; fortunately, it doesn't overpower me. I have always been lucky enough to know that however bad my gloom, I know it won't last forever.
I'm not a masochist, and I don't think I have an "unconquerable" soul, to quote "Invictus". I have changed from the days when I was teenager and an undergraduate, though. Then, I used to think that I had to go through walls to come out on the other side of a besetting funk. Now, rather than permit agitation to take hold alongside the "blues", I give in to the moment in all its misery, but focus on not reacting to it. And I get through the hours.
Beau came into my life on November 13 of last year. In proof of the effect he's had on me, below, I publish the draft of a posting I began on November 7, but never made public. I'd entitled it In the Wee Small Hours Of The Morning:
November 7, 2013
In the wee small hours of the morning
While the whole wide world is fast asleep
You lie awake and think about the girl
And never ever think of counting sheep
When your lonely heart has learned it's lesson
Youd be hers if only she would call
In the wee small hours of the morning
That's the time you miss her most of all
The lyric above, made famous by Frank Sinatra, is my theme song tonight. Just substitute the gender, and you have it.
It doesn't make a lot of sense, it's more than two and a half years and I've almost forgotten, but just when I think I'll have an uneventful night, the blank, black hours stretch out across my consciousness and flagellate my spirits. It's a good thing that, as my life stands now, I rarely have to be in a specific place early in the morning, as I can't predict when I'll fall asleep or that I'll sleep through the night. I am blessed, though, to be able to sleep late enough, whenever I get to sleep.
When I awake, purged of the emotions that beset me, I can return to my routines. Churchill spoke of a "black dog", in describing his depressions: mine nips at my heels; fortunately, it doesn't overpower me. I have always been lucky enough to know that however bad my gloom, I know it won't last forever.
I'm not a masochist, and I don't think I have an "unconquerable" soul, to quote "Invictus". I have changed from the days when I was teenager and an undergraduate, though. Then, I used to think that I had to go through walls to come out on the other side of a besetting funk. Now, rather than permit agitation to take hold alongside the "blues", I give in to the moment in all its misery, but focus on not reacting to it. And I get through the hours.
-------------------------------
So, thanks to Beau perhaps I'll have no more adventures, but I'm at peace. And I can go on. --And I know Bill would have loved him.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Westminster 1 and 2
February 11, 2014
Watching the "Best of Breed" judging at Westminster is like being at a Superbowl of canine teams: you start with many entrants, then watch them narrowed down across the group categories: Sporting Group, Hound Group, Toy Group, Non-Working Group, Herding Group, Terrier Group, Working Group. Spaniels are Sporting Group dogs, by the way, judged today.
Yesterday I met a former vendor at Westminster, a maker of equestrian blankets for "turnout", exercise of horses in paddocks, who I'd invited to join me for the morning. She had made me a skirt of the same waxed cotton fabric Barbour jackets are made of, a perfect fabric for a skirt to walk dogs in in rough weather --and to wear to Westminster. She didn't take a vendor's spot at the show this year because the price of the booths doubled between last year and this. Yesterday we walked through the show, which she enjoyed thoroughly, never having had the chance to see it before.
We met a lovely woman showing a Pyreneen Shepherd, a dog that looks like the proverbial "shaggy dog", but actually hails from the steep mountains that divide Spain from the rest of Europe. Like so many of the women who show up for Westminster, she is rotund. I don't know why so many of the women who own and show dogs are obese, but they are, without question, seriously overweight. Their dogs, on the other hand, are in perfect condition.
Today I had two missions at Westminster: 1. to see the Boykin Spaniels judged at 10:00 a.m.in Ring 6 a Pier 90; and, 2. to meet a friend for the judging of the West Highland Terriers ("Westies") at 12:30 p.m.. The show is so big that two buildings, attached to Piers 90 and 92, are needed. Pier 90 has the most activity, being where the vendors are located, as well as the American Kennel Club, the national organization; and the Westminster Kennel Club, which organizes the show.
I left the house at 9:15 a.m., having given Beau a 45 minute walk and left him with a pig's ear. I gave my house keys to Peter, my next door neighbor, who is both bothered by Beau's barking when left alone and willing to visit him to still it. I made it to Pier 92 just in time to catch the judging of the Boykins and to grab a seat in the front row next to another heavy-set woman showing her Field Spaniel, which was judged just before the Boykins.
This lady, "Corkie", lives in Chicago and drove here to have "Petey", her Field Spaniel shown. She took photos of the Field Spaniels shown throughout the judging and cheered for her dog's opponents as well as for her own. She was a perfect example of the gracious contestant: to have been invited to Westminster her dog had to rack up a certain number of points. To her, that was accomplishment enough and made her gracious. Her dog took "Best of Select", 4th place, and she was happy. She lives with three Field Spaniels and one Curly-Coated retriever in a house with half an acre of land. All her Field Spaniels are named after sandwiches: Reuben, Colby, Pastrami.
Judging the West Highland Terriers, which followed the Cairn and the Skyes, was Dr. Deen, a tall, elderly and portly Canadian gentleman in a three-piece suit and green-patterned bow tie. He is expert on all three terrier breeds and wears his expertise lightly: when I crossed paths with him in the elevator after the last of the judging, I asked --prefacing my question with a confession of abject ignorance-- how many criteria he took into account in judging. He answered me trenchantly:
"First, I look for how 'true to type' they are. Sometimes it's hard, because there isn't one dog that fulfills the type for the breed. Today it was easier: there were three or four "typey" dogs, so I could make distinctions from there."
Any dog that is at Westminster has to have racked up a certain number of points by winning at dog shows earlier in the year. There are all sorts of awards and a point system I have yet to figure out. What is clear is that those who show their dogs have a passion for doing so. It's an expensive game, with it costing as much as $100,000 to campaign a dog for Westminster. The participants within a breed all know each other and know what their dog's chances are, pretty much. When a particular dog won, I often heard the owner of a competitor say "Yup, the winner" --or words to that effect. Some were breeder-owner-trainers, but most dogs were shown by professional trainers.
I think it is a kind of addiction to show dogs, like gambling. It is an obsessive pursuit which requires rearrangement of schedules to a degree comparable only to having a child that wants to compete for the Olympics. -Except that there's no outside funding for it.
My own experience of watching the Boykins judged confirmed for me my choice of Beauregard as a pet --while simultaneously making me feel that my little friend was every bit the equal of any of the winners-- and grateful I didn't have to put him up to prove it.
Watching the "Best of Breed" judging at Westminster is like being at a Superbowl of canine teams: you start with many entrants, then watch them narrowed down across the group categories: Sporting Group, Hound Group, Toy Group, Non-Working Group, Herding Group, Terrier Group, Working Group. Spaniels are Sporting Group dogs, by the way, judged today.
Yesterday I met a former vendor at Westminster, a maker of equestrian blankets for "turnout", exercise of horses in paddocks, who I'd invited to join me for the morning. She had made me a skirt of the same waxed cotton fabric Barbour jackets are made of, a perfect fabric for a skirt to walk dogs in in rough weather --and to wear to Westminster. She didn't take a vendor's spot at the show this year because the price of the booths doubled between last year and this. Yesterday we walked through the show, which she enjoyed thoroughly, never having had the chance to see it before.
We met a lovely woman showing a Pyreneen Shepherd, a dog that looks like the proverbial "shaggy dog", but actually hails from the steep mountains that divide Spain from the rest of Europe. Like so many of the women who show up for Westminster, she is rotund. I don't know why so many of the women who own and show dogs are obese, but they are, without question, seriously overweight. Their dogs, on the other hand, are in perfect condition.
Today I had two missions at Westminster: 1. to see the Boykin Spaniels judged at 10:00 a.m.in Ring 6 a Pier 90; and, 2. to meet a friend for the judging of the West Highland Terriers ("Westies") at 12:30 p.m.. The show is so big that two buildings, attached to Piers 90 and 92, are needed. Pier 90 has the most activity, being where the vendors are located, as well as the American Kennel Club, the national organization; and the Westminster Kennel Club, which organizes the show.
I left the house at 9:15 a.m., having given Beau a 45 minute walk and left him with a pig's ear. I gave my house keys to Peter, my next door neighbor, who is both bothered by Beau's barking when left alone and willing to visit him to still it. I made it to Pier 92 just in time to catch the judging of the Boykins and to grab a seat in the front row next to another heavy-set woman showing her Field Spaniel, which was judged just before the Boykins.
This lady, "Corkie", lives in Chicago and drove here to have "Petey", her Field Spaniel shown. She took photos of the Field Spaniels shown throughout the judging and cheered for her dog's opponents as well as for her own. She was a perfect example of the gracious contestant: to have been invited to Westminster her dog had to rack up a certain number of points. To her, that was accomplishment enough and made her gracious. Her dog took "Best of Select", 4th place, and she was happy. She lives with three Field Spaniels and one Curly-Coated retriever in a house with half an acre of land. All her Field Spaniels are named after sandwiches: Reuben, Colby, Pastrami.
Judging the West Highland Terriers, which followed the Cairn and the Skyes, was Dr. Deen, a tall, elderly and portly Canadian gentleman in a three-piece suit and green-patterned bow tie. He is expert on all three terrier breeds and wears his expertise lightly: when I crossed paths with him in the elevator after the last of the judging, I asked --prefacing my question with a confession of abject ignorance-- how many criteria he took into account in judging. He answered me trenchantly:
"First, I look for how 'true to type' they are. Sometimes it's hard, because there isn't one dog that fulfills the type for the breed. Today it was easier: there were three or four "typey" dogs, so I could make distinctions from there."
Any dog that is at Westminster has to have racked up a certain number of points by winning at dog shows earlier in the year. There are all sorts of awards and a point system I have yet to figure out. What is clear is that those who show their dogs have a passion for doing so. It's an expensive game, with it costing as much as $100,000 to campaign a dog for Westminster. The participants within a breed all know each other and know what their dog's chances are, pretty much. When a particular dog won, I often heard the owner of a competitor say "Yup, the winner" --or words to that effect. Some were breeder-owner-trainers, but most dogs were shown by professional trainers.
I think it is a kind of addiction to show dogs, like gambling. It is an obsessive pursuit which requires rearrangement of schedules to a degree comparable only to having a child that wants to compete for the Olympics. -Except that there's no outside funding for it.
My own experience of watching the Boykins judged confirmed for me my choice of Beauregard as a pet --while simultaneously making me feel that my little friend was every bit the equal of any of the winners-- and grateful I didn't have to put him up to prove it.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Going to the Dogs: Westminster Weekend; "Barkfest"
February 9, 2014
Now that the Winter Antiques Show is done, the social calendar here focuses on Westminster and the associated events. Friday, the Pennsylvania Hotel (where the owners of many of the dogs showing at Westminster stay with their dogs) was host to "The Progressive Dog Show". the "Progressive" is host to "toy" dogs, the tiniest members of the dog species. It features dogs dressed up in all sorts of silly outfits, which no larger dog would be caught dead in. However, owners of toys are themselves a breed apart.
Yesterday, Saturday, was devoted to the first-ever "Masters' Agility Trials" at Pier 92, where dogs competing at Westminster are judged in their breed groups. The space was divided into two rings large enough for eight apparati testing agility to be positioned along the perimeter of each ring. They are: an open tunnel, a closed tunnel, a pause table, weave poles, an elevated walkway the dog approaches via a ramp, a seesaw, a tire jump and an A-frame. I watched toy dogs compete in the first trial of the day, which began just after noon, following the playing of the "Star Spangled Banner", which formally opens the show.
The first obstacle was the open tunnel, the last obstacle the "weave poles", a slalom of twelve poles for the competing dog to weave through. From start to finish, the dog and its trainer accompanied each other though the course, trying to finish each test as quickly and correctly as possible. The fastest dogs could do the course in under sixty seconds. They were mainly "Papillons", toy dogs with peaked ears that look like butterfly wings. Smart and swift, they flew through the tests, although the fastest dog of all was a rat terrier, not as pretty, but even faster -frighteningly fast if you're a rat.
This morning was "Barkfest", the annual benefit for the Rescue Fund of the American Kennel Club, sponsored by Bonham's, the English auction house. "Barkfest" is an opportunity for Bonham's to exhibit dog paintings to be auctioned the day after Westminster ends and simultaneously to support the activities of the Rescue Fund. I was extended an invitation this year and bought a ticket so I could bring Beauregard, who was a great hit. At one point, Beau was set upon by a pair of Italian Greyhound puppies not much older than he is. They were rampant, raising their spindly legs and bringing their tiny feet down on Beau's head: it was like being assaulted by butterflies. The activity of the greyhounds made little impression on Beau, who, when he'd had enough, sat down in front of them. --As he always does whenever he wants to make an excited dog calmer.
There were show people at "Barkfest". One woman was walking a champion Beagle around, asking the other beagle owners "Are you showing?" in a tone that suggested that if they were, she didn't think they were serious competition. There were poodles on display as well, along with a small brown and beige cocker spaniel shaved half way up, long-haired half-way down.
The strangest dog that attended was a black Xoloitzcuintli, a Mexican hairless of Mayan origin, tall and muscular. The owners, a mother and a teenaged daughter, delighted in repeating the name of the breed in the Mayan language, a tongue-twister which sounds like three separate words. With its jewel-like eyes, and peaked ears set in a triangular head over an athlete's body, the dog would give any potential assailant pause.
The paintings on exhibit were of especially good quality this year, mainly oil paintings and sketches of Springer Spaniels, Irish Setters, Foxhounds, and Dalmatians. Some of the images were full portraits of the dogs, others of the dogs' heads, and still others of the dogs hunting in the field. In Bonham's front window was an enormous painting of hunting dogs in a pack in the field large enough to grace a castle's hall --or a Fortune 100 company's boardroom. There was champagne and orange juice and pastries for the humans, biscuits and water for the dogs. You left with an enormous "goody bag" of treats, dog accessories, the catalogue of the exhibit and the latest Bonham's Magazine.
"Barkfest" started at 10:30 a.m. and we stayed about an hour. Beau and I walked home after, traversing the park in about an hour. Shortly after we got home, Beau settled himself comfortably in his bed and fell asleep for the afternoon. I am thinking of registering him for agility training --I'd like to see him this tired every day.
Now that the Winter Antiques Show is done, the social calendar here focuses on Westminster and the associated events. Friday, the Pennsylvania Hotel (where the owners of many of the dogs showing at Westminster stay with their dogs) was host to "The Progressive Dog Show". the "Progressive" is host to "toy" dogs, the tiniest members of the dog species. It features dogs dressed up in all sorts of silly outfits, which no larger dog would be caught dead in. However, owners of toys are themselves a breed apart.
Yesterday, Saturday, was devoted to the first-ever "Masters' Agility Trials" at Pier 92, where dogs competing at Westminster are judged in their breed groups. The space was divided into two rings large enough for eight apparati testing agility to be positioned along the perimeter of each ring. They are: an open tunnel, a closed tunnel, a pause table, weave poles, an elevated walkway the dog approaches via a ramp, a seesaw, a tire jump and an A-frame. I watched toy dogs compete in the first trial of the day, which began just after noon, following the playing of the "Star Spangled Banner", which formally opens the show.
The first obstacle was the open tunnel, the last obstacle the "weave poles", a slalom of twelve poles for the competing dog to weave through. From start to finish, the dog and its trainer accompanied each other though the course, trying to finish each test as quickly and correctly as possible. The fastest dogs could do the course in under sixty seconds. They were mainly "Papillons", toy dogs with peaked ears that look like butterfly wings. Smart and swift, they flew through the tests, although the fastest dog of all was a rat terrier, not as pretty, but even faster -frighteningly fast if you're a rat.
This morning was "Barkfest", the annual benefit for the Rescue Fund of the American Kennel Club, sponsored by Bonham's, the English auction house. "Barkfest" is an opportunity for Bonham's to exhibit dog paintings to be auctioned the day after Westminster ends and simultaneously to support the activities of the Rescue Fund. I was extended an invitation this year and bought a ticket so I could bring Beauregard, who was a great hit. At one point, Beau was set upon by a pair of Italian Greyhound puppies not much older than he is. They were rampant, raising their spindly legs and bringing their tiny feet down on Beau's head: it was like being assaulted by butterflies. The activity of the greyhounds made little impression on Beau, who, when he'd had enough, sat down in front of them. --As he always does whenever he wants to make an excited dog calmer.
There were show people at "Barkfest". One woman was walking a champion Beagle around, asking the other beagle owners "Are you showing?" in a tone that suggested that if they were, she didn't think they were serious competition. There were poodles on display as well, along with a small brown and beige cocker spaniel shaved half way up, long-haired half-way down.
The strangest dog that attended was a black Xoloitzcuintli, a Mexican hairless of Mayan origin, tall and muscular. The owners, a mother and a teenaged daughter, delighted in repeating the name of the breed in the Mayan language, a tongue-twister which sounds like three separate words. With its jewel-like eyes, and peaked ears set in a triangular head over an athlete's body, the dog would give any potential assailant pause.
The paintings on exhibit were of especially good quality this year, mainly oil paintings and sketches of Springer Spaniels, Irish Setters, Foxhounds, and Dalmatians. Some of the images were full portraits of the dogs, others of the dogs' heads, and still others of the dogs hunting in the field. In Bonham's front window was an enormous painting of hunting dogs in a pack in the field large enough to grace a castle's hall --or a Fortune 100 company's boardroom. There was champagne and orange juice and pastries for the humans, biscuits and water for the dogs. You left with an enormous "goody bag" of treats, dog accessories, the catalogue of the exhibit and the latest Bonham's Magazine.
"Barkfest" started at 10:30 a.m. and we stayed about an hour. Beau and I walked home after, traversing the park in about an hour. Shortly after we got home, Beau settled himself comfortably in his bed and fell asleep for the afternoon. I am thinking of registering him for agility training --I'd like to see him this tired every day.
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