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During the Ford/Carter energy crisis my father would keep the thermostat set to 68 and tell us it was patriotic to freeze. Our house was a corner one and all the wind in the neighborhood seemed to settle into it.
So began my long history of living in wind chambers. When I moved off Fifth on 63rd Street, at 25 in 76, I didn’t need AC as my building had a lot of marble, and I lived on the first floor. I had the first ceiling fans anybody heard of in Manhattan. Bought on the Bowery when the Bowery was the Bowery.
Oh yes I’m one of those New Yorkers. I will never be ashamed of loving the city the most in the 70’s to around 85. It was affordable. It was fun. I heard it was dangerous but never felt the danger no matter where I went. I lived in that apartment until 91 and only had AC the last year as my super gave me a unit somebody was throwing out. It just wasn’t important to me. Neither was TV. A good stereo with analog speakers was of primary importance. I began collecting CD’s years before I could afford to buy an actual player.
Though my apartment was warmer than the average apartment nobody refused an invite basically because I threw great parties, always or often had food, always had liquor as I only drank with company and found out early in life that people would bring liquor we would drink then so the good stuff, mine, would be saved for special occasions.
Oh any night on East 63rd was special. I remember when my ex best friend Shelby came back from a cruise to the former Soviet Union. A professor famed for his film lectures invited her. She only had to design a brochure and didn’t have to sleep with him or in the same room.
I know because she took me to his office to do the negotiating. What do you say to a weird man who had noticed her when she walked into the auditorium for the first film, came up to her after class, and asked her if she would like to go for a drink? He did this in full view of the hundreds of girls who were gaga over him for reasons I never understood except that he knew many film stars.
I said something brilliant like: “So Shelby’s going to design a brochure?”
“Yes.”
“And her payment’s going to be her own room on your cruise to Finland, Leningrad etc?” Well I didn’t say “etc.,” and was dying to say “but why can’t I be Shelby’s roommate?” I didn’t.
I remember how uncomfortable we all were in his office. I remember thinking that I hated playing Rhoda to Shelby’s Mary. With most other girls I was Mary.
I remember hating Shelby because she was so beautiful and bright yet was an incredible bitch without any empathy or feelings for anybody but herself. I had met her during Viet Nam. She never protested.
We shouldn’t have been friends. Yet like lovers who weren’t good for each other we circled around one another for 20 years.
She hated the cruise. Joel Gray, Colleen Dewhurst, and many incredible stars were on it. Shelby hung out with Cindy Williams (Laverne on Laverne & Shirley) I remember thinking well she was the only one anywhere near our age–though older of course
The night after she came back from the cruise she came to my apartment with a lot of presents, which was totally out of character for her, and a large bottle of Stoli. We sat and drank shots. Neither of us realized that real Russian Stoli basically tastes like water. Well Shelby might have but she liked seeing me get drunk since I did because it was the 70’s but didn’t really enjoy. Oh I did but hated the next day.
No she really didn’t realize as when we stood up we fell down. We got up laughing. I had what looked like a large stick by my front door. It was called a police lock and weighed at least 25 pounds. You could kill somebody with that stick.
Shelby decided to play with it. It fell down. The super who hated me on general principle and was always cutting off my electricity, cut off my electricity and came up to curse me out. I had an ability to straighten myself out really quickly and threatened him with the police if he didn’t put my electricity on. He threatened me with bodily harm but acquiesced.
Shelby couldn’t stop laughing. We fell onto my sofa bed, passed out and went out around noon the next day for hangover food and Bloody Mary’s. Some guys came over and we let them pay for our brunch.
I was always amazed when guys would say “you know, your friend is beautiful but there’s something about you that’s just so….” And two thirds of the time they did
I have no idea what this has to do with living in wind chambers except that I was living in one then and my house now has the thermostat set to 68 basically because I’m cheap)
The whole time I was in New York I was obsessed with the color blue. My sister painted my old bedroom an exquisite blue, so beautiful I can neither really remember it or describe it. Yes it was weird when they first bought the parental manse but time and many changes have taken the weirdness away.
Lucia’s (the best of best friends) kitchen is a true sea blue, if your sea is in a very hot climate.
I couldn’t stop talking or thinking about redoing my living room. It’s pink and took ten coats to come out right. The downstairs bedroom is an ice blue. The study is turquoise and the guest room is teal. Obviously I love blue.
Then I came home and loved the coziness of the pink. I also said to myself: you’re so frigging crazy. Painting the living room is an excuse not to write. You spent the last two years moving. It’s time for some peace, and even more to get serious before you’re demented or somebody beats you to the weirdest story. Anyway you don’t have the money and every time you begin a home improvement project the stock market goes wild.
Yes, I’m the reason for the recession. Me, me and only me. It’s enough to make me ignore my house but I love it and weirdly I truly enjoy the “burdens” of home ownership.
The heating and AC guy was over today for the winter checkup. He said everything was perfect, and didn’t try to sell me something to enhance the performance. The exterminator came next. He didn’t tell me I had termites (I know he checks and gets a commission if he finds any.)
In New York both people would have tried to sell me a thousand things and would have had their hands out. OMG, was I supposed to tip them? I can’t help but think about the $1200+ I would be doling out this month in tips.
I enjoyed seeing people in New York. The city itself I wasn’t so crazy about. My last night I had a dream that I owned a cottage but couldn’t remember where. Great Neck? A cottage would be way too pricey. The Hamptons? In my dreams literally. It became a nightmare. I woke up and remembered; I do own a cottage, I do. In North Myrtle Beach SC. Oh the relief.
And I have a living room that will stay pink for a while. Hopefully the country will stay out of red.
Bone began NaBloSoFroDraWe 2009 or clean out your drafts week. I wrote this two weeks ago and kinda forgot about it. I meant to fill in the character sketchs but….
New York has never been about museums, theater, even restaurants to me but family, friends, the best museum in the world–the streets of New York, and OK I love restaurants in the city and Long Island more than any other place.
I stayed with my sister on the Island for a couple of nights and then went to my spiritual home, the Upper West Side. My best friend Lucia and her daughter Lucianame live in the best of all buildings. It’s non-doorman, just seven floors, built around the turn of the last century, one of the first elevator buildings in New York and half the building has been living there for thirty years or more. They all know me and treat me as just another building resident which is way cool.
I didn’t watch Seinfeld when it was on originally but instinctively knew that only the best friend could say “it’s me when ringing the door. And after your mother your best friend gets the coveted O or 1 spot on speed dial. Yes we all check.
One night Lucia and I went to a coffee shop across the street from her building. The food’s exceptional, the staff is wonderful and you never know who you’re going to run into but chances are you’ll run into Eleanor and end up eating with her.
Eleanor’s 83 and has been living in the building longer than I’ve been alive. She moved in as a young bride. Her husband died a few years ago and her son finally found himself a few years ago.
Eleanor’s the only Upper West Side Jewish Republican I know. Now we all voted for Rudy the first time, and Bloomberg the first time as we’re pragmatic and only tough Democrats when we have to be. Eleanor’s amazing–a group of us are Eleanor groupies. She would run for office because she knew the candidate would lose and she didn’t want the nice young person to suffer politically.
Eleanor worked on Wall Street until the 87 recession when she moved over to the city where she still works full and very long days today.
The city is honoring Eleanor with a ceremony and a party today. Lucia collected money from people in the building and bought her some jewelry. I so wish I could be there. Eleanor’s like the mother I miss and thinks I’m beautiful so I would love her just for that. .
Saturday night Lucia, Lucianame and I went to the cafe at the 70th Street pier for burgers, salad and sangria. Lucianame found it too funny that I needed “roughage.” Well it had been a week of heavy eating and for some reason…why am I defending my use of the word “roughage” rather than “fiber.” OK so we got back to the building and bought ice cream from the truck at the corner. As we were eating our ice cream, Miles came in.
Miles has AIDS. He was supposed to die ten years ago. For a number of years I would see Miles with an aide. He shakes but he has cheated death so long and through so many attacks. I almost cried seeing Miles alone with a dog. Miles is an artist. He specializes in buildings and when he and his lover lived in San Diego he began a movement to preserve some buildings. Recently he went to San Diego as the city was honoring him. PBS is doing a special about him.
The people in Lucia’s building gave him pricey flowers and he was so touched he painted a picture of them. He took us in to see the painting and the long foyer, living room and one bedroom that were filled with his art. I was stunned both by the almost plain lined buildings that came alive, and the floral art that while still in his style was lavish and lush.
These are just two of the people who live in one smallish building on the Upper West Side. I heart the Upper West Side, this building and its residents so very much.
I also adore Cooper who went to NYU so…this is one of the many reasons why
I couldn’t stop loving Bill Clinton even when I detested his wife who I now admire. I’m glad that I have a reason to love him!!!!!!!!!!! Can I just say, he’s so darn cute?
I don’t understand why categories show when I haven’t clicked them. “Impeach Bush’s” a bit old. “Impeach Cheney for occupying space” would make sense. I don’t mean this post to be a poor me one. My life is great. I would like it to be the best it could be. I do feel I deprived myself of much pleasure but my life has been sybaritic enough. I have excelled in the family, friends, actually be at work areas. Sometimes i was great at job hunting. Sometimes I was horrible at it.
I know what it’s like to be in love and I know what it’s like to crave solitude. I regret not staying in one relationship never written about here–never talked about, I never gave him a name on these pages but I didn’t stay. I wish I could turn back the clock and be turning 40. I wish my father hadn’t died eight months later. I wish my mother hadn’t become blind and our once simple relationship became difficult. That’s an awful lot to wish for.
Truly I wish my life remains on the sometimes even wonderful keel I seem to have been getting to.
*I believe that’s from Rhoda–Mary Richard’s (Mary Tyler Moore) Bff. Of course she meant that as in “look out, I’m taking over.” I mean it in “get out your HAZAMAT suits.”
I will be back in a week having seen family, friends and the friends of the Miracle of Facebook or childhood friends I still think about and remember with love. § Read the rest of this entry…
We’re having an uncontained large fire. It’s on the other side of the intercoastal and so far on the other side of North Myrtle. It’s a little exciting and very scary.
Day 2) They’re almost downplaying the fire on the news I live north of it. I would put an article from the New York Times in but unfortunately it’s the best I could find
This is for 3WW Here are parts one and two
Is deceit a vital part of growing up? Between ages fifteen and 24 there were many times I did set out to deceive my parents. By the time I was 25, in 1975-76, I was tired of playing word games with the truth. At 25, I wanted to indulge my long suffering father.
I had been “living” at my parents house for six months by January 3, 1976. I put “living” in quotes as most nights I would stay on my friend Shelby’s couch or in some guy’s apartment. I remember the first time I saw cable TV. I can’t describe the guy but I still remember the building, and his living room where WNEW-FM (my radio station then) played in the background while Reuters News scanned the picture tube. It was, I thought, a miracle. I can’t say the same for the sex as I don’t remember it.
When I came “home,” it would usually be two or three in the morning. My parents couldn’t and wouldn’t say anything as they had raised me without a curfew, and I made it to the train to the city and work each morning. They didn’t know about the little envelope of white powder I sometimes used. I never liked coke as a party drug but as something to keep me functioning I loved it.
When I indulged, which was most nights and many mornings and afternoons for I worked at a hand painted tee shirt company where my boss was a junkie; the art director an alkie, and I the coordinator between departments and assistant to the president, I would indulge in my drug of choice–pot. I tried keeping it to a manageable level.
So yes I was deceiving my parents but they were silent partners to it. I “lived” at their house so I could save my money for an apartment. My father insisted on paying for my monthly train ticket.
Years before after I dropped out of college, lived in Stuyvesant Town, and saved my money for an open ended ticket to Europe and Israel, I went to the travel agency to pick my ticket up:
Oh you’re just a few minutes late. A very handsome older man bought it for you The woman squealed. She thought I was horrors of horrors living off an older man. And I was.
Did he have a large nose, too long hair for somebody his age and a moustache?
Yes
That’s no man, that’s my father.
Whenever we went to restaurants and they tried to seat us in the lovers banquettes I made that distinction clear. I didn’t want my father mistaken for my lover and I didn’t want him to buy me things. I wanted the privilege of paying my own way.
I took a silent oath saying I would return anything he gave me. I tried returning the ticket. He was beyond insulted and told me that I could put the money in an Israeli bank account he had set up for me.
I knew then I was bought and paid for. It wasn’t until recently that I understand the pride a parent takes in being able to give. Fortunately I always knew how much my father loved me. Even in the years between fifteen to 25 when we our language was clocked and fraught with many different meanings.
Life’s too short to spend bitching
This is for this weeks 3WW Totally forgot to put it in! Me bad
I always start the story of Jeffrey and me with the day we met. That sounds normal until I remember I never start at the beginning. But that was one of the ten most incredible days of my life–and 50% of it happened before we met.
The allure of May 20, 1979 is simple. It was an incredibly beautiful day in the city everybody loved to hate. New York was supposed to be dangerous . I was out at all hours everywhere and my wallet was stolen once. I had just cashed my paycheck and everybody in my office pitched in to replace it. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else though I dreamed of a beach house.
I walked from my apartment at 5 East 63rd Street, one of the best addresses in New York though the building itself had and would see better days to Folk City, the club that Marilyn, Robbie and Joe were soon to buy. Folk City was on 3rd Street near 6th Avenue then. It was dark and tobacco stained. With a bar filled with talking people. Peggy the lesbian bartender who married a man gave certain friends of the house triples, though Robbie refuses to believe that. I could hold my liquor. But never there. The Roches didn’t write “Face down at Folk City“(read the lyrics. First time I heard the song I cried from joy) because girls were sober.*
It’s easy to say Marilyn, Robbie, Joe and I are old friends. Truth, the unvarnished truth is always simpler or more complicated. When we were very young Robbie and I had been briefly married. We weren’t meant to be spouses. I had run to Europe to start my life over in 1971. I came home not because I missed him though I suppose I did but because I had a premonition a healthy friend would die. Together we couldn’t figure out how to warn him and JohnnyB died as I became engaged against my better judgement and married a few months later.
By 1979 we were long divorced and had become friends. I wanted Robbie to marry Marilyn; and I wanted to fall in love. It’s hard for many people to understand that I wished them every happiness. I liked, and like, them. Marilyn was perfect for Robbie in ways that I’m not. The once overbearing love I had felt for him had long ago turned to love for a friend. I’m human; I wanted what I saw they had. And I saw it before many other people. If I’m devoting too much time to this, I want it out of the way. It’s only important to the story because it took place in Folk City and Robbie played a part in Jeffrey and I meeting. It’s not even absurdest or ironic humor but truly funny.
Be careful what you wish for had been my motto since I began college eleven years earlier. I should have remembered it as I walked through the various districts Manhattan had then. The sky was a vivid blue; a perfect blue. It was hot but not humid. I was wearing new jeans and stopped at Macy’s to buy some Willie Smith clothes. I didn’t yet know why I went out of my way to buy clothes but they would play a part in the story also.
Then I walked through the flower district so gay in every sense. From his perch on a human’s shoulder, a parrot asked if I was happy and did I desire sex. Yes, I thought, but not with you. I was happy though had you asked me I would have analyzed the thought to death. I tended to over-analyze every facet of my life.
Was it Lucinda William’s debut at Folk City? I’m not sure though I have post upon post, unpublished article upon article about that day; the last truly uncomplicated day of my life.
••••••••••••
*In the 90’s I saw the Roches perform at Steven Talkhouse in South Beach. They asked how many people in the audience had been in Folk City’s basement–kind of infamous. I didn’t raise my hand but almost everybody else in the audience did. The people I was with looked at me as if I were crazy, but I didn’t want to be part of a pretend party.
That’s it. Photos in a few days.
Two Iranian Christian bloggers are missing. As I’m four fifths on an incredible natural high, one fifth scared I left the townhouse not perfect and three fifths crazed by the money I have been spending when I should be saving, truly horrible things are happening. I know my math was off; it’s just the way I feel
This is a photo of me and the boyfriend I call well lots of things. If it doesn’t link properly I will have it later.
We’re in Folk City in the late 70’s. I met Jeffrey (his real name) when one of the soon to be new owners of Folk City, Robbie Woliver told me I had to come back the next day to see a girl who was better than incredible. My friend Helena and I had stopped by after dinner at Panchito’s a greasy horrible cheap Mexican restaurant that was very beautiful (I think) and everybody loved though if you didn’t eat your food in two minutes it congealed. Most people really went for the endless chips, dips and frozen Margaritas.
People liked hanging with me because well I hope they enjoyed me and I had contacts at all pivotal clubs in Manhattan. It was strange. I even knew Marc the doorman at Studio.
Helena lectured me because I was working twelve to fourteen hour days six days a week. I had recently been promoted to supervisor in a computerized litigation company and loved my job. But Helena was right. I realized the next day I wanted a boyfriend and set out to get me one. I have written in depth about the walk from 63rd & Fifth to the Village. How I stopped at Macys and bought new clothes–as it turned out it wslucky for me I didn’t have to go to work in the same clothes.
Yes those were the days I would think “I want a boyfriend” and despite my extreme shyness one would appear. The same thing happened with weight. “I want to lose 20 pounds,” and I would. Now–well I really try with the weight thing and it’s more manageable but the other thing….If you don’t try….and sadly I didn’t have to learn the skills.
The girl was Lucinda Williams. She and Jeff were friends from New Orleans and he suggested she send Moses Ash of Folkways a demo tape. Jeff had a recording contract with them. She didn’t become real famous for another decade at least but Rob was right; she blew the audience away. It was a star studded audience; filled with recording artists, producers, reviewers. I was in music groupie heaven. Problem was I could never be an actual groupie type. I was more the girlfriend type. I was shy. Robbie would come over and tell me that so and so wanted to meet me–he would come over constantly. I would smile demurely. Sometimes I want to hit the girl I was and tell her–all you had to do was smile at the guy–not Robbie. I always said I had to be hit over the head.
Jeff was the only one who came over and told me a bad joke. I’m a total sucker for bad Polish jokes. It was the 70’s and Jeff and I moved in together two days later. I plead the 70’s defense.
The thing was Jeffrey was sexy. Real sexy for the time. I felt as if I had been hit over the head by–I’m not sure I can describe the feeling. All my girlfriends were impressed. Very impressed. All my male friends disliked but tolerated him.
Jeff was the only one who came over and told me a bad joke. I’m a total sucker for bad Polish jokes. It was the 70’s and Jeff and I moved in together two days later. I plead the 70’s defense.
I have written a lot about Jeffrey. I did love him. For about six months he made me happier than I could imagine being. I think I did the same to him. I really didn’t mean to write this much.
This post was written under the influence of “I bought a house, sweated the renovation, and paid for everything, and wow, my life is becoming exciting once more. Only this time I’m in charge.”
Ms. Maya Hunt was sitting at her computer watching her rapidly dwindling portfolio. She thought she had $600 every day this year in unrealized (not sold) losses. One 07 statement she had to give her accountant showed 200K in (sold, stock or money market fund never to be seen by her again) realized losses. When times get tough…She poured a triple Absolut and thought she should really invest in liquor companies.
Just as she finished pouring the phone rang. Her cousin Madison didn’t even say hello but began screaming about AIG and Warren Buffet. Madison was walking down West End Avenue and couldn’t care less who heard. She hung up and realized Maya hadn’t said a word. Not even “how are you?” Ill mannered her mother had always called that branch of her family.
Madison saw her pot dealer Frankie who kissed her and began talking about how his brother was walking away from a 300K condo loft deposit. When Frankie and Madison parted ways at 97th Street, Frankie saw his clfriend (client friend) Henry. Damn if Henry wasn’t screaming to himself. Nah, he had a bluetooth on.
Henry, an intellectual property lawyer, was on the phone with his clfriend, Neil, who had just had the last of his margin called. He didn’t know how he was going to tell his wife. Henry tried to sound encouraging as he tried even harder to get off the phone so he could buy some weed from Frankie.
Neil bought a bunch of tulips from a Korean grocery and almost fell on the slushy icing up snow, and walked up the 12 flights of stairs. By the time he arrived in the apartment he thought of something to tell his wife but Maya was sprawled on the couch face down, a drink knocked over and an unlit joint in her hand.
Friday morning update: It feels insane to be so psyched about moving when I have lost so much (prefer to think of it as temporary but I don’t really expect these funds to come back. I didn’t sell when I knew I should and so have only me to blame. My “Pia’s battered portfolio” will be replenished. I thought I was moving so I could live really well and save more.
Now I’m excited about making my first real home, living near libraries that you can take home the best books and older ones probably don’t feel as if they spread disease. My kitchen will be large enough to actually cook in. How novel. I will join America. Hope America joins me. Please forgive me owning a washer/dryer for the first time in these green days and a dishwasher. I have done without all my adult life and I promise to use the washer as a hamper and not be crazy washing all the time. Though the thought is so scintillating.
I have no idea what today will bring but I feel great.
I still listen to CD’s when home. I listened to Billy Joel “The Stranger,” Brian Wilson “That Lucky Old Sun,” and John Hiatt “Live from Austin T_ ” while writing this. It’s a too true first draft that’s disjointed, and needs much much editing. However I’m stuck between needing to do errands and being paralyzed as I can’t believe the things happening in this country–I am talking politics and the truly sick rumors about Obama that I would hate were I a Republican. And then there is the economy, or isn’t. I should be so happy right now….
It was a beautiful summer day. We left your apartment for The World Financial Center and beyond; not knowing the world would change that day.
Wow, why was the DJ from ‘PLJ playing “Money for Nothing” over and over again? What were those “gold bricks” doing there? We began dancing and the DJ began handing us presents. Mouse pads, tee shirts, towels and more all saying “Windows 95.” We had no idea what Windows 95 was. But the carriage filled up with presents.
Nor did I know the DJ. I listen to your much hated, now, alt rock radio station ‘FUV. You would know the DJ…..
Everybody was smiling at us. You made it so easy. Smiling and waving at ten, eleven months you knocked the socks off people. It was the summer between my first and second years of grad school. I volunteered at the nursing home I did my field placement in for the summer. The Newt cuts had just begun kicking in and I was needed. But we didn’t care about that. OK it was an ego trip that many of the old people, some not even truly demented, mistook me for their 20something granddaughter.
I held you and we twirled until I was dizzy and you couldn’t stop smiling. There were Brinks trucks with gold bricks everywhere. Security guards (out of work actors) smiled and flirted with us. For once I wasn’t river obsessed.
You were enchanted by everything. The same song being played over and over again was hypnotic. “Dire Strait,” I said into your ear, “a seminal 80’s band.”
“Cool baby!” People were constantly saying that. I knew I was supposed to count the times it was said and remember everything about the person who said it. Skin color, hair, face, type of clothes. It really only counted when very funky people said that.
A motorcade of Brinks trucks followed by a gold Rolls with Richard Lewis in it followed. He waved at you. Looks like your daddy so you smiled and laughed even more as we waved back. You made me so ennobled. I would say and do things I wouldn’t normally. People saw the real me not the street face me. Every Manhattanite, maybe every person has one. I wouldn’t know. Manhattan has been the center of my life all my life.
We went to your apartment in Battery Park City and told your mother, my sister, all about the day as I stared at the Statue of Liberty and your mother was amazed and delighted by all the presents. We must have been given at least two of all Windows 95 promotional products.
Windows is coming, I kept thinking. Sort of like the signs all over lower Manhattan in the summer of 67, “The Blues Project is coming.”
Did we even know who Bill Gates was then? I think so as I used the Internet in grad school. Word the word processing program was so much better than Word star which I had begun on twelve years earlier.
The world changed the day we heard “Money for Nothing” repeated over and over again and we didn’t even know it. Though it would be the biggest overt symbolic change in our lifetimes.
Your grandfather told me over and over again the year before he died in 91 that computers and communications were going to mean everything. His time was over and mine was just beginning said he.
I didn’t really understand what he meant. That you and I were together the day Windows 95 was announced to the world, how amazing. That we were at the official announcement, wow. It wasn’t Silicon Alley they made this announcement in; it was the Promenade, the closest river walk to The World Trade Center and Wall Street. FiDi, it’s called now.
We were what people called “comfortable.” It’s an old fashioned term used by people who felt comfortable with their financial status and didn’t need to blast from the roofs “new money.” Not that we were 80’s e_cessive or 90’s rich.
Did we know then that we were going to see the greatest increase in personal consumption? That many people borrowed money to achieve their lifestyle?
Honestly we were going to care, not you but your Mom and me that people seemed to become instant millionaires regularly when we felt investing was hard and tortuous work. Our father had made lost and made several small fortunes. I have always known second acts can happen in your 50’s as I knew my father.
The times between 95 and now were great. My life was changed by computers and communications. I discovered blogging; blogging discovered me. It was a happy though warring marriage for a couple of years.
Seven years ago after Mommy Marian died, I decided to leave New York. But there was always one more thing I could only do in New York. Everybody else would be happy to leave New York to have their whole mouth redone. I had to find the priciest and best dentists around. Fortunately they liked my politics and my fighting the radical right and took 20% off. It was really because I paid cash in advance but, honestly I stupidly thought it gauche to negotiate. They were in what your mother and I have always called “the dentists building, that truly ugly Fifth Avenue building, 800.
Last year I ran out of things I absolutely had to do. I’m not percient but I knew two things: Manhattan apartments were going to sell for last money and something bad was beginning to happen to the economy.
The Monday after your too elegant and wonderful Bat Mitzvah I began to lose money. This never happened to me before and I was both very proactive and very paralyzed.
The apartment will close ne_t week. I have a ticket out of here the ne_t day. Don’t worry I will be back in time to celebrate, I so hope, after the election, for ten days at Thanksgiving–doctors, two birthdays, and the holiday, and for about four days at New Years–the holiday doesn’t feel right unless celebrated in Central Park with our own for the city residents fireworks, a race, bands and free warm drinks. First we make a New Years dinner complete with Black Eyed Peas. There are two more birthdays in that four day period.
Think is Jacquelin we were together for the beginning of the very good times. Those Juicy and A&F clothes you wear like the model you might become? We weren’t the designer “name” kind. It comes to you like the counterculture came to me.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Two summers ago I was at the class before mine.’s, at the high school you go to and I’m an alumna of, pre-reunion, and they were talking about the coming great depression. I was making more money than i ever had before, too much I realize now, and I thought “football players. What do they know?” That they had been high school football players 40 years earlier didn’t enter my brain but I thought of Rabbit Angstrom from John Updike’s Rabbit books and felt disquieted. Updike killed him off in the 90’s. The former high school basket player couldn’t find or keep work had become too successful. Car dealerships.
Maybe the boys from the football team were right. I’m scared Jacquelin and not sure if it’s leaving my life for a new one I haven’t really made yet, the economy and my personal losses, both or fear that I won’t be able to successfully start over as I’m too old–no refuse to think that one.
The world is changing again and it’s not going to be the easy world you had your first thirteen years in. Your parents will shield you. It’s a parents job to make sure a child knows what’s happening but to feel secure anyway and your parents e_cell at that.
Your mom and my father was a gambler. Not horses like Uncle Simon and the rest of the family who we’re very proud of which never struck me strange. It was a mark of honor to have family members “go away,” until it wasn’t.
Your grandfather gambled at poker and the stock market. I stayed as far away from risk as possible but i became greedy. Never again.
My second act is beginning. Your grandfather did his best during a long recession. He did it with grace and class. I so want to be like him and yet be me.
I have lost but I am blessed. My belief in only borrowing money from me paid off. I think of everything I could have had if I got just a little mortgage and had a million dollar apartment to sell. Every bank offered me one. When “everyone” does something stay as far away as possible. Your grandfather filled my head with that one since I was a small child.
And so Jacquelin, the stock I bought you for your Bat Mitvah–Apple as we’re not the Windows type, has lost much in value. Follow it. I believe Apple makes a superior product and it might not do well for a few years, but people use Ipods instead of stereos with a good docking system and it could be a great not really pricey holiday item. Or am I so out of touch?
I have been back in New York since the last week of August. Too long. When you come for Passover I will introduce you to my North Myrtle, not the Myrtle Beach tourists know. It’s in better economic shape than Southern Florida and while i love the hot Florida sun and we have had family there since the 40’s and many of my best college friends are from Miami and moved back, I think North Myrtle is the more sane choice. I want to live in a place that wasn’t hot, hot and hotter so it could fall cool, colder, coldest.
Jacquelin, life’s been too good for too long. I never borrowed money, have been late with credit card payments maybe once in the past 30 years and pay in full. While I think many people are “innocent victims,” I can’t help but feel that too many people believed that whatever goes up stays up. I do resent having lived like a perpetual grad student though in a “world class” “big deal” building–things it was called during the dot com years.
I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Though I lived like a perpetual grad student in the apartment amenity sense I have lived well. I plan on continuing to….Though the best laid plans…..
This New Years season I wish for sweetness, sanity and a Democratic mandate at the election polls. I’m glad you “hate” Sarah Palin. When you told me that you’re scared “Sarah will win, because most people are stupid,” I could see generations of Jaded Savages in your eyes.
You volunteer for Habit for Humanity and a Darfur group (I can’t believe my old school has these groups) and you wear designer clothes. Oh I so hope you always can…..
Obama is the new Black
L’ Shana Tova
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