newsornotnews (noticiaononoticia)

LET THE

It’s ungenerous, I know, but I have to admit it – when I see some rancher or suburbanite from Sheboygan on television saying that we need to restrict arabs from emigrating here because of the risk of terrorism, I want to laugh out loud. Do they think some muftied villain is hiding in the Tora Bora Mountains scheming to blow up the mall? Then I get angry.  The risk they’re identifying to rationalize their prejudice? That’s my risk, not theirs. I live in downtown Manhattan. How dare they appropriate me as hostage to their hatefulness? Let them worry about their fellow gentiles with semi-automatic weapons who are much more likely to pull the trigger on them.

I don’t literally live at ground zero. I live on West 9th Street, less than two miles from the 9/11 Memorial and I was certainly affected in 2001 although, tanx god, I didn’t know anyone who died. In the last 15 years, though, I’ve met family, spouses and children of victims.

There’s not much I can add to the canon on that day except my personal story. I was at my office, preparing to close a refinance with Paul Wood at Bleakley Platt located at 30 Wall Street which is about four blocks from the towers. When I heard about the first plane hitting, I called Paul and said I might be late depending on the subways. Everyone in the office was watching a three inch black and white television when the second plane hit. Paul called and said burning ash was coming in through the windows.

I bungeed two briefcases of current files and my laptop to a wagon and walked against the current from Park and 54th to 24th and the East River, the United Nations International School, picked up ten year old Samara and walked to 9th Street where we more or less stayed for the next three days.

There are no great observations I can make that haven’t been made by others except, perhaps, to note the vast difference between reactions above and below 14th Street and Union Square. Downtown was quiet. No cars were around. Flyers with photos of the missing were posted on the wall of the good magazine store on 10th Street (now a superfluous Verizon outlet) and at the park. Downtown was solemn. We grieved. Uptown was angry, vengeful. The streets were chaotic. All the talk was of what to do next. Downtown was a funeral; uptown was a wake.

There aren’t too many visual reminders of the event remaining except for all of the unnecessary and inconvenient security desks in the lobby of every office building (a bit of Sheboyganism there). WTC One is a skyline building and there is the Memorial. There are still construction cranes working at the site but there are construction cranes every third block in Manhattan these days. One might be tempted to say New York City has healed from 9/11.

Except it hasn’t. We’ve all known all along that it hasn’t gone away. Rather we’ve made a choice, all us city kids and the ambitious people and the queers and the artists and the financial wizards and the writers and all the square pegs who gather from all over the world to live in the only place we imagine we can have the freedom to be ourselves and to find like-minded souls. We’re saying, “yeah, I know, but there’s nothing else we can do. There’s nothing else we want to do.”

So we’ve chosen to accommodate ourselves to the danger. Think of it as a prosthesis. There’s no point in talking about it. No one points it out to you but we all know its there. Is there a choice? There is not and so we do. We do what we do. We live our lives with all the presence and awareness that we can – necessary for protection, necessary for delight. I try not to over-romanticize but it’s another vector of intensity endemic to New York City life.

That equilibrium, though, has been put under stress by the DJT presidency.

For one thing, we don’t fear arabs in New York. An essential part of that equilibrium is the knowledge that we’re all in this together, that next time it could be you or you or me. We’re all potential victims but we don’t view our fellow New Yorkers as potential terrorists. We welcome newcomers. The city has a gravity that assimilates, that pulls every one of us into synchronous orbits and we depend on that. By the second or third generation, whatever nationality they arrive as, they will be New Yorkers.

But DJT and the federal government promote a viewpoint that opposes that. Certain people, Muslims, are not part of your community, they say. They are not part of the melting pot. They are to be treated by a different set of rules and, to the extent it’s accepted by the citizenry, they are to be viewed as potential assassins, every one, which endangers our unity. It endangers the assimilation that we know is part of what keeps us safe and is provocative in exactly the way we look to avoid. It’s not just the violence that’s been visited on brown-skinned people, though that’s outrageous enough. It’s denying them the chance to be home.

Another DJT problem is the recklessness of his foreign policy, the muscle flexing without any sense or appreciation of where that places us in the community of the world. Where is the strategy, where is the purpose that can be expressed to our allies so that they will rally behind us? He is poking nation after nation with a stick. Friends and foes alike, and it does nothing but antagonize to no discernible advantage. It invites retaliation and retaliation makes New York the target.

Finally, DJT and his family constitute law enforcement sponges. How many resources are devoted to protecting, not just his wife and young child in Trump Tower or the residences of his older children, though it is all that? Every building burnished with the Trump name, usually in gilt, is a target, a target surrounded by innocent people.

The equilibrium under stress that I mentioned earlier? That’s me. I’m under stress. For the first time since 2001, I’m afraid. I have ground zero anxiety. I’m afraid of increasingly motivated terrorists. I’m afraid of bombs dropped by national actors. There are an infinite number of wasp nests out there and President Obama and the open arms of the city (and one hundred other factors, I know) have been able to create a landscape with a measure of security if not serenity. Our current president seems intent on disturbing that order for the sake of some false conception of manliness, to differentiate himself from his predecessor and to please his meager remaining constituency, the vast majority of which are out of harm’s way.

Pratt Institute School of Architecture held a memorial tribute and exhibition the other day entitled “William (Bill) Breger, 1922-2015, A Celebration of a Life in Architecture”. Bill was my uncle.

Krystyna, Bill’s widow, my aunt. has been carrying the flag for his history, encouraging tributes, working with documentarians on a film, making sure his legacy survives. One of her projects was a book of written memories contributed by friends, family and colleagues and, by rights, I should have contributed to it as well but I was daunted by the prospect. Bill, as you shall see, was a demanding critic and my relationship with him was deep and densely striated and I didn’t think I could include everything I wanted to say in a way he would approve of. I didn’t think I was good enough to do a suitable job and that is unfortunate because, while I am unqualified to tell his story, I may be the most qualified person left. He was a complicated man.

The Pratt event was warm and fascinating and revelatory for me. All of the speakers were former students of Bill’s, including Robert Siegel of Gwathmey Siegel (to throw in a marquee name), and all spoke of their terror of him during their years of study, how savage he was in jury, how uncompromising his standards were, how downright mean he could be. Here’s a little blurb posted on the Pratt website speaking of his relationship to the school: “Arriving at Pratt as a Professor of Architecture in 1946, Mr. Breger rose to chair the architecture program and establish architecture as an independent school with graduate and undergraduate programs representing all aspects of the built environment. Mr. Breger transformed the study of architecture at Pratt by bringing together his unique vision of aesthetics and philosophy within a rigorous and demanding professional curriculum. He educated and mentored a generation of architecture alumni, many of whom are leaders in their disciplines and credit him for contributing to their success.”

They also spoke about the excellence of his work, particularly his most famous work, the Civic Center Synagogue on White Street downtown.

The building is much written about, it’s rising vector, it’s flamelike shape, but the handtruck in this photo adds some important depth, I think. When Civic Center was built, the neighborhood was populated by the garment trade. The Synagogue’s sole purpose was to provide a place for Shacharit and Minchah for the factory owners and workers (It amazes me, thinking of Manhattan as a manufacturing center but just think of all those ILGWU co-ops on the LES and West 20’s and you begin to get a sense of how large the scale must have been).  To me, that speaks to a rarely noted ruggedness to the building, squeezing a place for itself, holding apart those abutting masonry walls just as it’s daveners found a way to squeeze twice daily services into their workday.

A bit of the documentary I mentioned above was shown yesterday. Bill had, in addition to his masters in architecture, a masters in philosophy from NYU and part of the selected clip was a colloquy given by Bill on the Kantian split between the rational and the experiential, how he believed that the pursuit of rationality can lead to a formally beautiful experiential dimension but how over his career (this was filmed in 1997) he erred towards the rational and undervalued the experiential. Truly great architecture, he said, accommodates both dimensions and the only time he achieved that equilibrium, he said, was with the Civic Center Synagogue (If it sounds like I’m in a little over my head here, I am).

One of the things I inherited from my father, along with his pot belly and blue eyes, was a hero worship for his older brother. Bill was around infrequently enough that, from the beginning, he was more legend than uncle and when he did show up it was a carnival. He cursed all the time. He was uniformly contrary and mocked his siblings. He was my primary competitor for Grandma Beas’s gribbenes. He had a little green MG sportscar which he drove so recklessly, no one would agree to be his passenger. He lived in Greenwich Village and that in itself seemed excitingly sinister in those days of exploding suburbs and white-flight. And then there was the fucking.

Any biography that omits how much of Bill’s energy was directed towards getting laid is missing an important aspect of his life; or maybe it took no energy at all because he was very successful in his pursuit. That was something my father and I both admired. He didn’t often bring his women to family events but when he did they were young and pretty and I would just sit and shyly gaze. Bill was a professor at the New York School of Interior Design, which had a few gay men in the student body but was overwhelmingly populated by women. College age women who were too bohemian for college, unhappily married women looking to enrich their lives, divorced women looking to turn their remarked-on good taste into a career. It was like the automat for Bill and he had a pocketful of nickels. Professor Breger’s charms were magnetic

I had a conversation with a general contractor Bill used often about this, many years later, after he finally found a home planet to orbit in Krystina, and he felt that the teaching and the fucking occupied so much time that it stole Bill’s attention from his career. Bill told me something like that too, that his life was rich in experience but that he did not leave behind the kind of masterwork he was capable of. He said that Gropius would have been disappointed in him. It was a sad, rueful conversation.

Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus, a school for the plastic arts that operated between the wars in Weimar Germany and which created an aesthetic that dominated architectural thought in the second half of the twentieth century. To the Nazis, however, the Bauhaus was regarded as a petri of degenerate art and Gropius as the ringleader was forced to seek refuge in the United States where he became Dean of Architecture at Harvard where. Bill was a member of the first post-war class, along with such fellow students as Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei but it was Bill who became Gropius’ assistant and draftsman (“draftsman” currently residing somewhere with Manhattan garment manufacturing). He was apprentice to Gropius for two years and judged him to be a great man and a great model for his life (Gropius has a few notable buildings but, like Bill, his greatest legacy is as a teacher).

There’s a story Bill tells in the documentary – Gropius told him, “I’ve been approached by a developer named Bill Zeckendorf who plans on building and wants to do good work so I’ve recommended you to him.” Bill was aghast. Developers were mercenaries, cheapskates, philistines. Bill passed so Gropius recommended Pei instead. The result was a great success and Pei’s career was made. Bill referred to it as the biggest mistake he ever made.

In 1975, having washed out at Boston University, I moved back into my parents’ Forest Hills apartment. It was not a good time. My shame and their suspicion conspired to leave me in a passive, depressed state. Bill came to my rescue.

He had moved his offices to a brownstone he had bought almost vacant on East 53rd street with the intent of modifying the building into a live/work space. The one nonvacant unit, on the east side of the top floor of the building, belonged to Mrs. Cicarelli and Mrs. Cicarelli would not move. No amount of money motivated her and her continued occupancy operated as a veto to Bill’s plans. She became his bete noire. He hated her. At any given moment he might rant in the bluest possible language about what a curse she was to him. He decided to wait her out and so he rented out all the apartments in the building to students, former students and attractive women and he occupied the west half of the ground floor. He invited me to live in the east half in return for pulling the garbage three times a week and sweeping once a week, tasks I would end up performing intermittently and badly.

One of Bill’s endearing qualities was the way he collected the troubled, the sad sacks, as friends and the way he took care of them (often to his eventual detriment) and I think Bill may have regarded me that way. He was always there backing me up whenever my life was most difficult. I went to visit him with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, a very talented artist, in the last year of his life (Bill was 92 when he died in 2015). Bill looked at and admired her work, which was a great relief to me. I had recently ended 30 years of practice as a real estate attorney and had it in mind that I would do some writing. Bill regarded me with sad eyes and said “The tragedy of your life is you have a great sensitivity to art without any talent for creating it. An artist has a way of seeing, a way of transforming experience that allows them to create in any medium, often several mediums, and you can’t learn it and you don’t have it.”

Kind of cruel, no? I say no. I don’t think he meant to discourage me or, for that matter, to motivate me. I don’t think he had a purpose at all. I think it was a genuine expression of pain on my behalf. He was being the only thing Bill knew how to be – honest. This is what he had done as a teacher. His former students spoke about it yesterday. He frequently told students (in a less gentle manner than the one he used with me) that they lacked the commitment or talent or both to be a successful architect. Now, I need not accept his judgment of me or I can accept that I’m not an artist but that I can be a talented craftsman. Spending time with Jolean, though, who is an artist, and seeing how she interacts not only with visual art but also music and drama and the way she mediates every bit of stimulus and information in the world, I know she’s an artist in a way I am not.

In 1976, though, he was my savior. The 53rd Street house was lively. Everybody knew each other and spent time hanging out with each other and, best of all, I got to see Bill five days a week. That was exciting for me. We had so many talks, personal, aesthetic, philosophical, critical. I got to see him work, to see how the projects came together, how they went from a few intersecting lines in pencil on a piece of yellow tracing paper, to concept drawings, to plans, to renderings, to models, to bricks. Better still, when projects had deadlines, such as a competition, and everyone in the office was “en charette,” I would work with him, labeling details, rubbing press-type onto boards, running the blueprint machine with it’s near-lethal aroma of ammonia.

Of course, I was still pretty miserable notwithstanding my new location. I’m sure he had to explain to anyone who visited the office the source of that marijuana odor that suffused the first floor. He did not, could not, understand my depressive ennui, my inability to energize myself to do much of anything. Most mysteriously of all, why wasn’t I out there getting laid? It baffled him. He understood not feeling good about yourself but, to Bill, you treated that by fucking, you didn’t let it stop you.

I spent about two years living on 53rd Street until my services were needed as a shill so that I could vote as a tenant, consenting to the cooperative conversion of my new address but the two years bonded us closely and Bill and I maintained very large parts in each other’s lives until the end of his. Whenever my contentious relationship with my father would flare, Bill was there to argue my side, even when I could tell he wasn’t fully committed to it. He had clearly expressed opinions of my various wives and girlfriends. We argued over politics, priorities, the changes the city was going through, music, family, almost everything. I liked disagreeing with him and I liked the jagged path our discussions would take. I even liked the sarcasm, the judgments which could be withering. An invitation to come over to his brownstone on West 10th would shift me into excited anticipation and drinking with him and Stanley and Sue, his downstairs neighbors, was an excursion into hysterical chaos. That I live in a brownstone in the Village has everything to do with emulating Bill.

There’s an aspect to Bill I think I’m missing. He was a madman, an anarchic, disruptive force, the spanner in the works at every event. It was hilarious and it was a pain in the ass. He never attended a party, a reception, a seder, that he didn’t hope to leave after ten minutes.

I’m not quite sure where to stop. He loved dim sum. He cherished his father, as sweet and meek a man as has ever walked the earth. He remained a protector and a scold of his brother, one year his junior, well into their eighties. When I was hospitalized in 2014, he would come visit me, notwithstanding how his 91 years limited his mobility. He developed macular degeneration beginning in his seventies and lived in fear of blindness saying, “It may have been possible for Beethoven to be a deaf composer but there’s no purpose to a blind architect.” He had an endless capacity for work and loved what he did and believed it to be important and worthwhile.

Bill found a consuming love late in life with Krystyna who, in the earliest days of their marriage, would spend six months a year away, teaching university in Cracow (an arrangement Bill thought ideal) but eventually was as near and constant as his right arm. He was a terrible, neglectful father who separated from his pregnant lover before their daughter Willow was born (though he did marry Willow’s mother before she entered kindergarten since, in the early ’50’s, illegitimacy was a significant social handicap) and the great sin of his life, in my opinion, was his inability to bring to the reciprocally tumultuous relationships with his daughter, grandson and great grandson the compassion he showed in abundance to his friends. I’m proud to include a video made by my cousin Willow below. She is as brainy as you’d expect Bill’s child to be.

He loved the opera, Mozart particularly and Don Giovanni even more particularly. He was constantly reading histories, those concerning Hitler and Stalin particularly. He loved reading old documents, train schedules particularly.

He specialized in designing hospitals and nursing homes and was responsible for creating many standards that became universal in health care facilities. He did good work, and often designed specifically for the local population where the facility was to be situated. He placed third in the competition to design the St. Louis Gateway and designed several noteworthy homes including the Evan Hunter house which was later owned by Steve Reich. The central characters of Hunter’s “Strangers When We Meet” and William Gaddis’ “The Recognitions” were both inspired by Bill (Bill was also friends with John Nichols, the  basis for Mark Swift in “Tropic of Cancer”) and, continuing with the literary, he was close friends with Anatole Broyard, Nat Hentoff and Norman Mailer.

Midst one of my romantic tribulations, Bill advised me, “It’s not that she’s critical; it’s that she lacks forgiveness and sometimes forgiveness is the only thing you have to rely on.”

I love Bill and remain in awe of him.

I have more memories, more stories to tell. Him taking notes during the sermon at my bar mitzvah so he could bust the rabbi’s balls more effectively later. Staying at his apartment in Provincetown. His beautiful requiem for my father at his funeral.  Bill’s cats, Howard and Johnson. His compassion for my first wife while ovarian cancer took her away. How he moved out of his parent’s Bronx apartment when he was sixteen years old so he could simultaneously attend Stuyvesant High School (where he was at risk of not graduating because he failed French) and attend classes at Cooper Union where he was most decidedly not admitted.

I like, though, to imagine the years I wasn’t there for, the late forties and early fifties in the Village when Modernism was contemporary, when abstract expressionism was being born, when cool jazz and hard bop were dawning, when, as Broyard wrote, “Kafka was the rage,” when the city was bursting with ambition and Spanish restaurants and smokey boites and renegade galleries and massive buildings with curtain walls like no one had ever seen before, when Bill was teaching, staffing and creating the syllabus for Pratt, first accredited by AIA under his supervision, mentoring a cohort of upstart city kids, striding arrogantly at the head of the big parade of post-war culture.

I had a gratifying time last night. About a dozen and a half of the alumni of Forest Hills High School, Class of ’72, assembled to celebrate the brief return to New York of Viola Lee, who now lives in San Francisco. Viola’s a wonderfully nice person and has made a point of maintaining her FHHS connections so the prospect of spending the evening with her draws a pretty good crowd. 

Reunions are a tricky business for many people but I love seeing my old classmates and have a lot of warmth for them, especially those that i go back to elementary school with. It’s curious because I was desperately unhappy and unhappy with myself in those years, very frightened about social risks generally and the judgment of girls in particular. I didn’t date once in high school. The possibility, or probability, as I thought, of humiliating myself wouldn’t permit me to so I would painfully crush, curse my inadequacy, and sit lonely. In a way, the greatest pleasure of the reunion is the corrective experience of interacting more openly, confidently with these friends than I was able to back when. While that might be sufficiently gratifying in itself but what made the night so special was that about a half-dozen attendees came up to me and told me how much they enjoy my FB posts, that they share them, that the posts help them in their understanding of the news or entertain them when the posts are more personal. They told me they were part of an audience I wasn’t sure was there and I loved it and I loved them for it.  It feels like I mention my mother’s death last August quite a bit. At the time, as is always the case when these life-changing events occur, I was disappointed and a little ashamed over the low emotional quantum of my reaction. When my father died I delivered the absolute worst, briefest and most unemotional eulogy given since Oedipus sent off Laius. For my mother, I knew not to make that same mistake twice. I don’t want to say I was cold to her loss but I’m a pretty tough nut and my defenses arrive like Kirk and the deflector shields. It’s involuntary and barely permeable and the best I can do is be aware when it’s happening and try my hardest to compensate. Still, looking back over the last nine months, I can discern the shadow of my grief in the shape of my thoughts and the range of my behavior if not in tears. So many times I’ve chosen paths thinking, “Helen would like this,” or felt the need to report to her and get her reaction to some occurrence. She could not be counted on for a positive reaction. Loving she most certainly was and fun, generous and caring. Supportive? Not one of her strengths. Accepting? Unconditional in her affection? No, not my mom. I told her I was teaching myself guitar. She responded, “I give it six weeks.” I told her I thought I’d attempt some freelance writing. She said, “So few people are successful at that.” I told her I was keeping a blog. She said, “How many people are there interested in what you have to say?” What can I say? Helen was Helen. I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.

In fact, I am amused except for those brief, brief moments when I continue to be angry, hurt and resentful. I’m only human. What I’ve done, though, over these last nine months, is replay old messages my mom left on the brain machine at just the right moment for them to be most suppressing, most inhibiting. I don’t even realize it when I do it. It sounds like my own voice. When my dad, who was no piece of cake himself, died, all of his expectations and disappointments, his competitiveness, his anxieties on my behalf seemed to go down with the sun. I loved him, I miss him but I had no idea of the weight he gave me to carry and after his death I was like a slinky that had been under a rock. With my mom, her judgments lingered like the cheshire cat’s smile long after the rest of her disappeared. Now, brothers and sisters, why have we gathered here today? We are here to understand why I haven’t blogged since the day my mother died. “How many people are there interested in what you have to say?” There’s one more reason too. My mother did not read News or Not News but friends of hers and cousins of mine did and within a few days after I posted an entry word of my latest subject had reached her and she invariably had a response and that response, that may have been the very reason I was doing the blog in the first place, to have my entries retold to her by readers who enjoyed it, who thought it was good. Perhaps I’ve lost my target audience. Fifteen months in, I still practice guitar every day. Davka.* And, apparently, there are people who like to read what I write, a thesis I believe I am testing to the max with this long, newsless, insular entry. I appreciate you getting this far. Hope you liked it.

My Mom had a boyfriend for about a dozen years named Ralph Ceisler. A wonderful guy. Salt of the earth. Big. Heavy. A little reminiscent of Lonesome Lenny in the Tex Avery cartoon of the same name.

I’m remembering he had been in the ladies’ undergarments business before retiring but that may be wrong. That may be Jerry, my mother’s other longterm post-divorce boyfriend. Ralph was a college graduate; in fact, he was very dedicated to and reuned often at his alma mater, the name of which i cannot recall. Veteran Navy officer, had golfing privileges at the local arsenal. When I met him he was older than I am now by about seven years or so. Ralph was in the habit of saying, “At my age, I don’t buy green bananas.” There’s a carpe diem aspect to that, I suppose. “When I want a banana, I want it now. I want it ripe and yellow and ready to go.” Fair enough, right? “My time is precious. I’m not going to waste my time banana waiting.” There’s a disengaging, distancing aspect to it too though, as in, “Don’t get me involved in your banana eating, okay? I just may not be here for the eating.” Fatalistic. He’s accepting a limitation or at least identifying it – “Time is not on my side.” And here is where i’m going to squeeze the metaphor until it turns blue (or yellow) because I’m going to disagree with Ralph. I say: buy the green bananas. Buy ’em! You need to understand, though, that it’s a bonus, an award, a happy accident of fate if you ever get to eat them ripe.

Ralph was, as I say, older than I am now but actuarily, he was younger. He had a right to expect more time than I do. Let’s be real: I’m a cancer survivor, I have no spleen and just a little bit of pancreas, I’m diabetic, I’ve got a clip somewhere in my large intestine where i had a mysterious bleeding ulcer. It doesn’t argue for longevity. Remember that friend of your parents they were always visiting in the hospital, someone who looked fine whenever you saw them but who your parents would say, in dour demeanor, was “not in good shape”?

That turns out to be me. And why not? I smoked and drank and drugged and got too little sleep and too much food all my life. I still do, with far too little discipline or moderation. I’ve abhorred exercise and sports and continue to avoid them notwithstanding how weak and windless those hospital stays have left me. The moving finger is not an idiot. It knew where to find me.

I know. Sometimes that’s just the kind of person who perplexingly lives to 100 but usually not. I’m not saying I’m agnostic as to my future health. I take my insulin at night and frequently during the day too though I don’t test my levels. I do a lot of sitting and lying around but I do a lot of going out too. I’m not sedentary. I stand while I practice guitar (the whole idea that I can learn to play at this point in my life is a little bit green banana buying).  

My weight has leveled out at a point I would have dreamed of four years ago. It’s not all misbehavior and disaster. This past summer, though, was a dog. I spent June in and out of hospitals in dangerously anemic states and, then, in August, my mom died.

I miss her. I’m not going to come in earlier than the traditional twelve months in assimilating that shock. In the month before my mother died she went to an outdoor rock concert for the first time, she swam, she hung out with my friends and got loaded. She lived in a pretty uncompromised state.

So, I say, buy the green bananas! Enjoy going to the store and savor the very act of picking them out, the aroma of them ripening in the bowl on the kitchen counter, put them in a pretty bowl and watch each day the way their colors change.

If you do get to eat them say, “Damn, that was a perfect man-banana encounter. I handled it just right and it worked out fantastically.” Then go out and buy some more.

When I began this blog, my intent was to pick out news stories that were on everyone’s lips but were not worthy of the time or concentration or pixels and stories that I think deserve greater consideration that are being overlooked. The home page of the NYT right now is headlined Trump Disputes Reports of Disarray. The event that merited this attention was that Trump posted self-serving denial-tweets. Are you kidding? Is that what’s going to happen, every twitter-storm gets a headline? At this point, that’s strictly dog bites man.

While I sat in the back of the Uber on my way to my mother’s apartment to find out why she was not answering her phone, I imagined a range of circumstances, none of them good, and I thought about the last time I went out on a similar mission, when my late wife Dorit could not reach her Aunt Aline on the phone. Aline was Dorit’s father’s sister. She was about 80 at the time of this story and lived alone on East 87th Street. When she came over from Poland in the ’30’s she was married to a conductor, Walter Eiger, who went on to build a significant career in Canada, where they both went initially until Aline moved to the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan which was, in the ’40’s, packed with refugees from Poland, Hungary and Germany. She played piano, like her younger brother (who had gone overland from a Russian prison to Palestine), and was able to make a living playing at the many piano bars and social clubs that catered to the sophisticated mittel europe clientele. She also, if Dorit is to be believed, maintained a salon in her small second floor apartment and enjoyed the favors of more than one generous music lover. I have seen a very old nude photo of Aline, a risque move to make in the pre-selfie past. By the time I met Aline she was a frail-seeming little old lady and, I thought, adorable in her well-kept vintage suits. She was, by many criteria, a nasty piece of work. An antisemite notwithstanding her jewishness, she also hated the “darkie” peddlers on 86th Street hawking children’s books which Aline assumed were stolen. She dropped french words into her speech, mon chere. She arrived with a cloud of violet powder trailing her and never went anywhere without a gift which initially might be a book for samara but soon became free discount coupons and used wrapping paper. What Aline loved most of all was opera. “Mon chere, it is the bouquet of all the arts.” She would stand on Lincoln Center Plaza in front of the Met, looking both cute and pathetic, until someone would gift her with a spare ticket, then she would stand in the back of the orchestra for the first act (she was well known to all the ushers) and finally, at intermission, would be ushered to a seat that had been empty up until then and sit in the orchestra for the rest of the performance. Dorit had been visiting Aline every week or so but as Dorit’s cancer came to limit her more and more, the routine devolved into a weekly phone call which was how there came to be a day when Dorit called and Aline didn’t answer the phone. I grabbed a cab to 87th street. I had no keys and so searched for, and located, the super to ask him to drill the lock but lockdrilling was not within his area of competency so he just busted down the door. There, on the floor, was Aline, wearing a nightie and blue bathrobe, eyes wide open and smiling but unable to speak, unable to move in any respect. She had spoken on the phone with Dorit just a week earlier and seemed, perhaps, a little confused but was mostly as she was when we last saw here. She obviously had been worse than she let on. Her toenails were long enough to curl over. The only thing to eat in the apartment was a box of cake mix. While the super called 911, I knelt down beside her and she lifted her arm and grasped my wrist and pulled my hand over her breast, a gesture I remembered my Grandma Bea doing once in the midst of family chaos generated by her husband’s, my grandfather’s, dementia. The EMS team arrived, put her gently on a stretcher and took us to Cornell Medical Center.

After being unable to reach her by phone all day, I went to my mother’s apartment last Monday and found her in her recliner, television on, dead. The funeral was Thursday and today will be the last day my sister and I sit shiva. I will, in the fullness of time, write about Helen, if I decide I’m equal to the subject. In the meantime, here is a photo of her taken this past fourth of August, her 87th birthday.

Trump’s been dishonest about  a lot of things in the course of his campaigning (mostly for the purpose of burnishing his meager record of achievements or denigrate the achievements of others). I’ve posted about some of them here. Now, as he sees the polls coalesce into a consensus he is unable to change our ignore, he’s attacking the very fairness of the voting process (like a kid losing at checkers upsetting the board) and he’s not referring to the vulnerability of the voting machines to hacking or general disarray. “The only way I can lose Pennsylvania is if there’s cheatinggoing on,” he says. What’s the cheat? He’s jumping for a ride on the familiar (and undocumented) Republican craptrain, multiple votes cast by black people (because we know what he means when he dog whistles “in certain areas”).

I love these photos of Afghans holding up purple fingers after casting their votes in the 2014 elections in Afghanistan, full of pride, I imagine, in themselves, in the process and in their country. It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? Holding up their fingers like torches. Despite large portions of the country being beyond reach due to Taliban domination, 58% of eligible Afghan voters came out to exercise their franchise. The voting rate in the 2012 USA presidential race was 53.6%. 

So that’s my simple solution in addition to being my proof that Republican-proffered ID laws are completely disingenuous.  If repeat voters are the issue, and not voter suppression, the simple no-fail, low-tech, low cost solution is the purple finger. Also, I think it would improve participation rates, not only by bringing people excluded by ID laws into the process, but also by shaming eligible voters to the polls. “I have a purple finger. Do you have a purple finger? You must have a purple finger.” Once again, a superficially intractable problem has been solved by me. You’re welcome.

I’ve been a little conflicted about writing about this last couple of weeks in Bridgehampton. Looking at someone else’s vacation photos is one of the more excruciating experiences recorded in human history thus far and I’m thinking that adding some text to that is not going to sweeten the deal. Still, that’s my job, isn’t it, relating the quotidian in an interesting, maybe even entertaining, manner? And lots has gone on too, sailing and fishing and guests and such. I guess I’ve been on vacation blogwise but I’ll be back in the city next week and I suppose I’ll do a quick run-through of recent events. Until then dear readers – put on your sunscreen and always swim with a buddy. I may have just saved your life.

Jolean’s in pain, all beaten up. Bruised, abrasions, sore legs and shoulders. That’s the result of shooting waves from 8:00 in the morning until 6:00 with hardly a break. Body surfing or, sometimes, with a short board. I envy her. When I was a kid, my grandmother would spend the summer at a kuchalane in Rockaway and we would visit often during the season. It was a kind of heaven. The boardwalk, skee ball, Jerry’s knishes, Takee cups, pinball and the ocean. Trust me, I was a buoyant little fellow. I’d bob like a cork, dive beneath the crashing waves our leap just as they hit to keep my head above water. I shot the waves. There was hardly any activity I liked better than shooting the waves. Now, I’m afraid. I feel so fucking weak and fragile. I’m under 150 pounds and I imagine myself cracking like a twig. I go into the water up to my knees like I remember the alter cockers doing at the beach. Like my mother does. Jolean, meanwhile is a porpoise. She’s a mermaid. 

She walks up the beach, slippy and shining wet in the sun, like Bo Derek. That’s right, like Bo Derek.  

And I’m sitting in a short folding beach chair, brushing sand off of me, admiring. I love the ocean, could spend hours staring at the waves, but the beach? Eh. If there was a nice green lawn up to the water’s edge, that would be fine for me. The sand. Why the sand? It gets into everything, it’s hot, it’s scratchy and uncomfortable against your feet. Beautiful? Sure, kind of. The dunes, the tall grass – love ’em. The nasty looking seaweed, littering the shoreline, like someone was pulling the tape out of a hundred cassettes and leaving it in piles right where you want to put your blanket. Not a fan. Seabirds? Very entertaining. I really enjoy watching them. 

Listening to the family who decided, with a whole empty beach, to put their blanket 20 feet from me? I hate them. Morons. It’s a warm, bright sunny morning. It’s a beach day, for sure.