wild abandon

Good job, Milos - you played a great game. I gather.

A few things to share with you:

 Our Prime Minister at Toronto's Gay Pride. Be still my beating heart.

Wimbledon on right now, hope someone wins.

The most stunning Sunday morning here, the air drenched with jasmine, camellia and roses - but in the background, the TV is turned to an epic battle of grunting - Raonic versus Murray, the men's final at Wimbledon. My mother would be so torn; as a Brit she supported Murray, as a patriotic Canadian, she rooted for the young Canuck. I just called Auntie Do, who has been fixated all week, of course, and asked who she's for. "The Canadian," she said, which made me glad; she did leave England forever in 1952, after all. "But Murray is playing better," she said.

I don't care particularly but will check in once in a while.

Home. What bliss, what heaven is this city, so tiny and tidy after NYC, and yet huge, crowded with things to do and places to see. Just the right size for a city person, though growing too fast, the traffic insane. Though not, never, as insane as the streets of New York. I had a thrilling visit to that great city, and was, as always, beyond thrilled to come home.

A last few shots from my trip:

New York is tolerant - signs like this are everywhere.

Spelling perhaps not the strong point here.

There's poetry all over, in the busses and on walls. This famous poem was on the wall at Pen station.

The day after my return I had a sleepover with Eli, who was driving his mama crazy. City day camp starts next week, but in the meantime, she has a very stubborn, extremely energetic boy in a small apartment. He and I had a busy visit - did lots of watering here, went to the Farm, then on Saturday morning he washed the car and went for a drive and then played golf, as the men in his family are wont to do on the weekend. Genetics!

Then we went to see "Finding Dory," a charming film about a fish without a short term memory. Perhaps a bit too advanced for a four year old, but he didn't mind and I enjoyed it, plus the theatre was air-conditioned, and then we rode across town for a barbecue with the rest of the family.

I told Anna about an incident, forecasting the bullying her children are in for in the world - as we were coming home from the Farm we passed through a group of youngsters, around 5 years old. Eli was riding his little wooden strider bike, and one kid planted himself in front of Eli and sneered, "That's the ugliest bike I've ever seen. It doesn't even have pedals. It's even below training wheels!" We just stopped for a few seconds, taking this in, the out of the blue nastiness of a child to a stranger, and then we moved on. Eli didn't mention it, so neither did I, but in the night I fumed - that horrible conscience-less child is going to turn into a hedge fund manager!

Anna said, "Imagine what must be happening to him at home if that's how he responds." What a great big heart she has. She'll need it. There was an article by John Ibbitson in the Saturday Globe about the worsening state of the world, the resurgence of a bullying Russia and the emergence of a bullying China, facing a disintegrating U.S. and a weakened Europe. Very very depressing. Better go out and smell the jasmine.

Okay, I do have a preference. Go Milos!

New York Day Five - Tuesday

Ted gets the New York Times delivered, so I got to read that fine paper as I ate breakfast. To the Café Noi for a final post and to a shop called Sable’s, which was mentioned in the NYT on the weekend and is around the corner from Ted’s – owned and run by Chinese people, it sells lox and sturgeon, traditionally the domain of the Jews. Bought some for Ted and Lola. Then packing and cleaning, making sure there is absolutely no trace of me anywhere. I hope to be able to come back.

Not even a ten minute walk up 3^rd Avenue to Lola’s, to dump my stuff and off to meet Richard Curtis, who became my New York agent in 2006. He loved my Jewish Shakespeare book and tried very hard to sell it, but could not find a commercial press interested – the market, they said, was just too small. So he urged me to find a university press, which eventually I did. I’ve sent him word of how I’m doing, and this time decided to see him again and let him know about my new projects, particularly the next book, about my parents and my uncle Edgar and his arcane world of bridge. Richard thought, though it’s very hard to sell memoirs, he said, there are now so many, there might be interest in a book like that “if you can make it about the larger world.” I will do my best.

Met Lola and her daughter Patti, cab to MOMA. Patti has had an interesting career in fine art restoration, and Lola had worked all her life as an artist and jeweller, so it was interesting touring two exhibits with them, one on Degas’ prints and another, very different, on the modern Californian artist Bruce Connor. The Degas was exquisite – my, that man loved women and yet saw them clearly – I don’t ever think I’ve ever before seen a classic work of art depicting a woman peeing. And Bruce Connor had a very dark sense of humour; I laughed out loud several times.

We had coffee at MOMA, toured the shop and then headed to Grand Central for supper at the Oyster Bar, which worked for Patti as she was heading back to New Haven from there. A delicious meal in a venerable establishment, including fried oysters, plump and juicy. Much, much talk of family. 

Lola and I had a crazy cab ride home – heading off in the wrong direction, much fuming before we got turned around – and then even more talk here about family. She had had a very full day and was still full of energy. A life force. She gave me this quote from Einstein: “The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost. One feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone.” She understands this better than I. 

We watched a DVD I’d sent her of my family’s early years, film taken by Pop, my grandfather, her mother Belle’s beloved older brother. It showed my dad as a boy sledding in Central Park, he and his little brother Edgar at a place by a lake and at boys’ camp – playing baseball, Edgar the shy intellectual strikes out and my aggressive dad hits a home run. Lola exclaimed, There’s Grandma! Yetta Kaplan, born near Minsk, the family matriarch, a difficult woman. Lola remembers her. Lola remembers when the Hindenburg went down. She is a human history book.

Lola and her sometime caregiver from Uganda, Jennifer

A picture I'd never seen before. The little boy, bottom centre, is my dad, with his father right behind him, somehow looking like everyone in the family. The smiling woman is Belle, Lola's mother, the other man is her husband Jerry, and the little girl on the end is Lola. Must be about 1924. 

We talked about the anti-Semitism her family, and she herself, had endured – her father Jerry Golinko had booked a hotel for a family holiday, but when the check-in guy saw him – “Golinko was not a Jewish name but Dad looked Jewish” – he was turned away: “No Jews are allowed here.”

Now I have to get dressed and go to Newark.

The New Yorker

Yesterday at 06:00 · 

In Daily Shouts: "I hated New York, a city where the desperately overworked and the startlingly rich breathe in the smells of each other’s garbage frying on griddle-like summer sidewalks."

New York Day Four - Monday

Monday July 4. One of the most important national holidays here, but of course, almost no-one is on holiday in the city that never sleeps. This morning, off to the Met, there just as it opened at 10, in through the south entrance few know about that’s always empty. This is one of the best art museums in the world – I like it much better than the chaotic overpowering jumble of the Louvre, and it has a greater span than the National Gallery in London, since the Met incorporates the kind of antiquities kept in the British Museum. An amazing place.

I went to an exhibition a New York friend had recommended, showing the relationship between high fashion done by hand and done by machine, a celebration of extraordinary design and mostly Parisian craftsmanship – amazing stuff no-one will ever wear and beautiful, handcrafted things – sequins! feathers! - that wealthy women did.

A dress made of straws

Exquisite

Adding this to my fall wardrobe.

Up to the second floor, to the magic room with FIVE Vermeers, the most in one place anywhere, I think. Again, his serenity and empathy, his exquisite detail – I love to sit with those 350 year old women and enjoy their company.  Toured through the Italian renaissance, though I feel I’ve done those geniuses thoroughly with Bruce, as he toured me through the museums and churches of Italy.

A quick lunch, a peek at the Sphinx, at the medieval rooms, and out into the day. From the sublime to the … sale at Bloomingdale’s. I needed a pair of black pants that were neither jeans nor dressy and found exactly that half price, Gerard Darel, a quality French designer. Also tried on bathing suits – definitely not. The salespeople are so attentive and polite, everyone saying hello and smiling as if they mean it – extraordinary when one has spent any time shopping in France.

Subway home, stopping at the Housing Works Thrift Store across the street where I found a $10 t-shirt to wear with my new pants. Resting briefly back at Ted’s now, and then out again to meet Gail, my uncle’s dear friend, at the Guggenheim.

Another sublime day.

9 p.m. It’ll soon be July 4 fireworks time in NYC, and it’s pouring with rain. I’m sorry for all the families out there getting wet. But I am in here with my feet up, because they really really hurt.

Walking up Madison Ave. to the Guggenheim, I could not help but notice – no, really, I could not help it – the Mephisto shoe store, with a Sale sign, right there. I have been wearing a great pair of Mephisto sandals for years, and now they, like their owner, are worn out. There, on sale, a similar pair in my size. This is why one comes to New York.

Well, this, and the museums and the theatre and the amazing everything. Gail and I had coffee in the miraculous Guggenheim, talking about the man we both loved deeply, her friend and bridge mentor and my uncle. Gail, who’s married with four children and 10 grandchildren and runs a huge bridge business, moved in with Edgar to care for him in his last months, as he died of cancer in 1997. “He was like a god to me,” she said. We discussed the intense, to me incomprehensible world of bridge. Gail fell in love with the game in her late teens and has been immersed in it ever since, which is just what happened to my uncle.

We toured the museum, especially the permanent collection with its luminous Kandinskys,

walked up and down the winding path inside, and then I walked Gail along 5^th Ave. for some blocks while we talked. She went home, and I walked in the park, where I saw a happy American family on a holiday outing – Mum and Dad so focussed on their phones they didn’t even notice me taking a picture, and two bored daughters with the controls of their sailboats on the pond.

On the way home, I heard a woman behind me admonish her two small children about being too patriotic; “Americans sometimes do bad things.” I turned around to smile at her and we ended up walking some blocks together, while she ranted. Seriously crazy, it turned out. Voting is just supporting the system, which is rigged and corrupt. We are just pawns. THEY want you to vote, and the choices are horrendous, she says. I saw a guy on Bill Maher’s TV show a few weeks ago saying the same thing, urging people “not to vote and support the system.” Jesus. She went on about the Peloponnesian War and the Athenians and how the Greeks invented history, and I thanked her and steered myself down another street. God help us if people who live on the Upper East Side of New York do not vote.

Home to put up my very sore feet, eat leftovers, finish the Pinot, pack. Tomorrow Cousin Ted reclaims his apartment and I’m moving my stuff to Lola’s for one night on her sofa, then lunch with my agent Richard Curtis, then MOMA with Lola and her daughter Patti, my cousin once removed, who knows a great deal about art. Maybe one more Broadway show tomorrow night. Wednesday – home. Full full full full.

9.30 Massive explosions despite the rain – the fireworks. Happy Fourth of July, crazy country. 9.45, still going strong, both rain and booming.

New York Day Three - Sunday continued

Sunday July 3. Walked across the beautiful park, with its old trees, hills and winding paths, always a surprise around the corner – including a vista that looks like the middle of the country – 

to the west side. My whole New York life was lived on the west side until my uncle died and I had to move to the east. I still consider myself a west side person in NYC. In Toronto, I am a rabid eastsider.

There’s a farmer’s market now on Columbus, stretching for blocks, many artisanal delights. I went to the Green Flea market, held on Sunday mornings, to look for my friend Jay Kavi, an elderly man from India who had a jewellery booth stuffed with sparkly goodies. I bought many little things from Jay Kavi through the years. On my last visit, he wasn’t there, so I was concerned, and this time I found out that Jay died. New York shrinks for me, yearly, but I guess everywhere does. Cousin Lola told me she has no friends left. They’re all gone.

More memory lane – I walked to the Clifton House on W. 79^th, where my grandparents lived till they moved to Sarasota in 1963. I told the doorman they used to live there, he asked their names and when I told him, he exclaimed, oh yes, I know that name, there’s still junk mail sometimes. I find that hard to believe more than 50 years after they moved away, but why not?

And then I walked up to W. 94^th to look at #39, my uncle’s house, sold in 1998. He would hate it now, with cutesie decorations and a forest of little American flags all over the steps. 

But I’m sure it’s in better shape than it was when he lived there and the place was crumbling. He ran Bridge World magazine out of the third floor and didn’t care the paint was flaking from the walls. The wine and food, on the other hand, were treated with scrupulous care.

Back across town to eat the last of my fish from Eli’s with a bit more Pinot, then down the street to Lola. We got an Uber to the matinee, there almost an hour early, but that’s a good idea when you’re with a 94-year old. Lola is marvellously feisty, though sometimes it’s a bit embarrassing  – she comments loudly on everyone around her. “Look at him, so fat!” she exclaimed about a man sitting almost right in front of us. “The poor person who has to sit next to him!” “Shhh!” I said.

The Humans is a family drama, parents drive in to NYC from Scranton, Pennsylvania with his mother who has Alzheimer’s to have Thanksgiving dinner with their two daughters, one who has just moved in with her boyfriend on the Lower East Side and the other, a lesbian lawyer who has come in from Philadelphia. The dialogue is note-perfect, funny and very real; we see unfold over and over the tensions beneath every family, the way parents nag out of love, how disappointed they are in their kids’ choices despite that love, how predictable their comments are, the way kids roll their eyes about their parents yet need them deeply. It hit uncomfortably close to home; I resolved to try to stop sending messages about health to my offspring. There’s a haunting sense of menace; 9/11 lurks in the background, and the new apartment has unexplained noises and lights going off, as if poltergeists live there too. And again, a secret must be revealed. Terrific acting and direction. Not my favourite kind of theatre, realistic family drama, but terrific nonetheless.

Lola and I got the 8^th Avenue bus uptown to get out of the Times Square area as quickly as possible; she knows all the bus routes so we headed for the crosstown bus at Lincoln Centre. I offered to take her for dinner, and as we approached the bus stop, there across the street was a Chinese restaurant called Shun Lee. It was one of my uncle’s favourite places; I ate there several times with him, the last time when he was suffering the effects of chemo and in rough shape. Lola and I had a delicious dinner there and toasted him. What a pleasure that was. She said, “He loved you very much, you know, your uncle.” And I, him.

Got Lola home. It was such a beautiful night that I went for a stroll around the streets – the sidewalk tables of the restaurants packed – and then went up to the roof garden here to watch the sunset. Sublime.