Mallory's Camera

A most fabulous visit to D.C.!

Alex is an epic hostess, so the two and two-half days felt like a mini-version of one of those fabulous house parties you read about in British novels: the adorable house that is just like a museum to Alex's quirky, interesting tastes, an enormous range of actual museums—we did the National Museum of African American History & Culture and Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post mansion where the Fabergé Eggs live—splendid weather; adorable felines; and non-stop conversation, perfectly timed so that the moment it began to pall was the morning I left to come back.

Alex also made it into The New York Times!



She had been to the Science Protest March just before I arrived.

Alex may be the only person in the world who's perfectly recognizable from the back of her head.

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She & her husband live in the same house her husband was born & brought up in, & every inch is filled with the most delightful kitsch. Kitsch is very much my own design aesthetic, so I scampered 'round the domicile, taking Art Photos™ at every opportunity:





Alex adopts people—by which I mean if she sees an opportunity to help them thrive, she helps them thrive! I see this in the way she opens her house to young people—presently, she has a very adorable young Russian woman, Arina, living with her—and to some extent, I see it in her friendship with me. It is a really lovely quality—and a rare quality.



So, the African American Museum...

It is a great museum, but I had some issues with the way the permanent exhibition is designed.

The permanent exhibition recreates the history of slavery—which is not necessarily the history you think you know. The exhibits are arranged chronologically, starting with the journey from Africa and the Middle Passage in dark, narrow halls in the lowest concourse of the building and culminating with the contemporary experience of African Americans in the somewhat brighter higher concourse—although given that, ironically enough, D.C.'s Black Lives Matter Plaza was being dismantled the very weekend I was in town, the contemporary experience may not be that much brighter.

There is no escape from the permanent exhibition, no easy way to drop in and out of the pieces you might specifically want to see. The design immerses you in the entire experience—and while I understand the intentionality of that design, it does make it difficult for people like me whose attention span gives out after about an hour and a half, no matter how worthy I may deem the overall experience.

It's an exhibition crafted for first-time visitors, in other words.

Repeat visitors are going to have a difficult time with it.

And even this first-time visitor developed a mild headache—it was so dark, so claustrophobic! And, of course, I understood that this headache was a measure of the exhibit's success—the suffering of the enslaved translating physically into my own discomfort.

Except—I was in a position to terminate my discomfort.

And wandered out somewhere around the beginning of Reconstruction.





Hillwood, in contrast, was all opulence & comfort as befits the spring-&-fall mansion of one of the obscenely rich.

We had a delightfully enthusiastic & mildly wacky tour guide:



Marjorie Merriweather Post became a connoisseur of 20th-century Tsarist art, something by accident—her third husband was FDR's ambassador to Russia. And the pieces were absolutely magnificent:





But I couldn't help thinking that in essence, they were not all that dissimilar to the lovely whimsies scattered around Alex's house.

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Alex said one other thing I want to remember.

Alex is a good cook. A comfortable cook. And we were talking about cooking, how challenging menu planning can be, & she said, "Well, of course, if you know your way around a kitchen, you don't see a loaf of bread, you see four sets of sandwiches, and one serving of French toast, and possibly bread pudding."

In other words, cooking isn't about recipes; it's about ingredients.

Words to live by.

Quite the fabulous mini-vacay!

From the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I traveled to the NYC Botanical Garden to see the miniature trains. Very cunning & adorable they were:





Though even more cunning & adorable was the strange & wondrous New York City some arboreal-minded miniaturist had conjured out of found materials like branches, acorns, bark, and leaves:





Neil Gaiman’s Christmas Carol was excellent.

Gaiman didn’t read from the published version of A Christmas Carol.

And, apparently, neither did Dickens.

Instead, Dickens went through the tale, took out all the long-winded, expostulatory passages, and prepared a kind of read-aloud version with stage directions—Stand up here. Gasp & hold finger up here. Pull beard reflectively here. Etc, etc—which he called a “prop book.”

The New York City Library somehow came into possession of Christmas Carol’s prop book, and Gaiman used it to guide his performance:



Gaiman has a remarkably pleasant public persona. It was just so interesting to watch how this evolved into his relationship with the audience. Because in the end, it’s not the material that makes a performance—it’s the delivery that makes the performance, and Gaiman can turn two sentences that lie flat on a page into a laugh fest. You see it most clearly when he is performing his own stuff:



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As always, I remain intrigued by the secret life of New York City rooftops, which can only be viewed from the windows of certain magical hotels—



—and mystified by biznesses that occupy upper stories in Midtown buildings:



I mean, that barbershop. Gotta be a money-laundering operation, right?

###

In the morning, I took my coffee at one of the many kiosks in Grand Central Station.

Grand Central Station right now is surrounded by homeless people, struggling to sleep over subway gratings that might keep them warm. I struggled mightily with my desire to document this phenomenon and my respect for other people’s privacy. In the end, respect for privacy won out: If I were sleeping on a subway grate outside Grand Central Station, I wouldn’t want anyone taking photos of me.

But I feel like I’m seeing more homeless than ever before, and if I can’t document it, then how do I prove that?

###

After coffee, I toddled off to J.P. Morgan’s old mansion, which is now a small museum.

The museum was staging an exhibition on medieval money, merchants, & morality.

Will money damn your soul?

Clearly, Hieronymus Bosch thought so:



Clearly, the 9th century monarch who owned this bible did not:



Of course, the great jewel of J.P. Morgan’s old mansion is its library:



Whimsical statuary had been installed up & down Park Avenue, and the Yuletide buskers this year mostly seem to be horn players:





I liked Manhattan much better on this visit than I had over Thanksgiving.

I’m old, so I’m invisible.

But being invisible seemed more like a superpower this time round.

###

As soon as I got back, I immediately felt weighted down by a very physical sense of apprehension—

It’s because you don’t feel safe, thought I to myself.

Sadly, this is an all too familiar feeling.

I can remember feeling just this way at three years old when I had to deal with my mother’s insane, capricious moods, and of course, it was an intermittent beacon—Danger, Will Robinson!!!—flashing throughout all the long years of my relationship with Ben.

I’m feeling it now with Lois Lane. She’s been very flakey on the responding-to-communications front. Which does not auger well given that we have plans to set up housekeeping together.

Flakiness has ever been friendship’s burden with Lois Lane. There’s a deep bond there, felt and acknowledged on both sides, but also that flakiness on her part.

Thing is, I never know how much I can rely on my gut when I start feeling this particular species of anxiety. You’re overreacting, some logical part of my brain counsels.

And in many cases, that would be true.

But it wasn’t true in my relationship with Ben where, if anything, I underreacted because I simply couldn’t believe I loved and trusted someone who was such a sociopath.

My kids tell me I am constantly over-anxious for no good reason.

And every time they do, I secretly think, Good! If you think it’s over nothing, that means I protected you from seeing the very real situations that caused that anxiety.

###


Owning this feeling in precisely these words—I do not feel safe—is actually pretty helpful.

It makes asking the corollary question automatic: What do I need to feel safe?

And that inspires agency.

I need to start working on a Plan B. And a Plan C. And maybe even a Plan D.

That is a bit daunting because it widens the circles on the map again.

The current living situation has settled down. L seems to have largely bounced back from Whatever It Was, leading me to believe that Whatever It Was was what they call a transient ischemic attack, a TIA, a kind of mini-stroke. To the best of my knowledge, she never sought medical follow-up. And she could have another TIA at any time, of course.

But the Universe seems to have granted me a stay until spring on the moving front.

I wouldn't want to try the Universe’s generosity beyond that point, though.

Baltimore was the Big Fun.

I had a delightful time there although, of course, three days—really one day and two half-days—is not enough time to do anything more than skim the surface, and as a big fan of The Wire, I was a bit disappointed not to hear Omar whistling The Farmer in the Dell from around a corner or visit Stringer Bell’s CopyMat.

Still. The American Visionary Art Museum is a sui generis in my admittedly not extensive experience with curated art collections. I would go back to Baltimore just to visit it again. World-class acquarium, too. And it was fun just walking around, trying to figure out what part of what I saw was unique to Baltimore and what part was the vision of some frustrated city planner, thinking, What can we do to get people to come to Baltimore without thinking of “The Wire”?

I met up with lookfar there. She is excellent company! Having a sympatico traveling companion definitely enhances the traveling experience. We each experienced A Small Setback in the course of the trip—she lost a beloved earring that she had just bought! I had one of those insomniac experiences I have from time to time—and I think had either of us been by our solitary, these setbacks would have been enough to invoke the dreaded Pall.

But together, we were able to disburse the negative vibes by planning and normalizing—we would simply go back to the American Visionary Art Museum and she would buy another pair of earrings! I would drink more than my customary two morning cups of coffee and sleep on the train! Thus, the setbacks were mere blips on the Big Fun panorama.

Some pictorial highlights:

I walked down Charles Street from the train station to our hotel in the Inner Harbor. Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station has this oh-so-bizarre and what-were-they-thinking statue pondering its generic Beaux Arts façade:



Charles Street, Baltimore’s great east/west dividing line, took me through the pleasant Mt. Vernon neighborhood, which is filled with parks and elegant brownstone mansions, now subdivided into apartments and offices. This church (which I thought might be modeled after a forelorn sandcastle its architect once dribbled on some horrible seaside vacation during his lonely and neglected childhood) is actually some sort of Methodist cathedral. No, seriously!!!!!!



The Mt Vernon neighborhood is filled with Himalayan restaurants for some reason.

Here is the Inner Harbor. It reminded me a great deal of that dirty scrap of San Francisco Bay alongside Oakland’s Jack London Square.



Three things I noticed right away.

(1). Remember when electric scooters were popular in every American city with a population over 100,000? Most American cities with populations over 100,000 did away with them over liability issues—because if you had an accident on one, sure you’d sue the scooter company. But you’d also sue the city because deep pockets!

Baltimore did not get rid of the scooters. Scooters remain immensely popular in Baltimore:



(2) People in Baltimore still throw their cigarette butts on the street. You hardly ever see cigarette butts on the streets of NYC anymore. But the streets and sidewalks of Baltimore are littered nwith them.

(3) Baltimore has a very diverse population. But—from this one outsider’s view at least—it had a bit of a The City and the City vibe to it. You’d see white people and Black people strolling outside, enjoying the wide promenade that leads along the waterfront. But you didn’t see white people with Black people. Very few integrated couples or friendship groups—this in sharp contrast to NYC, which is the city I’m most familiar with.

In fact, lookfar and I spent half an hour Saturday afternoon watching kids play in a fountain that had been turned into an impromptu water park. And the kids of different colors did not acknowledge each other. I have watched similar scenes in NYC parks, and whatever the grownups may think of each other, kids of a certain age who are playing in close proximity are quick to make friends. But not here.

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Here are lookfar and I taking off for the American Visionary Art Museum. Don’t we look fabulous?



lookfar’s hair endears her everywhere she goes! I think maybe a hundred people stopped her on the street to exclaim, I LOVE YOUR HAIR!!!!!!

She has great fashion sense, too! Altogether, an exemplary travel companion.

The American Visionary Art Museum is beyond fantastic. A relatively small collection, thank Gawd, because I looked intently at every single piece and therefore reached Total Museum Exhaustion relatively quickly—I absolutely love museums, but being inside one is a little bit like being inside a nuclear reactor for me because if you look at things, really look at them, it is very intense.

My two favorite exhibits:

The Fart Machine:



Surrounded by fart art!!!!





And then this tropical jungle that was apparently devised for a Bergdorf Goodman window back in the days when the department store windows along Fifth Avenue were veritable museums in and of themselves:





What the hell could such a window display have been selling?

And then there was the museum gift shop, which simply was The Best Museum Gift Shop EV-AH!!!!!!!!

I went wild! Purchased fabulous new eyewear!





And Zoltar sends his best ❤️LUV❤️ to smokingboot:



I could write tons more but not today. I have other things to do.

Oh—one more thing:

Nafisa called this morning to offer me a COVID booster shot.

“Don’t you have to wait a certain amount of time after you get the second shot? If you got Moderna or Pfizer?” I asked.

“We don’t give according to interval,” she replied. “I love you. I am concerned to you—do you say ‘concerned to you’ or ‘concerned for you?’”

Nafisa lost her mother to COVID. In Sudan. From whence she and her family had just returned.

Still, I am fairly certain she is wrong and that the proper interval is eight months.

Carol and I had a fabulous time!

We laughed and laughed and laughed, and pried into the intimate details of each others’ lives, and endlessly debated the question of why there are still cornfields throughout New York’s Southern Tier that have not yet been harvested even though it is nigh October.

Also, we explored Watkins Glen State Park, visited the Farm Sanctuary, made two trips to the Corning Glass Museum, and generally immersed ourselves in the deeply weird ambiance of small towns that ought not to exist except that at one time, 200 years or so ago, somebody thought there was some compelling reason to build them.

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If ever Wes Anderson decides to make a movie about a weird little hotel in the Finger Lakes, he’ll pick the Finger Lakes Waterfall Resort.

The property includes Hector Falls’ two lowest cascades:



As you can see, the falls are right under a concrete roadway. Not optimal placement for a majestic landscape attraction! Upstate New York is just filled with strange civic engineering decisions like this one.

The Ritz Carleton, it was not. Days Inn, it was not. Jonathan, the guy who owns it, spent 15 years driving a taxi until he could save up enough money to buy a dilapidated 1960s resort, which he is slowly renovating. The rooms have all the amenities, but scattered across the property are cabins he hasn’t gotten around to renovating yet. Funky!



I love funk.

“You don’t mind if I give you some advice, do you?” I asked Jonathan. (Of course, if he had minded, I would have given him advice anyway! It's one of the things the exchange of cash allows you to do.) “If I were you, I’d play up the funk! Pretend it’s a style decision! Maybe paint the place pink! Or yellow! Throw some plastic flamingos around. Wait! What would be the Finger Lakes equivalent of flamingoes?”

“Uh—we’re putting in aluminum siding,” said Jonathan very politely.

Anyway, I loved the Finger Lakes Waterfall Resort. TripAdvisor members, by and large, did not. So I urge anyone reading this to log on to the TripAdvisor site immediately and write the Finger Lakes Waterfall Resort a glowing review.

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Watkins Glen State Park is justly famous for its gorge. It wasn’t formed by the usual erosion process but by the unequal rates at which the underlying sedimentary shale, sandstone, and limestone layers freeze and fracture. The result is a natural staircase—considerably helped out by WPA efforts in the 1930s—that runs along Glen Creek's waterfalls, cascades, and plunging pools:







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In the early days of my marriage to Ben, while I was working for People Magazine, we would visit Nancy, his mother, in Millport every summer. Robin was her only grandchild.

Millport is a mere 10 miles away from Watkins Glen.

So, Watkins Glen brings back memories.

It may have been here, in fact, that I developed my obsession with economic geography since B and I spent endless hours tromping around the town and the hills above it, wondering whether it would make any sense to buy one of those 19th century mansions with incredible stained glass windows but only one indoor bathroom for seven bedrooms and, of course, despite the fireplaces, a bitch to heat in the winter. You could buy one back then for $50,000. The mansions had been built by industrial moguls, businesses long since bankrupted, corpses rotting away in one of the innumerable graveyards that also dot this part of New York.

The area has changed. The New York Finger Lakes district is now the second-largest wine area in the U.S., and they specialize in the types of Teutonic whites, Rieslings and Pinot Blancs, that don’t do well in Napa/Sonoma.

Money flows into those tiny towns that dot the lakeshores! But it’s seasonal money. Wintertime is bleak. So little Watkins Glen uses every trick it can to bilk the tourists in the high season. Oddly, the town elders haven’t figured out that the best way to bilk tourists is to offer tourists McLuxury at bargain rates. Watkins Glen’s bilking is cheesy and therefore, touchingly innocent:



Why, there’s even a Zoltar!



Bruce Shoe’s family originally came from the Finger Lakes. (That’s why they have that cottage on Keuka Lake.) Perry made all his real money buying and selling railroads when he subsequently moved to Minnesota. But the original Shoe building still stands:



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The Corning Museum of Glass is astonishing in every way.

Unlike just about every other museum I’ve ever been in—including several New York City museums I actually belong to—the Corning Museum of Glass did not give me a migraine after an hour and a half. Maybe I won’t be a veterinarian in my next life. Maybe I’ll be an artist who works in glass:



A tiny, tiny fraction of all the wondrous things we saw:











We did a glassmaking class. Here is Carol looking grim and determined as she begins her apprenticeship:



Due to a failure in communication, our beads will be mailed.

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We also visited the Watkins Glen Farm Sanctuary, founded by Deadheads in the late 1980s. The Sanctuary houses just under 1,000 animals rescued from farm factories and the like but mostly functions as an advocacy group. It’s a wonderful place, and I’m sending them a check:









“I’m starting to feel guilty about eating meat,” Carol murmured to me halfway through the tour.

Not me! Meat doesn’t comprise a huge part of my diet anyway, but the little I eat, I like.

The Sanctuary is big on promoting the vegan lifestyle.

To me, though, it’s not about giving up meat. It’s about raising animals that provide that meat in a more humane way. Or possibly growing meat proteins in vats.

At Deep Springs, Max did a rotation as the ranch butcher for six months. He has a trade he can fall back on when this U.S. Constitution thing crashes and burns!

But, after he started at Stanford, he became a vegetarian for a while. When I asked him about it, he told me “Oh, I’m not really a vegetarian. I’ll eat meat. But only if I know it was raised and slaughtered in a humane way. Like I’ll eat venison if I know the hunter.”

He’s no longer hardcore about his diet, but I suspect he’s still very careful about sourcing meat proteins.

One thing I think I will give up is eating turkey on Thanksgiving because those factory farms really do torture those turkeys. Not gonna post pix—they're actually pretty scary— but those poor turkeys looked like prisoners who’d survived some kind of Abu Ghraib run by Napoleon the Pig.

Anyway, fabulous weekend:



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Of course, Watkins Glen is only 30 miles from Tburg, so on the way home, I popped in to see RTT:



In general, he is doing well. Returned to work. Completely rearranged the furniture in the apartment—it looks a thousand times better; he has a really good eye for design.

But, of course, rearranging the furniture means he’s gonna stay in the apartment. For the foreseeable future.

I get why this is practical. John, the landlord, is gonna give him a break on the rent. It’s close to his work. He doesn’t have a car, doesn’t yet have a driver’s license, and when I offered—once again—to give him my car, he said, “Thanks, Mom. But I am never, ever gonna learn to drive a stick shift. I tried. It’s not happening.”

On a deeper level, it’s the place he’s called home for the past 10 years.

And right now, he needs the security that only home can give him.

But he has got to get out of Tburg. Out of upstate New York. I worry that it gets harder and harder to generate escape velocity, and I don’t know how I can communicate that to him without nagging.

Plus there is my sense that come winter, Ben’s ghost, like Catherine Earnshaw’s before it, will begin tapping at the window: Let me in! Let me in!

Robin is sad. The old posse has dissipated. Fortunately, he has gotten back together with the fabulous Rachel who love/love/love/loves him and will take as good care of him as he will let her.

Still. I was melancholy the next morning when I finally began driving back towards the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. Route 17! In the rain! The very highway that Ben and I drove so often when we were very much in love and if not exactly young, then at least not yet old.

I swear—when I’d made the trip three days ago, the trees in the Catskills were still mostly green!

And now, they were mostly orange.

Yesterday was one of those days.

Meaning: I spent the day in a mild panic attack.

Why? Who knows?

In the morning, I got a call from my insurance company: They’d tried to run my annual DMV report except the DMV told them that I don’t exist.

“But I do exist!” I said. “I’ll send you a copy of my driver’s license to prove it!”

Obviously, someone had mistyped some letters in my exceedingly ethnic name into the vast and cumbersome digital New York State motorist databank.

Vast and cumbersome digital databanks scare me on some primitive level, so I immediately started thinking that I’d done something, committed some act that seemed trivial at the time – so trivial, in fact, that I didn’t actually remember committing it. Clearly, though, it had been an act with a rebound effect, a butterfly effect so overwhelming and inexorable that now it was threatening my very existence in this time/space continuum –

No shit. I think stuff like that fairly often.

Anyway, crippling existential doubt seeped into the morning.

There was also some bureaucratic unpleasantness with the Tax-Aide people. I passed the tax recertification exam with a perfect score the second time around, but Gawd, the people who administer that program are fucking idiots, and I wasted a couple of hours dealing with them.

Lunched with Doris, the intrepid Democrat, who chided me for my absence from Bernie Sanders petitioning efforts.

“But he’s not gonna win, Doris. I mean, I love the guy, I’ll vote for him. But campaigning for him? That seems like wasted effort.”

“You don’t know that,” said Doris.

“I do know that,” I said. “The Paris bombings changed everything. Americans aren’t interested in economic equality. They’re obsessed with national security. And Bernie’s too honest to play that card.”

Somehow we started talking about the End of Doris’s Long-Term Live-In Relationship, which had taken place only this past April.

Linda had filled me in on some of the Doris backstory. Linda knows Doris socially because Hyde Park is a small town, and everyone knows everyone in Hyde Park, plus Doris was the Democratic candidate for the 19th District Congressional seat a billion or so years ago – the very same Congressional seat that Gore Vidal ran for a billion years or so before that.

“Her boyfriend was incredibly good-looking,” said Linda. “But arrogant. And, I don’t know. Seedy.”

‘We’d been together 20 years,” said Doris. “He was a lot older than me. And one day, we were arguing about going to the movies – I wanted to go; he didn’t. Finally, I told him, ‘Well, I’m going. I’ll bring you back some popcorn.’ And I went. And when I got home, he wouldn’t talk to me. I thought he was just being a jerk, and cooked dinner. But he wouldn’t eat. He just sat there. So finally, I said, ‘Look – if you don’t respond in any way, I’m going to have to assume something’s physically wrong with you and call 911.’ So I did.”

“Wow,” I said. “A lot of effort to maintain umbrage.”

“Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t umbrage,” Doris said. “He’d had a stroke.”

“Oh,” I said.

“If you catch it within the first 12 hours, they can reverse a lot of the neurological damage,” said Doris. “I went to visit him in the hospital. ‘Look,’ I told him. ‘I’ll be happy to do what I can for you. But I’m not a nurse. And if you think you need more care, you ought to contact your children.’ Then I had to go off to a political convention in Philly. And while I was gone, I got this very odd email. From Delta airlines. A flight confirmation. My partner, you see, did not have email. So when he made the flight reservation – to go to California where his children live – he used my email account. And when I got home, he was gone.”

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of any remark more insightful. She certainly didn’t look bent out of shape. “Do you have children?”

“Two daughters. One in Massachusetts, one in North Carolina.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Oh, I smile at their photographs occasionally when I pass by them,” Doris said. She didn’t seem particularly bent out of shape by that either.

###

Coupla weeks ago, as reported here, Pat and I had had a shortish conversation about the advantages of having children who live at a distance. “They’re always scrutinizing you for mental lapses,” Pat said. “It gets tiresome.”

###

Who will take care of me when I have my stroke, I wonder? I certainly wouldn’t trust either of my kids. I mean – I have no doubt that my kids love me, but they’re censorious, they view me with some embarrassment.

No, I think the person I’d want to live out my doddering last years with is Summer.



Summer and I had quite the jolly time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art day before yesterday. She likes to do what I like to do, which is basically not to check out any one particular exhibition but to get lost, to view great works of art and exquisite, timeless treasures at random.

She has a good eye for pattern recognition. Thus, when we looked at a pair of Ingres landscapes, she was able to point out to me that the laurel tree in both paintings was exactly the same.

“Ohhhhh! You’re right!” I said. I would never have noticed this on my own.

I was still under the influence of a conversation I’d had with Lorenzo, the new occupant of the downstairs rental along with his wife Markie. Before he decided to go to CIA so he could take the culinary world by storm, Lorenzo had been an artist and an art teacher.

“Thing is,” Lorenzo told me, “one’s perception of color is always biased. When you look at snow, you see it as white. But the truth is that snow isn’t white; it’s reflecting the sky. If you could really see it, train yourself to really see it, you’d know that on a sunny day, snow is blue.”

Summer and I had wandered into the French Impressionist Hall – the Met really needs to give me back all those Monet water lilies I loaned to them in an earlier incarnation as a filthy rich industrialist – and looking at those colors, I marveled at their magic. Up close, they look like seemingly random blobs of color on a canvas; step back six feet, and only then, do they resolve into images. But how does one paint like that?

“I am thinking that the Internet is very bad for painting,” said Summer. “Because they have those color charts. Where color is numbers, you know? And everybody think: Aha! This is the truth about color. But color is not numbers.”

Not entirely true, I thought. There is a difference between the behavior of colored pigments and the behavior of colored light. And light is essentially what you’re seeing on a computer screen.

But I knew what she meant.

We lasted three hours at the Museum. Three hours is usually all I can take. Being inside a museum is a bit like being inside a nuclear reactor: It’s very intense.

Afterwards, we took the train into the Brooklyn where I introduced her to BB. Handed the ESL baton over. They seemed to warm to each other. We’d been doing weekly English lessons via FaceTime, but for all sorts of reasons, that really doesn’t work. And she needs people with whom to practice her English. More importantly, she needs friends.

There’s a rusty bicycle that’s been chained to a streetlamp on the northwest corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street for the entire time I’ve been kinda, sorta hanging out in Greenpoint – what is that? Almost two years now?

I keep wanting to take a photo of it, but every time I try, all I ever get is a picture of a rusty bicycle.

But really, that bicycle is an interrupted story.

Who locked that bicycle so carefully to that street post? Why didn’t they ever come back for it?

I suppose that’s why I like cities so much. They’re just crammed with these totem objects, each one a layered narrative begging to be deciphered.

###

I’m crashing once again in BB’s fantabulous apartment, and I passed that bicycle on my way to the subway, which I took to the upper West Side because yesterday, I was seized by a sudden longing to go to the New York Historical Society.

As an orphan human child being raised by a wolf on the Upper West Side, my weekends had a set pattern. On Saturdays, I would hang out in museums, generally the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art – but every once in a while, the New York Historical Society, which is right across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. On Sundays, I would hang out with my best friend Roberta, and we’d walk to Greenwich Village and back. Greenwich Village had no particular significance; it was just a place to turn around. Roberta and I played a game, and that game was to make up stories about the interesting people we would see en route. These people were given names like Roderick and Maximillian and Allegra and Violante, and their stories inevitably concluded in horrendous acts of matricide. We were ten, eleven, twelve years old at the time and neither of us had heard of Freud.

Anyway, the New York Historical Society was an interesting place, filled with dusty glass cases crammed with interesting things like miniature portraits of people left over from the days when people were flat and had no third dimension as well as looming paintings of bucolic scenes that purported to be Manhattan Island, though since one could dimly make out trees and shepherds through layers of yellowing varnish, clearly they were not Manhattan Island: Where were the skyscrapers?

The New York Historical Society, I’m sad to say, has succumbed to contemporary curatorial mandates. These days, the majority of museums keep most of their artifacts locked up. The few they deign to put on display have spotlights and helpful annotations: In the late 19th century, Five Points was one of Manhattan’s most notorious slums…

I hate this.

I think museums should be one big dusty jumble where you can free associate.

Plus the New York Historical Society is in the process of using dead Henry Luce’s money to redo its fourth floor, which means that very little of its permanent collection will be open to the public for the next two years.

They were hosting a few traveling exhibitions – one on the history of Chinese immigration, another an Annie Leibowitz portfolio of non-portraits.



The Chinese immigration exhibition made me flash on the fact that I’ve actually written what’s essentially a 500-page novel on Chinese immigration.

My Steinbeck novel.

Which is all about how in the winter of 1932, John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell encounter the ghosts of the Chinese who established a fishing village along Point Alones in the 1860s and who were subsequently burned out by Italian fishermen in 1906. Highjinks ensue. Some of the highjinks involve William Randolph Hearst. I invented a kind of vengeful supernatural spirit, a female wraith, through whose enchantments Steinbeck and Campbell find themselves traveling (cue woo-woo muzak) Back In Time!! At the end, the Chinese ghosts are pacified and Our Heroes go on to write Nobel Prize-winning novels and follow their respective blisses.

In real life, this was the winter that Campbell fell in love with Carol, Steinbeck’s first wife. I think part of the problem I had with writing the damn thing was that I liked Carol and I liked Ed Ricketts, but I didn’t like Steinbeck and Campbell – and they were the main protagonists.

Anyway, wandering around this exhibit, I thought, Damn, girlfriend! Commercial hook! And you’ve already got the first draft!!

So maybe I should take the MS out of the drawer?

The first draft needs revisions. Plot is waaaaaay too convoluted. Dialogue is waaaay too Aaron Sorkin ‘cause that’s actually the way I talk! But, you know, The Grapes of Wrath ain't The Social Network.

The novel was what kept me sane when I was so-o-o-o miserable and beaten down in Ithaca. Possibly that’s why I never felt impelled to go on working on it when I got out of Ithaca – I didn’t want to be reminded.



The Annie Leibowitz exhibit was interesting in its own way, too. She would be able to take that photograph I long to take of that bicycle on the northwest corner of McGuinness Boulevard and Huron Street! The exhibit was of totem objects belonging to people who were meaningful to her in some way – or so the exhibit notes say. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that Annie Leibowitz is inspired in any way by, say, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But what do I know? Leibowitz’s lighting, her composition, were all pretty interesting. Though I did have to wonder how much of that was Leibowitz’s eye through the camera, and how much of it was her eye manipulating Photoshop.