A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early August, 1998

Saturday, August 1, 1998

10 PM. After 29 years of keeping a diary, the one thing I’ve learned is that however much I write, I miss a lot of stuff that I should have recorded. Some of the most memorable images or conversations or feelings have all escaped my diaries because I either am not aware at the time of their lasting impact or because there’s only time and room to write so much.

I feel privileged to have spent the week here and to have been a part of Ronna’s household, however briefly. I feel closer to Ronna and her mother and even Matthew – not that I’ve bonded with him, but I see that his reserve masks not only the good heart I knew he had but also an extremely generous and loving nature.

And when I’ve taken care of Abigail and Chelsea, it’s been a trip. I watched Abigail several times today while Ronna and Matthew were busy, and it amazes me to see how a one-year-old explores her environment with wonder and frustration and how she tries to achieve mastery via all the Fisher-Price and Playskool “educational” toys where she does something like press a button and “Old MacDonald” plays.

Abigail is trying so hard to stand up, it appears to me, but she can’t get there just yet. She’s what Beatrice calls a “self-comforting” baby because when things don’t go her way, she sits and sucks her thumb and holds the Chocolate Moose stuffed animal or some other plush toy.

Chelsea, being 4½, is much more complex. She can whine and be obnoxious, but she’s also very loving and sweet, and Beatrice had me show her how to tie her shoelaces by making “bunny rabbit ears,” the way I taught Billy when he was little. (FAU’s Dr. Caplan and I are probably the only adult males in Broward County today who can’t tie our laces in the normal manner.)

Getting up today at 6:30 AM, I ate breakfast, rested and exercised (in the bathroom, so I could have privacy). I left the house at 8:30 AM and went to Kinko’s, where I wrote Teresa, Sat Darshan and Patrick on AOL and did some Lexis and Web surfing. Then, at Barnes & Noble, I read the New York Times over iced tea.

I drove around Abington and Jenkintown for a little while and bought some fat-free cheese slices and a frozen California mix (broccoli, cauliflower, carrots) that I had for lunch when I returned home.

(Wherever I’m staying at the moment is “home.”)

I went out with Ronna and the girls and Beatrice to the cleaners at the Huntingdon Valley shopping center, and everyone got along better today. Matthew was home from the hospital when we got back at 3 PM.

I took a walk up and down the hills and went to the SEPTA station; one day I’d like to come back and really explore Philadelphia. Ronna says that her friend Ellen from West 86th Street is living in South Philly, “a really interesting neighborhood.”

I do see signs for hoagies and “water ice” and I’ve gotten enough of a taste of the city to want to see more than Tastykakes at Genuardi’s and a glimpse at the outside of the art museum from the highway.

This evening I went with everyone to the barbecue at the neighbors directly behind us. The backyards, unfenced, run together, but I went around the block because Beatrice couldn’t manage the steep steps over grass.

The couple who owned the house, with six kids aged 16 and under, seemed very nice, as did their French guests in whose honor the party was being thrown and pretty much everyone else there.

I had a particularly interesting talk with a couple – he’s British and older, she’s an American around our age – who were incredibly literary and well-read. (Later I learned that he’s an engineer whose company cleans parts of supertankers.)

When Jordan and his wife arrived, Ronna and Matthew left immediately, but Beatrice and I stayed on a bit. When we got to the backyard, Jordan introduced me to Faith.

Jordan, still slender but now with a beard, looks good, and Faith is pleasant if rather stiff, as if she’s uncomfortable with herself. She teaches English at the Community College of Philadelphia, so we had something in common.

Their son, Joshua, five years old, is a cute boy with curly black hair, blue eyes and a great disposition. He was quiet and polite during dinner but later got frisky when he was playing with his father and me.

Jordan and I both can talk up a storm, whether about politics or censorship or education – next month, Joshua will be starting kindergarten at a Quaker/Friends school – and I like him, as does Beatrice, a lot better than I used to.

(Later, Beatrice would tell me how Jordan used to come over with Joshua, without Faith, and she worried because he would stare at Ronna adoringly – “but he doesn’t do that when his wife is here.”)

We had chicken cacciatore for dinner, the six adults and the two kids at the table and Abigail in her high chair, and I greatly enjoyed myself.

It’s funny how a solitary guy like me loves sharing others’ domesticity. I really do feel that the most important moments of life are the little ones involving family and friends.

Ronna kept telling me not to bother cleaning up while she, Faith, and her mother were drinking the coffee, but I get satisfaction from throwing out garbage and taking dishes from the table to the sink and the dishwasher – or, as I did last night, helping Beatrice after dinner and getting down on the floor to pick up all the corn and peas and other food that Abigail had thrown down.

The only place I draw the line is at cleaning up cat vomit – which I’ve seen a lot of from the two cats here in the past few days.

I was genuinely sorry that Jordan, Faith and Joshua had to leave at 8:30 PM, but it was past the child’s bedtime. (Beatrice pointedly confided to me that she thought Chelsea should have a bedtime, too.)

I stayed with Abigail when she kept crying after Ronna put her to bed – until Matthew, watching TV with Chelsea on the middle floor, came halfway up the steps and said, “It’s okay, Richie.”

At that point I fetched my laundry out of the dryer and went downstairs to join them in front of the TV.

Beatrice put on a video of dance numbers from Shirley Temple movies with the lyrics of the songs highlighted. I suppose she thought it would be educational for Chelsea.

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Sunday, August 2, 1998

10 PM. My last night of sleeping on Ronna’s familiar brown corduroy couch was fine, and I woke up at 6 AM from a dream in which I was reading a comic strip who was buying my books at a store.

By the time Ronna came downstairs with Abigail, I’d exercised, had breakfast, shaved and read the Sunday Times Arts and Leisure section, which got delivered yesterday.

Because Matthew was asleep in Chelsea’s room, I showered in the middle bathroom and then watched Abigail, playing with her while Ronna made breakfast and did other chores.

Matthew slept late today, and the girls both cried when he went out for bagels; they worship him. When he returned, we all sat around the kitchen table talking and reading sections of the Sunday papers.

Ronna and Matthew will probably not be in Jenkintown next year: Matthews’s 15% pay cut and the problems of the hospital and the medical school have pretty much decided that.

Like all the couples I know – Scott and M.J., Libby and Grant, Teresa and Paul – no matter how much money they have, all of it gets spent.

When we were alone, Ronna said the only complaint she has about their marriage is that she doesn’t see Matthew enough. Like Beatrice, I’m thrilled that Ronna found someone like him, and I think they’ll be happy together for a long time.

At noon, I hugged Ronna and her mother, shook Matthew’s hand, and got a proxy kiss from Chelsea – who suddenly became all shy again – from Ronna, although they both came outside and waved goodbye as I left.

Like yesterday, today was in the low 80°s, gorgeous and dry, with a cloudless sky. The Sunday traffic was quite bad.

I stopped off to eat my sandwich and some snacks at rest stops on both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey turnpikes and at a Greek diner on Hylan Boulevard near the Verrazano Bridge.

I crawled through Brooklyn and Queens, getting off highways and taking a tortured route via Linden Boulevard and Northern Boulevard. It took me until 5 PM to get back to Locust Valley.

After I finished eating the veggies and Weight Watchers honey mustard chicken I bought for dinner, Paul returned from Mattituck. He told me that Teresa’s grandmother died on Friday night – no big shock.

Tomorrow’s the wake, at the funeral parlor on Lorimer Street around the corner from Teresa’s parents’ house, and the funeral is on Tuesday morning, also there.

Since Grandma Agnes wasn’t a churchgoer, there’ll be no church service, and the burial is in a nondenominational cemetery in nearby Ridgewood.

When Teresa got home, she filled me in on the details of the plans – and of course, there’s a lot of cooking involved. She asked if I could use the rental car to take her to Brooklyn tomorrow, and I said I would.

But Paul didn’t want to pick her up later in the day, and all of a sudden they got into such a furious argument that I scrambled up to my room. Because they were screaming at each other, I turned up my radio very high and tried to read today’s Times and Inquirer.

Now I know I’m ready to go home. I can still hear them talking a bit heatedly in their bedroom, but at least they’re together. I hope they can resolve their problems.

Certainly, I feel in a very awkward and embarrassing position whenever Paul and Teresa are so upset with each other. Their fights make me feel very much in the way.

I don’t have a decent shirt or tie to wear to the funeral home, but at least I have a pair of pants that aren’t jeans, an acceptable pair of shoes, and the sport jacket I left in Brooklyn last year at this time.

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Tuesday, August 4, 1998

It’s only 9:30 PM, but Teresa, Paul and I are all so exhausted that one by one, we were falling asleep in front of the TV during a WLIW/21 PBS documentary, The Italian-Americans. Well, it was a long day, the day of Agnes’s funeral.

In a funny way, I’m glad Teresa’s grandmother died while I was here so I could be a part of it because I always liked her a lot.

Up at 6 AM, I went out to mail my op-ed piece to Newsday (later I realized it needed heavy-duty editing) and to buy the Times and to move the cars so I could get out the rental car and take it back to Enterprise after I exercised, showered, dressed and had breakfast.

I wore my tan khaki slacks along with a white boys’ size 20 school-uniform polo shirt with a black tie, both of which I got yesterday at Target. Teresa was cooking like crazy, but by the time I got driven back here, she and Paul had already loaded the van.

Paul had to work in Manhattan later in the afternoon, so he took his van. Teresa asked me to drive to Brooklyn in the minivan while she worked on her eulogy, for which we tossed some ideas around.

Nobody was home when we arrived at Conselyea Street, so we brought all the stuff in the kitchen, and I found a legal parking spot (it was an alternate parking day) on Leonard Street. Peter and Paul came in their cars, and then Martin and Sal arrived, and we all went together to the funeral home across Lorimer Street.

The chapel was filled with about fifty friends and relatives. The minister, Walter Parrish, a young African-American man high in the hierarchy of the American Baptist Association, had promised Teresa’s parents he’d preside, and to do that, he’d come back from a church convention in Detroit last night and was returning there this afternoon.

He gave a nice talk reciting the facts of Agnes’s life. (Her maiden name was Orlando, the same name as the funeral home, which was owned by distant cousins.)

She was born in 1898, the year Greater New York, the city she loved, was also born, and arrived in America as a child on a ship from Italy. She married Teresa’s grandfather and worked as a saleswoman in the garment industry. Agnes became a community activist in Williamsburg, had always loved reading, and of course she loved her family most.

Three generations of women spoke: first Heidi, whose tribute to her great-grandmother was very moving; then Teresa, who did fine and told some funny stories, like how Agnes, unsure of the content of The Graduate, took her and her sister to see that when they were 15 and 13; and then Diana, who paraphrased Madeleine L’Engle’s The Summer of the Great-Grandmother in saying that death had given her her mother back. Diana choked up only when she talked about how close Agnes was to her in-laws (Grandma Teresa, Aunt Marie and Uncle Buddy).

Grandma Teresa kept crying, and I wondered about the stress on her since she is 102. She sat in front of me, in the front row with Agnes’s daughter and son-in-law, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and nephew Sal. (I sat between grandsons-in-law Peter and Paul.)

As the service ended, we all filed past the coffin, and I drove the minivan and followed the hearse; the limo carrying Teresa’s parents, Thomas and Grandma Teresa; and Peter and Connie’s car, in the procession to the Linden Hill Cemetery in Ridgewood.

The gravesite ceremony was brief: a prayer by Reverend Parrish, and then we put our roses in the coffin, and we had to leave so the workers could bury her before their lunch break.

Returning to Williamsburg, I was sent out to buy five sliced small rounds of bread at the Napoli Bakery on Metropolitan Avenue as the others got ready to serve lunch. Teresa’s chicken, filet mignon, quiche, orzo, and string bean salad were all gobbled up by the 25 or so people who came back to the house.

I guess because I lived in that house by myself a year ago, I feel really comfortable there and I know Teresa’s extended family so well by now that I knew that when she said we could “dine al fresco” in the backyard, Uncle Buddy would make his old joke: “Who invited Al Fresco?”

I was glad to be able to spend more time with Martin and Sal, who, like me, noticed Ferenc Molnar’s grave at the cemetery. They love their new house in Huntington even though it’s very big.

Teresa and I took her sister and the kids back to Douglaston with the flowers, which Teresa and I brought back to the nursing home to share with the women who cared for her grandmother the past few years.

Stupidly, trying to get out of the driveway in Douglaston, I banged into a car; I did almost the same thing just after Janice’s funeral back in the summer of 1980, so I guess I get too upset to drive well on these occasions.

In Manhasset, Heidi and Thomas were left in the car with me, and soon a fight over which radio station to listen to – hard rock versus mellow rock – ended in a physical confrontation which had Heidi sobbing hysterically and me feeling helpless.

I sent Thomas to get his mother and aunt, figuring the best thing I could do was separate the warring siblings.

On the drive back, Paul called, hysterical that Hattie was gone from the backyard, where we’d left her. Later he called to say he’d found her lying in the bushes. I think we are all just very upset over Agnes’s death and it comes out in strange ways.

I had a bite to eat and kept to myself while the others swam in the pool and had Chinese food, but I did go out to spend time with everyone for a while. It was nice to feel I’m a part of the family – la famiglia, as the Italian-American documentary called it.

I wish that I, too, belonged to a large extended family of relatives and friends, but I did experience that in my childhood, with my grandparents and all of our family on all sides. Now I am closer to Teresa’s and Ronna’s extended families than I am to my own – but I guess my family’s weird tight, closed group of me, my parents and my brothers suits me, too.

Mom sent Teresa some jewelry – silver pins – and said she wants to send some stuff to Ronna and Alice, too. I guess it’s because Mom had no daughters, daughters-in-law or nieces to leave things to.

I’m so tired.

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Wednesday, August 5, 1998

7:30 PM. Even though I have only a few more days in New York, I needed to relax today, so I didn’t stray far from home. Teresa let me take the car to Starbucks this morning, and this afternoon I drank Diet Pepsi at Taco Bell before shopping at Farmers Bazaar.

I revised the God-awful op-ed I emailed Newsday and cut the article in half; although I’d be shocked if they take it, I faxed it to the Times. Still, it’s good for me just to be writing again.

Following the instructions Marc gave Mom, I emailed him; we’ll see if his alphanumeric pager gets my message. I’d called him last this morning but nobody answered the phone.

I also called the Times to arrange home delivery of the paper starting next Monday at my parents’ house, and I did laundry, took an hour’s walk while listening to All Things Considered, left a second message on Alice’s machine, and answered another personals ad on AOL.

I bought stamps for me and Teresa, paying for her roll, and filled up the minivan with gas after I caused the odometer to go over 30,000 miles, the free mileage limit for her two-year car lease.

Teresa went to have her monthly dinner with her sister and female cousins – who are really the granddaughters of Agnes’s close friend Ida, a surrogate sister she met on the boat to America. (I remember that back in 1982, Agnes and Ida took an apartment in Hollywood for the winter.)

Jade got a B in her Nassau Community College photography class, and though I really don’t think she’ll end up being a photographer, I did tell Paul that she did very well for her first year of college. She accumulated 32 credits, and after all, only two-thirds of freshmen return in their sophomore year.

Obviously I won’t get a chance to see or even speak to some of my friends in New York City: Milton, Joelle, Judi, Mikey, and others. But I didn’t have the easy access of Brooklyn this year.

Perhaps it’s just as well that I spent intensive amounts of time with Teresa and her family and friends, as well as with Ronna and her family.

While I’m living with my parents, I’ll contribute financially to their household, and it won’t be uncomfortable, while I’m happiest living alone. Anyway, after my parents sell their house, I’ll probably see little of them when they’re in Arizona.

Besides, Mom and Dad may not live all that long, and it would be terrible for them to die before I no longer can make up to them for the hostility I’ve been feeling.

I’ve made up a tentative list of goals for the next year, and even if I can’t achieve more than a fraction of them, I’ll do the best I can. I need to keep remembering after all these months that it’s the journey, not the destination, that’s paramount – and it’s also the fun part.

I am almost looking forward to starting afresh in South Florida again.

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Friday, August 7, 1998

9 PM. Last night I had my second dream about teaching a college class at Nova, a sure sign that the fall semester is coming.

At 6 AM, I heard the news that U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had been bombed, and as the reports came in while I exercised, I began to worry about Alice, whose brother works in the Dar-es-Salaam embassy.

I wondered if I should call her. Alice would become hysterical, I knew. But it would be worse for her to hear it from the TV or radio.

I called Alice several times and each time hung up when her machine answered. At 8 AM, I woke up Peter, whose number I found out from the Manhattan phone book, and told him the news.

He said Alice never picks up the phone before 9 AM, and he’d call her then. I decided that since I was going to Manhattan anyway – to see Josh – that I should get the 8:26 AM train rather than wait for the next one at 10:26 AM, in case Alice needed me.

They’d already confirmed five dead and over 50 wounded in Tanzania. (The casualties in Nairobi were much greater.) Maybe I could help Alice get information. So I rushed to get ready.

But when I got to Penn Station and phoned Alice, she’d already left a message for me that her brother was still on vacation until August 24, as he’d told her when they saw each other in Spain. As it turned out, none of the Tanzanian casualties were Americans.

Since I was in the city at 9:45 AM, I decided to head to Wall Street. The Dow’s 300-point drop on Tuesday made the stock market front page news. (Both Asia and Monica Lewinsky have been blamed for the plunge, but it’s probably just a market correction.)

Anyway, I hadn’t been to the Financial District in a while, and it’s always exciting to watch people in the morning as the markets open.

The proximity to the water makes it cooler downtown, and I strolled past the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall and Trinity Church down to the bull sculpture.

I ended up at the Starbucks on Beaver and Broad, where I drank iced tea and read the Times for well over an hour as I listened to the cellphone swells talk about their clients.

At the table next to me, some slick-haired and suspendered young men tried to convince an obviously well-heeled redhaired woman in her thirties that she should invest in some new financial instrument of some kind. (She declined, citing bearishness.)

Since I was to meet Josh at noon at Nam Phuong, a Vietnamese restaurant on Sixth Avenue south of Canal Street, I walked past the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and into the subway to go uptown.

Josh and I had a pleasant lunch, though he’s very upset about Gabrielle. He says he now hates her and plans never to speak to her again after their last phone conversation.

She refuses to have an abortion and is in fact delighted about the pregnancy – which so far is proceeding normally.

Gabrielle won’t come to the U.S. since in Germany she will get paid for the first three years of the baby’s life, and afterward she’ll have government-funded day care.

Her parents want her to stay there, and she doesn’t want to live in Manhattan – while Josh refuses to live anywhere else.

Josh feels that she “duped” him into getting her pregnant. In one sense, he’s relieved because he has “no money” – none of my friends, no matter how much they earn, seem to have any money, or so they say – and won’t have to move right away. And Gabrielle isn’t asking him for any financial or emotional support.

Since Josh refuses to set foot on German soil, it’s unlikely he’ll see the child.

“What will you tell this baby about me?” Josh asked her, and she replied, “I’ll tell him or her that their father is an American who doesn’t want to see them.”

It bothers Josh that the child won’t be Jewish. Hey, I said, if you wanted your kid to be Jewish, the only way to assure that would have been to have sex only with Jewish women.

Thinking it over tonight after telling the story to Teresa, Paul and Jade, I realize that this sounds like a typical nutjob-Josh story. None of it really makes sense except in the most crazy way.

I can’t imagine why Gabrielle would trick Josh into getting her pregnant when she doesn’t need marriage or money from him; it would have been a lot easier to simply stay in Germany and go to a sperm bank if she wanted to have a child.

Eventually, over our Vietnamese lunch, we turned to other topics: Josh wondered if I thought the economy would take a nosedive. He’s hoping it will, so people who bought Manhattan apartments for investment purposes will be forced to sell cheaply – to him.

After walking Josh back to his office on Worth Street, I went north via Sixth Avenue and then up Sullivan Street and across Spring Street and up Broadway through the heart of SoHo. The neighborhood long ago stopped being a haven for artists and now seems like a pricey tourist trap and home to expensive shops and restaurants for the upper classes.

By the time I got to the Village, I felt woozy and sickish and had to get some bottled water and rest in Washington Square Park, for I hadn’t realized how tired and dehydrated the long walk in hot weather had made me.

The past two days I’ve done a great deal of walking in the city, and I was ready to get back home, so at West 4th Street, I took the A train to Penn Station, where I caught the 2:27 PM train back to Locust Valley for the second day in a row.

I had an early dinner, giving my table scraps to a begging Ollie, and finally washed my sheets after three weeks because they were so sweaty, I couldn’t stand to sleep another night in them.

My unemployment check was issued on Thursday, so I won’t get it until Monday at the earliest and probably not till after I leave New York, so Teresa will have to mail it to me in Florida.

As she and Paul cooked for the brunch she’s catering tomorrow – when I asked Teresa where it was, she Freudian slipped, “Cold Spring Hassle” – they were bickering . . . as usual.

I am almost positive I will remain single for the rest of my life. At least I hope so.