Tuesday, November 26, 2002
9 PM. I’m kind of dopey from lack of sleep since I got up at 2:30 AM. Although I did sleep about six hours, I don’t know how coherent this will be.
I’m in the spare upstairs bathroom bedroom at Teresa and Paul’s new house. Well, I said I was in the bathroom before I corrected my error, so maybe I’ll write this after I’ve slept.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
8 AM. Snow is falling gently, and there’s about an inch on the ground.
I did sleep well, but I’m cold now, and so I’m under all these blankets.
Yesterday morning, I got to the airport at 4:30 AM, and I had to wait for the JetBlue counters to open up.
The flight was good. The plane had leather seats, and thanks to the screen on the back of the seat in front of me, I was able to watch satellite TV (Today Show and The Weather Channel) as well as track our altitude, speed and whereabouts on MapQuest.
We got into Kennedy early, and Teresa was circling the terminal, as I found out when I dialed her cell phone; I should have known she’d be out there.
Teresa looks good and is a lot tanner than I am. She asked if I wanted to do Brooklyn, and I said yes, so we got on the Belt Parkway.
There’s a new big box store shopping center with Target on Pennsylvania Avenue, and on Flatbush Avenue I saw that H&M, the department store, is now at Kings Plaza, where Alexander’s used to be.
As we drove past my old house on East 56th Street and passed P.S. 203, Teresa said that the neighborhood looks good despite the changes.
She was hungry, so we went to the New Floridian Diner, where I’ve had countless hamburgers over the years.
Then we continued our drive up Flatbush Avenue, stopping to ride around Brooklyn College, which may not be, as Princeton Review ranked it this summer, the most beautiful campus in the country, but it still looks nice to me.
We also took a detour to ride around Park Slope, getting back on Flatbush Avenue again near the now torn-down above-ground Long Island Railroad Station at Atlantic, and I got to see Junior’s and LIU.
Teresa drove under the BQE, trying to get to Williamsburg, but somehow we didn’t take the right turn and we ended up in Bushwick, on skeezy Broadway.
Finally we found our way back to Williamsburg and Greenpoint and stopped off at Teresa’s mother’s, where I could use the bathroom and see the house again.
The three weeks I lived on Conselyea Street in July 1997 were a really happy time in my life.
Pam’s apartment on the top floor is nicely furnished but a bit of a mess – but I guess I’m not really used to the old kind of kitchens and bathrooms they have in old houses like that.
Teresa showed me how much the old neighborhood has changed, even in the last year. Streets like Bedford Avenue are now a mix of the new young gentrifiers and the older Italian, Latino, Polish and Hasidic residents.
First the artists came, then the yuppie singles, and now the expensive baby carriages and strollers seem to be out in force.
Because the BQE was jammed, Teresa took the streets – and I don’t know this route well – until we got on the LIE, where the traffic cleared up eventually.
Off Glen Cove Road, on Macouns Lane, we went to the farm stand, which closes for the season today. Teresa bought loads of stuff: cauliflower, brussels sprouts (I never knew they grew like that), other vegetables and apples.
Back at the new house, which is about two and a half miles from the center of Locust Valley, Teresa let Ali and Roxy, one of Diane’s dogs (her cousin has Pebbles now), out before she showed me around.
It’s a larger house and a lot more open than the one on Underhill Avenue. I picked the upstairs spare room because it has the good bed, although Pam, who’s coming tonight, likes the downstairs bedroom because it’s cozier and has its own bathroom.
We went out for pizza on Forest Avenue and then shopped at the new Farmer’s Market, which has moved into where Pergament used to be after Super Stop & Shop took the old Farmers Bazaar store on the next block.
After we put the groceries away, Teresa and I chatted for a while. Paul’s kids basically have stopped talking to her, and I know it especially bothers her that once Jade left the house, she essentially wanted nothing to do with Teresa.
Paul goes to see his granddaughter at Cat’s everyday, but Teresa has seen the baby only once. For Thanksgiving, the kids are going to their mother’s in Vermont.
Checking my email, I saw that Mark B’s wife liked the climate in Phoenix but found the city kind of empty.
Rosalie thanked me for the help, but UF offered the library director’s job to the retiring NYU Law librarian.
Paul came home after an appointment with Leon, who left him with a bunch of scripts, including one for Prevacid.
We had dinner – chicken cutlets, pasta with cauliflower and a salad – in the dining room, which Teresa doesn’t like; she misses the island in the kitchen at Underhill Avenue.
Then we watched TV and I read the paper till I came up to my room and collapsed.
I slept wonderfully with vivid dreams; I could hear the snow falling, not hard like rain, but softly.
Today Teresa’s doing a lot of cooking and baking for Thanksgiving, so I expect I will be restless, but it’s good to get away from my life at NSU Law.
I haven’t unpacked yet and feel like staying in bed.
*
10 PM. Tonight’s probably going to be the coldest night I’ve experienced in many years.
This morning’s snow ended at 10 AM and melted during the day, but it’s going down to the low 20°s tonight.
Thanksgiving’s high temperature will be only around 35°, which is very cold for this time of year in New York, and of course it’s frigid for me.
I spent the day mostly hanging out with Teresa as she cooked and baked two pumpkin pies, an apple pie, and an apple crumb pie. She gave me a piece of the pumpkin pie that she thought had too much clove in it, but it was fine.
I read yesterday’s Times and most of today’s, and we went out twice. In the morning, Teresa took Paul’s seven prescriptions to their druggist, Mr. Jolly, an Indian who used to be at CVS and opened his own pharmacy in downtown Glen Cove by the Staples and Annie Sez.
We had to get a few more things at Farmer’s Market, and while we waited for the drugs, Teresa had a latte and I had green tea at Starbucks.
Later, at 4:30 PM, she dropped off some stuff at the cleaners in Bayville, and afterwards we sat in the car watching the sunset from the parking lot at Ransom Beach, a spot I’ve loved since I discovered it on one of my drives out here in the early 1970s.
I’m not eating my usual diet, but I didn’t in Seattle and Tampa, either. I’m not really exercising at all, but I’ll get back to my routines when we – I mean I — get back to Fort Lauderdale.
Why did I say we?
I just watched last Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos in the living room with Paul, who slept through it. Meanwhile, in the spare room downstairs, Teresa fell asleep while watching the show with Pam.
It was good to see Pam again; she got here soon after Tony did, at about 5 PM. She said I lost weight, but I know I haven’t.
Pam talks a lot about Jeff, her college boyfriend whom she’s currently seeing, and his group of friends, many of whom have also had the stomach stapling and intestine removal surgery, as well as a lot of plastic surgery.
Apparently there’s a whole network of these formerly morbidly obese people, and Pam told me more than I wanted to know about it.
The others had steak for dinner while I had a reheated chicken cutlet from last night. And of course, they had martinis and wine while I had diet soda.
Paul fell asleep in his chair quite early, and he’s snoring now, but he doesn’t sleep well and gets up at 2 AM.
I know what happens when I go to sleep too early, but at my apartment there’s no one to see and hear me snore.
I just looked up and saw the Picasso print of the lovers that I remember from Teresa’s bedroom – or was it the living room? – on West 85th Street.
Teresa showed me a photo of myself from the early 1980s along with young -looking pictures of Teresa, her family, the neighbors from her building – Deidre, Barbara, Diana – and even Sat Darshan, back when she was still Avis, with her first husband, Anthony.
Tonight I remembered again how 30 years ago on Thanksgiving eve, I took Ronna on our first day, and I recited a zillion details of the night to Teresa.
Will I still remember all that 20 years from now, which will be 50 years after it happened?
Teresa said I probably won’t even remember what I ate for breakfast that morning. Then again, who knows if I’ll even be alive in 2022?
On AOL I could read all of Vincent’s eloquent, honest interview on Stretcher. He said that his own canon consists of people like Dodie Bellamy and me.
I’m so honored to be thought well of by Vincent, but stupidly, I wrote to him again.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
9 PM on a fine Thanksgiving when everything went great except for my taking Thomas’s backpack by mistake when Paul and I left Mattituck in his Corvette at 5:30 PM.
I feel terrible that I screwed up. I’m missing some stuff I need, like my glasses case, but there’s nothing I can do till tomorrow afternoon, when Teresa will bring it back here.
I’m not sure I want to go to Manhattan without my own backpack tomorrow, but I’ll see. I haven’t yet called Alice, so I don’t know if she’ll be home tomorrow.
Anyway, last night I didn’t sleep that well, and I was up at 5 AM. It was 25°, and the wind-chill factor must have been a lot colder. Today it never got much above 35°, though it was bright and sunny.
Teresa, Pam and Paul were up early, but I stayed under the covers for a long time listening to NPR.
I felt a bit anxious about the trip to Mattituck but also about the worries of my own life, like my credit card debt and the pressures of my job as ARP director.
Pam stayed here while we took the dogs and left for the North Fork at about 10:40 AM.
We were in Mattituck by noon; before we stopped at the house, Teresa and Paul showed me Peconic Bay and the beach at the end of Sigsby Road; on the other side of the water is the Hamptons.
Everyone else had arrived – everyone being Teresa’s sister’s family, including her in-laws. It was good to see everyone again.
Teresa’s parents are getting old, as are her brother-in-law’s mother and his father, who’s really deaf by now.
Of course, I have gray hair at my temples and lines in my face and the kind of turkey neck that should be hazardous on Thanksgiving.
Heidi really has grown up; she’s got a boyfriend, Ari, who supposedly looks like Meatloaf.
She’s finishing her BA in English at Binghamton next term and she’ll be staying on to get an M.A.T. although she’s going to apply to a couple of other graduate schools.
For her January intercession, Heidi wants to go to Japan; she studied Japanese for two years and she told me interesting things about the language.
Although Thomas seemed to want to go to Maryland, his parents are pushing the cheaper and closer Binghamton, where they would just have one trip for both kids.
Connie had a bad cold, and I talked with her a lot about my job and law students and the bar exam. Both Connie and Peter took the bar exam way back, before the MBE existed.
Next summer, Teresa’s mother is going to be 80, but instead of a party, the plan is for the family to take a trip together to Sicily.
The absence of Teresa’s aunt and uncle was keenly felt and as we went around the table before eating, Teresa, her sister and her parents all mentioned their moving to Colorado and Teresa’s uncle’s apparently successful struggle with testicular cancer (so apparently I wasn’t too old to get it).
Even though Teresa forgot to bring some of the dishes from Locust Valley, the table today contained tons of food as we sat down to dinner at 2 PM.
I ate everything there: the cornbread pudding, the two kinds of dressing, turkey (I was the only one who prefers white meat), chestnuts, and slivers of pumpkin and apple pie.
I tried to eat very small portions of everything, and I’m sure I didn’t gain too much weight.
The dinner conversation was lively; I sat between Teresa and Heidi, who I guess is my favorite. I remember seeing her for the first time when I came up for Christmas 1981, when she was just a few weeks old.
I remember taking the LIRR from my grandparents in Rockaway to Teresa’s aunt and uncle’s house in Floral Park.
It’s nice that I’ve been able to share holidays and celebrations with Teresa’s family over the years.
This morning I had thought about what Thanksgiving would be like if I stayed in Florida by myself; I probably would have been restless and lonely, the way I was three years ago, the last time I was alone in Florida at Thanksgiving, though I can’t remember what I did that day.
The past two Thanksgiving holidays I’ve been in Apache Junction, and last year I also had lunch at Sat Darshan’s gurdwara before going home to Mom’s vegetarian lasagna.
Driving back in his shiny red Corvette, Paul and I chatted a lot on the way home.
I just feel so stupid that I took Thomas’s backpack instead of my own. How could I have messed up like that? Am I an absent-minded professor?
By now I’ve heard both Teresa’s and Paul’s sides of the problems with his kids.
Jade obviously wants to be on her own, and I know that Teresa wants to run her life and take care of her. But Jade doesn’t want to be told that she’s made mistakes.
My feeling is that Teresa sees a little of herself in Jade and wants to prevent those mistakes that she herself made. Teresa can be stubborn about things.
P.J. probably lets the tensions with Teresa slide more, but Paul’s daughters don’t. But at least Paul gets to see his granddaughter nearly every day after work even if Teresa has only seen the baby once.
In the Chester Road house, Pam left us a note saying that Jade had called to say hi; she’s at work at the restaurant today and didn’t go with the others to see her mother in Vermont.
Families are so complicated.
Friday, November 29, 2002
10 PM. I’ve just been sitting next to the fireplace in the living room, reading the past two days of the New York Times while watching Sex in the City reruns with Teresa and Paul.
It’s good to be part of a family. What I miss most about living in my parents’ house is watching TV together at night in the family room. Well, I’ll be back in Apache Junction in several weeks.
I got up at 3 AM, and when I couldn’t get back to sleep 90 minutes later, I took a Klonopin, which put me out till 8 AM.
Paul had long before left for work, and Pam didn’t stay over after all, so I had the house to myself – no dogs, even.
I lay in bed for another hour and then had breakfast. At 10 AM, I called Alice and told her that I’d be taking the train into the city and I’d come over before 1 PM.
Teresa had told me to take her Astro minivan to the station, and although I was a little apprehensive, I got there fine.
It took a long time to get into Manhattan, mostly because when I changed at Jamaica, I had to freeze on the platform for a long time.
Then I got crammed in like a subway-car sardine with so many people around me that I didn’t fall despite having nowhere to lean on.
At Penn Station, I bought a MetroCard and took the local to 14th Street and walked over to Alice’s.
She looked terrific: the same as ever. We went out to lunch at Portfolio, where I’d gone with her before; it’s on 18th just west of Fifth Avenue.
Alice looks fabulous, and she generally is. Tomorrow she and Peter are going to North Carolina for the weekend to visit a minister friend and his wife. In a few months she and Peter will be celebrating the 25th anniversary.
Over a nice meal, Alice I talked about books, art and movies: she hates foreign films and contemporary art and she’s reading for pleasure only old stuff like Sister Carrie and Arrowsmith, although she said she did like Roth’s The Human Stain.
Alice says that most nights she gets into bed at 6 PM and then falls asleep watching TV. She’s still addicted to the predictable Law & Order franchise.
She’s begun taking Lipitor, and although she hates taking any kind of medication, it has brought down her cholesterol.
Alice is in good shape because she goes to the gym for 40 minutes every day.
We went back to her apartment after stopping at Fleet Bank; Alice is currently waiting on tens of thousands of dollars in checks that she gets 15% of.
Alice told me about having breakfast with Representatives Loretta and Linda Sanchez on Wednesday; the older one is obviously the more dynamic and helped elect her sister to Congress a few weeks ago.
They wanted to hear from Alice’s satisfied clients, and The sisters knew the rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
Back at the apartment. Alice showed me a mockup of the cover of the book the rabbi did, the one that Alice dreamed up, More Money Than God: How to Be Spiritual Even If You’re Stinking Rich.
The subtitle needs to be altered to reflect the current downturn, the publisher says. They may delay the book until the economy gets better.
Alice’s brother is planning on leaving his wife and moving to a nearby house he owns when his renter’s lease is up in April, but Peter says that he’ll believe it when he sees it.
Yesterday for Thanksgiving dinner, Alice and Peter went to her mother’s cousin in Hewlett, where she met a distant cousin who loves living in Mesa.
She showed me a trashy gay book written by her Jacqueline Susann-loving client in Mississippi, who’s published fifteen books placed by Alice and has “a house he’s built on his advances and royalties.”
I was glad to hear that her friend Elijah, also in Mississippi, has completely recovered from the vicious beating (gay-bashing) that put him in a coma a year ago.
I told Alice about my life, though I’m sure that in many ways I’m an enigma to her.
Naturally, I didn’t tell her about Teresa’s book idea, a novel about how everything would have been different had Gore been elected in 2000.
(I’m afraid I heard Teresa’s feelings when, in driving to Mattituck, my immediate reaction to her idea was a belly laugh.)
At 3:05 PM, I kissed Alice goodbye, saying I’d be back in New York sometime next summer, and somehow I made the 3:27 PM train out of Penn Station.
It’s been cold – I definitely needed to buy lip balm at the RiteAid on 13th and Sixth – but I’ve worn a t-shirt under a corduroy or denim shirt under a bulky sweater under a hooded sweatshirt under my jacket and gloves.
Although I didn’t see much of Manhattan, today was the busiest shopping day of the year. Besides, Manhattan still seems familiar to me.
The city is now mostly seeing friends like Alice, walking up ordinary streets, riding in the 1 and 9 trains, watching street vendors, and listening to subway musicians.
When I got back, Paul and Teresa and I sat around chatting. I got my backpack back, and Thomas got his.
Teresa said that her sister is really sick now, and she and Paul are complaining of sore throats, so I expect I will catch a cold as well. I’ll deal with it.
Mom sent a silver set of gravy holders and other stuff for Teresa “because I have no daughter-in-laws [sic].” Teresa did say that the stuff was nice and she could use it.
We had Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner and then watched TV.
Saturday, November 30, 2002
6 PM. I just got home from Manhattan a little while ago, and in half an hour, two couples are coming to dinner.
This morning I took the 10:13 AM into the city after calling Josh, who had been planning to study German all day, so he was free for lunch.
Today was in the 40°s, but it’s supposed to get frigid for the rest of my visit here.
At Penn Station, I took the A to 14th Street, transferred to the L to Union Square, and then took the 6 to Astor Place, right near Josh’s on 9th Street.
He now has short hair, a mixture of blonde and gray, but he still looks young. Josh has tinnitus and hearing loss, and his eyes are bad, but he doesn’t have to take any prescription medicine.
(This is what 50 year olds talk about with their old friends.)
Josh wanted to get French toast, so we went to Kiev on Second Avenue and 7th when the B&H Dairy Restaurant looked too crowded.
Josh is still struggling with German.
For Thanksgiving, Josh went to his cousins in Middletown, New Jersey.
Gabrielle is supposed to bring the kids sometime before the new year, but she used her credit card (with Josh reimbursing her), so he’ll be at her mercy, as usual.
I told him what’s going on with me, and he seemed to think it’s not unusual to get nervous when routines are interrupted.
This week in New York I haven’t been eating normally or exercising, and I’ll be glad to get back to my routines, but I wouldn’t have missed this trip for the world.
Being back in New York and seeing old friends in the city gives me a broader perspective on my life and makes me see that what I obsess about on a daily basis – my job at the law school, my debts – is just part of a continuum.
We went to St. Mark’s Bookshop, where Josh and I looked at the KGB Bar poetry anthology, co-edited by David Lehman with an introduction by Dennis.
Josh, of course, missed Jonathan Baumbach’s recent reading, but he said that Noah had a great piece in The New Yorker.
Seeing all those literary magazines and small press books and zines made me want to be a part of the scene again, the way I was in the late 1970s, but I guess I’ve moved on – although I’m still interested in contemporary writing.
Back at Josh’s, we had to take off our shoes when we walked in because Josh is “saving the floor.”
Rents in New York have come down a bit, but I was surprised to read in the Times Real Estate section that a one-bedroom house in Mill Basin goes for $1,000.
That seems expensive, given how far away from Manhattan our old neighborhood is. There’s no way I could ever again live in New York City.
Josh said that Simon is getting married to the girlfriend Josh met; she will become Simon’s third wife.
He also told me that Harry is okay, as is James, who’s now living in St. Louis.
Todd is trying to sell his house, but there’s a big cloud on the title. and Josh filled me in on his other friends.
Josh doesn’t like to hug, so we shook hands and I touched his shoulder when I left.
In the subway, I realized that I would miss the 2:14 PM train, so I had two hours to kill.
I decided I’d visit the Upper West Side, so I took the 6 to Union Square, the R to Times Square, and the 3 to 96th Street.
After walking a few blocks past the new Symphony Space, I stopped to buy a few things at a health food supermarket, Healthy Pleasures. Then I got on the M104 bus.
On Broadway, there are a lot of new stores, some of which I probably don’t remember seeing when I was last in the neighborhood a year ago.
On 86th Street, the barbecue chicken place is still there, but now there’s a huge Victoria’s Secret store on the corner of 85th Street.
Of course, there are all the Starbucks locations and new banks like New York Community Bank and Washington Mutual (the old Dime, the old Anchor).
The West 80s and 90s seem a little more Orthodox these days, though of course Zabar’s, H&H, Fairway and Citarella are still there.
As our bus made its way down Broadway in the 70s and 60s, past Lincoln Center, down to Columbus Circle, I did notice some changes – like the new 72nd Street subway entrance replacing the old fleatrap – but also I thought about how everything reminded me of living in that neighborhood in the 1980s.
As we approached Times Square, the streets got more crowded. I always say I liked the area better before it became so glitzy, but that isn’t quite true.
I got off the bus after we turned onto 42nd because I wanted to walk to Eighth Avenue to see the colorful new hotel designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica. I like the building even though a lot of people don’t.
At the Port Authority, I took the A train to Penn Station, where I caught the 4:14 PM back to Long Island.
On the ride home from Jamaica, I sat near a bunch of lively Salvadorean teenagers and pre-teens who got off at Glen Street. They engaged in horseplay, played tunes on their cellphones, and talked about a bar mitzvah at the Huntington Town House they’re going to on Sunday.
I managed to get Teresa’s van home from the Locust Valley station without killing anybody.