SOLSC: West 85th Street Turned Memory Lane

            I had dinner with a friend at a Greek restaurant on Columbus Avenue tonight. To get there, I walked down 85th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, where Jack and I lived 50 years ago.

            I passed a copy and graphics shop near Amsterdam. It was in the space that was, when we lived at the other end of the block, the Red Carpet Bar, and it achieved noteriety in 1971 when H. Rap Brown, a former head of SNCC, along with four other men, attempted armed robbery at the bar. Brown and an associate were wounded, and the other three men were arrested after a gunfight in which, according to the New York Times, “Bullets ricocheted off parked cars and building fronts on 85th Street.” Jack referred to the bar thereafter as the H. Rap Brown Memorial Bar. After it closed, the space was for a while a real estate office.

            Most of the block is brownstones, and I can’t remember how similar or different they are now from November 1970, when we moved away. Our building was 101, a red stone apartment building at least 100 years old. Once upon a time, it had large apartments, perhaps two per floor. When we lived there, the sixth floor, where we lived, had been chopped into tiny, and weirdly laid out, spaces. We had a big living room, a bedroom separated from the living room by French doors, and a kitchen that looked like it had once been a hallway. At one end it was as wide as the stove, and the sink looked like the utility sink in a garage; its drainboard was a literal piece of wood, about 14”x9”, tacked to the wall. We did have a lot of windows.

            At the Columbus end of the block, the corner of our building has seen a series of bars and restaurants. When we lived there, it was a very disreputable bar, so dodgy that even Jack wouldn’t drink there—and he drank most everywhere. After we’d moved away, it became a very upscale restaurant whose name I don’t remember. Today, it’s a country-style restaurant called Good Enough to Eat; New York magazine called it “very Vermont-farmish.”

            I like checking out those locations where I have put mental plaques on buildings, e.g., Jack and I lived here, 1967–1970.

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SOLSC: College Boosterism

            Tonight I went to a fund-raiser but also an information session about my old college. I went to Antioch College. If you’ve heard of Antioch at all, it’s either because the college was closed 10 years ago, or 25 years ago for its Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, which required consent for every step of an intimate encounter, starting with kissing.

            In fact, Antioch reopened in 2011 after the alumni bought the college from the university. (This is way too long and complicated a story to go into; here’s one version of what happened.) And the SOPP that was widely derided when it first became known at the time now seems prophetic in the age of #metoo.

            So tonight two staff people from Antioch came to talk to about 10 Antioch alums on the Upper West Side of Manhattan about what the college is doing now and how we can help. They faced tough questions about how Antioch is presenting itself, what elements of its program are really unique and how to best present those elements. Antioch’s co-operative education, in which students spend 12 weeks every year at a full-time job somewhere in the country and write a paper about their experience, is what distinguishes the school from most other. Whether that’s enough to keep the college alive remains to be seen. I want Antioch to survive, despite my own love/hate relationship with it. There has never been another college like it.

            If you know a high school student who seems out of step with her or his milieu, Antioch might be exactly the right school. Check it out here.

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SOLSC: Busy busy busy busy busy

            Today was full of activity.

            Morning, start cleaning up the living room since writers’ group is coming this evening.

            Noon, dentist visit downtown.

            Shop for food, since I usually make a protein of some sort. Today I plan to make a miso-ginger chicken salad. I did buy the rotisserie chicken yesterday, so today I just need the white miso and some vegetables. There’s an Asian food market (and a second one opened up recently) in my neighborhood, but I had to ask for the white miso, since I didn’t even know what section to find it in.

            Back home, I have to call the bookkeeper for my physical therapy place; they sent me a

bill for several visits back to 2013, and I spent a couple of hours over the weekend researching my canceled checks so I’d be prepared to prove that I’ve paid for all but one of the visits. But once I reach the proper person, she doesn’t even know about all the earlier “charges,” and says all I have to pay is the Medicare deductible for this year. I am so annoyed at having wasted all that time, as well as the energy anticipating what I’d thought would be an argumentative phone call.

            Next, a couple of hours of free-lance copy editing work that has to be done today.

            For the chicken salad, I have to make the dressing, which takes half an hour, partly because I thought I could mix it up in the small food processor, and it turned out it needs the big one. Then I have to shred the chicken off its carcass, which takes much longer than I expected, an hour. Pulling it all together takes another 15 minutes.

            Back to the living room to finish cleaning up, which mostly involves piling all the papers together and putting them in my bedroom. Cheating, I know, but I’m running out of time.

            Finally, I print out the three pieces the writers have sent for our perusal this session. Fortunately, everyone is late so I have time to read two very good short stories, and a series of e-mail comments on a film script we discussed last month.

            And the first person arrives...

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SOLSC: Time Management

            Since Jack died, any time management skill I had has deteriorated. I make to-do lists and never look at them. I do things not on my list. I go to sleep too late, wake up too late... Well, here’s how my morning went today...

            Preface: I lost an hour of sleep Saturday night, made worse by going to sleep almost an hour later than usual (2:45 instead of 1:45 a.m.).

            So I’d thought I’d go to bed earlier than usual last night. But I’m a night owl. Once it hits 9:30 p.m., I stop feeling tired, even if I am. Not in bed until almost 1:30 Sunday night.

8:30 a.m. My alarm goes off. (This is my attempt to get a decent start on the day. It's half an hour later than I had to wake up before I retired.)

8:49 a.m. I actually wake up. The alarm had fit very neatly into my dream, so I guess that’s why it didn’t wake me for real. I switch off the alarm, which turns on the radio.

9:30 a.m. I wake up again. Apparently, I went back to sleep even though I’d rolled over onto my back and I think I can’t sleep on my back.

9:50 a.m. I actually get out of bed. Lying in bed listening to my local public radio station gives me the illusion that I am learning something from the news. But some seven hours later, I no longer remember what was so riveting.

9:50–10:20 a.m. I’ve gotten my New York Times, which is delivered to my apartment door, and Publishers Weekly, which I retired from five years ago and where I still do free-lance work. Then I read all of the Times’s front page story about the Saudi royal family members and others who were “arrested” last fall, and read the front page portion of the stories about Kenya’s historic drought and voters in Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district. In PW, I read the long news story about feminist bookstores (there used to be 100, and now fewer than 10, but they’ve been doing very well since Trump’s election) and the opinion “Soapbox” piece about writing historical fiction and how closely to hew to fact.

10:20–11:30 a.m. I open my laptop to write an e-mail to my B&B hostess in New Orleans to ask her a few questions about the delicious muffins she sent me. Instead:

            1. I get an e-mail from a friend about a movie we’re planning to see on Thursday. She suggests we order our tickets in advance, but when I go to the theater website, the movie isn’t available on Thursday. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out if this is true, and then check another theater, where it is showing on Thursday, and then e-mail back my friend.

            2. I see an e-mail from a PW colleague with an attachment, but when I click on it, my e-mail warns me it may be deceptive. I go to the PW mail site to ask the colleague if he sent me an attachment. But there I see an e-mail from another colleague that requires me to go to another website to check out a document, which has some conceptual problems. So I have to e-mail her back, explaining as well as I can what the problem is and how it might be fixed. This takes a lot more time. But when I click “Send” after a while I get an error message that I’m not connected to the Internet. BUT I AM. Yet another example of computers lying.

            3. And I forgot to send the e-mail I intended to write in the first place.

11:30–11:45 a.m. I write all of this in my journal.

            And after this, I finally take a shower, get dressed, and return to the kitchen for breakfast. Or is it lunch by now? You tell me.

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SOLSC: Old E-mail

            After Jack died, I found a way to save all his e-mail. I especially wanted the e-mails he had sent. He used to reread his own e-mails, and I wanted to be able to do that as well, just as a way to “hear” his voice.

            In fact, it took more than a year before I began to go through the e-mails, copying them into files according to who they were sent to. Most of them are to me; to our daughter, Christie; to a friend he often went to the movies with; and to his brother and his uncle in Kansas. I didn’t think I would find any secrets, and so far I haven’t. But I have found e-mails that have given me just what I want.

            For instance, we were members of the Museum of Modern Art. In April 2010, I e-mailed him to ask whether he got the MoMA members’ preview notices. He replied, “I do not. Just another example of me being a second-class citizen.” But his final comment in this thread can’t be reproduced here. It made me smile, as it was almost our own secret language, but in these days of school shootings, it would look like very poor taste.

            Do you have family jokes or comments that you can’t repeat to anyone else because they might sound harsh or cruel, when you know they aren’t?

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SOLSC: Local Retail

            I went shopping in the neighborhood today. First the housewares store to buy muffin tins. The owner of the B&B I stayed at in New Orleans made killer oat bran muffins, which she kindly sent me the recipe for. I once had a muffin tin, but it must have gotten so grungy that I tossed it years ago and just not been inclined to make muffins since.

           Next the local independent bookstore. I needed to get a copy of The Boys in the Boat, an account of the American rowing team from working-class families that won gold in the 1936 Olympics against, among others, Hitler’s crew team. It’s for my book group, and there’d been too many holds on copies at the library. So I had to get my own, and the bookstore had used copies (mine will rejoin them when I’m done with it). While at the bookstore, I couldn’t resist get a print edition of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury—I’ve already read the free PDF that circulated on the Internet soon after it was published, but since I can afford it, I want to support the publisher, and author, by buying a copy. And there was Thomas Piketty’s Capital, big, fat, tempting. I know I should read it, I want to read it, I took it from the table—and with my bookstore membership, I got $10 off my total purchase. I will read it.

            Back to shopping. Refilling my refrigerator, which I’d mostly emptied before my trip, at the grocery store. Then to Rite-Aid for paper towels. But wait. The Rite-Aid had gates down, and the sign on the door said “This location is closing, Liquidation sale starts Monday.” This is a big surprise. Two chain drugstores have been a couple of blocks apart for years, and the Rite-Aid has always looked busier, with longer lines, so I wouldn’t have expected it to be the one that lost out.

            Before I headed on to the Duane Reade/Walgreen’s, I checked out the new H Mart. This is a Korean supermarket chain that opened the weekend I left for points south. Not only are there all kinds of Asian foods both fresh and packaged, and a big seafood section, but also cooking pots and housewares. I will have to spend more time there to see what might be entering my kitchen. Maybe the store is what inspired me to make fried rice for dinner.

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SOLSC: Postal Mail

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            Over the course of three days, I went through the accumulated two weeks of mail, plus what came over the three more days I was home. There was a lot! The vast majority was solicitations for money, both from organizations and from politicians. But there was useful stuff as well. And like last year, I made lists of what came.

Magazines

The Nation (3)

The New Yorker (3)

The Week (2)

The New York Review of Books

Poets & Writers

Church & State (the magazine of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State)

The Hightower Lowdown

Harvard Health Letter

Catalogues

L.L. Bean

Vermont Country Store

MoMA Design Store

Raymour & Flanagan

Go-Ahead Tours

Crystal Cruises

Women Make Movies

Miami Writers Institute

Political solicitations

Democratic Governors Association

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

Emily’s List (2)

Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin)

Dick Durbin (Illinois)

Keith Ellison (Michigan)

Claire McCaskill (Missouri)

Debbie Stabenow (Michigan)

Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts)

Ann Kirkpatrick (Arizona)

Jacky Rosen (Nevada)

Tina Smith (Michigan) (2)

Commercial

Wells Fargo

RCN

2 real estate agencies (and I am not selling)

Organizations (I’ve given to some, will never give to others)

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State

Friends of the High Line

Union of Concerned Scientists

Tenement Museum

Bloomingdale School of Music (a local school where my daughter took piano lessons)

American Humanist Association

Southern Povery Law Center

National Museum of African-American History & Culture

Habitat for Humanity

Food for the Poor

Friends of the New York Public Library

Schomburg Center/New York Public Library

Partners in Health

314 Action

9/11 Memorial

ACLU

The Actors Fund

Adirondack Council

AAUW

American Farmland Trust

American Museum of Natural History

American Red Cross

Berea College

Calvary Hospice

Campaign for Tibet

Center for Reproductive Rights

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Center for Victims of Torture

City Harvest

Coalition for the Homeless

Common Cause

Consumer Reports

Corporate Accountability

Dorot

Drug Policy Alliance

Food Bank for New York City

Feed the Children

Guggenheim Museum

Heifer International

Hospice Support Fund

Human Rights Watch

Institute for Public Affairs

International Planned Parenthood Federation

NARAL

NAACP

National Museum of the American Indian

National Women’s Health Network

New York Landmarks Conservancy

Paralyzed Veterans of America

Partnership with Native Americans

Planned Parenthood

Population Connection

Rainforest Action Network

Senior Citizens League

The Smithsonian

Friends of the Smithsonian

SOS Children’s Villages

TechnoServe

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee

Waterkeepers Alliance

WBGO (local jazz station)

U.S. Holocaust Museum

American society for Yad Vashem

Friends of Yad Sarah

The Useful

2 checks for freelance work

2 deposit statements for 401(k) required minimum distributions

2 pension deposit statements

tax info on my co-op

maintenance bill

American Express bill

cable bill

Macy’s credit card bill

letter from Medicare supplemental plan denying a claim

Spring Calendars

Whitney Museum

Center for Jewish History

Museum of Modern Art

New-York Historical Society

Performances

Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, Mass.

New Jersey Performing Arts Center

Travesties

Once on This Island

SOLSC: Messy Weather

            It rained, then snowed today, but I had a date with my daughter to see Black Panther at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. So I put on my boots, got my walking sticks, and set out into the weather.

            There was just a bit of slush in upper Manhattan, but when I got out of the subway in Brooklyn, the snow was coming down at a 45-degree angle. Not nice. I’d never been to the Alamo, so when I turned away from the driving snow, that turned out to be the wrong direction. I had to ask three people before I got to the theater, just in time to see all the trailers.

            (If you haven’t seen Black Panther yet, do not hesitate. It is highly entertaining, and has a social justice, and feminist, message among the superhero exploits.)

            After the movie my daughter set off to see another film with her husband, while I tried to find my way to a different subway than the one I’d arrived on. I’d looked at my Google Maps and thought I knew where to go, but once on the street, the streets didn’t accord with the map. And there was slush and snow everywhere, and growing pools of melted snow at the intersections. I stopped in a Century 21 to consult my phone, asked a man on the street, went in the direction he pointed me in, and ended up in a McDonald’s to consult my phone yet again. Asked a woman on the street, and she pointed me in what turned out to be the right direction. It wasn’t the stop I’d been aiming for, but it was the right train.

            I want to add that without my walking sticks, I would have been slipping and sliding, and possibly falling. They helped keep me steady, and I strongly recommend them.

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SOLSC: Travel Day

            Today was a travel day. I packed almost everything yesterday, so this morning it was just whatever was left over that I had to use in the morning. Yet another wonderful breakfast from Cindy, my B&B hostess (Monrose Row, two blocks outside of the French Quarter in New Orleans): fennel and dill scones, gluten-free oatmeal muffins, and granola, yogurt, and fruit.

            Cindy called a cab driver she knew, who grew up on Long Island, but has been living in New Orleans for 30 years. He served up his opinion that since Katrina, too many of the original residents left because they couldn’t afford to rebuild, and the new residents want to “fix” New Orleans by turning it into a generic American city. What he described sounded a lot like what American aid workers do when they go to a developing countries with their own ideas of how those countries should develop, rather than find out what the people living there want for their own development. I hope he’s wrong about New Orleans.

            The flight from New Orleans to Atlanta was on time and uneventful. The Atlanta airport is huge, with little help in the way of signs. I was in terminal B and had to get to terminal T—it was a very long walk to the train, and two stops on the train. Once at the gate, I learned the flight was delayed; the plane was there, but LaGuardia Airport was delaying flights because there were so many planes they were trying to clear out. Once on the plane, the pilot told us that turbulent weather, not in New York but around New  York had caused a delay in planes getting in to  the airport.

            We left about 45 minutes late and got into LaGuardia about half an hour late. Not too bad. It’s cold, but a brisk cold, not a beastly cold. I’m glad to be home. I’m unpacked. And to bed very soon.

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SOLSC: Runners on the Streetcar

            Today I set out to ride the St. Charles streetcar from one end to the other. First, I had to get to the Canal Street end, at the edge of the French Quarter. I thought that the Rampart streetcar would do it, but it turned north, the wrong direction. I had to get off and take the streetcar going the opposite way. As soon as I got on, I was offered a seat by a young woman in a yellow T-shirt with a message about the Humana Rock & Roll 10K race.

            “Did you run the race?” I asked. I knew about it because the weekend event had made it a bit difficult for me to find a place to stay for my week here.

           “Yes,” she said, and the woman sitting next to me weighed in that their drunk friend over there, pointing to a woman in a seat across the aisle, “she’s the oldest one of us and she's the fastest of all of us.”

            We all got on to the St. Charles streetcar at Canal Street and continued on our way. There were six women in their running club, from St. Louis, and they ‘d all come to run in the Rock and Roll 10K. Laura, who I sat next to, explained that the parents of Meghan, another of the young women, live in New Orleans and they were all staying with them. (The parents live in the Garden District, an area that includes mansions in many architectural styles. I have no idea what sort of home Meghan’s parents have.)

            Laura waved at everyone outside the streetcar who would wave back. Meanwhile, she told me about Heather, who was watching a livestream of her daughter’s soccer game this afternoon; Sarah; and Marie, the fastest. Marie will be 50 in a few months, and she’s planning to run a race in Hawaii for her birthday.

            Meanwhile, Laura became a bit antsy about when they were going to get to their destination; she desperately needed a toilet. And when she saw a (very tastefully designed) McDonald’s, she decided it was time to get off. So the running club from St. Louis all departed. 

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SOLSC: Louisiana History

            Today I spent a couple of hours at the Cabildo, part of the Louisiana State Museum. The Cabildo dates from when New Orleans was part of the Spanish empire and the building was the site of the government council. Today it has exhibits from the 1815 Battle of New Orleans—fought about a month after the war had actually ended—up through Reconstruction. Here are some bits of information I learned.

            1. Joseph Savary, a free black man and professional soldier, formed a battalion of other free black men in 1814, called the Free Men of Color of the Louisiana Militia, and was the first black man to reach the rank of major. This battalion turned the tide against the British, leading to American victory. However, the white citizens of New Orleans were too uncomfortable with any armed black men, so the battalion was ordered to leave the city.

            2. The 1959 hit song “The Battle of New Orleans” was written by an Arkansas schoolteacher, Jimmy Driftwood, in the 1930s to teach his students about the war. It became a #1 hit when Johnny Horton recorded it in 1959. Oddly enough, it also became a hit in Britain, though some of the lyrics considered insulting by the British were altered without changing the actual history (“bloomin’ British” replaced “bloody British”).

            3. One room compared myths with history, pointing out, for instance, that while Hollywood movies like The Buccaneer (1938 and 1958 versions) made the pirate Jean Lafitte the ultimate hero of the 1815 battle, he actually played a very minor role. Andrew Jackson also was lauded as the ultimate hero, but not everyone was impressed. Some local citizens thought he was taking too long to lift martial law, and Jackson put one of them in jail. When a journalist wrote about this, Jackson jailed him as well. Later, Jackson was fined $1,000, approximately $17,000 today, for his high-handedness.

            4. And Louisiana’s electoral votes never went to Andrew Jackson in his three runs for president, when he lost in 1824, and won in 1828 and 1832.

            5. The Louisiana Purchase was rather like a three-way baseball trade. Spain turned over its territory to France on November 30, 1803, and France in turn sold it to the United States a few weeks later, on December 20.

            6. New Orleans’ population continued its diversity from its settlement by Spain and France. In 1850, the city had immim grants from Ireland (20,000), Germany (11,500), France (7,500), and England and Scotland (2,500). The population also included 13,500 enslaved people and 11,000 free blacks, as well as 50,000 native-born in New Orleans or migrants from other states. 

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SOLSC: Falling, Again

            After losing then finding my phone yesterday (in yesterday’s Slice of Life story), I went to dinner at one of New Orleans’s most famous, and oldest (since 1840), restaurants, Antoine’s. The food was delicious (soft-shell crab with butter-almond sauce and a roasted corn side. Along with food a very good chardonnay. I mention the wine because it may have contributed to what happened later.

            After dinner I set out to walk back to my B&B. When I got to Bourbon Street, the crowds of people in the street and music coming from all the clubs and bars lured me to join them. I strolled along for a few blocks until the crowds thinned.

            As a car approached from behind, I thought it was time to get back on the sidewalk. Unfortunately, I picked a spot where a driveway curved into the sidewalk, and as I stepped up, my foot landed badly, and I fell forward. Not as badly as two years ago, but in protecting my head, I jammed my finger against the pavement.

            Passersby stopped to help. A self-styled street person said he’d seen many people fall where I had, then asked if that made me feel better. (It did.) After severa; minutes, I gathered myself and got over my shock. They helped me to my feet, and one couple walked me up to the main street, and I walked, gingerly, back to my local home.

            The B&B proprietor had a good first aid kit, and I went off to bed wondering how sore I’d be in the morning.

            By which time, my skinned knee felt fine, but my left pinky was very painful whenever I bent it. So off to an Urgent Care clinic to see whether there was any broken bone. Fortunately, there wasn’t. And the x-ray tech gave me this brace (left) to hold the pinky and its neighbor steady—the C component of R(est), I(ce), C(ompression), and E(levate). 

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SOLSC: Phone Lost, but Not Lost

Just over a year ago while on a tour of Cuba with my daughter, I lost my new smartphone, which I’d had for only a few months. That was a Slice for December 20, 2016

            Today I am traveling again, this time on my own, and in New Orleans. I had finished going through a very moving exhibit about Hurricane Katrina. At the opening of the exhibit is a battered piano tilted at a 45-degree angle. The piano was Fats Domino’s and was found in his house on Marais Street. The house had been totally destroyed during flooding from the hurricane, and the piano ruined. For a while, people thought Fats had died as well, but he had evacuated to a relative’s. The piano was donated to the museum, and it’s set up in the position it was found.

            Of course, I wanted a photo. I reached into my purse for the phone. No phone. My pockets? No phone. Panic. I tried to search through my purse more thoroughly, but also asked at the reception desk if I had left my phone there. I hadn’t, but the receptionist suggested the call-my-phone feature, and after I gave her my number, she dialed it. I didn’t hear a ring from any of my belongings, so while she continued to listen to her phone ring, I rushed through the exhibit, hoping to hear my phone’s blues ringtone. Silence.

            Back at the reception desk, I suddenly heard ringing from my backpack. There was the phone. Why hadn’t it rung in the first place? My phone seems to put itself on vibrate on its own sometimes. Devices have minds of their own.

            This trip the phone was found. But in my euphoria on finding it, I forgot to take a picture of Fats’ piano. So no  photo here. I’m sorry. 

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I’m participating in the 11th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!