Saturday December 7, 2019
Had horrible persistent leg spasms when I woke up. At 11:30, I went to Julia Wilson, my chiropractor, whose approach-- a very gentle touch-stretch of some fibrous/neural network between the base of my skull and my hip--usually magically relieves the arthritis. Today, however, I remained very stiff, with major hobbling through the supermarket to replenish my dairy and produce supplies.
Went to Harris and Neville’s in early evening for dinner with two of their other friends—Alex Cohen and Nancy Nichols.
Nancy and Neville have known each other for years. Nancy and her husband Joel Leffert were both working actors when they met, and Joel is still one of a tiny minority who has been able to cobble together a career out of regional theater, understudy work, small parts in major plays, large parts in minor plays, and the occasional lines in Law and Order (the bread and butter of New York actors, until the program finally ended after 20 years). Right now, Joel is in San Francisco until next October understudying five actors in the Harry Potter musical. Nancy had been an ideal ingénue: petit, cute, blonde with blue eyes and a big singing voice that got her roles into her thirties. She and Joel also put together a small Shakespeare company in the city, which they managed, directed, and acted in for years, with Nancy and Neville constructing the costumes. However, after adopting two biological siblings, Joel and Nancy needed a reliable income and benefits, so she left theater work and found an administrative job at CUNY where she worked for 16 years. Tonight she celebrated both her 70th birthday and her retirement, and, having outlived the ingénue curse, she wants to act again. She’s a soothing and funny presence and I was glad to see her.
Alex is a freelance writer, and she met Harris and Neville a few years ago after interviewing Harris for a small art publication. Among her writing assignments is reviewing Broadway plays for another small on-line magazine, and shortly after they met, she asked Neville to go with her to the next one she was reviewing, free tickets. Lucky Neville became Alex’ “date” from then on, seeing shows like Hamilton with exorbitant price tags that are impossible to get tickets for. Alex is not a soothing presence, however. Although she has attractive features that have held up well after 60 years, she has a loud barking voice that dominates a conversation with obvious ideas. An eagerness to please and loneliness is translucent under all that assertive persistence, and she has not been successful with men. Alex has been very kind to me during my illness, however, sending me interesting novels, and she loves Willie. Mostly, she makes me sad.
At dinner I became bored and irritated after Harris interrupted an interesting talk that Neville, Nancy, and I were having about videos we've been streaming, He wanted to recount a long stoned description of his friend's funeral, which was poignant but I'd heard it three or four times already, and I didn't know the friend or his two wives who reconciled while dumping baggies of their late husband's ashes under a cathedral of pines in the Catskills. So I was still irritated when he rambled on and I snapped at him. ”So where’s the segue?”
He stopped. “What?”
“The segue between the conversation that Neville, Nancy and I were having about streaming and your friend's funeral.”
Harris laughed. “No segue.” He then added, “I wanted to eat some of the ashes.”
I forgave him immediately. He had shifted the conversation to weird and interesting. “What? Eeuuu. No you didn’t.”
“I did. I wanted to taste my friend's body.”
“But it’s ashes and bone. It has no taste.” Alex remarked sensibly, although I thought this was beside the point.
“They do it in other cultures,” Harris argued, not sensibly.
“New Guinea! And they get kuru.” I pointed out.
Alex asked what kuru was and Nancy and I both exclaimed at once that it was like mad cow disease.”
“I just want a taste a little bit.” Harris said.
The idea of Harris tasting my ashes was horrifying. I turned to Michael, “Keep him away from my baggie.”
Willie called me toward the end of dinner, and I left the room to answer because of concern that he might have emotionally tanked. Fortunately, he was in good spirits, had visited his friend Alex in Bayside during the week and gone to an all-you-can eat Korean barbecue restaurant. And today he saw the Rosary Ladies, a group of Haitian and Hispanic older women who regularly meet at a church in the Lower East Side to pray and slide beads together. Will had started doing his rosary at their church after his conversion. Being possibly the only young man to join this practice ever, as well as being kind and a potential priest, they became cult like followers, even after he quit the seminary. (I met them once and was congratulated for being his mother with more enthusiasm than for anything else I've done ever.) He told them about Samantha and her rejection today and how sad he felt. One of the Haitian women said, “This is Jesus showing you how you broke his heart when you left him.” Wow. When Catholicism sings like that there’s no other religion like it.
As we drove home, Michael said he believed Harris was putting everyone on when he expressed interest in the ashes as a snack, but I’m not so sure. He’s an incorrigible romantic and sensualist. Whatever his motives, however, his support of cannibalism did liven up the evening.
Sunday December 8
The new renters of our old apartment in the barn came by: Farrell Brickhouse, an expressionist painter, and his wife Beverly Peterson, a documentarian. Only a little younger than we are, I'm interested in knowing them better. Went into town for grilled cheese and tomato soup at Grazin'. The sandwich was costly and a little bland. Inspired by the movie Ford vs Ferrari, I spent afternoon watching a documentary on Carroll Shelby as a fact checker. Later I made sausage-stuffed acorns. After dinner we watched the end of The Accident, a British drama with Sarah Lancashire one of my favorite actresses.
Monday December 9
I don't cook at the Army on Mondays, but their regular volunteer couldn't make it, and Darcy and Ria are drowning in Kettle Season, so I told them Friday I could make it. My plan was to make it easy with a one-pot meal of rice, chicken and sausage. I made the mistake on Friday, however, of asking them to set aside drumsticks instead of boneless thighs or breasts. Cutting meat off the legs, with all their sinews, was slow and tedious, particularly with our bad knives, and I ended up with dismal shards of dark meat, to join the rice and sausage. I found boxes and boxed of donated carrots in the cooler, which I decided would make an easy vegetable to roast. Unfortunately, I didn't turn the oven temperature high enough and they weren't soft by the time service started. (This was a stupid mistake. Our oven never heats high enough unless we dial it all the way up). Since I was by myself, while I cooked I listened on my IPhone to the latest episode of the House impeachment hearings. I’m afraid that Trump's guilt is being diluted by these long-winded hearings, and that the corruption and criminality implicit in the evidence are not obvious enough to feed the public's greed for drama. Darcy was in and out delivering kettles looking exhausted, as was I by the end of service. Not a lot of diners, and I thought the food was mediocre at best, but three of them wanted seconds, so that was gratifying. Home to my bathtub.
Hard rain in the early evening, when I picked up Michael at the train station from his dentist appointment in New York. As he leaned into the car, he told me, somewhat sheepishly, that he had sat next to Steve Dunn for the ride north, who asked if we could drive him ride home. Michael added that he wanted to apologize to me. The rain was unrelenting and Steve only lived a few blocks from the station, so it would have been churlish and mean-spirited to refuse. Michael gestured over to him, who was crouching pathetically in the downpour under the station lights. He splashed over, rattling on about something as he ducked into the back seat.
When he was settled in, he muttered, "I want to apologize for the other night.' It was not convincing.
I looked back at him, “You were horrible,” I said. “I was wrestling with the computer and you just kept yelling at me. I was very tense. You made it worse.” That ended the apology talk.
He turned the subject toward Virginia and his support for her as BOE commissioner, as if that made up for his abuse the night she was nominated by the CCDC. I said I liked her personally but thought she had made too many mistakes in the November election. He babbled on until we dropped him off at a house he owns on State Street, the poor side of town, which he likes to point out. Rumor is that he has a lot of money. I have rarely been subjected to male abuse but the verbal battering I got from him at the Commissioner election still remains with me. I usually feel sorry for people I dislike—a reverse arrogance—particularly when they are a physical wreck, but I have no pity for gnarly Steve.
Michael and I got together with Tim Hollis later at Helsinki. He talked about his strange difficult Polish girlfriend, and then went on to describe work that he did at Siemens, one of the modern kingdoms that rules the world, reducing the 6% interest on a multi-billion Euro debt with lower rates from multiple loans from multiple banks. The pressure from additional global projects only increased after this until he finally burned out last year, moving back here full time, restoring his Hudson house, managing its apartment, and taking care of an aging aunt. Given that he's young and noticing the excitement in his voice while describing his successful massive debt reduction, I can't imagine that he will live at this slow upstate pace indefinitely.
Tuesday December 10
Woke up and was too exhausted to move. Cooking yesterday did me in and I had to skip it today. Lee and Tom are coming this afternoon, so if I did cook this morning, I'd be comatose by the time they arrived.
Went to Cascades for lunch and had a conversation with two women at the next table, Eileen Weglarz, our local Episcopal minister, and her companion, who is Catholic. The church has a midnight mass at Christmas, which I’d like to go to if I get up the energy and Michael will drive me. Rev. Weglarz told us that her sermon will be based on a picture she saw of a church in California, where, instead of a crèche, three cages had been set, with Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus in each one to represent the treatment of immigrants at the border. Very strong. I talked to them for such a long time that Michael had to yell. “Sister!” as a reminder that Lee was due to arrive. We got home just as they did.
Lee and Tom are always ready to perform if they anticipate any size audience. I joked earlier that they would probably bring their instruments with them, even though they were spending the night with just Michael and me. But there they were, his guitar and her mandolin, leaning against the wall in the mudroom.
Tom explained that they wanted to rehearse a Christmas concert they were hosting for their numbers and would we preview it. “I’m not sure about it.” For the first time ever, I heard Tom being uncertain about performing. And, he wasn’t wrong, since it could be interpreted as presumptuous to invite neighbors to a concert where only Lee and Tom are playing. I thought, however, that might not be a bad idea for neighborhood Christmas party, if it was short and lots food and wine followed.
Tom developed this plan after he discovered instrumentals arrangements of several carols specifically for the guitar and mandolin. He was eager to learn them, but also, typically, wanted an audience to hear them.
They played for us in the afternoon. It ran too long and although they included vocals for a few carols, it was too heavy on the instruments. Also, Lee is less skilled on the mandolin than Tom is on the guitar and unfortunately her instrument predominated. I was reminded of the piano recitals when she and I were young, and our fingers had become very strong from milking the goats. Dad would say proudly at the end, “You girls were the loudest!” I suggested that Tom might play closer to the mic and Lee further back to balance the sound. Tom, never shy, was pleased with that recommendation. I also suggested they shorten the carols, particularly those that were strictly instrumental (five verses without lyrics is onerous) and that they might add vocals to more songs. They took my comments cheerfully. A shorter concert with more singing could make a very pleasant introduction to the holidays and to neighbors who might not know each other.
I made a soup with Asian chicken meatballs, kale, and reconstituted mushrooms. Lee and I talked about our various kids and grandkids, who are all doing ok except for her son Jim, whose bipolar disorder is currently spiking his Facebook posts with delusions and extreme right wing sentiments. He's also sending crazy emails to Lee, filled with vitriol and resentment, which she's taking very hard. It is impossible for her to objectify Jim’s attacks that so clearly originate with his disease. She continues to insist that his fury at her and at the world is something he can control with common sense. And she doesn’t consider that the somewhat wanton sexual behavior of our youth might have had a less than healthy effect on our children. Married at sixteen with four kids by the time she was 21 did nothing to jumpstart her adulthood. Her husband Matt was borderline abusive and negligent, although to be fair he was 17 when they were married and had been employed, although low paid, consistently after that. With four kids and Matt's low income, they were very poor, but managed with some minimal subsistence from Mom and Dad. Lee emotionally survived her life at home by existing in a cocoon of mental haze around which her kids spun out. She effectively survived outside the home by getting her BA and Masters in education, financed by our parents. When she was 28, Matt told her he was in love with a local beauty queen, and she happily kicked him out. She got a job working for the teachers union and lived in a communal situation for a couple of years, hooking up with George, a good-natured physics grad student. He was in love, she wasn't and she dropped him peremptorily when she met Tom, whom she married and then went on to get a law degree when she was 40. Through it all Wendy, her daughter and the oldest, served as her brothers' caretaker, which trained her to become a super mother later on to three handsome, great sons. Danny, Lee's youngest, buffered by his older siblings, grew up with a dry wit to marry well and produce a beautiful daughter who is now working for a bank and living in Manhattan with her own apartment. Jim and Tommy, Lee's middle two boys, became troubled. Tommy became a criminal after leaving home at 16. Jim’s illness didn’t manifest itself until much later, stabilized for a long time by a steady kind friend and a stint in the Navy's submarine service. When it did Lee was supportive for years, taking him back home when his illness became extreme and sending him money. It’s only recently that Jim has turned against her and used those early years as a bludgeon, which confuses and angers her. (My relationship with Jill in its occasional rags is my own lesson in memory differentials between mother and child.)
After dinner we watched opening episodes of two programs, one they recommended (Art of the Crime) and one we did (Schitt’s Creek).
Wednesday December 11
Went to breakfast at Cascade’s, after which Lee and Tom headed out. In the afternoon I had an appointment with my gynecologist Dr. Marici, who declared my ass free of lichen sclerosis. I spent the rest of the day reading and sitting. Very lazy. We didn’t even watch anything at night. I had a dream in which I was hanging around with two handsome guys in a warehouse-like space in lower Manhattan. I heard one of the young men say to the other that he’d probably sleep with me. I thought, “Doesn’t he know I'm 76?” The next moment I’m running along the street past old brownstones and other residential buildings built in the nineteenth century, happy and thinking, ”I’m back in New York! Thank god, I’m back in New York.” This dream is obviously about my physical youth, not returning to contemporary Manhattan.
Thursday December 12
An email from Jillian gave good news that her medical tests were normal.
Cold and clear today. Julia Wilson's magic chiropractic hands relieved some of the winter ache, but I’m still tired and sore. I had vague intentions to do some Christmas shopping in Hudson, but didn’t find a parking place, so I went home. Am feeling lazy, sluggish, and mildly depressed. I don’t want to do anything worthy or far from my computer.
Forced myself to walk up and down the drive and then over to the pond, which made me cheerier. The pond is filled with iced-over water flowing out through the ditch at the end. Maybe if I’m still alive in the summer, the water level will be high enough to swim even if Paul doesn't fix the outflow. Another reason to live.
Went to Ca Mea for dinner, and had salmon. I told Michael how depressed I was, with no interest in anything and unhappy about Willie, the upcoming radiation treatments, and not seeing any kids for Christmas, with it possibly being my last. Just gloomy. I skipped an Executive Committee meeting last night. I don't care about politics, burned out by Gene's campaign and Steve Dunn’s crazy attack. I agreed, when Carl Atkins asked me, to help him with a report on health care for the Democrat Issues subcommittee, but I have no urge to dig into this or research the issues on criminal justice reform or addiction, which I promised to do.
Speaking of Gene, his wife Donna is leaving him after Christmas, he just had cosmetic surgery for man boobs, which, he said, only showed him how big his belly was, and he is suffering from a severe hiatal hernia. And he lost the DA race. Maybe I should stop complaining.
I meditated later and felt better. Another New York dream. I was walking with someone at night along an avenue lined with spectacular gleaming white marble mansions, sweeping upward in exaggerated Renaissance style. The person with me said they had just been cleaned. Again, I had a strong feeling of satisfaction and happiness at living in New York again.
Friday December 13
The Board of Supervisors in Hudson voted against Virginia Martin last night, who only got three votes out of 20. That means nomination process starts all over again with the CCDC; we can't recommend Virginia again, so it looks good for Erin.
My hair became a sudden emergency and I drove into town where Ken cut it back into shape. He updated me on his new doublewide mobile home, which he loves. Before we moved upstate, the snob in me thought of mobile homes only as the last refuge between destitution and homelessness. It didn't occur to me that living in a trailer park could be a positive. But in these rural places, where there are few affordable houses for sale, this is a totally acceptable form of home ownership, doublewides having two or more bedrooms, large interior spaces, and opportunities for gardens. Ken showed me pictures of his place, with a kitchen like my own—a long table in its center, appliances lined up under the window, and pantry shelves opposite them. Original rugs and antique furnishings warmed up the living spaces. And he pays only $750 a month for everything. “I can live on my social security here.” Nice. And my hair looks sane again. He told me I had a great head of hair, about which I have mixed feelings since at some point he'll probably have to shave it off again.
Worked this afternoon on the issues report on addiction, which got me out of my slump. Later Michael called upstairs to tell me Dave and Janet were coming by. Janet had her brain MRI this morning at Sloan. Since she never comes by I was sure the results were bad or at the least complicated and they were looking to talk over the options. Instead I was happy to learn that the two brain tumors had shrunk slightly and she is looking at radiotherapy both for her brain and her lungs, which also harbor two small and shrinking tumors. Neither of us are doing New Years Eve. I said I might have a dinner on Michael’s and my 30th anniversary on the 27th and they were welcome if they were around, She will just be back from California that day, so we are all relieved to have an excuse not to socialize. When she first came in the door and I thought the news might be grimmer than it was I hugged her without thinking. She was a friend for years and it’s an old habit. Were no longer friends, but we aren't enemies either.
I swamped two steaks in the sous vide, and made rice and broccoli for dinner. Watched the French detective series Art and Crime after. This was a better day than yesterday.
