Archive for January, 2015

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Letter From New York 01 11 15 While they marched in Paris…

January 11, 2015

Riding on Amtrak back to the city, the Hudson River is more heavily iced than it was just a few days ago. Once again, it is steel grey as is the whole world, grey and overcast, not bathed in the golden light of yesterday.

On the train I usually ride in the café car; it has been years since the trains running between Albany and New York have had an active café car. Sitting with me are two friends I have made through the train, Kathleen and Arthur, who have a small farm on the west side of the Hudson, outside of Catskill.

We met on the train some years ago, taking the same Sunday train back into the city. We had a tradition of bringing along leftovers from the weekend and making a picnic of the ride into New York. With food and a good bottle of wine, the trip always evaporated.

Then I started not going back on Sundays, waiting until Monday mornings and, while not riding the Sunday picnic train, we have remained friends and we have partied since off the train. We’re all headed back early this Sunday because we have dinners in the city.

Arthur is headed to Paris next week for a culinary tour of the City of Lights. Naturally our talk turned to Charlie Hebdo and the march that took place there today. Millions marched for solidarity; lead by the French President Hollande, who was joined by British Prime Minister David Cameron and Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. Also there was Netanyahu of Israel as well as Abbas of Palestine, the President of Ukraine and the Foreign Minister of Russia, all putting their differences aside long enough to join this march, equal parts of sorrow and defiance. With no speeches, just presence.

Back in Germany, Hamburger Morgenpost printed some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and was firebombed.

Some are saying that this event has ripped the soul of France the way 9/11 seared the soul of the United States, a fundamental change occurring in the fabric of society.

Obama is calling for a “Counterterrorism Summit” is Washington in February.

Ah, the clouds have parted and some sunlight slips through, causing flecks of light to bounce off the icy waters of the Hudson.

It is impossible to know where the road is leading at anytime. But the situation we face with radical Islam seems particularly knotty. Is it, as Arthur suggested earlier, a result of poverty? Or does radical Islam offer a route away from oppressive governments? Or is it that we are seeing the beginning of an Islamic Reformation which promises to be as violent as the Christian Reformation? Any of these is probably too simple an answer for the most complex question of our time and reality is a mixture of all of these and more.

Each day will be played out and we will move irrevocably into the future and the future will unfold. In the meantime, three million took to the streets in Paris in some effort to express feelings that must seem inchoate.

When 9/11 happened, the streets of New York were eerily quiet and the world seemed in a daze. It will be interesting to speak with Arthur when he returns to see if Paris is the same.

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Letter From New York 01 10 15 After all, it’s the Sabbath…

January 11, 2015

When I woke to a bright and sparkly morning, I picked up my iPhone and used The Weather Channel app to ascertain the temperature. Much to my surprise, it had plummeted to zero degrees with a wind chill that made it feel like minus sixteen. My eyes dazzled at the screen.

It doesn’t usually get that cold here but that cold it was. I checked the water faucets in the kitchen that generally freeze up when it gets that cold but was relieved to find they were running. I made coffee and went back to bed to read The Week, my favorite magazine.

You could feel the cold seeping through the walls. I was grateful for my comforter and flannel sheets. Curling up in bed, I sipped my coffee and read, wrapped in my warmest robe. It was a lovely way to spend a couple of cold hours this morning after waking earlier than normal.

As is often the case with bitter cold, it was bright and sunny so the day had a cheerful feel to it. Bright light flooded the living and dining rooms and warmed the house.

Around the time that “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” started broadcasting I was out upon my errands, checking mail and going to Kohl’s to find a birthday present for Alicia, the daughter of Nick who helps me on weekends. I opted for an educational toy that would help her learn how to spell, feeling I had exhausted the princessy things at Christmas.

It was wonderful this afternoon to watch her tear through her presents, seeing, for a moment, the world through her three-year-old eyes. Really magnificent.

So, fresh home from her party, I’m having an exciting Saturday night in Claverack, writing my daily edition of the blog and doing laundry. Later I will watch an episode or two of Marco Polo on Netflix and then head for bed.

I actually did not do emails today. I was taking a break. I made sure on my iPhone that I wasn’t missing anything important but I didn’t dive into them on my laptop. That can wait until tomorrow. Today, I wanted a little respite from the world.

Brunching at the Red Dot, I only scanned the headlines of today’s NY Times. Even when I was reading The Week I felt like I was studying history because it is a look back over things I have been following all too closely during this past week.

No, today I wanted a bit of rest from the trials and travails of our world, from the constant staccato of events from all over the world that bombard us by the minute. I eschewed the Twitter feed and only checked Facebook to make sure I had missed no birthdays.

It was a time to concentrate on the here and now, the little world around me, centering myself as best I could. I have felt the pressures of the world all week and have listened to that staccato beat of bad news and today I just needed a break.

Today was a day to enjoy shopping for a three year old, to wonder at the geese on the creek and to enjoy the deer that gathered in my yard while watching the sunlight dance through the barren trees of my property.

It was the Sabbath.

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Letter From New York 01 09 15 Glad to be living in a peaceful place…

January 9, 2015

To the east of me, a family of deer have gathered, huddled together, perhaps against the cold though it was warmed considerably since the plunge of two nights ago. To the south of me, on the creek, are gathered hundreds of geese that have made their first appearance on Claverack Creek in at least year.

Once was that there would be some geese there year round with a massing of them in the fall. Then they went away, just gone. It confused all of us in the neighborhood. Rosemary, one of my neighbors, phoned me of an afternoon to ask me if I had geese on the creek? No, they’ve gone. She told me they were gone from the pond, too; the first time in her forty years of coming to Claverack that there were no geese.

Coming home from the city last yesterday to see if my pipes had frozen, I arrived back in the light and to my amazement found my creek populated again with geese, noisy and rambunctious and almost as plentiful as ever.

This morning, to my great surprise, I woke to find four inches of fluffy white snow on the ground transforming our little circle once again to a winter wonderland. It was deep enough the snowplow came to dig me out. It felt good to wake to the clean and bright countryside.

As I was waking to the geese and fluffy white, two hostage dramas were being played out in Paris. A man held hostages in a kosher market while the Kouachi brothers, suspects in the Charlie Hebdo killings, were holed up, ironically enough, in a printing company. The man at the kosher market claimed he had coordinated his efforts with the brothers.

The man at the market claimed he was with ISIS, which, I think, is normally at odds with the group the Kouachi brothers were involved with, Al Qaeda in Yemen. I guess terror makes for strange bedfellows.

As I sometimes do when news is breaking, I went to twitter to see it unfold in almost real time. And while looking at the twitter feed and reading rapidly updated articles, I was sitting at my window, looking out at the snowy landscape and feeling distanced from the murder and mayhem in Paris.

Wednesday I had dinner with my friend David Wolf, a lawyer in New York, who also has a house in Connecticut, far out of town, surrounded by acres of land. We discussed the perspective being in nature seems to put on the news, how it softens the hard edges of the headlines.

It is quiet here; the only occasional sound is the snowplows clearing the street and the constant chatter of the geese. Quiet and peaceful in Claverack while half a world away there is chaos. I suppose it has always been like this, that there is peace and quiet in most places while others erupt in spurts of violence.

I am delighted I live in one of the peaceful spots where I can watch the sun slowly set in the west, a slight tinge of pink in the sky, a harbinger of better weather tomorrow. May the weather be better and may there be an outbreak of peace tomorrow, too.

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Letter From New York 01 08 15 Starting with the Magna Carta…

January 8, 2015

To the left of me, the Hudson River is steel grey, ice clinging to its shores. The sun is just beginning to set to the West. I’m headed north after a day in the city, going home to see if my pipes have frozen.

It is bitterly cold here; not as cold as the Midwest but nearly so. I don’t remember a time when the wind chill was predicted to reach minus thirty-five in Claverack, not in the fourteen years I have been here.

It is beautiful, this ride up the Hudson, good for thinking and pulling together one’s thoughts or to just absorb the beauty. In the clear channel of the river, barges plow their way through the frigid waters.

In France, the hunt for the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo killings is focused on northern France. In New York, at Penn Station, squads of State Police were present as security throughout the city has been heightened. Extra police are stationed at various news outlets today in case anyone in New York should decide to play copycat.

For a moment today, distracted by the cold, I had forgotten about the massacre in Paris and the ramifications it would have in New York. Whenever there is violence in a western city, New York beefs up security reflexively. We go about our business but never forget we feel like a bull’s-eye is on our back.

Mayor DeBlasio phoned the Mayor of Paris and offered his condolences.

There has been much written today about freedom of the press and Charlie Hedbo, including a very moving one from a journalist from Wired, reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show happening in Vegas. I tweeted his article out today.

In Yemen, thirty-seven were killed in a car bomb attack. In Nigeria, two thousand have died in the latest onslaught of the Boko Haram. But those two events have not captured the world’s attention in the way that the Charlie Hedbo killings have. The articles I’ve read today have speculated it was because they were journalists and freedom of the press is one of the sacred tenets of the West.

800 years ago in 1215, a group of rebel Barons coerced the Magna Carta out of King John, beginning the ongoing process that resulted in our Constitution. 800 years of growing freedom and a few masked men want to roll it all back.

It may be that this assault on journalists has forced us all to think about the freedoms we have as evidenced by Charlie Hedbo exerting its privilege to be provocative, profane, rebellious, etc. It is a privilege that has been earned over generations from the Barons of England to our rebellious Founding Fathers to the peasants who stormed the Bastille in Paris to those who are fighting today in various parts of the world to hold back the darkness.

And that is why, I think, Charlie Hedbo has been so deeply felt by so many. The killings were designed to kill something greater than the poor souls who died; it was an assault of our Western sense of freedom.

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Letter From New York 01 07 15 Je Suis Charlie

January 7, 2015

The night was bitter cold as the frigid weather from the Midwest began to barrel into the Northeast. Outside the cottage, the wind blew and you could hear the wind swooshing through the barren branches of the trees. It was a good night to be snuggled in the cottage, watching episodes of Netflix’s Marco Polo series.

When I woke this morning, I did, as I usually do, check what emails have come in while having my first cup of coffee. There was one from CNN Breaking News that announced that three masked men had entered the offices of France’s satiric magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and killed ten. The number would later rise to twelve, including two policemen.

Eleven more staff were wounded, four seriously.

It was an operation carried out with military precision, happening on the one day a week that all staff would be at the office for the weekly staff meeting. As I write this, the three killers are still on the loose. America and the UK have pledged assistance. It is presumed the masked men were Islamic radicals offended by Charlie Hebdo’s unrelenting satire of Islamic Radicalism.

While constantly shocked by mass killings on our home ground, we are unaccustomed to stories like this from Paris, which has not suffered an attack like this since 1961.

Fear of all kinds walks the streets and boulevards of the City of Light tonight. Parisians are afraid. French Muslims are afraid; worried that this will accelerate the anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping secular France and give more wind to the sails of the Far Right.

Interestingly enough, even as anti-Muslim sentiment rises so has anti-Semitism. Not just in France but across Europe.

Thousands gathered in Germany to protest the presence of Muslims within that country’s borders. The Cathedral in Cologne turned off its lights in protest of the protest.

There will be a national day of mourning in France tomorrow and, for a while, at least, the shock of what has happened will hold the country together. Thousands have gathered in Paris to hold their pens in the air as a sign of solidarity with the dead journalists. The same is happening in Trafalgar Square in London.

Everywhere, people are holding signs that pronounce: Je Suis Charlie. I am Charlie.

Charlie Hebdo was raucous, outrageous and often controversial. It was firebombed three years ago after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, a thing forbidden in Islam. So, today, there was no sign that let the attackers know which offices belonged to Charlie Hebdo. They forced that out of a woman at gunpoint.

Among those who were killed was Stephane Charbonnier “Charb”, the editor, one of two who had a police officer assigned to him after previous death threats. Also dead is an eighty-year-old cartoonist, Georges Wolinski, considered one of the world’s great cartoonists and one with a wicked sense of humor.

Really, an eighty year old?

While what Charlie Hebdo does is often outrageous and perhaps a bit profane, it exists in a country where free press and free speech are constitutional rights. And that is why so many are carrying signs that say Je Suis Charlie. I am Charlie.

They are supporting the right to free speech, not just in France but around the world where there are those, including these three masked men, who would extinguish that right. They pronounced themselves Al Qaeda when they stormed the building.

They wanted to turn out the lights at one establishment in hopes it would cause fear in others – as it probably will – but against that are the thousands standing in the cold in London and Paris and other places saying, Je Suis Charlie.

Je Suis Charlie.

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Letter From New York 01 06 15 Facing the challenges of the new year…

January 7, 2015

The cold that has held the Midwest throttled for the last two days is heading east and will be with us tomorrow.

It is time to pull out the long underwear and the heavy sweaters and to be concerned that pipes don’t freeze.

This will be a short letter as I have spent the day in languid pursuits, a long leisurely lunch with my friend Larry Divney at his favorite place, Ca’Mea, the best northern Italian north of New York.

We met so I could return to him the various containers in which he had brought wine to Christmas celebrations, part of the best Christmases I have ever had. He and Alicia, his wife, are very special people and fill a special place in my life. We celebrated both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together and it will remain with me as two of the best Holidays of my life.

The market is volatile. The world is volatile. The New Year did not bring some magical changing of the tenure of the times. The troubles of the old year have blended into the New Year and we continue on.

The Republicans have taken control of both the Congress and the Senate and so I suspect we will have a very rocky couple of years while they do their best to demonstrate they can govern as opposed to being the party of “No!”

I grew up Republican, one of those good cloth coated Republicans that Nixon described in his famous “Checkers” speech, back when we actually believed in Nixon. My parents did. They were one of the few people in our neighborhood who supported Nixon when he ran against John Kennedy in that long ago, much studied election.

But I haven’t been able to recognize the Republicans in the last couple of decades. They seem so far away from the party I grew up. Now they have the entire Congress and it will be interesting to see if they can govern and govern with some sense of responsibility, which I haven’t felt they’ve had for quite some time.

Boehner is once again the majority leader in the Congress but not without some pushback within his own party.

The Republicans seem fractured. They are trying to hold it together but I’m not sure they can. It will be interesting to watch. I would like to see them manage but I’m not sure they can.

So, on this first day of the new Congress, I hold my breath and wait to see what occurs.

In the meantime, I must head for bed as I go back to the city for the first time in three weeks to begin facing the challenges of the year.

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Letter From New York 01 05 15 Back to the hustle and the bustle…

January 5, 2015

As I often do before I begin my daily blog, I check the headlines at Google News to see what is happening. Today was a fairly big day for news in that, while I was not listening to the radio or watching TV News or checking it online, markets plunged as oil dropped below $50 a barrel for the first time in years. Apparently there is an oversupply of it when not so long ago fear of a lack of it drove prices through the roof.

Jury selection began in Boston for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is accused in the Boston Marathon bombings. There is a pool of 1200 potential jurors. Survivors and first responders are expected to testify.

The thirty-year-old son of New York Hedge Fund Manager is in custody. Allegedly, he shot his father in the head because he’d had his allowance cut.

And I cannot not mention that today Teresa Giudice, one of Bravo’s Real Housewives, went to prison today.

That was some of the news that I would have seen if I had been looking but I wasn’t. The day was bright and shiny like a new penny but cold, with a wicked wind blowing through the town. There is a wind advisory for the area that started early this morning and goes for a while longer. I’ve cleared branches out of the drive that have been ripped from the trees.

There’s a dent in my car door from another such wind adventure.

Mostly, though, today I did some work from home and went out shopping because I’m going to cook dinner tonight for friends. I am making a penne pasta with asparagus, mushrooms and chicken with a red sauce. Like most things, I found the recipe on-line.

It has been a quiet day of reflection as I did my work, beginning to blend into the New Year, sending out some emails on projects that are potentially coming up, working to re-connect with folks that have fallen off my radar during the Holiday Season.

Playing in the background has been upbeat Big Band music from another era. It has cheered me as I’ve begun the year’s work. For, in America, work begins again today.

I think in the UK they hold on a little longer, through this week. It will be a slow ramping up but ramping up it is. You could almost feel it in the day. I could feel it in myself. 2015 is here and now must be dealt with.

I go back into the city on Wednesday for a couple of days and it will be interesting to test my resilience in re-adjusting after nearly three straight weeks at the cottage. Ah, back to the joys of crowded subways and throngs of people, the hustle and the bustle of the Big City.

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Letter From New York 01 04 15 Living in a world of choices…

January 4, 2015

The sun has set and the lights in Claverack are blinking on, here on Patroon Street. If the family of deer trotted across the property, I missed them, as I was busy in the kitchen cooking for some friends who are coming for dinner.

Today I woke early, close to five and attempted to return to sleep but really couldn’t so eventually got up and made coffee. While it was brewing, a text came in from a friend down in Delaware who apparently was having the same kind of morning I was having. Feeling fretful and grey like the day, he took himself for a walk to the beach from where he sent me a picture of a beautiful but barren beach.

We had a text conversation for a few minutes and then he let me know he needed to call a friend who had just informed him, by text, that he was very ill with a form of leukemia.

That smacked the world into perspective.

While I have anxiety about moving into the New Year, it is not burdened with health fears and the prognosis of a limited horizon. It caused me to realize I have all kinds of options and opportunities in front of me. And it is with that knowledge I must move forward.

There was a task I have been delaying so I went to my laptop and finished it and got it off my desk. After showering, I went down into Hudson and went to Christ Church Episcopal for their 10:30 Sunday morning service. I was, unfortunately, a little late because there was a radio interview on NPR with Deborah Halber, who is the author of The Skeleton Crew, all about amateur sleuths who help solve the country’s coldest cases.

I know one of them well. His name is Todd Matthews and he solved a forty year old case known as The Tent Girl, an abandoned body wrapped in a piece of tent canvas for a shroud. Todd was active in The Doe Network, a group of hard-core individualists who become fascinated with particular cases and are like dogs with a bone. They won’t give up. He has parlayed his work into a job as Communications Director for the recently formed NamUs, National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

His work is fascinating. He was one of those amateurs who got it into him and he wouldn’t let go until the woman was identified. We’ve been friends now for ten years or so and while we don’t connect frequently, we have a place for each other in our lives. I admire him immensely.

So I was late to church, a thinly attended service this second Sunday after Christmas. Being a lapsed Catholic, I find solace in the services of the Episcopal Church, so like Catholicism but fundamentally different in their approach to many things. Mother Eileen, interim Rector of Christ Church, always goes out of the way to make me feel welcome.

Like many, I have a hard time concentrating on the sermon but it was a good one today, about carrying the Christmas spirit forward into the year, that all of us have good and evil in us and we make the choices day to day on which we’ll be.

At least that’s what I took away from it.

Hey, Hitler was said to have doted on children and Osama Bin Laden was many times a daddy.

It is now fully dark. I must go turn on the lights so my guests can find their way to my home and I will do my best to live in the choice of good over evil and, while I must acknowledge my anxieties, I must also remember all the good fortune in which I live.

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Letter From New York 01 03 15 Snowflakes falling; tragedies and miracles

January 3, 2015

Outside, snow is falling, big, thick, wet flakes of snow, falling and covering the ground, making roads treacherous and the landscape beautiful. It started shortly after I drove into Hudson to deliver Holiday quiches to Alana Hauptman, proprietress of The Red Dot. I had some for her earlier in the season but when I went to deliver them, I couldn’t reach her and they stayed with me so long I felt the need to rid myself of them and to bake fresh for her, which I did this morning.

It was cold this morning in the cottage and shortly after rising; I set a fire in the Franklin stove to help warm the cottage and have used its wonders to keep a soft warmth flowing through the cottage all day.

After delivering the quiches, I returned home, following in the wake of one of the big, bruising snowplows that seem to relentlessly patrol the roads of Columbia County to keep them passable. We crawled along at half the speed limit as the roads are deteriorating rapidly. I’m home now for the evening. And tomorrow it is supposed to climb up into the fifties!

Ah, right on schedule! The deer are crossing in front of the window where I write, headed off toward the field beyond my woods. They stand proud on the tip of the hill before it slopes down to the farmyard.

It is a quietly good afternoon. Jazz plays, snow falls, deer roam, the cottage is full of the smells of a good day’s baking. In total, young Nick and I whipped up five quiches today in record time while doing some much needed straightening of things after the busy Holiday season.

For the first time all day, the cottage feels warm. I’ve just put another log into the stove.

Outside the safety of the cottage, the world continues its pace, full of tragedies and miracles. A seven year old survived the crash of her parents’ plane and walked through rough terrain to seek help. Everyone else on board perished. The story brought tears to my eyes.

As they did when I got a text from my friend Nick Stuart, letting me know that his long anticipated Green Card had arrived in the mail today and when I read it, my eyes watered up. It has been a long journey to getting one.

Things here seem piercingly close when I read about them or watch news on my laptop, having now been a cord cutter for three years now. I think it is the landscape with its raw beauty that makes all things seem closer to the heart.

It is what I have treasured about this time in the country. I have been closer to nature than I have ever been in my life, with time to notice the changes in the seasons and in the tenor of the days themselves.

Like noticing that the family of deer always seems to cross in front of my window when I sit down in the fading light of day to work on this blog. I have taken time to notice the snowflakes falling and the raindrops splattering into the drive.

Next week I will begin to go back to the city more often and am hoping that I don’t lose my sense of connection with life in the burly bustling that is New York.

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Letter From New York 01 02 15 A week ends in a New Year…

January 2, 2015

The day dawned drab and dreary here in Claverack, a grey day, the kind that made you want to roll over and bury your head in your pillow. Grabbing my teddy bear to my chest, I did just that, the boy in me not wanting to face the day. But not long later, I was up and had my morning coffee and had a good hour perusing the New York Times.

The news today was filled with yesterday’s passing of Mario Cuomo, father of the current Governor of New York and a former Governor of the State himself. He was a big man who filled the rooms he was in and flirted with running for the Presidency more than once.

When he was Governor, I was always aware of who he was even though I wasn’t living in New York then. He died, interestingly enough, only hours after his son, Andrew, was sworn in for his second term as Governor of the State of New York.

He was a staunch voice for the liberal side of the Democratic Party, often stymied in his plans for the State by the dire finances New York endured when he was first elected. He served three terms, went into the private practice of law after being defeated by George Pataki in his fourth attempt for the office, became wealthy and watched his children grow into politicians and newscasters. Chris Cuomo of CNN is another son.

The day did not stay grey and in the early afternoon, the wonderful golden light that blesses the Hudson Valley showed and transformed the landscape. The deer crossed my yard.

Earlier in the day, I went out and walked the circle upon which I live with my friend Lionel. A squirrel perched on a tree branch, so steady as to seem a statue. We noticed trees that had been uprooted by some wind event in the last two weeks, including a birch tree in his yard and an oak in his neighbors.

We live on a circle, Patroon Street, a scattering of a dozen houses on lots from one to four acres, broad and spacious with scatterings of trees and wild overgrowth. During the summers I cannot see my neighbors as my two acres is all woods except for the clearing where the cottage stands. On the east side of my property is the Claverack Creek and on the other side there are only wild woodlands. Behind the northern edge of my little universe is a long open field belonging to a farm. Once when traipsing across my “back forty” I encountered a cow that had wandered onto my land.

There has been much stability here since I moved here thirteen plus years ago. I am sure that to all of us who live here, Rosemary’s Cottage will always be Rosemary’s Cottage even though she has passed and it has been sold, gutted and is being rebuilt by a couple up from the city.

Tonight’s sky is tinged with pink. What’s that saying? Red sky at night, sailor’s delight? If true, we will have a gentle day tomorrow. I have loved being here this fall and winter, having time to notice the rhythms and pacing of my little world.

The New Year begins. I will have more to pay attention and will probably be spending more time in the city than I have but probably less than I was. It will be an interesting thing to see how the New Year plays out.

Every Friday, I have a conversation with two friends who live in California, whom I have known now for twenty plus years, Medora and Meryl. When I met Medora she was Vice President of Development for USA Network and Meryl was about to become the Chairwoman of the Television Academy.

We gather by phone on Friday to support each other in life. Each of us shares and each of us supports and it has been a blessing. We have been doing this since early in 2001 and it is one of the constants of my life.

When we were talking today, I was realizing how blessed I am to have this ongoing support group. Exactly how we started is now lost in the mists of time but it is a great joy for me to stop for half an hour each week and share the joys and tribulations of the past week with two people who have known me so long and so well.

The sun fades. The barren trees stand stark against the light. The deer are now coming back across the land. A week ends. All is well in Claverack.

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