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Letter From New York 03 24 15 Arrived in New Delhi…

March 24, 2015

It is 5:30 here in Delhi; the sun is beginning to set, as my usual world is just getting ready to go to work. I arrived safely after a good flight and a few hours sleep on the plane but was very tired after checking in at the India International Center where I am staying for a few days. I laid down for an hour’s nap but hit the snooze alarm enough that it was two hours before I got back into the world.

It was reported that short naps could improve memory five fold. I hope that is true; I was feeling pretty foggy by the time I laid down.

While I haven’t seen much yet of Delhi, I have seen enough to know that it has changed since I was here ten years ago and is vastly different from when I was here twenty-one years ago.

When I arrived at Delhi International Airport in 1995, I realized I had stepped into a movie I had never seen before. It was wildly chaotic. It was the middle of the night and, despite that, the airport was swarming with people, all yelling and screaming. The airport buildings themselves were tired and not very clean, barren, looking like something out of a 1940’s Humphrey Bogart movie, possibly co-starring Ingrid Bergman.

Today, I arrived at an airport that looked pretty much like any other major airport in the world, being swept by moving sidewalks along the way to immigration and customs. It wasn’t this way even ten years ago.

I was genuinely amazed.

My friend Sanjay sent a driver to pick me up and bring me to my hotel and we wove through the streets of Delhi where the roads have radically improved though, while lanes are clearly marked, the drivers seem to not to notice. It takes nerves of steel to drive in Delhi. I said so to Joginder, the man who picked me up. He smiled tightly.

It was not long before the beggars started coming up to the car and asking for money, always a moment of existential crisis for me, though at this point I had no rupees to give them.   On the drive to the hotel there were fewer beggars than I remember from before when they assaulted one at every turn.

Tomorrow I will be doing some sightseeing. I would like to return to walk around Connaught Place, where I have not been for twenty years and see the changes there.

Here to talk about media as having the ability to empower individuals, the Supreme Court has announced a major court case regarding freedom of speech on the Internet. Section 66A of the Technology Act has been declared unconstitutional, claiming it infringed on free speech. It allowed authorities to make arrests based on their interpretation of social media postings.

While I was safely winging my way to Delhi, an Airbus crashed in the Alps. No one is expected to survive. It was on its way to Germany from Barcelona. I give those passengers and crew a moment of silence.

Long absent from the offensive on Tikrit in Iraq has been air support from the US led coalition. Apparently now there are at least surveillance flights happening, giving direction to troops on the ground. Air strikes may soon follow.

In Mosul, IS is dissembling the city’s cement factories and moving them deeper into their territory as the push by Iraq to take Tikrit seems on the verge of success.

Israel has been accused by some in the US of spying on the Iran Nuclear negotiations and then giving that information to US Congressmen in hopes of undermining the negotiations. Israel denies it. If true, it marks a new low in the relationship with Israel.

Now we know Israel spies on us and we spy on Israel. We spy on everyone. We hacked Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. What makes this a bit different in the eyes of some is that Israel may have shared the information with lawmakers.

What did Rodney King say after the LA Riots: can’t we all get along?

The light is fading in New Delhi and I have work to do on my speech while I have hopefully improved my memory by my nap.

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Letter From New York 03 13 15 Greater love than this…

March 13, 2015

It is around nine in the morning as I begin writing; early for a Letter From New York but I fear if I don’t write this on the train ride down to New York, it just won’t happen today. I will arrive in the city in time for a meeting, then a lunch and then another meeting and then home on the 5:47, which tends to be occasionally a riotous ride as it’s the train many “Empire Regulars” take home on Friday. Unlike most trains on our route, it has a bar car as it continues on past Albany to Rutland, VT. Then I am scheduled for dinner with friends, making a long and busy and probably fun day, despite this being Friday the 13th.

It was a little hard to wake up this morning and I hit the snooze feature on my phone twice before actually rising so I scurried through my morning rituals this morning and only began to peruse the Times as I was sitting having coffee at Relish, the little restaurant across from the Hudson Train Station.

The morning lead story in the NY Times app was that IS [or ISIS or ISIL] is still fighting fiercely, attacking Ramadi while being pushed back at Tikrit. In months of heavy bombing, they have actually lost relatively little territory and are proving to be a tenacious enemy. Islamic groups in Africa, Boko Haram in Nigeria and a group in Libya, have claimed allegiance to the “Caliphate” as has a group in the Sinai Peninsula.

Various groups in Iraq, such as forces loyal to Shiite Cleric al-Sadr, are beginning to join the fray, sensing victory in Tikrit and jockeying for places of power in the event of a win.

While tenaciously fighting, IS is having some internal struggles to fight while governing. They are viciously executing anyone they suspect of wanting to flee the fighting. There is a nascent resistance to them that seems to be slowly growing and while about 8,000 have been killed, they are being reinforced by approximately a thousand foreign recruits each month.

Some IS fighters are repulsed by the violence of the group, causing restlessness in the ranks. And there is tension between the locals and the foreigners who are leading IS.

After the shooting of two officers, protests have resumed in the streets of Ferguson, MO. The protests were calm.

The House Oversight Committee is going to formally ask for answers from Hillary Clinton about her State Department email. Not unexpected. They also want the electronic versions and not the printed copies she gave to State.

A Univision host said on-air that Michelle Obama resembled a character in “Planet of the Apes.” He was fired.

In a sad note, Michael Graves has died. A postmodern architect, he is perhaps best known for the household wares he designed for Target, Alessi and Disney. He continued vibrant work even after he was paralyzed from the waist down in 2003 as a result of a spinal cord infection.

Perhaps the most awaited literary event of the decade, if not the century, is the release of “Go Set A Watchman,” the sequel to Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The announcement set off a great debate as to whether Harper Lee, now 88, had been manipulated into agreeing to publish the book. The State of Alabama started an investigation to see if there had been elder abuse. It has now closed the investigation, saying its questions had been answered to its satisfaction. The debate had divided the small town in which she resides in an assisted living center.

In a move that will make little girls around the world swoon, Disney has announced a sequel to “Frozen.”

Sweden is sending people to the UK to question Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, who has for the last few years received political asylum at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, over sexual assault allegations.

The world has a new island, created in Tonga by the eruption of an undersea volcano.

As we know, Tim Cook went on to replace Steve Jobs at Apple when Jobs died. What we didn’t know was that Cook offered part of his liver to Jobs to attempt to save his life when he was rapidly declining before actually getting a liver transplant. Jobs angrily refused, shouting at Cook almost before the words were out of his mouth, according to a new book, “Becoming Steve Jobs.”

Greater love than this, no man has…

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Letter From New York 03 10 15 Some feeling pressure…

March 10, 2015

It is late morning and I am settled in at the Acela Club at Penn Station, having done some emails and doing some work before I go to my afternoon appointment. I’m catching up with my old friend, Peter Kaufman, who was one of my first clients. The day is pretty grey but it’s going to warm up to fifty degrees here in the city and that’s pretty marvelous! Rain may come this afternoon.

The ride into the city on Amtrak was a feast for the eyes. Near Hudson, the river was an almost solid sheet of ice. A Coast Guard icebreaker had cut a narrow line through the ice and a barge was majestically threading its way down the river. Further south, the ice became loose with small floes bobbing on the water.

As the train’s Internet service was going in and out, I often found myself staring out the window at the magnificence rolling by. Lately, bald eagles have been flying along the river, across from the train. A lone coyote has been seen making his way across the open ice. West Point sails by in all its sturdiness.

It will be a long time and perhaps never before the ice thaws between the current President and the current Congress. There is brutal chill right now due to the open letter sent to the Leaders of Iran by 47 Republican Senators suggesting any agreement with Iran wouldn’t outlast Obama. It resulted in a blistering response from Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif, pointing out to the Senators that what is being negotiated is not a unilateral agreement with the US but with the US and the other four permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

Zarif has a point.

Four officers rescued an 18-month-old baby who had survived for fourteen hours upside down in her car seat while in a vehicle in a river. Her mother had passed away. After the ordeal, she is gradually improving. All four officers claim they heard someone calling for help within the car. They are not sure where the voice was coming from.

In another accident, 55 were injured when an Amtrak train struck a semi stalled at a crossing. The accident was in North Carolina. The train was New York bound.

In Argentina, three French sports stars and five members of a French television crew, along with the pilots of two helicopters, died when the two copters apparently collided. They were on the way to shoot an episode of a French reality show called “Dropping.” France is in mourning.

Ukraine has been quiet the last few days though today the Ukrainian military authorities are claiming that the rebels are using the truce to amass major weaponry.

Reaching critical mass is the cry for Hillary Clinton to say something about the email fiasco. She is expected to do so today. The right is digging its teeth into this, hoping, I expect, for another Benghazi moment. Some on the left are rising in support but most are just asking her to explain herself. Quickly, before it gets worse.

Wikipedia and the ACLU are suing the NSA over privacy concerns. Among the thousands of documents Edward Snowden leaked was one that showed the NSA was particularly targeting Wikipedia, among others, including CNN.com. Wikipedia joins a long list of corporations and foundations suing the NSA over their snooping. It will probably keep growing unless some come to court and receive rulings.

What is definitely growing is pressure on “Bibi” Netanyahu at home, facing elections. They promise to be extremely close. Some recent polls have shown him falling behind and he is claiming a worldwide effort to get him out of office. Commentators in Israel see him showing the stress.

Also facing pressure from a crumbling economy is President Maduro of Venezuela, who is facing the challenge by asking Parliament for extraordinary powers to face down “imperialism.”

Not looking very imperial today is the Euro, which has hit a twelve year low against the American dollar. It costs $1.08 to buy one Euro, a bargain for travelers but a challenge for businessmen attempting to sell their goods on the continent. The market is responding by diving lower.

And now it is time to close up for the day and head off to meet my friend Peter up by Columbia University. He suggested hot cocoa but it may actually be a day for iced tea.

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Letter From New York 03 09 15 Not at all, all bad…

March 9, 2015

The Weather Channel app indicated today was going to be warm but rather cloudy. Instead, the sky is blue and the sun has beamed down happily all day, warming my part of the world to a stunning 48 degrees; I even wandered a bit with only a fleece jacket on for a while.

The trees are casting sharp shadows and there is the sound of water dripping as icicles melt. Perhaps we are on our way to spring at last!

Tonight I am trying my hand at Shrimp Scampi accompanied by a white Cote de Rhone. My friends Lionel and Pierre are coming and I am savoring what time I have with them as soon they are off to Baltimore, where Lionel has a new job.

The news of the day is not all bad. Strange in places but not all bad.

Forty-seven Senate Republicans have sent a letter to the leaders of Iran warning them that a deal with Obama might not last beyond his administration. Something like this is unprecedented, I suspect. It feels wrong to me. Not surprisingly, the White House is furious.

IS continues to feel pressure. The Iraqi forces continue to put pressure on them in their drive to retake Tikrit. The US led coalition has bombed their oil fields, which once got them somewhere between $850,000 and $1,500,000 a day. Between the raids and the oil glut, oil is no longer their biggest source of income.

Divisions seem to be rising, with Syrian and Iraqi fighters resenting the privileges given to foreign troops in the form of better pay and postings. A resistance movement seems to be forming; several militants were gunned down in a drive-by shooting recently.

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, has admitted in a documentary that he cooked up the plan to retake Crimea long before he originally said. The trailer, with this piece in it, was shown on Russian television last night. No date for the actual documentary screening has been set. It is called “The Path to the Motherland.” Well, we suspected, now we know.

While the world’s archeologists are attempting to save Syrian and Iraqi artifacts and ruins, the Vatican is attempting to get back a letter written and signed by Michelangelo. It was stolen back in 1997; a ransom request was received today. The common thinking is that this was an inside job.

And in Israel, three men found a trove of Hellenic coins and jewelry while spelunking and have turned the treasure over to Israeli authorities.

Today, speaking of treasures, the Apple Watch was unveiled. It starts at $349 and goes all the way up to about $17,000. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, promises it will be like a friend on your wrist, a coach. I am going to be interested to see if it catches on. The report I read indicates it is not as user friendly as the iPhone.

And in another bright moment for Apple, HBO Now, HBO’s OTT offering, will be exclusively available on Apple devices for the first three months.

What also was shown today is a new MacBook, which is light and wonderful and gold and almost stole the show.

What is not stealing the show, is Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco, which continues to brew and boil and bubble. Politico speculates that she will address it at a press conference scheduled for sometime in the next few days.

In 2006, Helen Mirren won an Oscar for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in the film, “The Queen.” She is back as Elizabeth II in a Broadway play entitled, “The Audience.” Though my Bachelor’s and Master’s are in Theater, I rarely attend. However, this is one play I intend to see, once I have returned from India.

Ah, the day has reached that state when all seems cast in shades of brown. I must go set the table and prepare for dinner. A martini awaits.

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Letter From New York 02 10 15 Of sex and politics and other things…

February 10, 2015

Taking advantage of the fact it rocketed to just above freezing today, I went for a walk to break the spell of cabin fever that has settled upon me as it snowed and snowed and snowed. It is both above freezing and the sun is brilliant, causing me to squint as I walked. It appears that the weight of the snow has felled a couple of trees in the neighborhood.

Early this morning, Nick, who helps me out at the house, and his sidekick, Bernard, arrived to finish digging me out. It was while they were shoveling and knocking down icicles that a report came in from the BBC that, indeed, Kayla Mueller, the last American hostage in the hands of ISIS, was dead. It is not clear yet whether she died in the Jordanian bombing of Raqqa or if she had died at another place and time.

Regardless, she is dead and my heart goes out to her family. Her “crime” was that she was an American, helping refugees. She paid with her life for her humanitarianism.

Tomorrow, my brother goes to Honduras to bring medical care to places that have no medical care except when teams like his venture there. He has done this for many years. Honduras has a place in his heart; he ran a clinic for children in El Progresso, Honduras, after finishing his internship. Yearly, I worry because Honduras, never the safest of places, has devolved in recent years and is now one of the most violent countries on the planet.

Jeb Bush continues to groom himself as a Presidential candidate. Today he released the first chapter of an eBook about his time as Governor of Florida, filled with emails from his first weeks. Chris Christie, current Governor of New Jersey, is being dogged by tales of a lavish lifestyle to which he has managed to grow accustomed. After all, he said, he is just “trying to squeeze the last juice out of the orange.” The King of Jordan picked up a tab for him for $30,000 to pay for a vacation in that country.

Once upon a time Dominique Strauss-Kahn was considered a front-runner for President of France. Today, he is on trial in Lille, France for pimping. He denies it, not for a moment believing that the provocatively dressed women at the “swingers” parties he attended were prostitutes. He has a “horror” of sex with prostitutes. His sexual activities have been under the microscope since 2011 when he was accused by a housemaid at the Hotel Sofitel in New York of forcing himself upon her. That was settled out of court. He had to step down as President of the IMF. He has been attempting to rehabilitate his reputation since then. I don’t think it is working.

In other sexual/political news the High Court in Malaysia has upheld the sodomy conviction of former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar. He was convicted in 2008. That conviction was overturned and now that overturning has been overturned. Prime Minister Najib of Malaysia defended the decision, even as criticism of him is mounting in that country. As Imelda Marcos had a thing for shoes, his wife has a thing for handbags, the kind that can cost as much as $150,000. She has lots. He doesn’t earn that much as a politician. And no one seems to quite believe the story of family money from somewhere.

In Minsk, tomorrow, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany are meeting. They are going to discuss creating a de-militarized zone in the southeast of Ukraine where the September truce is being broken by both sides on a daily basis. While dialogue may continue, it is beginning to feel as if the door on diplomacy is closing. The US is talking of arming Kiev and the EU is against it. Putin maintains his inscrutability.

All of this is news and if this were a normal week, Brian Williams would be leading the dissemination of it on NBC. It is not. NBC says they will resolve the Brian Williams crisis in the next day or two. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll, 40% of Americans think he should resign.

This weekend the highly anticipated film, FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, will premiere. The film version of the naughty book of the same name will probably do well at the Box Office though first reviews of the film aren’t particularly good but then reviews of the book were awful but it didn’t prevent it from lingering for what seemed forever on the best seller lists.

I’ll wind down now and get ready to go to the local Mexican restaurant, Coyote Flaco, for some dinner. The sun is setting and the temperature is supposed to dip again, making this the longest cold stretch I can remember in the fourteen years in Claverack.

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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 12 21 14 Io, Saturnalia!

December 21, 2014

There was a light dusting of snow when I woke this morning, just enough to return a little Christmas magic to the countryside. It was a usual morning for me, coffee and the NY Times and some household chores. Right now I am doing a load of napkins in the washing machine so I have an ample supply for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners.

Things have been organized to go to the cleaners including a couple of tablecloths that need pressing to bring them up to Holiday snuff. Recipes are scattered across the dining room table to put together the shopping lists for the next few days. Everything is humming along.

Household cleaning is scheduled for Tuesday and the marathon of quiche making will happen later today and tomorrow. Marcel, Lionel and Pierre’s poodle, is sleeping on the settee by the front door, quietly waiting for them to come back from church. Jazz versions of Christmas carols play on Pandora.

It’s a pretty good day at the cottage, a soft, sleepy sort of day.

While wanting to shut the world out this morning, I didn’t do it. The NY Times beckoned to me too much and I curled in bed with coffee and my iPad to read the major stories of the day.

They’re not very Christmasy.

A man who had posted on social media that he was out to kill some policemen gunned down two police officers in Brooklyn in an execution style killing. He had just shot his girlfriend in the stomach, who will live. He headed to New York from Maryland and had committed the murders by the time the warnings came to be watching for him had arrived. He said they were retribution for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. He then committed suicide in a subway station.

Kim Jung-un, the North Korean dictator, is threatening us. I’m not sure exactly what he’s threatening us with but he is threatening us. He’s not happy the United States doesn’t want to take him up on the offer of a joint investigation of the Sony hack. So he is threatening us with mighty mischief.

So, the world is still a pretty bleak place out there but Christmas is arriving and thoughts of the Holiday fill the world. Thank goodness!

“Io Saturnalia!” used to be the greeting that filled Roman streets during the weeklong festival they celebrated in the middle of winter, starting around December 17th. They exchanged presents and ate and drank to excess. Sound familiar? Christians co-opted the festival in the 4th Century AD, turning it in to Christmas. Since some Christian historians believe that Christ was actually born in the spring, early Christians moved the date up to coincide with the popular Saturnalia.

Our Puritan forefathers didn’t celebrate Christmas. Apparently you could get in a lot of trouble with them if you had any parties around December 25th. It was a very naughty thing to do.

But the Puritans couldn’t hold down a good party; Christmas became legalized in the 1680’s and America was off and running in making this Holiday uniquely its own. It was a frenzy of gift giving, not to everyone’s appreciation. People were lamenting the commercialization of Christmas back in 1904. People have been lamenting that ever since.

This year I have pulled back some and focused on a few good friends and relatives. I make quiches for other friends and my neighbors. It feels good to be simpler this year. It feels good to be giving presents from my kitchen.

There was, of course, splurging on a few people. For them, I managed, I think, to find things for them that would both be useful and, hopefully, treasured in years to come.

I’d like to think my Christmas gifts would speak to the recipients in years to come, fostering enjoyment and recollection even when I am not present in person.

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Letter From New York December 9, 2014 Not unlike the folks at Downton Abbey

December 9, 2014

I am on the train, plowing south, toward the city. Outside there is an ice storm, making streets treacherous. Deciding caution was the better part of valor, I called a taxi to take me to the station. The Prius isn’t great when the roads are icy. Once I slid through the intersection at the end of the road, straight to the other side. I was lucky.

A kind man picked me up. Turns out he had been coached in football by my late neighbor, Hank Fonda. We talked about him for a while; the goodness I knew in him was underscored by what my driver told me: Hank had kept him out of a lot of trouble when he was young.

Tonight, there is an event in celebration of Downton Abbey at the Hudson Theater in New York; if it weren’t for the fact I had snagged a ticket, I wouldn’t be going into the city but would be cozying up to the Franklin Stove, listening to Christmas Carols and doing Christmas cards.

That’s a lot of what’s on my agenda for the next few days. I am mostly prepped for Christmas with only a few things left to order, mostly food baskets for those far and away.

It feels like a particularly well-organized Christmas this year, perhaps because I have more time on my hands than usual. I woke this morning feeling quite the country gentleman. Not sure why. Perhaps it was because the day could start lazily with good strong coffee and a perusal of the Times.

Once the things that needed doing were done, I showered, shaved and prepped for going down to town. To my great surprise, all the trains have been running on time. Often ice is worse than snow for them.

This brand of weather is likely to continue for the next few days with a break finally coming at the weekend. I’ll be doing a lot of homebound things I suspect tomorrow when I get back to Claverack, all the way through to the weekend. It’s not very safe on the roads and I think I’ll be living on what’s in the cupboards as opposed to making trips to the Price Chopper, which is about to get a new name, more upscale, better to position themselves against the behemoth down the road, Walmart.

Tonight at the Downton Abbey event will be Hugh Bonneville [Lord Grantham], the actresses who play Lady Edith and Mrs. Patmore as well as Robert Collier-Young, who plays the scheming Thomas. There will be highlights from Season Five, which is to premiere next month.

It is amazing the cult like following that has surrounded the show. I know folks who have Downton Abbey parties, expecting guests to show up as one of the characters. Each premiere episode results in many a bottle of champagne being uncorked. We seem to be fascinated by the doings of the very, very upper crust Crawleys and the adventures of the dozens of minions who care for them downstairs.

Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downton Abbey, every episode, is to be commended on the richness of his writing and his careful depiction of class differentiators in that time.

When Downton Abbey began it was 1912, the new season brings us up to 1924. It will be interesting to see how the Crawleys and their staff deal with the 1920’s and the social changes that are beginning to shift the landscape beneath them.

Perhaps that’s why the program resonates, we, too, feel the landscape changing under our feet. If you are not a digital native, the world in which we live seems confusing, with old ways rapidly evolving into the new and unfamiliar.

Perhaps nowhere has this been more evident than in the world of media, a world in which I have been a denizen for many a year. Just this morning I read a report in which network television viewing has declined 11% year over year and even more among Millennials. It is a shattering decline for the status quo.

At the same time, SVOD viewing is rising [Subscription Video On Demand (think Netflix and Hulu)] rapidly.

Television content providers, ad agencies, cable distribution companies, networks, everyone is scrambling to adjust and to survive in a future they can barely see.

Not unlike the Crawleys.

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Letter From New York December 6, 2014 It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

December 6, 2014

Outside, a soft, chill rain falls on Claverack Cottage. The creek flows gently toward the pond – all seems to be soft shades of grey today. A fire burns in the Franklin Stove and the Metropolitan Opera is on the radio. It is warm and cozy in my world.

Tonight is Winter Walk down in Hudson, an annual transformation of Warren Street, the main thoroughfare, into a winter wonderland. Stores unveil their winter decorations, carolers in Victorian costumes stroll the street, pausing to sing classic Christmas carols. A human crèche scene dominates one end of the street and Santa’s Village dots the town square at the east end of Warren.

It is one of my favorite days of the year, all full of good cheer and light hearted folks, strolling down the street, entering shops and seeing their Holiday goods displayed. Reindeer reside in a petting pen while Santa strolls the street. One year he played a mean trombone for the crowds.

It runs from five to eight and I will go down early and do my wandering early, coming home to have dinner with neighbors who will wander with me, through the stores and shops.

It is the official Columbia County kick off for Christmas.

Vendors sell hot cider on the street. It is a great mingling of the county and some of my best memories of my time here are from Winter Walk. Some years were snowbound, some years were just cold and some years were snowbound and cold. This year will be damp. Rain and sleet are predicted for the night.

I’ll bundle up and go, not wanting to miss the evening’s festivities. I love running into friends and neighbors, love the laughter of the evening and, for once, enjoy the jostling crowds of people who come from miles around to soak in the wonders of Winter Walk.

As it ends at eight, people crowd into the restaurants for dinner and drinks and the evening winds down in communal pleasantries.

Packages have begun to find their way under my tree. Santa, in the form of Amazon, has been arriving regularly. I have at least three holiday stations programmed on Pandora, classic Christmas carols filling the rooms of the cottage and I am especially fond of this year’s Christmas tree, adorned with ornaments from various phases of my life.

Electric candles light the Cottage windows and winter lights festoon the cottage.

I love this time of year.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

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Letter From New York December 5, 2014 Repeal Day

December 5, 2014

Do you know what day it is today? Well, it’s December 5th and today is the day in 1934 that Prohibition was repealed. The Great Experiment was declared a failure and Utah became the state that triggered repeal though you couldn’t drink in Mississippi until 1966.

The Roaring ‘20’s, fueled by bathtub gin, had long since faded into the Great Depression and it was time for America to have a break. Brother, can you spare a beer?

So today is Repeal Day and there is a Repeal Day Cocktail Conference happening and I guess I will toast Repeal Day when I sit down for dinner tonight. It will be a bit of a celebration and I will mark it on my calendar for future years.

What I won’t be celebrating but will be acknowledging are the myriad protests that are being conducted regarding the failure of the Grand Jury to indict the police officer involved in the chokehold death of Eric Garner on Staten Island.

Two hundred some were arrested last night in New York and a photo of a spontaneous protest in Grand Central went viral. People began to lie down in the main hall until there were several hundred, imaging the death scene of Eric Garner.

In Phoenix there were marches because an unarmed black man was shot down there. Eric Holder went to Cincinnati to announce the results of a two year study of police there that didn’t portray them well; excessive force was one of the faults found with them.

It was said at one point that the election of Obama was going to usher in a post-racial era. It hasn’t and of late it has seemed the drumbeat of police violence against minorities has, if anything, increased.

The Mayor of New York, DeBlasio, is walking a fine line in being sympathetic to the protestors while being supportive of the police. It’s a tightrope.

But perhaps it is more than minorities. A white acquaintance was mugged on the Upper West Side a week ago and claimed the police treated him very badly when he reported the incident. His take from what he’s heard is that the police are intimidating folks so they don’t make reports so the crime statistics go up. They’re very down this year in the five boroughs, on the way to a record year of lows in most kinds of crime.

But the incidents of police violence towards minorities feels like it is on the upswing because of the high profile nature of Eric Garner’s death and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. And they put a pall across the land. Putin’s Russia is having a field day with the stories as I’m sure are other countries less friendly to us. China, too, may be having a day with the stories. We lecture them regularly on human rights.

So while tonight I will be toasting Repeal Day, where we were freed from the yoke of Prohibition, I will not be raising a glass to law enforcement. I will do that on a day when there is a swing in relations and we feel that all are treated the same, regardless of color.

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