Letter From New York August 5, 2014

August 5, 2014

Or, as it seems to me…

The sun is playing hide and seek, darting in and out from behind clouds, a day that is both dark and bright, mood changing by the minute. The creek flows by, clear and steady; in a southeasterly direction, which I was informed yesterday, was very good feng shui. I’m pleased to hear that; we all need as much good feng shui as we can manage to find.

I didn’t realize it until I was scanning the headlines from the New York Times on my iPhone while having my first cup of coffee but yesterday was the 100th anniversary of World War I, the war that was to end all wars. Which, of course, it didn’t. It was merely a prelude to that greater catastrophe, World War II.

A century ago and we are still reaping the effects of that whirlwind.

The Russian Tsar was toppled in 1917 and, with his family, assassinated in 1918. Out of the ashes of the Russian Empire grew a very brief democratic government that gave way to the Soviet Empire. The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, rolled into exile in the Netherlands on a private train where he remained for the rest of his life. The last Austrian-Hungarian Emperor abdicated. The last Ottoman Sultan got the boot in 1922.

Borders were remade.

The Ottoman Sultan decided to side with Germany and Austria-Hungary, which was not a wise decision. When the war ended, his Empire was carved away. The British chopped up the Ottoman Empire for their own purposes. The British did a lot of that, doing things for their own purposes. The sun had not yet set on the British Empire. It took World War II to finish that off.

Iraq was not Iraq before the end of World War I; it was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Jordan was born out of the great carve up of the old Ottoman Empire as was Syria.

Germany lost territory and a swath of Poland cut the country into East and West. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was no longer an empire. Austria and Hungary became separate countries. A new country called Yugoslavia was created, as was Czechoslovakia.

The new Soviet Empire was diminished from what the old Russian Empire had been; new countries arose out of the demise of the old Tsarist domain. The Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were no longer subservient to Russia. Finland was no longer a Russian Grand Duchy, declaring its independence.

After the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine, America began to lean toward the Allies, entering the war in 1917. Its role in helping win the war established America as a global power and manufacturing powerhouse. It was the beginning of the American century.

Many of the best and the brightest of a generation of Europeans died during that war. The ones who survived wrote some of the greatest war stories ever told. Hemingway gave us A FAREWELL TO ARMS and Erich Maria Remarque gave us ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. F. Scott Fitzgerald became the chronicler of “The Lost Generation.” The war years were followed by the Roaring 20’s, a grand party partly fueled by a need to find distance from the horrors that had been.

World War I gave us modern warfare: tanks, gas, war planes. It wasn’t the War to End All Wars but it set the tone for all wars to follow. It gave new meaning to the horror of war. The great players in the Second World War all were present during the First War. Hitler was formed in the trenches of World War I. Churchill’s role in the catastrophe of Gallipoli marred his reputation, only fully redeemed by World War II. Stalin was formed in the crucible of the war and the subsequent Russian Revolution. Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy and itched to have a military command, a hope blunted by Armistice.

It was a century ago. But it seems so much of now started there, a remaking of the world order that we are still sorting out.

 

 

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Letter From New York July 27, 2014

July 27, 2014

Letter From New York

Or, as it seems to me…

It is a mercilessly grey day in Claverack. A medium hard rain falls outside the cottage and far away thunder rattles the skies. It is a drear day; so dark it is actually hard to see to the end of my property.

It is the flip side of yesterday, so lusciously beautiful that it caused a heart to ache – perfect skies, perfect temperature, a day lazed away in idle pursuits, antique shopping on Hudson’s Warren Street, a leisurely stroll through the little Farmer’s Market, then reading on the deck while the creek languidly slipped by on its way to the pond. It was a splendid afternoon. The wind caused the tall branches to brush against one another, their rustling the music of the afternoon. The reflections of light on the creek with the stirring of the water by the breeze resulted in thoughts of pointillism.

This austere day is made for contemplation. It cries for thought as I stare out the window by my desk, on the rain-drenched drive of the cottage, casting my mind out into the world.

It is hardly prettier out there this week; the Ukrainian crisis still unfolds. Body parts still apparently lie in the debris field of MH17, most certainly brought down by a missile. Putin seems to be doubling down on supporting the pro-Russian rebels. Two doctors leading the fight against Ebola have contracted the disease. I cannot tell from this morning’s headlines if there is or is not a temporary ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. The ill-fated Costa Concordia reached its final resting spot. The United States has evacuated the embassy in Libya because of escalating violence. The Taliban reclaim tracts of Afghanistan. The Boko Haram have kidnapped the wife of the Vice Prime Minister of Cameroon. Forest fires plague the drought stricken state of California with no rain in the forecast. An Air Algerie flight fell from the sky over Mali.

The litany of the world’s trials and travails could go on and on. They are enough to cause us to climb into our bunkers and hunker down for the duration. And that may be a bit of what I do when I retreat to the cottage and indulge in the beauty that surrounds me. If I focus too much on the world an existential ennui falls upon me and I feel I cannot breathe.

For all the dark things happening in the world, there was still laughter on the street yesterday. Hot dogs were purchased from Rick’s stand at 6th and Warren. Ice cream cones were being consumed from Lick, farther down Warren. Little children careened down the street, chased after by parents. Newborns rode in carriages. People find jobs and sit down for meals. The world keeps going on and, in that, I find solace.

It is like this moment, when suddenly the rain stopped and the sun burst through the clouds to dapple the land with its light. The earth abides, hope survives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Letter From New York July 20, 2014

July 20, 2014

Letter From New York

July 20, 2014

Or, as it seems to me…

 

A gentle rain fell last night in the Hudson Valley, ushering in a gently beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, a Goldilocks sort of day, sun glimmering off the creek as well as the small puddles left behind by the night’s rain. The deck is freshly stained, gleaming in the day’s light.

It is another bucolic day in Claverack.

It is not bucolic in much of the rest of the world. The past week has been haunted by the loss of MH17 over eastern Ukraine, a civilian passenger jet shot down by a surface to air missile, apparently by pro-Russian separatists who apparently bragged about having brought down the plane and then removed their social media boasts once they started to realize they may have hit a civilian plane.

According to reports I have read, Euro Control approved the flight plan for the plane; it is one of the generally used flight ways from Europe to the Far East. American airlines have been warned away from that route; I am sure none will be flying it now. Too late.

Nearly three hundred are dead, including eighty children, a leading AIDS researcher, an Australian novelist, a Dutch Senator, a cross section of humanity caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, their bodies scattered across nine square miles of contested land, some strangely intact, some ripped apart, all dead and gone in an instant, hopefully.

We are all appalled. The Russian propaganda machine has come up with all kinds of conspiracy stories, some that are completely bizarre but all of them pointing to others to blame. One pro-Russian separatist told a British journalist that this was all the fault of the Queen.

So it goes in the increasingly strange world in which Russia lives.

These seem almost apocalyptic times, with the chaos that is Iraq, that cradle of civilization, a Caliphate declared over parts of Syria and Iraq by ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The Kurds move toward autonomy. Iraq as we knew it seems destined for disintegration. War rages in Gaza. Rockets fall in Israel. And innocents die in all these places.

It seems hard to realize that innocents are dying in all these places when a soft wind is blowing through the Hudson Valley and lovely meals are being consumed in open air cafes with good food, good company and good conversation, often avoiding the painful topics of what is happening in the world because there seems to be so little we, as individuals, can do to alter the events. They seem out of our control. We can decry what is happening but what can we do to change what is happening?

Sitting here in the quiet of the cottage, I don’t honestly know. I can write my Congressmen and Senators on domestic issues about which I have an opinion but would Putin heed a letter from Claverack when he seems to pay little attention to the President of the United States?

But the downing of a civilian airliner seems to be coalescing European opinion into a united front of condemnation, something that they have not done. European interests are closely intertwined with Russia, provider of natural gas to much of the continent. It seems to be taking a tragedy for them to take a stand.

The digital front page of the New York Times this morning is splattered with news of the downed aircraft. The world is reeling from its loss. We depend upon our air lanes to move us to and from – they should be safe from what is happening on the ground but they no longer are. We are confronted by what modern weapons can do in overeager hands. This is no suicide bombing with an improvised device.

As we sit in our bucolic places on a warm summer’s day, the world grows more dangerous.

 

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Letter From New York

March 4, 2014

Letter From New York

March  3, 2014

Or as it seems from Italy….

At 220 km/h the Italian countryside slides by as the Italo, Italy’s high-speed train races from Roma to Firenze.  It has been raining on and off all day; off now, as I am cozied up in the Club Car, leaning against the window, staring out onto the Italian countryside, a mix of lush greens and soft browns, a land prepping for spring.  Farms slide by, clouds scud across the sky, threatening more rain, I ride the train backwards as we slide through tunnel after tunnel.

For the last five days I have been in Roma at SIGNIS, the global organization of Catholic Communicators.  I did a speech for them two and a half years ago in Costa Rica and they apparently liked what I did as they asked me back to be on two panels for them this year.

As many know, I grew up in the Catholic tradition and feel that I will never quite quit being Catholic.  It stays with me, a reality from which I can neither escape or fully embrace. 

At SIGNIS there were 300 plus delegates from 80 plus countries, a United Nations of Catholics.  As the days went on, I became aware of the vast gulf between some of them, particularly between conservative and liberal Catholics, with the liberals primarily but not exclusively from Northern Hemisphere countries.

Some American Catholics described their discomfort with African Catholics who tend to be conservative and narrow according to their counterparts, dogmatic and rigid against the backdrop of a changing Catholicism in the north where some embrace Catholicism but turn their back on rigid rules.  I suspect North American Catholics have no trouble with birth control and lean to acceptance of gay marriage, certainly gay relationships.  They seem to follow the social leanings of mainstream liberal Protestantism.  NOT ALL but a goodly number.  It was even surprising to me to hear their voices at such a Catholic conference.

All speak of a “Francis” moment, that this new Pope who has sat upon the Papal Throne for only a year has generated interest in Catholicism and an openness to it that has been missing for at least a generation or two.  Not doctrinally liberal, Francis is spiritually sensitive and projects an adherence to the teachings of Jesus perceived missing in the last Pontificates.  “Who am I to judge?” he has said while also acknowledging at moments, he does not know.  Appealingly human, he has captured the imagination of many and because of that there is a “Francis” moment – a chance for the Church to reclaim the drifting masses and to hold a moral high ground felt missing for a time.  Any man labeled a Communist by Rush Limbaugh deserves some solid attention

Now two days later, I am on the return journey from Firenze, back to Roma, to spend a night before flying home to New York, hoping to be able to get there, as the weather is not promising.  Taking a walking tour yesterday, three of us were treated to an insider’s look at Firenze by the charming Chiara.   The tour ended in the Gallery at the Academia that holds Michelangelo’s David, a sight that literally takes the breath away.

For an hour, I stayed with him, Michelangelo’s vision of the young David, naked, armed only with a slingshot and a stone, ready to take on mighty Goliath.  It is a work of staggering beauty and worth the trip to Florence.

Waking this morning to church bells pealing, I thought this was a good end to the trip, a visit with David.  Once we were all a bit like him, ready to take on Goliath, in the heady days before Kingship and Bathsheba, before the weight of power and the lure of his lusts pulled him from the purity with which he faced the Philistine giant.  For centuries it stood in the town square and now sits protected in the Academia, hopefully for as much of eternity as can be managed.

While back in Rome, it will be interesting to witness how long the “Francis” moment will last, how long it can be managed, this chance for Catholicism to reclaim hearts and minds within and without the Church.

 

 

 

 

 

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Letter From New York February 3, 2014

February 3, 2014

Letter From New York
February 3, 2014
Or, as it seems to me…

It has been quite some time since there has been a letter from New York. Fall has collapsed into winter; holidays have come and gone. The creek, in the midst of the polar vortex, has frozen for the first time in recent memory. Canadian geese swarmed the unfrozen portion, having failed to migrate south, caught in the unexpected fierceness of this winter, a winter that has blasted the Midwest and turned Atlanta into the world’s largest parking lot.

The wheel of life has kept turning. Babies have been born and Mandela died, marking the end of an era, the last of the great non-violent protestors gone – a man who made his mark with quiet resistance while in prison and who went on to lead his nation into what all hoped would be a better time.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Academy Award winning actor, was found dead on Sunday in his West Village apartment, a drug syringe in his arm, heroin nearby, another victim of drug overdose. Amanda Knox, the young American woman was found guilty again of murder but will only go back to Italy kicking and screaming. Found guilty once, then the guilty verdict was overturned and then she was found guilty again. Will there be another appeal? How long can this go on?

The Pope continues to amuse and confound while giving the appearance of actually making changes in the most unchangeable of organizations. He appears to be a breath of fresh air while remaining a doctrinal conservative; a fact pointed out pointedly by the New York Post this past week.

Downton Abbey has made its return; season five has been ordered for next year and it seems there is no one who is not interested in the family Crawley. Netflix still grows, becoming ever more ubiquitous and the world waits for the return of House of Cards while Orange Is the New Black continues to be water cooler conversation for many.

Hudson has been extolled in the New York Times, its clever shops praised [it is time to do a fresh walk down Warren Street], its dining scene celebrated. It is the center of “rurbanism,” a comingling of “urban-rural confluence.” It’s a buzzword conceived by Ann Marie Gardner and prominently quoted in the NY Times article on January 16th of this year, front page of the Home section. Everything is town seems to be “curated.”

According to the article, there is a great buzz about Hudson, something almost anyone who has been about the last ten years could have told you. But the noise now is louder. The “Hudson Secret” is out.

About the time Hudson was splashed across the pages of the Times so, too, was Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, the Republican frontrunner for Presidential candidate in 2016 – at least he was until one of his aides decided to “get back” at the Mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey with a mammoth traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge into New York City. Then came the accusations by the Mayor of Hoboken that Hurricane Sandy money would be delayed unless she played along with some urban development about which she had misgivings. Poor Chris Christie has gone from being the man of the moment to being booed at a Super Bowl rally. He looked rather glum while Cuomo of New York was downright ebullient when kidding back and forth with the new Mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio.

Fortunes change quickly in the political arena. Christie was fighting for a nomination and now is struggling for survival over “Bridgegate.”

And fortunes were won and lost over the Super Bowl, the annual football extravaganza that had the New York Police working overtime to cut down on vice before the Big Game. The Seahawks won in a landslide, as Peyton Manning seemed frozen on the field. The game proved the importance of live television events, once more.

All this has gone on since the last LFNY. The world has kept on moving without this missive. But it will be back more frequently, now that declarative sentences have been conquered.

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Letter From New York, November 26, 2013

November 26, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

Fifty years later…

I was a young boy in Catholic school in 1963 when, in the early afternoon, it was announced that the President had been shot.  Not long after, it was announced that the President had died and we were all sent home.  At home, on that rainy November day, standing in our living room, looking out at Bryant Avenue, watching buses trundle down the rain slicked street, in a grey room on a grey day, I turned to my mother and asked her a question for which she had no answer:  what kind of country are we to do this?

I remember distinctly the color of the wood frames of the window, that I was looking out to the world and looking to the world to give me an answer.  That year the living room was painted an ivory color: I was standing behind a chair with a pink velvet back, next to a marble top that held ashtrays for guests, cocktail napkins and other assorted party goods, I remember all those odd details because that was where I was standing when I understood that Kennedy had died.  Not where I was when we I heard it but where I was when I understood he was dead.

I was crying that afternoon, once I realized what had happened.  I hadn’t realized what had happened when I heard the news; I only realized it when I was home, in the safety of my home, in the warmth of my home, in a place where I thought I was allowed to feel.

I was Catholic.  Kennedy was the first Catholic president.  We had all watched his inauguration on television in school on the portable television I had carried to school from my bedroom.  It was a major moment for Catholics, though not for my family.  We were Republicans and had supported Nixon – definitely a minority at Visitation School that year, 1960, when he had been elected. 

The 50th Anniversary of the assassination of Kennedy has brought back to me all kinds of memories of those days, the day he died, seeing Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on live television, the day he was buried.  I recall we watched CBS, Walter Cronkite’s voice carrying us through the trauma of having what we thought of as a lovely young man, youngest man elected to the Presidency, with a lovely family, the leader of the free world, a man of eloquent words and the capability of stirring men to motion, gone in a sudden, mad moment that even today seems incomprehensible.

Conspiracy theories flow like a raging river even now; there are conferences for them, those who think Kennedy’s death was the result of a far-right conspiracy or the result of Castro’s revenge, or that the Mafia organized his death or Lyndon Johnson’s Texas cabal organized the President’s death to catapult their man into office; it was Kennedy’s own driver who murdered him.  There were shots everywhere on the grassy knoll.  There are, it seems, a thousand theories and a hundred conspiracies, which have kept the case from closing on Kennedy’s death.  The Warren Commission was a white wash.  It goes on and on and will probably never end.

Kennedy was a man who said:  A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.  And Kennedy was an idea that has lived on despite our growing knowledge of his flaws and faults and all too mortal foibles, of his dalliances with interns, movie stars and mob connected women.  He accomplished only a middling amount in Congress but he was an idea and he lives on, an idea that drove us to the moon and back, an idea that created the Peace Corps, an idea that still inspires us to “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.”

He is gone.  Those of us who remember where we were when we heard he had died are entering our late middle age or more and will be exiting the stage.  The 50th Anniversary of his death is a marker for those who remember where they were; fifty years is a long time, a lifetime, a half-century in which the world has radically changed.

It is said his death marked the end of innocence but we were not innocent then.  We were a deeply divided country, simmering with rage over integration and economic issues that bubbled over in the years following his death.  His death was the punctuation point for all the troubles to come.

But Kennedy was an idea and he lives on, an idea, an abstract, held in higher regard than any other post war President, 90% of people think he did a wonderful job and they think that because he is an idea that lives on, an eloquent idea that drew us beyond ourselves both while he lived and since he has died.

 

 

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Letter From New York, October 30, 2013

October 30, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

Usually I write my letters from the bucolic setting of the cottage, on quiet Sunday evenings.  Tonight, however, I am sitting in the Odyssey offices and my fingers got itchy for the keyboard and my mind needed the stretching that comes from putting words to digital paper.

It will be Halloween tomorrow night and I will likely be in the city, surrounded by a borough’s worth of children [and adults] dressed for trick or treat.  I vaguely remember being a child and working Bryant Avenue for a bag full of treats – I didn’t have any tricks up my sleeve.  There is something joyfully innocent in all the ruckus that comes with kids and Halloween.  Huge amounts of sweets will be given out and dentists all over the land will gleefully rub their hands together at the thoughts of the cavities coming.  One woman in North Dakota plans to hand out “fat letters” to obese children.  Now that’s a bummer. 

It is definitely turning nippy here in New York.  We went from a string of impossibly beautiful days to a string of days when the weather could best be described as: eh.  Which mostly describes my mood: eh.

I just passed over the headlines a while ago.  Sebelius has gently self-flagellated in front of Congress, apologizing for the blunders that have brought a harsh spotlight on the Affordable Healthcare Act, aka Obamacare.  She may be forced to resign though so far the President hasn’t demanded a head on a platter.  While she was apologizing the President was defending up in Boston while that state’s former Governor Mitt Romney went on record as blasting AHA once again.

The NSA [National Security Agency] is defending itself even as the revelations of what it’s been doing keep getting bigger.  Seems they are interested in everyone from Angela Merkel down to you and me. Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP, one of the biggest ad agencies groups in the world, has gone on record on NPR as saying that all of this has damaged “Brand America,” which it has.  Not irreparably, but damaged none the less, so Sorrell says.

Facebook, of the screwed up IPO, has rebounded and is now trading far above its original price point, making early investors finally happy.  Stocks, in general, are up, if down slightly today.  Happy we have avoided a shut down, the markets are ignoring that this is just a temporary fix and we have kicked the budget can down the road a bit – to past Christmas at least.

Vladimir Putin is, according to Forbes, the most powerful man in the world.  The President of the U.S. is number two.  Does this prove that it’s good to be the dictator?  I believe Angela Merkel of Germany is the fifth most powerful person in the world despite the fact she couldn’t keep the NSA from spying on her cell phone conversations.

We have had a lot of embarrassments lately, haven’t we?  I mean the very public, very bad, simply awful debut of the website of the AHA [Obamacare] and all this spying that the NSA has been doing, exposed by Snowden, who is holed up in Russia with the world’s most powerful man.

There’s good news.  Our deficit is DOWN to $680 billion!  Down to 680 billion.  We’re doing something right, I guess.

While the budget deficit is down, gun deaths went up again as six more people died in a North Carolina shooting today.  It appears to have been a custody dispute gone really wrong.  About 10,000 people have died from gunshot wounds since the Newtown massacre nearly a year ago.  It’s a drumbeat that just won’t stop.

And that’s sort of the way it is today, October 30th.  A bit like the constant line from the Laurel and Hardy movies:  now that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into! We move from mess to mess right now and it would be possible to get pretty discouraged from all of it.  But what else to do?

Vote!  It’s Election Day next Tuesday.  Time to make your voice heard! 

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Letter From New York

September 16, 2013

September 16, 2013

Or, as it seems to me…

It is early Monday morning as I begin to write this, riding the train back down into the city, a grey day, rain falling softly, chill with the first leaves turning.  I am wearing both a sweater and a jacket; last night I had the first fire in the old Franklin stove.  Tonight there may be frost in the Hudson Valley; the seasons are changing.

The anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone again, with its reading of names and somber remembrances.  It felt less raw this year to me, less time spent catapulted back to that day, to the raw emotions of shock, surprise, hurt and confusion.  Though I say that, I know I will never be free from that day nor, I think, will any New Yorker who lived through that experience.  Sudden loud noises still cause me to jump.  I have learned to be watchful traveling about the city.  I ride the ends of subway trains, not the middle because for I deem them safer from any terrorist bombers.  Wouldn’t they want to ride the middle of the train where they might do the worst damage?

So I am changed by that day, forever and always, as, I suspect, is everyone who lived through it, in some way carrying a bit of post-traumatic stress with us as we continue to plow forward into the future.

We have seen in a week the stunning turn around in Syria from imminent bombing to a tortured diplomacy that hopefully will succeed in depriving Assad of his chemical weapons without a missile being fired.  It’s a stretch to hope this but a stretch we have committed to taking and one that resonates with a country that is weary, weary as we were, perhaps, when Viet Nam was winding down, exhausted by the expenditure in lives and fortune for muddy goals not completely achieved.

When asked this week how I was by an old friend with whom I had not talked in awhile, I responded that my life, compared with 99% of the world was pretty miraculous, which it is.  I don’t live in the suburbs of Damascus.  I am riding a train down to New York through some of the most beautiful countryside America has to offer, the grey light glinting off the magnificent Hudson.  I have health and am successfully navigating my recuperation from arthroscopic surgery on my knee, not too bad but not quite the walk in the park the doctor made it sound.

Yet, like many Americans, perhaps most Americans, I have a sense of ennui.  As we felt as Viet Nam wore down, we are tired and there is a sense of travail.  We have endured ten years now of war in far off places.  We are still weathering the Great Recession, an economic downturn that narrowly avoided being another Great Depression.  We have been dodging bullets, literally and figuratively, and we are weary from it.

Yet we rebounded from the ennui that came at the end of Viet Nam, the oil crisis, the roiling inflation of the 1970’s, the shock upon the body politic of Watergate, a President resigning and the horrible fashion choices of the era.  We survived that, we survived the Yuppie 1980’s and we will survive all this and return to a sense of forward movement.

It is easy when we are in such moods to chat about the decline of America and we are in such a mood.  We have survived ten very difficult years, leaving us questioning much, just as we did at the end of Viet Nam.  We will question for a while yet and we will come up with answers.

I believe the national spirit will revive and prosper.  We have some very challenging and exciting times coming toward us.  There is some economic revival, we have a pause in Syria, the country is barreling toward the moment when whites will be the minority and that will reshape the country in ways we have yet to discover.

On this grey, chill day, I feel the warmth of optimism, wondering what the future will hold, for the country and for me.

 

 

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Letter From New York August 19, 2013

August 19, 2013

Writings from the side of the creek…

It has been grey all day in Claverack, just a bit on the cool side, perfect weather if you wanted to do all the shops on Warren Street in Hudson but I’m afraid I couldn’t quite manage that.  I am cozied in the cottage recovering from arthroscopic surgery on my left knee, a torn meniscus the culprit.

Once finished with the surgery on Wednesday, my dear friend Lionel drove me up to the cottage where I have retreated for four days of rest and recuperation after a stunning set of days on the Cape and the Vineyard – Provincetown with my friends Dawn and Gail and Edgartown with Jeffrey and Joyce, ten days where I did my best to turn off the outside world and concentrate on the beauty that is the Cape and the Vineyard.

Then home for a few days and the surgery, which has kept me close to the cottage, leg elevated, ice pack on for a half hour, off for half an hour, a steady rotation that marked my first three days of recovery, days that were stunningly beautiful. I sat and recuperated on the deck, staring down at the creek, watching a gaggle of geese sail majestically up and down the creek as it glittered in the sunlight dancing between the tree boughs.  It was an idyllic setting for recovery.

And as the sedation slowly washed its way out of my body it was good to reflect on what has been, for the most part, a very good summer albeit with its intimations of mortality that came with the death of my friend Joe Eros.  I have cruised to Bermuda, visited my town of origin, walked the streets of Provincetown, stared at sunsets over Edgartown harbor and feasted with friends at numerous good restaurants here and there – and the summer is not quite over.  Labor Day Weekend I will go to the Wisconsin Dells for the wedding of my best friend from high school’s youngest son.

It has been so idyllic that the drumbeats of reality have seemed particularly far away.  It was hard to imagine the rioting and protests in Egypt as I scudded across Edgartown Harbor with my friend Jeffrey on his sailboat.  The plight of Snowden seemed far away; I didn’t care if he ever got out of the transit area in Moscow’s airport. 

I have felt carefree about the NSA and the thousands of times a year they apparently have flaunted the law in their eavesdropping. How could I care when it was much more important what I would have at Devon’s Deep Sea Dive in Provincetown? 

As I was having a shrimp special on the Vineyard, NBC and CNN were getting themselves into hot, hot water with the GOP over proposed projects on Hillary Clinton.  Surfacing from my knee surgery, it seems the GOP has punished those two networks with bans from the Presidential Primary Debates in 2016.  Couldn’t they have waited to see the projects?

Russia cracks down on homosexuals and the world becomes outraged.  I care though my outrage seemed muted by the sun on the Vineyard, where I learned to love the BTBama, a latte with four shots of espresso with grapefruit zest – it could start any heart.  I sipped it while reading the morning papers in the Behind The Bookstore café in Edgartown, owned by Jeffrey and Joyce, where all the news seem muted by the pleasant present of lattes and papers and good weather.

Soon, Labor Day will come and with it there will be a return from the land of the lotus-eaters into every day reality that will be unbroken by time in the pleasant spots of the world.  It will be a fall of concentration and nose to the grindstone but I will have had the cosseting of a mostly marvelous summer.

In the fall, I know I will have to turn myself to creating the future, not just enjoying the present.  Summer fades and the tasks of fall mount up but buoyed by those summer memories, hopefully yours were as carefree and jazz filled as mine.

 

 

 

 

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Letter From New York

July 22, 2013

July 20, 2013

A vision of things not to be…

When I was very, very little I encountered the McCormick family. They had six children, all about my age. I don’t know quite how I met Sarah, the McCormick that was my age but we were fast friends by the time we walked together to Kindergarten at Fuller School.

I grew up with that family and have remained close to them in all the decades that have passed since Sarah and I headed off to school for the first time. It is unusual, I know. Our childhood friends seem to slip away as we move into adulthood but Sarah and the entire McCormick family did not. When they moved to St. Louis after 8th grade, I flew down to visit them. When Sarah was living in Spain, I visited her there. When she moved to Albuquerque, I visited her there and she visited me when I lived in Santa Monica. Her son, Kevin, has grown up thinking of me as Uncle Mat and I think of and call him my nephew.

I attended family reunions with her and stood with the McCormick family when a drunk driver killed the youngest daughter, Trish, one night shortly after I had visited her in Colorado.

Mary Clare is the oldest and lives in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. I have visited her there, was present when her daughter Margaret got married and returned when Margaret died. She and her husband Jim lived in New York awhile and we dined together at a favorite restaurant, Café du Soleil. I introduced them to my friends and they became friends.

John and Eileen, the parents, settled in New York after St. Louis and once I had moved to New York, I dined with them on a regular basis at their country club and attended family events with them. I contributed to John’s 80th birthday presents as if I were one of the kids. I mourned when both of them passed away within months of each other.

For four years I have spent my Christmases with these people. They are as much a part of my life as if they were my blood family. They are a family of choice and I went to be with them once again when Joe Eros, the oldest son of Jim and Mary Clare, died in an accident while he was hiking in Alaska, where he was stationed in the Army.

Kevin and I sat, looking at Joe in his coffin, and he said to me that he had always had a vision of the future and it had included doing things with his cousin Joe. We cried together. I, too, had a vision of the future that included getting to always know Joe a little better. And now our vision of the future included things that would not be…

He was a special man. Smarter than anyone I know. His Uncle John said that before there was Google, there was Joe. There seemed to be no nook or cranny of history of which he didn’t have some knowledge. He had a wry, dry wit that would bring a crooked smile to my face as he would crack a joke with his own crooked grin. His eyes danced with intelligence.

After 9/11 he joined the Army, served in Iraq, left the Army, went to law school and re-enlisted and was stationed in Alaska, a place he loved. He died doing what he loved, being outdoors, being alive.

I cannot tell you how much I miss him and miss that I will not have more opportunities for knowing him better. His brother Michael went to Alaska and met with his friends, met with the people who had been present when the accident happened and then accompanied Joe home. My admiration for Michael is enormous and my vision of the future includes knowing him better. He demonstrated what an amazing man he is during this painful period.

I have my family of origin. I have a family of choice. My vision of the future includes them both. I cannot imagine it differently.

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