Remembrances of things past

Posted on April 14, 2011 by 40andover

TLP (the little prince, my son) checked out a library book on fishing. We had to read about each fish, length, weight, best bait and whether the species would put up a fight. Also we had to go through the various baits (it WAS a how-to book, after all) and the only thing I could add was when we got to fly fishing. I told him we could go on the Orville’s Fly Fishing School website (I silently prayed it had not gone into Chapter 11 or dissolved).

When it came time for me to read about a fish that was a pesky fighter, I recounted my family’s trip to San Francisco, circa 1968. Mom and Dad took us to eat at the Fisherman’s Wharf, which — at that time — was an exotic dining destination. My parents were dressed in evening wear, so I presume that after dinner we were being dropped off at the hotel with a sitter, but I can’t remember. I do remember fishing for our dinner and Dad’s having caught a pesky, fighting fish that flailed in and out of his tuxedo jacket. Mom and Dad must have eaten that fish (I think we kids stayed with hamburgers).

That was the first and last time we went fishing with Dad or anyone. Too traumatic. If TLP wants to go fishing, Uncle HOSOB (husband of sister of blogger) or Cousin Gentle will have to take him. Thinking back 43 years ago, I am still traumatized.

Even more tales from the 60s

Posted on April 14, 2011 by 40andover

I mentioned to POB (partner of blogger) that if I don’t write down these memories, soon they will be lost because my brain is maxing out.

The 60s were not all days of wine and roses. Some of it was very confusing to a little kid.

I remember when our Jamaican-born baby nurse was not allowed to go into a Sutton Place apartment building to speak to the mother of a boy who hit my sister. Even in our own building, she had to stare down the landlord who told her she had to take the service elevator. She took the main passenger elevator. I was wide-eyed and only later understood what happened.

And yet, for years after his assassination, our baby nurse reminisced about that day that then Senator Bobby Kennedy held the door open for her on his way to the tennis club in our building. People born after those times don’t see how big that was.

Mom used to tell us that her secretary told her not to marry Dad because he was a Jew. Mom had to break the news to her secretary that Mom was also Jewish. To Mom’s credit, she continued to work with that secretary.

I look at it more practically: Mom was dropping an intimidating Polish last name for a generic Jewish one. In those days, it was also a question of: “pick your poison”.

Dear IFOB

Posted on April 13, 2011 by 40andover

Dear IFOB (Italian friend of blogger):

First, let me say that I do like your critiques of my views and my blog. You challenge me to define and refine my positions. And you are right, recently I conflated three issues: the deficit, taxes and entitlements.

I believe in social programs and safety nets. Ideologically and emotionally, I am all-in on these. But we can’t go into debt to provide them.

If everyone paid taxes even at Bush tax levels with no deductions or loopholes and, excluding war costs, we couldn’t pay for the social programs and safety nets, then we have to re-prioritize and cut.

Unencumbered by facts or education in this matter, I just don’t believe that we would go into debt to provide these programs if people paid their taxes and we didn’t go warring in quagmires.

Separately, we have a huge debt right now. We spent on credit and now we have to pay the bill. Forget about the reasons for now. The bill is big and we owe it. I think that means higher taxes, at least for a while.

And just for icing on the cake, President Obama is pissing me off a lot lately.

Oh, and IFOB, I think you still owe me lunch. We can just eat tuna fish sandwiches — nothing fancy.

Ciao

~~ Blogger

More tales from the City

Posted on April 11, 2011 by 40andover

These past days, I have been lost in the old days and vignettes from childhood.

I remember that my parents often threw cocktail parties for my mother’s colleagues in the advertising and cosmetics industries. My mother knew everyone’s cigarette preferences and she filled silver cases with the preferred brands and laid them on the coffee table.

And women had those tortoise cigarette holders that made smoking look so cool.

People drank Manhattans, Rob Roys and martinis (gin and very dry) and gimlets. People drank blended scotch whiskey and Gordon’s gin back then. I guess there weren’t that many other choices. Twists of lemon, little onions and olives were in dishes, and there was a bottle (?) of bitters, ready to finish off the drinks. My parents converted a closet in the foyer into a bar with an open front that faced into the living room.

A hired waiter passed hors d’oeuvres to men in slicked back hair and square hankies in the front pockets of their thin-lapeled suits and women (including Mom) who had Jackie Kennedy hairdos and dresses with shoulder wraps. No one dressed like Lady Bird Johnson.

We would come out in our matching pajamas and say good night. And then Mom or Dad would tuck us in bed. As soon as they were out of sight, we would creep back to the closed door closest to the “action” and listen and giggle until we were discovered and sent back to bed.

Only in retrospect, can I place the end of those heady days as around 1968. I am guessing that it all ended as a result of social upheaval from the 1968 assassinations and the Vietnam War. And because raising three children in the city was expensive.

Everyone tells me I ought to watch Mad Men. But I prefer the memories.

PLaza3-9285

Posted on April 10, 2011 by 40andover

That was my family phone number for 50 years.

Not 212 753 9285.

PL3-9285.

PL for PLAZA, meaning midtown east.

My dad’s office phone was JU2-1455. JU meant Judson for midtown west. There was MU for Murray Hill, etc. GR for Gramercy Park. POB (partner of blogger)’s home phone was GR3-9119.

And it wasn’t just a series of numbers, but it located you in area of town. Like old-fashioned GPS. Your phone number made you less anonymous. And you couldn’t take your home or business number with you if you moved across town. Wires and technology couldn’t handle that. So, if you had a GR or MU or JU or PL number, you lived or worked in a geographically defined area.

And our zip code was 22, not 10022. In the 1960s, you didn’t need five-digit zip codes, let alone the new nine digit ones.

Of course, some people (very few still alive) remember 6-digit phone numbers. They probably think I am late to the game of recognizing the lost nuances of day-to-day life in New York City.

But, today, I came across my birth announcement, among the memorabilia that I, as family archivist, need to preserve. And it held more information than the fact of my birth (as a result of which my family was forever changed — some say for the better, others say “not so much”). It captured a time and place in New York in the 1960s, where my family’s PL prefix in our phone number and our home address reflected upward mobility, into places where Jews mostly couldn’t find apartments. It also suggest certain life that fashioned after JFK’s Camelot (at least until private school tuition kicked in).

The 60s gave way to the 70s and the urban decay. Then came the late 70s, 80s and 90s and urban renewal and soaring population growth. The end of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st gave rise to untold fortunes and a sea change in the socio-economic-racial-cultural urban landscape.

The nuances of numbers and two-digit zip codes were irrelevant and unworkable even in the late 70s. Every now and again, I see a decades-old advertisement on a building that time forgot (until the lot next to it was demolished to build a high-rise) that has a six-digit phone number with a prefix that refers to a neighborhood.

And I think, I was born in a small town. I was raised in small town. It just got big and anonymous during my lifetime. And these strangers don’t know the secrets of my small town.

And that’s good enough for me.

Carpe Diem

Posted on April 5, 2011 by 40andover

Tonight SOB (sister of blogger) and I had dinner with our uncle. He is 81 years-old. He has been in a slow decline in the last two or so years but able to dance (his life-long passion) and go about his life.

Unfortunately, he has aged rather dramatically in the last month. So, SOB and I needed to convince him to let us help. Just when we were bracing ourselves for the image we had, when he walked into the restaurant, the even further downward trajectory was so profound that it was hard not to cry.

He has our aunt, his partner of 60+ years, and he has SOB and me. There is no one else close by. (And our aunt has her own medical issues.)

He always said he lived every day as he wanted. He said he hated going to sleep because he never wanted to end a day.

But living life on his terms and according to his muses often meant that he didn’t show up for his family (his parents or my mother — his sister) in their times of need.

I guess carpe diem means different things to different people.

As SOB and I helped him into our aunt’s apartment building (they have always lived separately), he lurched for the elevator and forgot to look back or kiss us goodbye.

Life on his terms.

Technology Upgrade

Posted on March 29, 2011 by 40andover

So, POB (partner of blogger) and I have been dancing around the DVR issue. (To get a DVR or not to get a DVR? That is the question.)

Why so resistant? We didn’t want TLP (our son, the little prince) to become too attached to TV shows, etc. We want him not to grow into a v-idiot who schedules social interactions around an episode of, let’s say, Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

In short, we lost. “It is only one TV show,” we say to each other as we slide head first down the slippery slope. And it will make Friday nights around the dinner table with friends and godchildren less stressful if TLP doesn’t have to watch the clock until, as he says, he “must withdraw from society” and watch his program. (Yes, my son speaks with a dramatic flair that is best left to an adaptation on Masterpiece Theatre. Nevertheless, his turns of phrase are diverting, if head-scratching.)

I learned that a DVR is not a separate device, but an enhanced computer chip in a cable box. Who knew? (Two entire generations knew.) Our friendly helpdesk person explained that to me and more. “Sa-ay-yyyy you’ah watching O-O-prah, and you didn’t catch what they said, you can rewind a live broid-cast!! It’s ama-ayyy-zing. Not that I watch my programs live, because I am working the night shift here now since I lost my old job 15 months ago, but I’m just say-yin’ it’s possible.”

We chatted some, and I wished her well. “It was a real pleasuhre talkin’ to you, [POB].”

Did you think I would give my own name? Besides, the bill comes to POB.

The Vegan and the Hot Dog

Posted on March 24, 2011 by 40andover

Yesterday, I was part of a group of colleagues entertaining an out-of-town colleague’s client who was visiting New York. The client is vegan, so we tried a highly rated vegan restaurant in Gramercy Park. Not a piece of bread for the table. There is nothing non-vegan about bread. The food was tasteless. There is nothing non-vegan about flavor. There was not enough food in a serving. There is nothing non-vegan about healthy-sized servings. Somehow even the protein sourced from non-animals didn’t fill me up. There is nothing non-vegan about a few extra pounds around the midsection. Maybe I ordered wrong because all I seemed to eat was grass and shrubbery.

Later in the day we took the client to a basketball game. There is nothing non-vegan about popcorn, french fries, onion rings, beer, pretzels and peanuts. Being vegan CAN BE awesome. Imagine being able to say the following: “Sweetie, I had to eat the fries and rings and roasted peanuts, because there was nothing else. What could I do?”

But everyone grabbed all the food I had and left me alone, waiting for some miscellaneous things, like wine and mixed drinks that were ordered. And, I was starving.

I looked to my left. No one I know. I looked to my right. No one I know. I turned around. Uh oh, a colleague on his cell phone. But, wait, I remembered that he doesn’t have such good far-vision. So, the coast was clear. I put on my sunglasses anyway.

I proceeded to order a decidedly, and possibly offensively, un-vegan hot dog and scarfed it down so no one would see. Immediately, I felt terrible about what I had done. Here I was stuffing sausage derived from mystery meat of inhumanely killed animals and we were entertaining someone who has a conscience.

Then I was sure Karma would boomerang and I would be the Lucille Ball character in a “Here’s Lucy” episode where she was at a gallery opening and she started breaking out in hives. Lucy excused herself. Then the spotlights turn on, a curtain is pulled back and there is Lucy behind the prized sculpture, scratching her hives and looking like a deer caught in headlights.

But I wasn’t caught. Except when I got home, I noticed a mustard stain on my jacket . . . .

Karma IS a boomerang.

In the Game

Posted on March 19, 2011 by 40andover

So, SOB (sister of blogger) and HOSOB (husband of SOB) jetted off to Rome today. They were there two years ago (and Florence and Venice in the two years before that), but got excited about our trip and decided that one can never go to Italy enough. (I believe our family has only grown higher in the esteem of IFOB (Italian friend of blogger).)

So, they are going to a country that, Thank G-d, is just providing bases for the sorties over Libya and not missiles or planes. So, there is a lesser likelihood that Italy, in general, and Rome, in particular, might be bombed in retaliation.

YES, I have gone through the disaster scenarios and I am comfortable that they are traveling to Italy.

It is a sad, sad, truth that war is only real, if — to quote a business axiom — you have “skin in the game”. Otherwise, it is a statistical variance on the number of humans in the world.

Our family doesn’t have “skin in this game”. But some of us now are closer to the “game”. And it is no longer a GAME. It is war.

The test: day 4 or 5 or so; Purim

Posted on March 19, 2011 by 40andover

I was at a Purim party at the synagogue. At Purim, kids (of all ages) dress in costume. I am not sure why, although in the Story of Esther, King Ahashverosh has a party at which Esther (with the help of Uncle Mordecai) saves the Jews from death at the hands of evil-doer Haman.

It was primarily a kids party with associated adults expected to dress in costume, as well.

The theme of the costume party was “under the sea.” I put on an old blazer that I used to wear to the office, over a t-shirt, sweater and jeans. So, I came as a lawyer and lawyers are often referred to as sharks. So it was a come-as-you-are party for lawyers. The one time being a lawyer has been an advantage.

One of the rabbis asked, “how goes your month of cheerfulness and optimism?”

Uh oh, CLERGY is reading my blog. Actually, that may, in a convoluted way, validate my sometimes sanctimonious attitude.

Wow, this month of optimism and cheerfulness is getting really, really awesome.

40 — oh wait, yikes!! 50 — andoverblog

Aging and living in urban US

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