Return to New York City & Pluviose, a poem

Central Park not far from West Park Drive — I took the photo by cell phone on Saturday, climbing high on a rock formation around 10 in the morning, bitter cold wind but sunny: I meant to snap the lake I saw too but didn’t manage it

Dear friends and readers,

Yvette and I reached home from New York City and our pussycats not far from midnight last night (Saturday). We had come to New York City for two nights and three days (at a huge expense) for reasons we made explicit and not so explicit. We said we were coming to NYC for Yvette at long last to go into the opera house and experiences one of the operas we’d been watching in an HD-screen theater live, and since John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer was removed from HD operas broadcast across the world (a genuine loss) we chose this weekend. In summer we had said we ought to have a holiday but didn’t exactly know where to go, and thought of NYC but since in August NYC is hot, to say nothing of the reality the plays I’d want to see were starting in later September, we decided on some time during the fall.

I knew I was coming as a way of breaking a thick wall of pain: NYC the place Jim and I had lived in so happily (well on and off) together for 11 years and visited many times since, my home (where I feel at home, crazy as this may seem, where when my inability to cope with space as to north, south, east, and west is not so bad once I am situated since I know so many of the streets and places like I know my hands). Why I needed to do this I don’t know: twice in the two days I began to shake uncontrollably from nervous distress, and at times it seemed everywhere I went I was looking at some place or scene he and I had been together, or some place or scene he and I had passed through together and remembering, here we did this, there we would do that. But never cried. Why I don’t cry I can’t figure out, instead I sit down and put my hands over my face for the time I need to do this until I’m calmer.

So many ghosts. I grew up here with two parents, both now dead, and I went to the theater with my father. Shopped on 34th Street when it was glamorous and had an Orbach’s and got a fancy coat with my mother. They were with me too. Sombre in Central Park I went walking with Memory.

Yvette and I had saw some terrific theater and great photographs, which I mean to write blogs on Ellen and Jim have a blog two. Beyond Death of Klinghoffer, which Yvette has already written in her concise brillian wry way upon, we saw together Stoppard’s The Real Thing and went to the Metropolitan Museum for a few hours and happened upon photographs by Thomas Struth, I saw Albee’s A Delicate Balance, and walked in Central Park, both wandered in Times Square where twice we found places to eat meals we could ingest (our old standby The Olive Garden, up against the Tickets booth, still there and offering the best meal we had while we were away). We missed out on Frederick Wiseman’s “rapturous” (so saith the New Yorker) National Gallery. Nowadays PBS (which devotes time to slick cliched dramas, with all star casts and writers (Worricker) does not air Wiseman. It was down at the Film Forum (Houston Street) starting at 4 pm or so, and it didn’t fit into our tight schedule. I noticed it played in AFI in Maryland today at 4 so there is hope it may show up here yet.

We had some comical misadventures, the type that seem funny in retrospect but not lived-in experience. I worry intensely about making trains and one of these liminal journeys between here and there (actually I go into mini-panics lest we miss a train, or fail to get off a train before it starts up again), one of these transition times was at 4 pm when we left Death of Klinghoffer and the Met Opera house, and had to get back to the Park Central Hotel at 56th Street and 7th Avenue to rescue our bags (we did it by subway, then walking, then tickets) and then, armed with said bags, into a taxi, and back to 34th Street to Amtrak, rattling down 7th Avenue through Broadway and east to Madison Square Garden. As it happened we were way early for a 7 pm train, so I said let’s trade in our tickets for 6 pm, and Yvette wanted to eat! She persists in this desire of hers to eat, though she is so fussy about what she eats. So we had a hunt, and finally found a place underground at Madison Square Garden (way expensive) and then when we got back to wait for some 30 minutes, on the board was a train delay of nearly an hour. We get on finally and so does all the world: the train was now supercrowded: Yvette and I could not find two seats together walking up and down the coach and I noticed a man was sleeping over 4 seats and as he looked like a bum, people were letting him occupy 4 seats (two double chairs facing one another). Fuck it I said, and went over, and shook him slightly and pushed him off the double seat we were going to occupy across the way from him. The way I cope with possible belligerence is to get very polite, perhaps schoolmistressy, and he asked me if I were the manager of the train. I replied he has no right to more than one seat, proceed to ignore him and barge on to the two seats and we took our stuff, sat down, and plugged in to recharge our phones and ipads.

Good thing as her ticket and mine had been cancelled (!) and she would have been distressed by the conductor: it seems that if you have a two-way ticket and the conductor on the way fails to swipe the ticket right, your whole ticket is cancelled. (What kind of system is this?) Somehow I was responsible said this conductor, giving me a phone number. I had to phone on the train someone in some inaccessible place and explain; I admit she immediately guessed the problem and said she could fix it; I just had to stay on hold. Yvette hears and says give her your phone number. I do. We did not get disconnected and the ticket became valid again and could be swiped by magical computers. This guy is watching us; but we carry on sitting and talking to one another and reading. We finally get to some stop where the layover allows for getting off the train, and he is walking off the train — without his bag. Suddenly Yvette was worried, “he’s forgetting his bag!” I said he’ll just get belligerent. He is a man who drinks heavily and falls asleep, “it’s none of our business” (an old NY axiom). But I could not stop her from running after him, pushing partly through the crowded aisles, to call to him, “Sir, sir … you are forgetting your bag!”, looking all anxiety. Most unexpectedly he turns round, comes back and is all courtesy to her, genuinely touched by her apparent concern, telling her all he meant to do was walk for the fresh air and come back into the train.

We then moved to the seats across the aisle as the train was less crowded, but he offers to get me a coffee, apologizes to me in positively courtly manner. I accept his apology. He had been impressed by my willingness to sit in seats across from his where everyone else treated him like some pariah. In a couple of stations he gets off and we say “cheerio” and other polite salutations.

However, turns out Yvette was not motivated (as he and I both thought) by her good heart, but was afraid that if he left his bag we would have to report it to the conductor as possibly a terrorist bomb and then we’d be stuck on the train with interviews for hours and hours. She wasn’t thinking of him at all. I said (startled at this), “no one would report such a bag … he’s not a terrorist, just a poor man who drinks too much and his stuff looked miserable in his wretched bag.” But could not persuade her she would not have had to report it. She would have reported lest we get in trouble for not reporting it. I ask myself, Have I neglected some aspect of her education?

Shall I say that NYC does have restaurants that are neither super-expensive or dead cheap (Montreal and other cities seem to have no half-way places) but often the food is sheer snobbery. Who eats that? I mean for real? I did begin to discover some better places, a real Trattoria up two blocks from the hotel, a good cafe near the park. The subway is a mystery to me once again, but Yvette got pretty good at navigating us up and down, east and west. A new system gives the trains with letters and numbers colors so you can see at a glance which set of trains run up and down and and in and our of the same tracks at some point or other. She had not taken an heavy enough coat and was not keen on walking above ground

Caroline faithfully visited the cats daily, played with them, put down food, cleaned the litter, including much later on Thursday night and Saturday afternoon. Still they were upset. Caroline sent photos each day.

Wary Clarycat

All day today she has stuck close to me, sitting tight on my lap, half-clutching at me with paws.

They refuse to play with dead leaves: Ian all intense uncomfortableness:

Ian went into his hugging me act by 4 this afternoon.

I don’t know if I’ll return again soon. This time took a lot out of me. I had a lot to do today too: bills, much mail to go through, catching up on my courses: I am asked to submit a proposal which will entice retired people at the OLLI program at Mason to read Trollope — I ask myself, what am I doing enticing older people to read anyone? There’s something wrong here. I even managed to go out to DC this afternoon with a friend to meet with an all-women Aspergers group at a Teaism not far from the E-Street Cinema, and share experiences and problems and how to cope.

I’ll end with poem I came across a couple of weeks ago: by John Burnside he analogously captures something of the experience I felt during the three days: on Thursday night coming home exhilarated from seeing Glenn Close’s performance in Albee’s A Delicate Balance, I had a 11 block walk in the rain with the sidewalk running rivers so it was indeed

Pluviose

There is a kind of sleep that falls
for days on end, the foothills lost in cloud,
rain in the stairwells, rainspots crossing the floor
of the Catholic church

and the sense of a former life
at the back of our minds,
as if the dead had gathered here in shapes
that seemed at least familiar, if not perfect.

As children, we were told they came
for our sakes, bringing secrets from the cold,
the loam on their eyes and hands
a kind of blessing,

but now they are here,
in the creases and lines of our mouths,
speaking through us to friends we have never seen,
or only to the rain, because it sounds

the way it sounded then, when they were young,
setting a ladle aside, or a finished book,
and the world almost come to an end,
when we stopped to listen.

Late afternoon, and further along the canal
the lock-keeper’s prettiest daughter is setting
eel traps in the clockless silt and purl
of waters her mother fished, before marriage and barter,

and though she has been dead for forty years,
she is living the life I lost on the way to school
in the body I failed to grow up in, her hands in the flow
of the river, finding the current

and teasing it loose, like a story, the word by word
oftrains running through in the dark, in a seasonless rain,
and the faces in every compartment familiar and strange,
with a sister’s disdain, or a grandmother’s folded smile.

Sylvia