Is everybody dying? I see that actor Patrick Swayze died today. Of pancreatic cancer — said to be the worst, the most painful cancer that you can have. I never read The Basketball Diaries, by Jim Carroll, who also just died; I never saw the movie with Leonardo di Caprio or read any of Carroll’s poems. Ordinarily, his death is not something that I’d have reason to mention. But every time one of these fellows passes away, I’m more surprised that I’m still standing. Believe me, “personal responsibility” has nothing to do with it.

My mother-in-law is dying. I can say that because she’s past caring about my mentioning it. She is failing very quickly, faster than she thinks — faster, we hope, than the pain of a bad heart can keep up with her exit. We hope that she’ll be able to greet her younger sister this weekend. My mother-in-law is looking forward to that. She’s looking forward to it so keenly that Kathleen has been asked to come down next weekend (the last in September) , so as not to crowd the festivities. One is used to this. I certainly am. My mother’s last words to anybody were addressed to me. “Did you put the leftover ravioli in the freezer?” she wanted to know. “Wanted to know” is an understatement. We are talking about Denial of Death on a Wagnerian scale.

Meanwhile, life is quickening in the East Village. I’d tell you a cute story about that, but I’d be speaking out of turn. I can tell you this, though: my grandson likes Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.” So does his mom! Which may have something to do with it. I can’t decide whether to get to know the song. Information? Or barging in? All I really want is to live long enough to hold him. Given the fact that Patrick Swayze was in at least ten thousand times better shape than I am, I wonder how it is that I’m even here.

When, just before my mother’s wake, they opened the casket, so that my father, my sister, and I could take one last look, I collapsed in heaving sobs. It was very dramatic, but it was wholly genuine — part of the panic in my sobbing was the surprise of feeling so intensely about someone I had disliked for so long. At my father’s dying, in contrast, I wept once — when the priest uttered (in English) the et cum Lazaro line that Fauré sets so beautifully at the end of his highly idiosyncratic Requiem. It’s funny, but I always thought of my father as a little boy, even when I was the little boy. There was nothing immature about him; I don’t mean that he was an overgrown adolescent. Nor was there anything youthfully “creative.” He was simply somebody who struck me as never quite getting used to the miracle of things. He was hopelessly impractical about all domestic realities, and I loved that about him to the bottom of my heart. If  he had been my real father, I couldn’t have adored him more. But I didn’t adore him at all. I just loved him. I’m not sure that he ever knew that, or that it meant much to him. No matter.

I am of two minds about dying. Part of me has been packed and ready to go for years. A somewhat bigger part is still too egotistically attached to my work at The Daily Blague and at Portico. I haven’t yet turned either site into the souvenir-monument that I’d like it to be. (Little did you know that you were reading a tombstone-in-progress!). But death is for survivors; the dying too quickly forget what has happened. 

A small, small part of me knows what’s really difficult. Our bodies don’t matter (not to us) when we’re dead. The faces that we saw in the mirror every morning simply cease to be when the life goes out of them. What matters, to those who survive us, is what they can make of us. The legacy that we may think that we leave is in fact something that the people after us fashion out of our leftovers. Our nakedness in death is nothing to our helplessness in the judgment of survivors.

There’s one thing we all agree about, though, no? Let it happen before we know it. Let us cheat death by not recognizing it, when it doffs its hat. Let us be busy urging the freezing of the leftover ravioli.

The weather is distinctly autumnal, and I am coming back to life. One of these days I will be able to repeat after me: Summer is Depressing! Heat! Haze! Humidity! No wonder I shut down. While I’m  not crazy about slush and short days, I can live with them easily enough. But I really cannot abide the “seasonable” weather of July and August.

After lunch, I went out to drop the bills at the Post Office — the mailbox that used to stand outside the Viand, on the southeast corner of 86th and Second, has been removed, presumably because of the subway construction (forfend!) — I walked over to Best Buy, to pick up a sheath for my new Nano. I’m not happy with what I bought; I don’t trust it not to open in the middle of a walk, casting the player to the ground, where it would break, having pulled free of the headphones on the way down (the casting-floorwards part happened in the bathroom before I took my walk; thanks to a small rug, the breaking part did not happen). I ought to have ordered something online; the selection at Best Buy was really unsatisfactory. Not content to spend a mere $22, I looked for a DVD to buy as well, and I chose Love, Actually, a movie that I rented not long after it became available, perhaps in 2004. In those days, I didn’t know who half the actors were, and I wasn’t sure about the slice-of-life aspect — all the independent love stories that converge on a Christmas pageant. I was fine with it tonight, though. I couldn’t see for about forty minutes after the film ended, my eyes were so salty. Is 2004 really five years ago? Increasingly, it is.

Once upon a time — a lot longer ago than 2004 — Kathleen and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of this building. The man who lived next door to us still lives next door to that apartment — or at least he still lives on the seventh floor. The man who took our apartment lives on the eighth floor now, but he is still very much here in the building. The next-door neighbor is tall and only slightly stooped; his hair has always been white, and he looks as though he ought to be running a general store in the heartland; but he has had a very beautiful Asian girlfriend for a very long time (perhaps she is his wife!). The man who took our apartment is, we were told at the time of our move upstairs, an economist from Russia. He has a teenaged daughter now — perhaps she is older now (I haven’t seen her in a while — which is what happens to children you’ve watched grow up, between the ages of 17 and 30). Here’s the thing: neither of these guys looks a day older. Than twenty-odd-closer-to-thirty years ago! It’s true that I’ve seen them over the years. Now that I think of it, none of the other residents whom I’ve watched age over the years looks any older, either! How is that? Aside from a few cases of serious illness, a few instances of drastic weight loss, usually involving wheelchairs, and always ending with a death notice posted at the elevator, everyone looks just the same as he or she did in 1985! Oh, also except for the man who likes to pass out cookies in the middle of the day — he really is a sweetheart, although I can never really think of anything apt to say to him, exccept “No, thank you” — and who stopped wearing a hairpiece about two years ago. That was pretty drastic! But we’ve all gotten used to the new look; we always knew that it had nothing to do with chemo.

Kathleen worked late this evening, so I fixed myself an impromptu chicken salad on the early side, while I was watching the beginning of Love, Actually. Same old same old: yogurt avocado dressing, with the other half of the avocado cubed, along  with ditto chicken, tomato and mushrooms, and a sprinkling of toasted walnuts, the whole topped with a happy grating of Maytag blue. The mushrooms and the blue cheese pushed the concoction a bit over the top — not as inedibly as if I’d crumbled a few pieces of bacon into the mix, but you know what I mean: a Richie Richness. The walnuts were slightly past their prime — I am no less sensitive to the rancid turn of fats than the princess was to the pea — but the salad was tasty withal, and I managed to put most of away. What I had trouble with was putting down the dinner-time read. Having nibbled on the sexy chapters already, I’ve begun Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome at the beginning. As I read, nodding, I realized that it is time to dump Gibbon in the tip. The Roman Empire declined and fell? Good riddance! Renaissance nostalgia for the enlightened Rome of serene peristyles, in which Cicero spoke his perfect Latin, is totally bogus. Cicero was hacked to death in a mafia-style hit. Check it out. 

When I got back from my walk, I turned on the laptop in the living room. It was cool enough (plenty beaucoup!) to work in there, and I had a book to write up. As the computer booted up, I did the nesting thing, getting my the book and a mug of tea. There was something that I was supposed to get from the blue room, but I couldn’t think what it was. Without getting carried away, I sat down in the living room and started to write. I hadn’t got far when the doorbell rang. That’s when I remembered what  needed to get in the blue room: cash for a deliveryman tip. I blame the cool weather. I’m so happy with the rain and the brume and the generally Novemberish conditions — what can I say; I’m a child of the North Atlantic and I find its miseries validating! — that I forgot what I was looking for.

Given my quiet, out-of-the-way type of life, it’s hardly unlikely that I’d be totally unaware of a fantastic French movie that stars just about everybody — Romain Duris, Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Lucchini, François Cluzet, Albert du Pontel, and — one of the two female stars of Inglourious Basterds (shown below), Mélanie Laurent. I’m sure that Ms NOLA will tell me tomorrow morning that she has known about Paris for ages. I’ll learn that it was shown to a select crowd at Bryant Park one evening in July.

Well, just let them mock me. The simple fact is that I came home from Quentin Tarantino’s movie last week and headed straight to the computer, on which I ordered Cédric Klapisch’s latest film in a trice, from Amazonne. In the old days — but never mind the old days. In the new days, I received the package, as a matter of course, within the week. Voilà!

Paris is a great treat. Its story seems to reminisce at least three or four recent French hits: Paris je t’aime, Fauteuils d’orchestre, Le temps qui reste, and Fin d’Août, début Septembre (the last of which is not quite so recent). It really belongs to Ms Binoche, who deserves to have a photograph posted here. But it wouldn’t be a flattering photograph, because the style of the movie dictates that the actress look her age. She’s still gorgeous, of course, but not gorgeous in the way that Ms Laurent is gorgeous. Not any more. Ms Laurent, for her part, promises never to look a day older — in the same way that Catherine Deneuve has never looked a day older (only a day better).

Maybe this is cheating, but at the end, I was only too happy to bear in mind that Mr Duris, who plays a straight dancer with a bad heart, is himself undoubtedly in the pink, and set to make dozens more movies. Even if IMDb lists only three. 

At one end of things, Kathleen’s mother is ailing. At the other, Megan talks about “the little one.” Now that my daughter is more than halfway through her pregnancy, I expect that she will just laugh when she hears that, contrary to my recollections, I’ve been itching for grandchildren since she was eight years old. At least! That’s to say that Megan was eight years old when Kathleen met her, and already, according to my wife, I was looking forward to future generations. I myself date this anticipation to a far more recent period. The moment I knew that Megan and Ryan would be getting married, I became Grandchildren Central, although I tried not to betray this preoccupation, even though it was as though antlers were growing out of my scalp.

There are grandfathers who want to enroll their grandchildren at prestigious universities. I want to take my grandson to the Cloisters. Actually, I’m thinking more about a Fort Tryon Park experience; we can leave the Cloisters itself for later — as long as he sees the building through the trees. The simple truth is that I grew up in the ecosphere of which Fort Tryon Park — but not Central Park — is a part. I probably won’t live long enough to want to take my grandson all the way out to Bronxville (that would be never), so the homeyness at the northern end of Manhattan is most welcome.

If I’m not thinking much about the prestigious-university thing, that’s only because I doubt that there’s a school that’s good enough for this kid. No vanity intended! At The Daily Blague today, I did a little math, and calculated that the tuition for a truly superior education, taught by five seminar leaders to twenty students, would come to a total of $50,000 for a three-year program (pricey, but also dirt cheap, considering current costs), at an annual payout to the teachers of $200,000. The math is probably incorrect — and, sadly, it wouldn’t have been any better if I’d gone to this sterling academy. Paying the teachers, though, would be the only signifcant cost. It’s inconceivable that the books would cost more than $500 altogether. As for location, I’m counting on the kindness of strangers, because, frankly, classroom costs oughtn’t to amount to much more than zero.

The prospect of being a grandfather is certainly concentrating my mind. To an extent that I’d have thought objectionable as well as improbable, I’ve lost interest in non-family connections. While I was still seeing a psychotherapist, a year or so ago, I discussed the possibility that my personaltiy lay on the Asperger’s-autism spectrum. This was pooh-poohed professionally, rightly I’m sure. (How like me to be crestfallen at not “having” a stylish handicap.) I wondered about it, though, because my connections to other people have always been so weak. I don’t know a soul from childhood; I’m barely in touch with my sister. Aside from Fossil Darling (food for thought, when you think about it), I wouldn’t know anybody from prep school or college if it weren’t for Facebook. I have one friend from my seven years in Houston, and I’ve actually lost two others, definitively. Six years of collegiality on Wall Street have left no trace at all. At best, I’m like the clubman in the William Maxwell story who “had no friends.” If I do have friends, it’s because I’m married to one of the friendliest women on earth. Left to myself, I’d have no encounters off the Internet.

This line of thinking has been intensified by my summer experiment of giving up everything except The Daily Blague and Portico. Whether the experiment was a success or not, it’s too early to tell;  but I’ve come out of it with the most magnificent feelings. There’s no doubt in my mind that I unearthed my métier this summer, and the discovery has rendered me mightily impatient with the activities of  the past sixty years. I need people more than ever, but I need them on the other side of a correspondence, not at the other side of a table. I’m in almost desperate need of people who want to write as well and as badly as I do. That must be why I can’t wait to make the acquaintaince of my grandson, with whom I won’t be conversing for a while. Knowing someone whom I love to pieces (as I doubtless shall) and of whom I expect nothing: that will happen.  

As you know, I like to watch movies in the kitchen, while I’m cooking. And, because I’m cooking, “listening” would  be a much better word. The movies are always so familiar that I don’t need to look at them, and, anyway, it’s the voices that stir me. But tonight, for editorial reasons, I was actually looking at the screen, and seeing something that I wouldn’t have heard.

Yesterday, I found myself watching The Philadelphia Story. I had been watching Cary Grant movies, but The Philadelphia Story took me off in a new direction: I wanted to see High Society next. High Society is the musical version of The Philadelphia Story, and I have always thought that Grace Kelly’s was incredibly courageous to take on  the part of Tracy Lord. Impersonating Katharine Hepburn, the actress for whom the part was written — the actress who, being not so unlike Tracy Lord in real life that she couldn’t buy the rights to Philip Barry’s play — and in a musical in which she doesn’t sing much: either great nerve or dumb determination. I haven’t researched the matter, but one assumes that, if Katharine Hepburn owned the rights, then she must have approved of Grace Kelly. Which makes High Society impressive for Hepburn as well.

I was weeping during the Overture. The movie hadn’t even begun, and tears were pouring out of my eyes. But those tears were different from the ones that cascaded during “True Love,” the musical’s interpolation in which Tracy remembers her honeymoon with Dexter on the True Love. I have always thought that “True Love” is one of the most beautiful songs in the world, but that’s because I was a defenceless kid when I heard it the first time. Later, I came to find the scene sort of tacky. The color is too vivid, and the scene is too obviously shot in a studio, not on a boat. This is a charge that can be leveled at the entire movie, but “True Love” is extraordinarily romantic: you want it to be right. Tonight, though, I decided, that it’s just fine.

I changed my mind because what I saw on screen wasn’t some dream of love that it would be nice to encounter in some ideal world, but an exact impression of the wonder of being married to Kathleen for years and years. (You’ll pardon my taking the Bingle’s POV). I’m not going to say that Kathleen would be mistaken for Grace Kelly even when she was 26. But she moves just like Grace Kelly, and she always has. And she is in fact the smart loving woman that Kelly is pretending to be.

True love is the most delicate, breakable object in the world, and even after thirty years it cannot be taken for granted. Even after a hundred, I’m sure — could it be put to that test. But when true love has lasted for thirty years, you look at a scene like the one in High Society and you don’t say, “it’s just the movies.” You say, hey, this really happens. And the tears pour out of your eyes.

Another reading day? That’s what I wanted when I got up. So much for last week’s feeling that I was really living in the rhythm of my new assignments. Work wasn’t effortless, exactly, but work was the only effort. There was none of the much more common effort of worrying about working. I was getting somewhere! But that was last week.

What I wanted, of course, wasn’t a reading day. What I wanted was a check-out day. This is what depression is like for me, when it hits.  I want to have nothing more to do with the world, at least of a transactional nature. Today, I wanted very much to have nothing to do with the lady in charge of the building’s office, but there was no way round it. I had to tell her that I was expected a mover tomorrow. That was really all that I had to do, but I knew that there would be complications, if not outright trouble. When I told the lady in charge that I was expecting a mover tomorrow, she said that she hadn’t heard anything about it. What she meant (since of course she was only just now hearing about it from me) was that she hadn’t received a certificate of insurance from the mover. No matter what I said, she repeated that I would have to arrange for the certificate of insurance, or the mover would not be allowed to set foot in the building. As I expected, she took a palpable pleasure in repeating this condition. If not, then not. It was making her day. Not that I was helping.  Having expected the encounter to go badly, I did what I could to assure that it did go badly.

It didn’t go that badly — nothing happened that a nice call from LXIV couldn’t smooth over. (The energetic and resourceful LXIV has been helping us out with some refurbishment projects, and now, a year after the bolt of fabric took up its post by the front door, we’re sending a love seat out to be reupholstered.) The mover, it turned out, had already submitted the certificate of insurance (can you believe how boring this is!), but the lady in the office hadn’t got round to checking her fax machine. (A capable and helpful adminstrator would have thought to check that detail, instead of idiotically repeating the need for me to contact the mover, but this woman wouldn’t have done such a thing for the likes of me if there were a million dollars in it for her. Of the same age and, if I may presume, both more or less Irish, we are born enemies. It is that simple. Each one of us is dead certain that the other is a useless sack of water.) I was so rattled by the sour aftertaste of this inescapable enmity that I couldn’t do anything when I got back to the apartment.

My mother (and more than a few friends) would have said: what a big baby you are! I can understand that I might look infantile, or, at any rate, deeply chickenshit; I avoid encounters with certain kinds of people with panicky rigor. But I don’t shrink from such people because I’m afraid of them. It’s rather that they make me fear myself. The desire to visit physical mayhem on dull-witted bureaucrats who aren’t well-paid enough to (a) have a brain or (b) give a damn frequently threatens overwhelms me. They say that you have to put up with such people in the world, but I, for one, would like to know the reasoning behind that proposition. I say — but we’ll draw a veil over what I say.  

I hope you realize how mortified I am to confess such high-strung ricochets. This is supposed to be the Web log of a civilized humanist, but for an hour today my soul could not decide between homicide and suicide.

In the end, I did sit down and write up this week’s book — and then I went to the movies. In view of tomorrow’s Chinese fire drill, I thought that I’d better get this week’s movie-going out of the way. And while I was at the movies, Kathleen was on a train, chugging home from Washington, where she spent an exciting couple of days that I’ll ramble on about anon, hopefully with the aid of a link to the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday, as I noted, I was burnt out. Today, I was intemperate. That’s progress for you.

When I woke up this morning, I knew that I’d be having a Reading Day. I’ve been firing on all cylinders for a longer stretch than usual, and I’ve feeling good about it, too. It got to the point where I felt so good about it that I couldn’t stand it. In future, I hope to trim these lapses into immoderate ebullience, but, for the moment, there are Reading Days.

Yes, there’s something bogus about the label, something prim and euphemistic, because of course Reading Days are devoted to reading because I’m good for nothing else; they’re Burnt-Out Days. If they were genuine Reading Days, then I wouldn’t feel so guilty about them, especially around lunchtime, which is when it becomes obvious that I’m never going to get any real work done. I’d say, this is a scheduled Reading Day! In fact, I could never schedule a day for reading. It would be like scheduling a day for taking taxis or eating potato chips.

What saves my Reading Days from ignominy is the fact that I can’t stand to read junk. Just as I can’t stand to watch television, unless it’s Mad Men or something in French. (If my French were as good as it ought to be, I’d have to give this up.) I find “escapist” reading to be anything but: the only thing that I want to escape is the lousy book. For example: I picked up a copy of Harlan Coben’s Tell No One once. I should say right away that I love the French film that was adapted from it. But the book revealed itself to be utterly unreadable by me on the fifth page. The writing was execrable. That’s why they invented the word “execrable”: to describe the prose style of Harlan Coben. I take my hat off to the stronger sorts who can wade through it.

(Memo to self: compose a list of well-written junk. Is there any? There must be!)

So what I read to today was history. Like most men, I would rather read history than fiction. Unlike most men, I would rather read fiction than military history. I don’t mind the occasional battle, but let’s be honest: the average battle is about as interesting, from a strategic sense, as a game of roulette. You want to win, yes; but you don’t want to read about it. Except for the odd mis-match, battles are to accident what the human body is to water: mostly.

I have not encountered any battles yet in Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, but then I’ve been skipping around.  I see that Mr Wickham sternly disapproves of reading the history of these much-maligned centuries for “the narrative of nationalism,” by which (I think) he means evidence of the origins of modern Belgium, &c. But that’s exactly what I love about the period.

Take that treaty, which I’m always disposed to mention at the slightest inducement, between Charles the Simple and Hrolf the Viking, in 911. Charles went on to be extinguished, but Hrolf, a/k/a Rollo, begat and begat until William the Conqueror, wouldn’t you know, issued; and one of the intermediate begats, a Richard or a Robert, decided that “count of Rouen” wasn’t grand enough, so he started calling himself “duke of Normady.” No battles involved in any of this, but look what came of it! (The Battle of Hastings, yes; but Other Things, too.) Mr Wickham doesn’t shed much light on the meeting at St-Claire-sur-Epte (rightly so, given the scope of his book), but he does say this:

Charles was not an entirely useless king. His Lotharingian adventure was at least a sensible strategy, even if a desperate one [must go back and learn more!]. He also had the vision to deal with the Vikings of the Seine by recognizing them and settling their leader Rollo as count of Rouen in 911. The Vikings (Nortmanni in Latin) of the Seine more or less respected their side of the deal, and held off future attacks; they settled down and soon began to behave in ways analogous to other Frankish magnates, and “Normandy,” though prone to civil war, remained fairly firmly in the hands of its count/duke.

The magic, of course, lies in the idea of Vikings settling down. It’s enough to make you believe that anything is possible. As, indeed, it is!

Dublin was the most powerful and dangerous of these new polities, and in the 850s it became the focus of stubstantial reinforcements, but the Vikings never engaged in large-scale territorial conquest in Ireland. It was too difficult, with all those tiny kingdoms, and also not hugely remunerative, as there were too few stores of movable wealth (as in eastern Europe, slaves were Ireland’s most valuable exportable commodity.)

Not so cheering, no. But I’m sure that I would read Harlan Coben’s books if they were written by a stylist of Chris Wickham’s caliber.

You’d think that a book about “the Dark Ages” would be more depressing than any other kind of history, but Jonathan Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 is the saddest book that I’ve read in eons. I want to shout, Stop that Making of America! The making of Frankenstein’s monster sounds like a much better idea. I had not gathered from the reviews — and the publisher, Harper, has gone out of its way to package the book misleadingly — that Mr Lears intends his title with extremely bitter irony. It refers, of course, to D W Griffith’s horribly proto-fascist film epic of the same name (more or less). I wasn’t expecting this, but The Rebirth of America seems designed to support my conviction that the “Civil War” wasn’t worth it.

Still, concentrated capital set the boundaries of permissible debate. The Supreme Court proved particularly helpful to business interests, eviscerating the Sherman Act by excusing offenders on technicalities, and defining labor unions as “combinations in restraint of trade.” Equally important was the Court’s gradual redefinition of the Fourteenth Amendment as a substantive defense of corporate property rights. The culmination of this process was the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), which extended the definition of the word “persons” in the Fourteenth Amendment to include legal persons — ie, corporations. What began as a measure to confer rights on ex-slaves became a boon for big business.

I suppose, though, that it’s better to feel Burned than Burnt Out.

It turned out to be a nice day. Thanks to two nightmares that visited me this morning, though, I expected it to be rather awful. I looked out at the beautifully clear September sky, and all I could think of was that beautiful Tuesday morning nearly eight years ago. I’m not given to anniversaries and commemorations — not emotionally, that is — but the nightmares were discouraging.

The nightmare that I had while I was sleeping was a computer thing — my desktop wouldn’t boot up properly. I’m pretty sure that it was inspired by what I’ve just learned is a new Windows update that won’t install itself properly, and that has to be manually quelled. It’s not a big deal, but it kindles ancient anxieties.

And notwithstanding the nice-day business, this nightmare turned out to be prophetic. When I sat down to start work at The Daily Blague, the site’s server was in the process of melting down. The outage didn’t last very long, and I worked around it with what struck me at the time as supernatural aplomb. Then, in the afternoon, Gmail went down for a few hours. Nobody seemed very upset about it; aside from one feed at reddit, I saw no mention of it at all. Oh, there was a Times story about the “fail,” and all that; I knew that it wasn’t just me. But it seems that I don’t know anybody who really depends on Gmail for anything, and I find that unsettling. Is everyone really too busy otherwise, texting at the wheel of a car?

The much worse nightmare that I had while I lay in bed awake was occasioned by the September sun. In theory, the morning sun ought to fall full strength on my face in in late April, but I’m never aware of it doing so, as I always am in early September, when it’s the first harbinger of autumn. My eyes were closed, but the intense light filled my head with a fiery redness — or at least the hot orange that is so not yellow (the sun’s high-noon color) that we read it as red. Most people, I think, would have rejoiced in the life-giving light and warmth, but I couldn’t.

Whether it’s because I never believed in God or because I read a Golden Book of solar-system science at too tender an age, I regard the sun as a massive and ongoing atomic explosion. To me, the sun is, above all things, violent — a very big bomb. This sort of thinking makes it difficult to accept the fact — and what kind of fact is it, anyway? — that the sun is prodigiously stable. How stable is “stable”? What if there were — an event?

In this nightmare, I got past the total extermination of life part as immediately as life itself would be exterminated in the event of an event. I moved right on to wondering how long it would take the Eiffel Tower to burst into flames and/or melt. And for the ensuing puddle to evaporate, like drops of water in a hot skillet. Thirty seconds?

And yet: it turned out to be a very good day! I didn’t do a lot of work, it’s true. But I read a great deal, and I took an energetic walk. I cooked the first batch of the season’s ragù. And I watched most of two Cary Grant classics. The most remarkable thing about the day was the intensity with which the Cary Grant classics didn’t strike me as classics, as beloved old-chestnut movies. They were as fresh and lively as anything showing in a theatre right now.

The movies, His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, hadn’t changed — I had changed. I was every bit as exhilarated by the witty, deeply romantic dialogue as I was forty years ago by the discovery of the witty, deeply romantic pleasure of intimacy with brainy girls. The badinage between Grant and his leading ladies, Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, is as joyously abandoned as what used to be called “criminal conversation” (illicit sex). It isn’t a stand-in for sex, it is sex. How had I missed this? I hadn’t missed it, but I hadn’t felt it. Today, I felt it, you-know-where.

On my smiling face.

For the first time in I don’t know how long, it is very quiet here. There is no music, the baroque (mostly Bach) playlist’s that I listened to for most of the day having ended a while ago. But more than that, the air conditioner is silent, and so is the powerful Vornado fan that sits on the floor like a devoted pooch. Outside, the city is quiet, too. It’s as though the cool weather calmed every spirit, leaving few if any drivers restless enough to travel.

I’ve been to the Cloisters again, as you can see — twice in one calendar year! Not exactly unprecedented, but certainly unheard of since about 1967. I went in May, when my good friend Jean Ruaud was visiting from Paris. I was surprised that Jean liked the museum as much as he did. It’s one of the dearest places on earth to me, but I’m electrically aware of its confected nature. Bits of stone from here and there, including heaps of loot from Civil-War-torn Spain — all incorporated into a California villa gently tweaked to look “medieval.” What a Fourteenth-Century observer would have made of the tower (a meaty erection that always makes me think of the Plaza outside Kansas City) remains blessedly unimaginable. As a child of the Critical Sixties, I know full well that there’s nothing Cluniac about the Cloisters. And yet — the place may tell us little or nothing about monastic life in the Middle Ages (my vote: “nothing”), but it has a lot to say about what’s appealing about the monastic idea today. Set in a large park, reached from one side only by the wail of an occasional Metro North commuter train, and overlooking the studiously undeveloped banks of the Hudson River on the other, the museum is so arrestingly placid that the George Washington Bridge, an unfinished, skeletal structure that dates from the depth of the Depression, looks Plantagenet by penetration, just over the ramparts of the Bonnefont Cloister. No matter how bogus it might be on strict art-historical grounds, the Cloisters is unquestionably a sanctuary.

This time, Ms NOLA was on hand to help me to make sure that DCW, our young artist friend from San Francisco, made it up to Fort Tryon Park before his tumble into the full-time oubliette of school and after-shool job. When I asked him what he liked most about the Cloisters, he mentioned the colors of the stained glass. Now, if there is anything that I have consistently overlooked at the Cloisters, it is the stained glass. I have yet to see any great medieval stained glass in situ, and the quantity of ghastly Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American stained glass that I have seen leaves me with a deadened suspicion of the medium. How like me to be all but hamstrung by anxieties about authenticity! For my young friend, it seemed, the beauties of the color were justification enough.

We arrived at the Cloisters in a taxi, but we left on foot, wending our way through the park to bus and subway at 191st Street. Somewhat quixotically — foolishly, in any case — I was determed to climb to the belvedere that looks out over Inwood and Highbridge toward Long Island — you can see the identical-seeming Whitestone and Throg’s Neck Bridges. The stone staircase with very short steps ought to have been challenge enough; I was breathing like a locomotive when we got to the further flight. I worried that my companions might be worried, and I knew that Ms NOLA, at least, was of sufficiently practical a disposition to foresee how massively inconvenient my collapse would be in an ornamental spot some distance from the reach of any ambulance. I did not so much resolve to get into better shape as promise myself not to be so headstrong in future.

It really is amazingly quiet here. There is not even the plash of a gentle fountain.

This has not been a good week for Dear Diary entries. Either I’m so tired that I can’t see straight, or I’m preoccupied by very boring insights. Tonight, going in, I can assure you that I have nothing to say.

Which is to say that I kept my head down and worked hard all day. All day? Yes, all day.

And then I remember that I interrupted the Daily Office process to go out for a haircut. I got the haircut; I had a club sandwich at the Hi-Life, and I bought much more than I’d planned on at Agata & Valentina. Then I came home and got back to work. I’m still at work, even though I completed every project scheduled for today hours ago. But all I thought about while I was out was how I wanted to change this and that at the Daily Office.

I am Mr All-Work at the moment — which isn’t a problem. The problem is that I was brought up (by the literary lights whom I read when I was young) to look for a certain kind of story. There’s another kind of story lying around here somewhere — not that my pointing that out is at all interesting. But I’ll figure it out.

Speaking of optimism, do you think that Randolph Scott, in real life, said, “you’re swell!” anywhere near as often as he said it in the movies? He’s such a doofus that I suspect that he did. “You’re swell!” sounds like the limit of his brainpower. Gay men like to imagine that Scott and Cary Grant, when they lived together in the Thirties, had something physical going. “Don’t make me laugh,” as Grant said in about forty movies. I’m sure that Grant, who was seen trading currency futures during the making of Gunga Din, figured out a way to make Scott pay more than his share of the rent. The ideal roomate, no?  

In other news, I can’t decide whether to bore you with the story about boring Kathleen last night. We don’t call it boring, of course, even when Kathleen falls asleep at the dinner table; we just say that my voice is soporific. Kathleen asked a question about Mozart that led to a discussion — via the fact that Mozart’s father, Leopold, came from Augsburg, in Bavaria, on a sort of get-out-while-you-can basis (Leopold’s handling of his son’s very considerable child-prodigy earnings doesn’t make him the Bernie Madoff of the 1780s, but one suspects that that’s only from lack of suckers) — of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Even I had trouble keeping track. Kathleen would seek FDA approval, if she didn’t want me all for herself.

Ah! Kathleen just got home, and I want to read to her the funny piece in this week’s New Yorker, “For Immediate Release” by Paul Simms. I haven’t laughed so much at a New Yorker casual in — a long time.

 

Something interesting happened to me today. Let’s see if I can make it interesting to you.

A few months ago — in late April or early May — I decided that I had better make a practice of reading the fiction in The New Yorker. I knew that I was getting old, and I didn’t want to get out of touch. I’d been reading The New Yorker for over forty-five years, but I’d stopped reading the stories — reading them as a matter of course, that is, simply because they were published in The New Yorker — decades ago. As you get older, that’s what happens. Every now and then, you take up something new, but for the most part you let go of things that used to be very important. When you give them up, you sigh a sigh of relief: you’re free. Your sense of well-being is no longer dependent on whether or not you have, say, read this week’s New Yorker story.

And it’s fine for a little while; but then you begin to wonder: what are those kids up to? Can you still even read the stories in The New Yorker? I found myself asking this every time a story by T Coraghessan Boyle appeared. I really cannot stand Mr Boyle’s work. It’s not that I think that he’s no good — not at all. I can tell that he’s very good. But I can’t stand his stories. (The real mystery man for me is Philip Roth. I can’t stand him, either — but I can’t begin to understand why he’s as highly regarded as he is. To me, the fiction of Philip Roth is nothing but a mound of slipshod vernacular.) Worried about the T Coraghessan Boyles out there, I thought that I had better start policing the perimeter, as one old dodger puts it in an old Miss Marple episode.

The only way to force myself to read the stories in The New Yorker — each and every one of them, whether or not I was in the mood to do so — was, I knew, to commit to writing them up as a weekly thing at Portico. And that’s what I did. Or it’s what I thought I did.

As I was publishing my write-up of this week’s New Yorker story today (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House“), I looked back at the other stories that I’ve written about. This is where the challenge of making the interesting thing that happened to me interesting to you gets tricky.

You probably couldn’t care less about the difference between a Web site and a blog, but, as you know, I operate one of each, and the work that I hope will last appears at the Web site, not here. One difference between a Web site and a blog is that Web sites require handwritten navigation. If you post a new page at a Web site, you have to update the associated menu page, or else nobody will be able to find what you’ve just written. (Blogs automate this business.)  So, after I wrote up Ms Petrushevskaya’s story, I added the title (as a link) to the list of New Yorker stories that I’ve written up. (The page has no permalink, but you can see it here.) Then I wondered why the oldest entry on the list dated to the issue of 8 June. Hadn’t I started writing up the stories in May? Or earlier?

Usually, when I dream up some new feature for my sites, I start out with blog entries. Both the Friday movies pieces and the Book Review reviews ran for ages on the old Daily Blague before I decided that they really belonged, permanently, at Portico. So I figured that there were a few Daily Blague entries that discussed New Yorker stories — written during May of this year — and I thought that I would simply transfer their contents to their proper destination. All I had to do was find them.

But the contents did not exist. I hadn’t lost the pages; I’d never written them. The first interesting thing that happened to me today was the shock of discovering that I had never written up a month’s worth of stories. I’d planned to write them up, hoped to write them up; but I’d never got round to writing them up. The second, much deeper, shock was realizing that I’d completely forgotten how different and difficult things were, three months ago.

It hit home when I found a draft appraising Jonathan Lethem’s story in the issue of 25 May, “Ava’s Apartment.” I’d written the story up, but I’d never edited it or formatted it or uploaded it or done any of the seven or eight things that have to be done to transform a raw piece of writing into a published Web page — at a Web site, without the help of a blogging platform. So I took care of that  today, this afternoon.

It’s a little thing. Today, I wouldn’t let a week go by without making sure that every new piece of prose got published. I have worksheets and tickler files to make sure that regular weekday projects (such as writing up the week’s Book Review, or the latest story in The New Yorker) are completed. In the spring, that competence was beyond me. Never mind why — just as long as you don’t think for a moment that I’m more disiciplined now than I was in May. Over the summer, by dint of concentrated effort, I’ve learned how to do a few things that I didn’t know how to do in April. It’s that simple. The surprise was that I’d completely forgotten what it was like not to know how to do the things that I can do now.

It’s the shock of reading history: we can’t believe that people used to be stupid enough to enslave other people. And so on. When we learn something, we forget what ignorance was like. We can’t quite believe that ignorance is the explanation. It’s hard to know that you didn’t know. But if you can manage the trick of it, nothing is more interesting.

Three months ago, there were all sorts of things that I wasn’t getting round to. That’s why I decided to take the summer off — from everything but work. The result is that I find it almost incomprehensible that I didn’t write up those stories and get the pages up onto Portico.

Here I was, thinking that I’d be spending the evening alone, when Ms NOLA wrote to ask if I’d like to go to a book party. The upshot of ensuing parlays was that Ms NOLA came to dinner after the book party. Over an impromptu series of small dishes, we spoke of cabbages and kings — stuff far too electrifiying to be discussed in these holy halls. Then Kathleen came home, from a dinner date with an old friend, and Ms NOLA told her the latest news.

I might have gone to the book party if I hadn’t ventured forth on a round of errands in the later afternoon. That a traingular walk — from 86th and Second to 92nd and Madison, down to 82nd and Madison, and hence home — should reduce me to geriatric biliousness is, sadly, no surprise. When I got home, I felt that strange sick feeling that overcomes me on very hot afternoons (but at no other time).

But I rallied, and dinner was interesting when it wasn’t simply tasty. I’ll report on the interesting part later. A lot of the food was purchased last Thursday, for the dinner with Irving’s parents. I’d overbought shamelessly. Among other things, we ate some delicious plums. Well, I did. There was only one of those, I realized ruefully. When I’d gotten over cooing about it, I had a plum of somewhat differerent provenance that Ms NOLA had already tasted. It did, as she said, have a “fermented” edge, quite unlike the utterly sweet and uncomplicated fruit that I’d begun with. If I were a very, very rich person, I would hire somebody just to buy fruit. Have I already told you the story about Lorenza de’ Medici (a famous Italian cook) and Lauren Bacall? The setting was a cooking promo at The Cellar, Macy’s basement kitchen shop. A propos of the dish, Ms Bacall asked, “But wherever do you get such good pears?” A true New Yorker — to which Ms de’ Medici’s truly Tuscan answer was, “Why, from your garden <where else?>.” There’s nothing like a good clash of cultures, is there.

And so to bed…

In the movie that I was watching in the kitchen this evening, Little Children, Jennifer Connelly’s character tries to tell her mother that her husband is not like her father: he’s different. “They’re all the same,” counters Mom.

Are they? Are we?

On the whole, I agree with Mom. I don’t think that men understand the value of relationships until they’ve been taken away. Men don’t have “relationships.” They have loyalties. The great thing about loyalty is that, once you’ve sworn it, you don’t have to think about it. In fact, you’re not supposed to think about it. “Reconsideration” and “loyalty” are two words that barely manage coexistence on the same page, and never in the same sentence. A relationship, in contrast, is an ongoing reconsideration.

Not to be flip, I was reconsidering my approach to making hamburgers. I had actually opened the latest issue of Saveur, which is all about burgers, and learned the most amazing trick: slipping butter into the middle of a patty works makes for a deliriously juicy (buttery) burger. This turns out to be quite true! I did not actually read the article to learn how to do it, though. I’m having very mixed feelings, lately, about books and magazines on the subject of cookery. Well, about reading them, I mean. There is so little time, and food is, after all, only food. At the same time, I’m an eager collector of handy tips, such as the idea of tucking a pat of butter inside a burger.

Here’s what I did, anyway: I took my sharpest knife to the newly-formed patty and sliced it equitorially. The resulting halves were only slightly deformed by this operation. Once they were made presentable, I sprinkled minced green onion on the slightly larger half and spread the other with a bit of butter (a good deal less than what I’d call a “pat,” though).

Maybe it wasn’t the butter that made the burgers so delicious. Maybe it was cooking them in a cast-iron frypan. It has taken me forty years to learn how to maintain a cast-iron pan, but I think I’ve finally got it. Oh, I always knew what you’re supposed to do, but I just couldn’t do it. I just had to clean the pan after each use, because, well, not to clean it would prove fatal, no? (There was a trick that I had to teach myself, though: use a straight-edged wooden spatula to dislodge sticky bits from the pan. This is as effective as conventional scrubbing, but nowhere near so damaging to the patina of ‘seasoning” (grease) that renders a well-kept cast-iron skillet frypan non-stick.)

Surprisingly delicious burgers were yet another example of how loyalty can get in the way of learning, if you let it — which of course you have to do if you are a loyal sort of guy.

I used to think that gay men were different. And why not? They were certainly thought to be different by the straight men who felt obliged to spit on them. The great discovery of my fifties, though, was that gay men are men, after all. I was very disappointed to find this out, because I had high hopes for gay men to be interesting. I didn’t think that it was being gay that made gay men more interesting; I just thought that it was the massive rejection from the bastions of masculinity that charactized life in the Fifties and Sixties and well into the Seventies that, well, opened up other lines of inquiry. But while gay men are sharp critical thinkers about masculinity, they don’t, as a rule, choose to  live outside it. The sad fact of the matter is that gay men like men, even if they do, like straight men, find them to be very irritating.

On the brighter side, there’s a lot less spitting.

Is there no hope? If Mom’s right, and all men are “the same,” then there’s clearly no percentage in attempting a more decent profile. Inevitably, you’ll let your lover down, and in the same old tawdry way as a million other guys.  The only way to save a shred of dignity is to be firm about one thing: don’t call Mom.

So, it’s a boy. Megan and Ryan have narrowed the names down to a short list, but they’re “not sharing.” So we’re calling him “Irving.” The name was proposed by one of Ryan’s cousins, on Facebook, and swiftly rejected. But it’s too wonderfully improbable not to adopt pro tem, and, plus, what name could better suit the child of parents living in the Lower East Side?  On top of everything else, there won’t be any other Irvngs. We thought, my daughter’s mother and I, that in “Megan” we had found a name that would occur to no one else. If I’m just as wrong about “Irving,” well — how fantastic will that be.

It was not, at any rate, a very productive day. I was busy every minute, but with amazingly sparse results, at least when I was sitting at the computer. I had a cold supper all ready when the parents-to-be arrived, but I didn’t serve it right away, because I couldn’t sit down. I was simply too hot. Whatever my skin temperature was, the subcutaneous heat felt like 145º, and no amount of standing in front of fans would cool me off.

Megan handed round a sonogram — taken only this morning. (How wonderful it was to have them to dinner on the very day of their Finding Out.) It was a head shot. The tyke has a recognizable profile, complete with an itsy-bitsy nose; and he has a lot of rather Alienish teeth, still lodged in his gums. Ontogeny recapitulates cinematography.

I asked Megan, how was she sure? She replied that the technician made a point of asking her if she’d noticed “the little boy parts.” We take it that the technician knew what she was talking about, what with doing this every day. In any case, Megan had indeed noticed the little boy parts.

When I sigh, “A grandson!” — which I do quite often (even though it hasn’t been twenty-four hours since I heard the news) — it is all about me. I know that, and celebratory spirits are dampened accordingly. The responsible part of my cortex understands that the only important thing is that Ryan and Megan will have a healthy child who’s disposed to be happy. I am also of the opinion that they will be unusually thoughtful and energetic parents as well as loving ones.

But there is a lot of stuff about being a man that I have never come to terms with — I’ve worked around it. Maybe every man does, every thinking man, anyway. I’m speaking of everyday masculinity, which in everyday peacetime is almost entirely a matter of bluffing. From time to time, though, strange situations come up, and how we have dealt with them lingers. It lingers, and we are either proud or ashamed. We realize that the strange situations were defining, even if we didn’t know that at the time. Being men, we keep score, even the guys like me who don’t like games. And we wind up with questions like this: Do I “deserve” a grandson?

The answer to that is clearly “no.” Life, as I’ve been reading all over the place lately, owes us nothing. And the child’s gender doesn’t factor in the one thrill that I’m looking forward to the most: when Irving reaches out to pull my beard. If he’s healthy, he will pull my beard with a linebacker’s singlemindedness, genuinely hoping to pull the hair right off my face. Disappointment in this regard will only make him pull harder, and — this is the best part — he will smile at me in the most friendly way all through the torment. What fun he’ll be having!

No: I most certainly do not deserve a grandson, and here’s why: I’m plotting to have a false beard made, one that will tear off in his hands. Won’t he be surprised! And I will still have a beard! It’s time to endow an analyst fund.

For days, I’ve been stewing over how long it has been since my last visit to the storage unit, on 62nd Street. Something must be done! That’s really how I put it to myself — which explains why nothing happens. “Something must be done!” means just about nothing. “Go to the storage unit this week” is all too clear. I was avoiding clarity.

On Friday, however, I’m scheduled, as I mentioned the other day, to have a Remicade infusion. That rules out going to the movies, at least during the day. Nothing would be over in time. So I’d have to go sooner. Yesterday, surveying my worksheets — yes! it has come to that! worksheets! — I figured that I could spare the time for a movie this morning, and, what d’you know, but a movie that I’ve been wanting to see, In the Loop, is showing right next door to the storage unit. How dandy! I’d see the movie, have lunch at a nearby pub, and then spend an hour or two in storage — boxing books. The current plan is to pack books in boxes and then have Housing Works come pick them up. I’m told that they’ll do that. (We’ll see.)

We stayed up very late last night, and got up correspondingly late this morning. Kathleen got up very late. If I’d left when she did, in fact, I’d have been just a few minutes early for In the Loop. But I wasn’t feeling very well; there were gastro-intestinal issues (phantom, as it turned out), plus the malaise that follows a late night of drinking wine until Kathleen goes to bed. Did I say that Kathleen was obsessing over the knitting of bootees? So often, that’s how late nights happen. I saw Kathleen off to work, and went to the computer, where I sat most discontentedly. “I’ll go tomorrow,” I told myself. But this proved to be unacceptable. A part of me — the largely unfamiliar Sicilian part — had been assured that we’d be going to the storage unit today. The Sicilian part of me is not prone to violence, but it is very ascetic. It is most unhappy when suffering is on the menu, but only on the menu. The Sicilian part of me also wants to get things over with.

So I was running late when I got to the movies. Not late-late; if all had gone well, I’d have missed a couple of previews, no more. But all was not going well. The box office couldn’t take credit cards; it was a problem with the connection. I never pay cash for the movies (or for anything that will take plastic), but I’d have made an exception this morning if I hadn’t been quite late — because it took forever for the customer at the head of the line to decide how she wanted to handle the outage. Would she pay cash? Would she come back later? When I asked and found out that I’d have to pay cash at the refreshment counter, too, I turned on my heels and went next door to storage.

The reason for the “Something must be done!” mentality is that we are paying a fortune — in many parts of the United States, it would cover a nice one-bedroom apartment — for vastly more storage space than we need. We could have what’s left just packed up and moved to another, smaller storage unit uptown (in a facility operated by the same outfit). But I’m determined to shed the books that make up a large percentage of current contents. When the books are gone, we’ll have a better idea of how much storage space we really need. Or so I rationalize.

Having surveyed the dump, I went back downstairs and bought six “large” packing boxes. Even before I paid for them, I knew that they were too big for books; they’d be impossibly heavy if packed full. As indeed they were. On my way back to the elevator, I realized that I didn’t have any strapping tape. I decided not to buy any at this time. I would unfold a couple of boxes and fill them and see how it went. This was not the dumb idea that it may seem to be. The experience of putting books in a box, even knowing that they’d all have to be packed in some other box, was nothing short of inspiring. I can’t wait to go back and buy six “small” packing boxes. I’ve already got the tape; I picked  it up at Gristede’s when I was shopping for dinner.

Having filled two large boxes, I decided to quit. I stuffed some junk in a tote — a bunch of trays, as it happened — and went to the pub. Then I went home. The Sicilian part of me was still not satisfied. What about the movies? Now, for most people, going to the movies is fun. And it is for me, too! But it is also an assignment. If I’m supposed to see a movie on Friday, but know in advance that I won’t be able to see a movie on Friday, the Sicilian part of me takes a very dim and jaundiced view of proposals that involve going to the movies on the weekend. The Sicilian part of me knows that going to the movies on the weekend is almost certainly not going to happen. This is because I myself detest seeing movies on the weekend, when the theatres are relative full. I like empty theatres.

So I looked at what was showing in the neighborhood. The good news is that thirteen different movies are showing within two blocks of my house. The bad news is that more than half of them are always out of the question. Also bad news, on a day like today: I have usually seen the aceeptable movies already. Pretty quickly, this afternoon’s choices came down to two: The Hurt Locker, which I’d like to have seen (if you know what I mean), and The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, which (I checked) has a Metacritic rating of 41. Did I really want to see Jeremy Piven play a slobulesque hustler? No. But it was a less-sharp stick in the eye. A less-sharp stick in the Sicilian-part-of-me’s hand.

When I crossed 86th Street on my way home, I noticed that the sun was hot. It was as though a broiler-oven had been opened behind me, and waves of heat were pouring out. This heat thing has got to come to an end soon. I’m bearing up better than I’ve done in the past, but it’s like life in wartime: I’m doing without a lot of stuff “for the duration.” Maybe, though, the heat is making the Sicilian part of me feel more at home. How on earth else explain my trip to a purgatorial storage unit on a blazing day?

We had a super storm this evening. It was super for us because we were home — high and dry. I did think about the people who were just getting out of the theatre. The rain was coming down in curtains, like a blizzard, only much noisier — and that without factoring in the operatic thunder and lightning, for which, trust me, no expense was spared. Gigantic lighting bolts were thrust into Astoria as though Bette Davis were stubbing out cigarettes in a fit of pique. It suited my mood down to the ground.

It suited my mood down to the ground because I’d just found out the most incredible thing. I’ll be writing more about this incredible thing in a Portico page that I’ll link to next Monday, but for the moment it’s enough to say earlier in the evening, over dinner, before the storm, I was wondering what in hell I would write about this week’s New Yorker story. This week’s New Yorker story, “Max at Sea,” by Dave Eggers, turns out to be an extract from the novelization of Mr Eggers’s script, with Spike Jonze, of a film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, didn’t know that when I read the story. I didn’t find out until after dinner.

I was plenty pissed, I don’t mind saying. But that’s all I’m going to say for the time being.

***

We had one of our New Evenings, and it was a great success. As Kathleen left for work this morning (for the printer, actually), she said that she’d be home early, and she asked for a chicken salad. I don’t think that she really wanted a chicken salad, but that’s what does come to mind in a pinch if you have been brought up as Kathleen was. The idea of ordering dinner like a great lady, at the beginning of the day, does not come naturally to my wife. After nearly thirty years of marriage to the likes of me, she still has her Second Mrs de Winter moments.

In the event, Kathleen did make it home very early, and we did have a chicken salad. We had yet another chicken salad that I invented, this time to use up what was on hand, so that I wouldn’t have to go out to buy anything. Here’s how I did it:

I combined about a half cup of mayonnaise with a dash of curry powder, the juice of half a lemon, a quarter teaspoon (or less) of moutarde de Meaux, salt, and the top half of an avocado. Despite the ghastly summer weather that we’ve been having, the avocado was not quite ripe, so I had to process it into the dressing.

To this I added a left-over roast chicken breast — just the one. Cubed, as they say. Also the cubed other half of the avocado. About two dozen green grapes, halved. And a small handful of toasted walnuts.

This yielded just enough for two — such a relief. Frugality is my motto these days. It means making the most of everything, and that, in turn, means “no leftovers,” because Kathleen and I never eat leftovers. The leftover roast chicken breast doesn’t count, because it’s not really a leftover; we wouldn’t eat it at all, except in a salad.

***

Also over dinner, we talked about Mozart’s strep throat,* which soon enough led to (yet) another hearty denunciation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. I used to wish that Mozart would come back to life just to see how neat it is to listen to all his music on the phonograph/cassette player/8 track/CD/Nano. But now I wish that he would write THE opera about being a misunderstood artist. Instead of “Salieri kills Mozart,” we could have “Mozart kills Pushkin/Rimsky/Shaffer.”

* It is taking me a while to adjust to the new Greg Kinnear portrait of Mozart, but I’m working on it. Mozart on CNN, though — it’s weak of me, I know, but I think it’s cool.

On Friday, something remarkable happened: I was never alone. Extraordinary, really. I am usually alone for most of the day, and always for at least part of it. But one thing led to another. Actually, every time somebody left, somebody else showed up.

On Saturday, instead of succumbing to the vapors, I tackled the housekeeping with unusual thoroughness. Aside from a short stack of DVDs, a tall stack of CDs, and the materials that one fine day will be mounted in our wedding scrapbook (just in time for our thirtieth anniversary?), everything lying about the apartment in the morning had found its place by dark.

On Sunday, I had to work. Well, I hadn’t been able to get anything done on Friday! I didn’t mind working yesterday, though. I didn’t feel under pressure to get things done, although I don’t know why that should be.

This Friday, I’ll have my quarterly Remicade infusion. For the first time in ages, I feel that I need it. It may be that my immune system has had nothing to do with the fact that I’ve felt run down for about a week — and, although I’ve felt run down, I haven’t felt the small but sapping aches and pains that characterized life before Remicade. Not yet. And I wasn’t too run down to have a big day on Friday (big for me, anyway) and an industrious one on Saturday. It’s possible that I’ve just been working hard. But I’m disappointed that I won’t be progressing from four infusions per year to three anytime soon. I have no objection to the infusions themselves; ordinarily, I feel no different leaving the hospital than I did walking in. But the infusions are very expensive, and I can’t expect that insurance will always be there to pick up the tab. 

Another dispiriting factor has been the pile of novels that confronts me. I’m not really taken by any of the books in it; I’m afraid that I bought rather promiscuously in the spring. I wanted to be in the swim. Instead: imagine whitewater rafting, but without the water. The novels in my pile have been as difficult to like as it is hard to imagine waterless whitewater.  

I have come to think somewhat better of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, though. I really disliked the first two chapters, and when the subject of the New Coke fiasco came up — the book is set in 1985 — I thought about throwing the book across the room. Now that I’ve almost finished it, I think instead than the author has undertaken this project at least 15 years too soon. Mr Whitehead writes very well — a bit too well at times, if you know what I mean — and he has a sure grip on the agonies of adolescence. But he doesn’t yet know how to make that most horrible stretch of life interesting. (Maybe nobody does.) It’s rather like what Kathleen said of the Francis Bacon show at the Museum — twice as awful up close.

I myself, by the way, find the Bacon twice as interesting, and surprisingly beautiful. But I know better than to venture a discussion of the matter with Kathleen. At least I got her to see it.

Tomorrow, I will be alone all day. What’s extraordinary is that I don’t know anymore how important it is, or even if it is important, to be alone. That is, I don’t have to be alone in order to work. A deeper-thrusting change is hard to imagine. 

Here I am at 23 months. According to the legend, I’m standing in “Mother’s Library,” which, since my mother wrote it, would be my grandmother’s library. Where was that? And what was Nana Lilly doing with a library? This must have been Grampa’s Sutton Place flat, about which more anon. As you can see, I’m the compleat sophisticate, accoutered with cardie and corduroys, surrounded by books, and reaching, with unsuccessful surreptitiousness, for the maraschino cherry at the bottom of the glass. It would appear that a number of charmed adults have been ruffling my hair.

At least there isn’t too much hair — a Seventies problem. Here, it is still 1949. Truman is president. Hattie Carnegie lives at the Cooper-Hewitt. This is the first picture of me as I am today. It’s done.

Here is an earlier picture — same apartment — from my life in the American Raj. Is that kitchen neat as a pin, or what? The curtains alone! I clearly learned nothing from my early environments.

Taking stock of old photograph albums this evening, just to know what’s what, so as to begin thinking about what to do with what, I had occasion to look at a lot of very old pictures of me, of Kathleen, of our families, and even of people who I only heard about as a child. Aunt Lala, for instance. She was a connection of my maternal grandfather’s family in St Paul, but I’m not sure that she was actually related to anyone. Imagine being called “Lala”! And the way my mother would say her name told me that, well, it meant pretty much what you’d think it would today.

Kitty Lilly at ten, looking gorgeous already (what a colleen she was!) in a swimsuit, posed demurely but not primly on a dock at White Bear Lake. Kitty babysat for us while she attended Manhattanville College, in the late Fifties. I could swear that she took us to see Vertigo and Teahouse of the August Moon — fascinatingly inappropriate movie choices. She probably didn’t; but she was so cool that it’s no wonder that I pin the adventures on her. One of my favorite memories is of her correcting me in the kitchen during one of my parents parties. She was all dressed up, while I was malingering in my pyjamas and bathrobe — ” malingering” being a fine word, I think, for a child’s opportunistically contriving to stay up way past bed time. Always ready to tell anyone who asked what it was that I wanted — for Christmas, for my birthday, or just in general — I angled passionately for my latest heart’s desire, a set of “resonance chessmen.” Eventually, Kitty figured out the spoonerism and clued me in. The funniest part is that, at least as I remember them, the Renaissance chessmen were in fact quite lugubriously gothic, elongated like the kings at Chartres. I never got the chessmen, which is a great relief to my conscience, as I never played chess with enough interest to deserve a special set of any kind. After Manhattanville, Kitty went back to Lincoln, married, and had a family. I exchange Christmas cards with her widower, whom I may have met once, a long time ago. I haven’t met either of Kitty’s daughters.

Then there’s an album that will be very easy to knock down into digital shape. It’s a collection of smallish Polaroids of a dinner party for 65 people that my parents gave, in the spring of 1972, to introduce my first wife (then my fiancée) and her mother to their friends. Tables for eight or ten were strewn about the house; I dined at the one in my old bedroom. Well, “old” bedroom. I’d moved out of it about a year earlier, and into it only three years before that. There was a Raj aspect to our immense Tanglewood home: my father would not have been able to afford anything like such square footage in the Westchester that we’d left behind in 1968. At the party, you won’t be surprised to learn, our table was the most riotous. One of the most high-spirited company wives was easily goaded by a rather interesting member of the “St Michael’s Mafia” into smoking a great big cigar, and how we all ended up with our clothes on, I’ll never know.

On my honeymoon with Kathleen, nine years later, we went up to New Hampshire and stayed at a place called the Woodbound Inn. Never has there been such a peak week for sugar-maple reds; the snapshots that I took look hand-colored. Kathleen and I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle, who were nearby, and my cousin Jane, who still lived at home at the time. Looking at the picture of John, Kathleen, Ann and Jane tonight, I realized that my late uncle was a year younger than I am now, and my aunt quite a bit younger — probably not even Kathleen’s age.

But the most remarkable photograph that I saw today was posted by my daughter at Facebook, and that’s another story!  

 

 

Let’s just never mind why. The oven smoked something awful tonight. I knew that it was going to, but I had to run a few pieces of ham under the broiler, for a total of ten minutes. In that short time, the air in the kitchen became toxic. It would have been less so if I hadn’t closed the swinging door, but on a hot night I didn’t want to open the balcony door. And I certainly didn’t want to advertise my smoke-detectorlessness to my neighbors, by opening the front door, which is what Kathleen wanted to do. When we sat down to dinner — a very tasty dinner, as it happened — I weakened and let in the hot air from outside.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to know that even on days when I don’t cross a street, life can be very exciting here. And, even though the smoke has cleared, the air in the kitchen is still pretty acrid.

Notwithstanding all of that, as I say, we had a very nice dinner, and I want to thank Kathleen’s cousin-by-marriage, Kurt Holm, for the recipe. Kurt and a friend of his have started up a very smart site — I suppose it’s a blog, essentially — that offers a dandy idea for dinner every weekday. The idea, I believe, is that you check out the site while you’re at work, and, if you like what’s on offer that day, you print out the entry, which includes a shopping list, a pantry list — things that you’ve probably got on hand — and a list of necessary kitchen equipment, as well as step-by-step instructions. It couldn’t be more lucid. This was the second time that we tried a recipe.

The site is called notakeout, and today’s dish is called “Green Beans, Walnuts and Lemon with Grilled Ham.”

To tell you the truth, I have never had anything quite like it — and yet there’s nothing strange about the food in front of you. Atop slices of ham that have been glazed with melted apricot preserves and then grilled, you spoon a light salad of steamed beans tossed in butter and lemon, together with a handful of toasted chopped walnuts. Kathleen, who would eat cardboard if you squeezed lemon juice on it, was in heaven, and ate every bite. I ate every bite, too. I made a few very slight and very idiosyncratic mental adjustments to the recipe, because there will be a next time.

After dinner, I retired to the blue room and did a lot of tedious updating work on the “Home Theatre” branch at Portico. (The menu has no permalink, so I’ll send you to the page with the sexy snaps — can you believe Claudette Colbert’s dress? If she were buck naked, you wouldn’t stare as hard.) Over the years — and I mean all of them, since 2000, when I launched Portico, that I’ve spent online — I’ve occasionally written up movies in my DVD  collection. This is distinct from the “Friday movies,” reports of movies that I’ve just seen in the theatre.

Why would I write about a film twice? The simplest answer is to invite you to compare the review that I gave to Hollywoodland when I saw it in the theatre, nearly three years ago — in those days, I kept the reviews at The Daily Blague, not at Portico — and the Home Theatre entry that I wrote today, after watching the DVD three times over a recent ten-day period. Studio executives may be less than thrilled to hear it, but most of the best movies get better over time.

I wasn’t writing this evening, certainly. I was updating HTML files and choosing images for the pages that I’d written before Corel WinDVD made it easy to capture stills. (Or that I hadn’t bothered to garnish with images.)

In any case, got the Home Theatre branch into shape because I plan to add a new page to it every week. What’s next? Either Hitchcock or Fred Astaire — but don’t hold me to it.