A serene view of the loony bin, don’t you think?

Kathleen will be away every weekend this month. To be sure, I’ll be away with her for two of them, around Thanksgiving. But that’s even worse: that means that I’ll have to travel, too. So I begin the month with the solemn wish that I could give it a pass, and wake up in December. (Although Kathleen will be away the first weekend in December, too.)

Did I just say December? Christmas? During the summer, I thought that I just might be ready for Christmas when it came round, but, now that November is here, I’m not so sure. I haven’t done anything about Christmas cards – that’s always Step One. And Kathleen and I haven’t decided whether to re-launch the Christmas Day at-home that we hosted earlier in the decade. And will we have a tree?

It’s a familiar split. Half of me believes that, if I take a deep breath and think as clearly as I can, I’ll be able to devise a satisfying but not arduous plan for Christmas. And half of me wants to run away.

(I’m struck by how willing I am to settle for “satisfying” these days. “Satisfying” is good. For one thing, it is often about as good as things get. It makes a far more realistic objective than “wonderful” or “unbelievable.” Beyond that, though, it’s about all I can take. Anything that’s better than “satisfying” is really too much!)

And, mind you – we don’t do Christmas presents anymore! It’s not as though we had that to worry about!

Having broken my neck in September, of course, I have a perfect excuse not to do anything at Christmas. Seeing that my life has not so much returned to normal as re-launched in New and Improved form, it’s a totally bogus excuse, but it still sounds good, and nobody would dare argue with it.*  Kathleen least of all. If you think that I’m skittish about Christmas – !

And, if we have a tree, can we put up the nice ornaments? When Kathleen’s father retired, and her parents downsized, Kathleen came into a small treasure of beautiful old glass ornaments. They might be worth a great deal, but probably not to us. (It’s the difference between “used,” as they are in our hands, and “antique,” in a dealer’s.) If Kathleen has no intention of peddling them at eBay, though, she’s also disinclined to hang them on spindly spruce branches from which they might be knocked by clumsy visitors, or tumbled by a faulty tree stand.

When did we last have a tree? The old Daily Blague doesn’t cast much light on the matter. It has seen three Christmases come and go without leaving a record. Certainly there have been no snapshots. I wonder if Kathleen will remember… and if she’ll let me use at least a few of the good ornaments this year.

If, that is, we have a tree.

* People would be far more likely to think that I’m deluded about the “New and Improved” part.

[Midday in Manhattan; Telephone call between Yorkville and Tribeca*] 

Me: You’ve never seen Infamous?

Fossil Darling: I’ve never seen Infamous. Do you have it?

Me: Of course.

FD: Then I’ll borrow it from you.

Me: Sorry; I don’t lend books or DVDs anymore.

FD: You lend them to me.

Me: You can come over here and watch it. We’ll have popcorn.

FD: I don’t want to spend that much time with you.

Me: You admit it!

[Mutual ROTFLOL – as adapted for gents in their sixties]

* Fossil Darling works in Tribeca.

This afternoon, Kathleen and I had brunch at the museum with Jean Ruaud, of Mnémoglyphes – the blogger from a foreign capital to whom I alluded the other day – and his nephew, André-François Ruaud. André is the publisher of Les moutons électriques,  an imprint that he manages at Lyon, and that has just issued Les nombreuses vies de Maigret, a collection of essays and other materials devoted to Georges Simenon’s most celebrated creation. Among other contributions, there is a portfolio of photographs taken by Jean. If you have ever visited any of his sites over the years, particularly Empreintes, his ‘Fotoblog,’ you know that Jean Ruaud is one of the most gifted amateur photographers on the planet. (Actually, with the publication of Les nombreuses vies de Maigret, he is no longer an amateur.) Jean and André are in New York at the moment to collaborate on an upcoming project that promises to be very interesting to fans of another famous fictional detective – and I leave it to Jean to fill in the blanks as he sees fit.

When did I first encounter Jean’s blog at the time, Douze lunes? During the summer or early autumn of 2004, I think, right before I launched the first Daily Blague. Over the years, Jean and I have broached the idea of meeting in person, either here or in Paris, often enough for me to begin to wonder if we might actually ever get together. (At our end, Kathleen has been so tied up with work for the past few years that we’ve only managed brief escapes at Thanksgiving. As it happened, we spent the Thanksgiving of 2003, somewhat before I met Jean online, in Paris, and we were not inclined to revisit the City of Light in late November anytime soon – considering that one of the key points of winter travel for Kathleen is plenty of soleil. In Paris that year, it was miserably rainy the entire time we were there.) In the end, it was probably inevitable that the decline of the dollar ordained that the meeting would take place in New York.

Jean was very generous with his time, for me met not once but twice. How I wish that my French were in better shape! I ventured a few mistake-riddled phrases, but stuck to English out of sheer humanitarian concern for Jean’s sensibilities. Among other things, we talked about Jean’s really very interesting job, which I would describe by likening him, in a way at least, to the subjects of Andrés last and forthcoming books. But when Kathleen turned to Jean and said, “RJ tells me that you’re a detective!” Jean all but hid his head under the tablecloth in embarrassment. Really, he is much too modest. All I will say is this: come to think of it, I won’t. 

Kathleen and I hope that Jean and André enjoyed getting together as much as we did. As Confucius says… I was going to quote Confucius in French, but it’s quite different, and my classical Chinese isn’t up to deciding who’s more faithful, Simon Leys (in English) or Séraphin Couvreur. Compare:

To have friends coming from afar: is this not a delight?

Si des amis viennent de loin recevoir ses leçons, n’éprouve-t-il pas une grande joie ?

Who said anything about leçons? My joie, however, was grande indeed.

The moon glimmers through thin clouds over Astoria.

In the event, I got to sleep fairly quickly last night. I even turned out the lamp on my bedside table, something that I’ve been loath to do lately, because it has felt like a kind of burial alive. I got up early this morning as well, excited by the prospect of my big day.

After a delightful lunch at the Bateau Ivre, I quick-marched to the hospital for the Remicade infusion, arriving only minutes late. For the most part, I read The View From Castle Rock while I sat in the chemo chair, finding the book both comfortable and disturbing. When the infusion was over, I checked in with Kathleen, who was headed off to a late night at the printer, and decided to walk home along the river. It was very peaceful – because it was very chilly. I wished for a pair of gloves!

At 81st Street, I climbed the long flight of stairs with two intermediate landings and caught my breath as I continued along the Finley Walk. By the time I left the park, I was tired enough to consider hailing a taxi to carry me the few remaining blocks. I did get home on my own steam, but even though I was very hungry and quite in the mood for a ham-and-cheese sandwich (as if I hadn’t had a croque monsieur at lunch!), I had no choice but to sit still for a little while before tackling the cold cuts. Among other matters, I had to decide on the color of Nano that I want. It’s impossible, because I don’t want any of them. I’ll settle, I suppose, for the brushed black. Kathleen and I agreed that we do not live on the same planet as the apparently quite anemic people for whom Apple selected its iPod colors.

In the course of our morning badinage, something that Kathleen said prompted me to interject, “A steal at eleven hundred dollars!” I’ve no idea what it was that she said, but now there’s nothing for it but to watch Rear Window, the film from which that remark comes. Speaking of films, I remembered to click the “Tomorrow” button before I checked movie possibilities for tomorrow morning. Good thing, too; for a moment there, I thought that there was nothing worth seeing besides Reservation Road. I am happy to report that La Vie en Rose has finally disappeared from the Angelika’s screens; now, will it please appear on DVD so that I can watch it over and over and over at home.

Really, I ought to be in bed, or at least sitting quietly with a book (Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock, which has captured my reader’s interest because I waited until I thought that it would). I most certainly ought not to be hanging over the computer, even with a mug of hot chocolate. The chocolate is delicious, but any soporific effects are bound to be countered by the buzz of writing even a simple entry such as this one.

I’m in the middle of a swirling week, really a quite extraordinarily busy one after weeks of quiet – and I’m loving it. Tomorrow (later today, I should say) holds a great treat in store, and I’m not talking about the Remicade infusion that I can just, shy of three months since the last one, feel the need of. Remicade is a miracle, not a treat. The treat is meeting a long-time correspondent and fellow blogger who lives in a foreign capital. More than that I shall not say, not, at least, without said blogger’s permission.

Tuesday night posed a challenge: my first night out since giving up the martinis. The occasion was the first Orpheus-at-Carnegie concert of the season, which I’ll write up presently (as soon as I’ve seen what the Times has to say about it). In the old days, I’d have gone straight from Carnegie Hall to the Brooklyn Diner, not as much as a block away, for a dinner of Eggs Benedict and three martinis. Then I’d hop in a taxi (or, if the taxis just weren’t driving by, the subway) and go home – where I very well might have another martini. Eventually, I would pour myself into bed, but I wouldn’t remember doing so.

Last night, I went to the Brooklyn Diner first. The place was packed, so I sat at the bar. I ordered Pigs in a Blanket, an appetizer that will serve as dinner for me, and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. I had a second glass of wine, paid the bill, and left. Then, for reasons that I don’t care to discuss, I had a third glass of wine in the bar at Carnegie Hall, just before the concert. It was a that-or-else glass of wine, and I regretted it very much during the second half of the program, because my eyes kept wanting to close. This would never do, as, for reasons that I’ll enumerate when I write about the concert, I intended to pay the closest attention. I triumphed, but it was a struggle. When I got home, I did not have a fourth glass of wine. I had hot chocolate instead, and I was soon very sleepy. But then, I wasn’t at the computer.

Amplification: I was not at the computer trying out a new HTML editor.

May the morning sun kiss you and keep you warm and dry all day. In the absence of sunlight (such as I’m afraid we’re expecting), my good wishes will have to do.

PS: Even Monday brings treats, one of them an iPod Nano. It’s the model for me, I’m told. I can’t imagine actually using it, though – it seems, like Facebook and Capri pants, so age-inappropriate!

¶ See Me Now.

Anthony Newman’s organ recital at Holy Trinity Church, which is practically next door, was a lovely way to begin the season, and at some point today there will appear at the end of this entry a link to more substantive remarks than I’m prepared to make at the moment (having just put the Book Review review “to bed”). If I tell you that the surprise hit of the program for me was one of Mozart’s Epistle Sonatas, you’ll quite rightly think me daft – at least until I explain.

Not that my attention to the music ever flagged, but as has happened at other recitals at Holy Trinity, I couldn’t help being charmed by the interior, which is more reminiscent of a large parish in a small town than of a grand Gothic cathedral in its aspirations, into fantasies of joining the congregation. I could sit in the back, wearing the attitude of a staunch catachumen. And I could sing the hymns. (During a trio of French baroque characteristic pieces – including Rameau’s very famous Poule – I copied out the words to a hymn that I’m sure was an Abolitionist favorite: “In Christ there is no East or West.”) But I’d be coming at Episcopalianism from a pole opposite that of Eric Patton’s starting point, having been brought up Roman Catholic and not Unitarian. (I’d link to Eric’s blog, but it’s too depressing: he’s discontinuing it.) I’d be sure to show up only very sporadically, and never for vestigial services such as the Blessing of the Animals, if indeed they have such an event at Holy Trinity.

Kathleen says that it will be all right, though, to give $25 or so to the organ fund. I keep thinking of the organ as new, but in fact Anthony Newman – that’s right, last night’s organist – inaurgurated it twenty years ago, and it’s in need of serious maintenance. Not that it sounds it.

¶ Anthony Newman at Holy Trinity.

Here’s a view of Midtown from the top of the Great Lawn in Central Park – which is not a lawn at all but a constellation of softball diamonds. It’s pathetic of me to point this out in such a teensy photo, but the Chrysler Building is the fourth speck of light from the left. On the right, you can see the lighting at the top of the TimeWarner Center, which I had never noticed before. I don’t know why, but it gives the towers an air of mad-scientist laboratory. Lights in the attic – that sort of look.

All photographs by Kathleen Moriarty.

What a silly boy I was. I thought that, after an early dinner, we would come home in plenty of time for me to sit down at the computer and dash off a Sunday entry about our walk across Central Park and our lovely meal at Nice-Matin with Kathleen’s client (who happens also to be our personal friend), Jim. The walk and the meal were indeed lovely, but I was an all-but-weeping basket case by the time that Kathleen poured me into a taxi and took me home, where I went to bed on the spot.

The towers of Central Park West.

Perhaps I’d overdone it. I had gotten up at something close to five in the morning and waded through no end of New York Times – including three editions that dated back to my hospital stay, a month ago.  (Don’t think it was a waste of time; I clipped three interesting articles!) I also read a lot of James Schuyler’s recently re-issued What’s for Dinner?, a novel that I look forward to recommending more fully. And I made breakfast-in-bed for Kathleen. Later, after lunch, we tackled a very disorganized closet – you know what that’s like. Kathleen stood on a step-ladder and handed things down from an  almost inaccessible top shelf, which we promptly stocked with old tax records and such that had been taking up prime lower shelves. There are still a few piles of stuff to deal with in the blue room, but not as many as I feared there would be. Several cubic feet of stuff were tossed.

Then we went for our first walk, our regulation Sunday constitutional: down 86th Street to Carl Schurz Park and the flagstaff next to Gracie Mansion. Then the promenade to and from the head of the Finley Walk at 81st Street, a view that, if you’re a regular reader, you’ll have seen perhaps once too often. Then homewards from the flagstaff, this time via Holy Trinity Church on 88th Street, to check to see whether Anthony Newman’s organ recital (!) is scheduled for tonight or for Wednesday night (I somehow remembered an even-numbered date) (it’s tonight). I was pretty tired when we got back to the apartment, but a little over an hour later I was cool and spruce and ready for another stroll. I hailed a taxi to take us to Fifth Avenue, not so much to save the walk as to put us in the Park before night fully fell. I have Photoshopped Kathleen’s images in order to give an idea of what the light was like at about six-forty.

The Beresford, partially under wraps.

I cannot deny that dinner was all the more delicious for being expensed. Jim, who lives in San Sebastián when he is not on a plane or in a hotel room (or at his flat in the West Eighties, which we were to have visited after dinner had I been a little stronger), has acquired an expertise in Spanish wine, and what a dope I feel now for not have made note of the excellent choice that he and the sommelier arrived at last night. All I can say is that it was a Rioja, possibly an Alta Rioja, and that it had the ethereal qualities that I associate with the very best Burgundies – although it tasted nothing like a French wine. Kathleen was quietly impressed with me for cutting off the pouring of a second glass – not absolutely altogether, but right after a few thimblefuls had dribbled in. 

And so to …. [yawn!].

The worst of it is, I slept until eight-thirty this morning, a now-unconscionable hour. Guess I was tired.  

Whatever brought on this morning’s thick dream, it was not yesterday’s good news. In the late afternoon, I walked down the the Hospital for Special Surgery to see Dr Steven K Magid, rheumatologist to the stars but also to me, so that he could examine the surgical incisions (the operation was a month ago today) to make sure that they were completely “closed up.” Only then might I schedule my next Remicade infusioin. The odd thing about Remicade, sort of, is that you have to be in perfect health to absorb it – perfect, that is, except for the condition that sent you to the Infusion Therapy Unit in the first place.

Dr Magid pronounced the wound “beautiful,” a word that Kathleen has also used when changing bandages. (We’ve done without the bandages for about a week, but when she took a look on Wednesday and repeated herself, I got on the phone to make the doctor’s appointment.) The first item of business this morning is to make an appointment for the earliest possible opening. I’m slightly overdue for the next infusion, and I know from experience that going just a few days too long means turning from a coach into a pumpkin.

When I said this to Sarah, the nurse in the Infusion Therapy Unit who just told me a minute ago that infusion bookings will open at nine, she replied (with her quick Irish wit), “Well, now, that’ll be just in time for Hallowe’en.”

As a rule, I don’t share my dreams. I think it’s boring and rude. For a long time, dreams were not a problem, because heavy drinking buries dreams. Whether you have them but can’t remember them (like so much else) or don’t have them in the first place, I can’t say, but now that I’m down to a glass or two of wine – and last night, I never got to the second one; I was too sleepy, even though I was fired up by the season finale of Mad Men – I dream all the time, and I’ve been having some corkers. To contradict the old hymn again – last time, it was about the East River – some of these corkers do not “fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.” Au contraire. They hang around all morning, like the overupholstered ghosts of Freud’s first patients.

This morning’s dream, the odder details of which I’ve just poured out to a friend who happened to be awake and on chat, was, I see, about adolescent acceptance, something that eluded me completely when I was young, mostly because I didn’t know what to accept. I sometimes rather bumblingly confused my longing with homosexuality, but what I wanted wasn’t love or touch or release but simple understanding. “Simple” – ha! There was nothing simple about me then. (There still isn’t, but I’ve sanded down the surfaces a bit.) God Almighty could not, probably, have convinced me that I was a person of worth, even though I myself had no doubt that I was a walking gold standard of worthiness. I wanted companionship – and coronation. As I say, “simple.”

Most of the dream took place in a ruined mansion near Prospect Park. The grounds were extensive but also wildly overgrown, and both house and garden were littered with broken debris. This was the retreat of my friend, X. Well, I knew X and X knew me, but (as in life) I was not part of X’s circle, most of which was also on hand. How annoying that was! X’s friends (in the dream) were sullen and hostile, like the party guests in a Bergman nightmare. Some were beautiful. Some were dweeby. All were men. I had gone out to Brooklyn to rent a tuxedo from X, but it was a bad day for that, he told me (and how wicked I was to show up unannounced), because he was “at home.”

Beneath all the new-wave filigree, the flotsam and jetsam of sophisticated, “pointless” Sixties movies, my dream was about the different but much more ordinary boredom of putting up with a friend’s friends as a way of getting closer to the friend. (Very adolescent, but see also Swann in Love.) At one point, however, I found myself alone in the house. I wrote a note to X.* I have no idea what the note said, but I did begin the first sentence with X’s name, followed by a comma – only I addressed him as “Y,” another real-life friend. (“Simple.”) When I began the second sentence with an identical apostrophe, I remembered reading recently that to begin successive sentences with the addressee’s name is a sign of the most desperate and hopeless love; the writer’s only next move is murder-suicide. Unable to continue but also unable to tear up what I had written, I sat at the flimsy old escritoire, paralyzed in deep humiliation.

It isn’t what woke me up, but that’s enough for now. Doctor, what do you think it means?

* Of course; more Proust! Why be in the same room with someone, however madly desired, when you can write notes to him from another room?

Have I ever told you that the Queensboro Bridge is my favorite bridge? In the world, I think, but certainly in New York. Everybody has a favorite. The suspension bridges are certainly more popular. The Queensborough is a plain old cantilever bridge, but it goes out of its way to capture some suspension-bridge slopes. And those crazy, firework-ey Saul Steinberg finials!

How about this fine cargo ship, the Caribbean.

Except, er, it’s actually a barge. See the tugboat at the back? It’s a barge, and an empty barge at that. Let me tell you, that thing was traveling!

¶ “Wellsperger’s” Models: A Second Look.

Here is a bit of schist or granite or whatnot – rockface – from Carl Schurz Park. The only interesting thing about the image is that I just learned how to resize it, using the latest version of PhotoShop Elements (an application that I have used for three generations), which I bought for my new-ish laptop. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to resize the pixels. The instructions at Help were totally counterintuitive; it was only when I did what they told me not to do that I was able to move forward. 

Typical. Resizing images is just about all I use PhotoShop for.

Not so typical is a bit of what feels like bait-and-switch from Coffee Cup. I  bought their HTML editor for the new-ish laptop for one reason only: Microsoft has discontinued FrontPage. I’ve used FrontPage for seven years, learning to live with and love its maddening limitations. Were it not for Microsoft’s greedy copy protection racket, I’d just go on using FrontPage for the rest of my life. Now, Coffee Cup isn’t as expensive as FrontPage, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. Whereas FrontPage reads my stylesheet without so much as a burp, just as every browser does, Coffee Cup requires an additional product to render stylesheets usable with their HTML editor. $34 additional, to be exact, and another $13 for hard copy. (Essential, because I’ve been unable to download software of any kind with our wi-fi connection.) I’ve written a blistering letter of outrage, but I haven’t sent it.

By and large, I’ve had it with innovation. Everything can just stay where it is for ten years. Then maybe I’ll have an appetite for a bit of change.

Three weeks ago, on the day after I came home from the hospital, I went to the barbershop for a trim. Working around the neck brace proved very difficult for the barber. In any case, short and scruffy as it was, the beard still needed trimming, so I went back today. It was my regular barber’s day off. One of his colleagues asked me if my beard had been shaved in the hospital, or, worse, by me. He was shocked by my answer. But he got me looking fairly normal.

What follows (at Portico) is a lightly edited (and corrected) letter to a correspondent and friend who recommended that I rent and watch The Lookout, a picture that I don’t even recall seeing advertized. Written and directed by Scott Frank, it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher, and Jeff Daniels. Very roughly, it’s about the difficulties that Mr Gordon-Levitt’s character has in reconstructing his life after sustaining a head injury in an automobile crash for which he was irresponsibly responsible, Two of his friends were killed, another also severely wounded. The “problem” aspects of the plot, predictably, yield a certain “made for TV” quality that is not entirely overcome until the second half of the film.

We watched the movie on Saturday night. The first thing that I wanted to do on Sunday morning was to write a report to my friend, telling her no less about the circumstances in which I saw the video than about the kind of critical response that might show up in one of my “Friday Movies” pieces. I see the movies covered in “Friday movies” in theatres, and if nothing else my letter backs up my insistence that I can respond to a film far more intensely on the small screen at home than on the big screen in public. I don’t seem to meld with audiences in the dark; the everyday detachment that gets me from my flat to the movie house follows me into the auditorium. At home, I am far more defenselessly at the mercy of what I’m watching.

The following rough synopsis ought to make my letter at least fairly comprehensible: a creep called Gary Spargo (Mr Goode) uses his girlfriend, Luvlee (Ms Fisher), as an enticement to engage Chris (Mr Gordon-Levitt) as a lookout in a robbery that Gary has planned for a bank where Chris works as a night janitor (despite his upper-middle class background), and where Mr Tuttle is the manager who won’t give Chris a chance to step up to teller. That Gary’s plans will miscarry is never in the slightest doubt, especially once we get to know a cop (Sergio di Zio) who likes to stop by the bank every night to share a box of doughnuts with Chris. Viewers familiar with Woody Allen’s Match Point may have no trouble recognizing Mr Goode’s face, but nothing else about him will be remotely familiar. Bone, Gary’s shooter, is played by a nasty-looking Greg Dunham. Jeff Daniels plays Lewis, a blind man with whom the local social workers have hooked Chris up with as a flatmate.

¶ About The Lookout.

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All went well with the housecleaning yesterday. I moved slowly and avoided twisty situations. But then, in a near-final bit of cleanup, I reached high to replace of boxed set of Mozart’s mature string quartets in its pile atop the CD/DVD shelves in the corridor. That was a mistake. It hurt. I’m hoping it’s just muscle.

Always in search of new and difficult learning curves, I installed Coffee Cup on the laptop, to serve as my HTML editor, and I’m finding that FrontPage it ain’t. (FrontPage may not have been perfect, but I knew how to use it, which of course guaranteed that it would be discontinued.) How long it’s going to take me to figure out how to work with the new software is almost as much fun to guess at as the nature of the pain in my neck.

In a little while, Kathleen and I are going to promenade down Third Avenue to Gracious Empire, doubtless with several intermediate stops. I’ll be the guy with the tan corduroy jacket, the neck brace, the cane, the scraggly beard. and the neat wampum that Kathleen strung together for my reading glasses.

I know that I promised a risotto write-up for today – we’ll see. Maybe I’ll content myself with a PodCast – of me moaning. I can do that now! (But seriously, folks, it’s not that bad.)

Bon weekend à tous!

A lot happened at the beginning of September. I came to believe that I was to some extent afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. Then I fell down and broke my neck, having had a few too many martinis at a bistro lunch. Putting the two together was not fun, but I’m doing well – healing very quickly, and establishing new ways of getting things done that, in truth, I’d been mulling over for months and doubtless would still be dithering over if it hadn’t been for a sudden spot of surgery. I’m doing well enough to think very hard about the irreversible mess that I almost made of my life, not because I’m a bad person but because there was some very important information about my life that I didn’t have, and because the luxury of waiting for that information to sink in and work some changes in my life was denied me.

The linked page isn’t for everybody. If it strikes you as strongly wrong-headed, or driven by some sort of denial, then please, for the love of humanity, stop reading it. It’s provisional and preliminary. I’m not ready to do much with anyone else’s experiences. But the desire to begin some serious work is very strong, and Thursday is my day for taking stock.

¶ “Wellsperger’s Models: A First Look.

The building at the center of the photograph that is topped by a construction crane is the Greenberg Pavilion at New York Hospital, a/k/a Weill Cornell Medical Center or somesuch nonsense. (If I were Dante, I’d create a level of hell for living philanthropists deluded enough to try to glue their names on to their benefactions. As the song goes, Just You Wait, Sandy Weill, Just You Wait. I’ll get dressed and go to town.)

It’s the building in front of and below the Greenberg Pavilion that I’m off to today, at least figuratively speaking. The building with the bands of darkish windows that might seem to be the lower floors of Greenberg is actually a block closer to the camera, and it’s the Hospital for Special Surgery. Almost everyone in our very large apartment building who has heard about my broken neck has come out and asked me if I had it taken care of at “Special Surgery,” and my reply has always been a polite version of “Damn right.” This hospital, so long familiar to me as the site of a calm and quiet infusion unit (chemotherapy, without the cancer), became a “real” hospital in earnest three weeks ago, and it’s where for the first time in my life a scalpel was taken to my skin.

As it happens, the surgeon who headed the operation, and who will examine me today to see if if the wounds (not that anybody uses that word) have healed sufficiently for the two sutures to be removed (yes, only two, for an incision that’s 27 centimetres long), does not have his office in the hospital proper. My rheumatologist does. My rheumatologist’s office, together with the crammed chamber in which his two secretaries try not to step on each other as they do their work, would fit in our living room. The surgeon’s personal office is not much larger, but it is part of a vast suite of offices and examining rooms and whatnot, in a hospital annex two blocks to the north.

Kathleen is going with me, thank heaven. She was in Washington the last time I was in the surgeon’s office – when I was sent directly to the hospital as an “emergency entrant.” There is no emergency room at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Almost every patient has been suffering from some ghastly misery for ages, and is only now getting it fixed, on schedule. People who fall down and break their necks go to other hospitals, unless, like me, they’ve got some pre-existing bone problem. There aren’t that many such cases, so the hospital doesn’t really need an emergency room. But it does have procedures for “emergency entrants. ” I’m sure that it must. It certainly has an “emergency bustle.”

Did I mention that the other “emergency entrant” on the day of my admission was a woman who had just recovered from an operation sufficiently to be sent home, only to fall down in the lobby? How did that happen? Everybody leaves the hospital in a wheelchair. (I certainly did. Fossil Darling resisted the urge to push me into the East River, but we were out in the driveway by then, and he was distracted by stowing my gear in the trunk of the car. I suppose I owe my life to his ADD.) But that is what I overheard. The lady fell down in on her way out. It was too awful to think about, both for the woman and for her family.

Kathleen will be with me for however long it takes (within reason), and then she’ll go to the office, unless she insists on seeing me home. Once home (I’m painting pretty pictures here, assuming that the surgeon doesn’t discover any ill consequences of my having moved the Steinway grand), I shall reread vast swathes of Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, so that I can write it up. It is just the sort of book for me right now. The author’s father and grandfather compensated for the discomforts of life with alcohol and extreme wit. Mr Waugh, in contrast, appears to have a more gently cynical spirit, more inclined to smile with an intense frown than to say, as his father did of tourists from the Midlands who, in his opinion, besmirched his beloved Somerset with their litter,

The roads of West Somerset are jammed as never before with caravans from birmingham and the West Midlands. Their horrible occupants only come down here to search for a place where they can go to the lavatory free. Then they return to Birmingham, boasting in their hideous flat voices about how much money they have saved.

I don’t suppose many of the brutes can read, but anybody who wants a good book for the holidays is recommended to try a new publication form the Church Information Office: <i>The Churchyard Handbook.</i> It laments the passing of that ancient literary form, the epitaph, suggesting that many tombstones put up nowadays dedicated to “Mum” or “Dad” or “Ginger” would be more suitable for a dog cemetery than for the resting place of Christians.

The trouble is that people can afford tombstones nowadays who have no business to be remembered at all. Few of these repulsive creatures in caravans are Christians, I imagine, but I would happily spend the rest of my days composing epitaphs for them in exchange for a suitable fee.:

He had a shit on Gwennap Head,
It cost him nothing. Now he’s dead.

He left a turd on Porlock Hill
As he lies here, it does there still.

Write such things today, and you’ll be given the Carol Gotbaum treatment.

And when I’m through with Mr Waugh – or he with me – I’ve got eight other books to write up next. I’ll have to re-read them all in order to say anything halfway intelligent. In this way, I promise to spend the balance of my time here below, never lifting anything heavier than a pretzel stick – I promise!

HAPPY UPDATE:

The suture has been removed. There were actually two sutures, but the barber appears to have shaved off the one at the top of my neck, so we’ll just live with that bit of blue thread. Another suture, complete overlooked these past three weeks so far as dressing and cleaning is concerned, was removed from an incision over my pelvis. That’s where they got the bit of gushy interior-bone stuff that I became familiar with while watching Manda Bala. 

The surgeon, Dr Andrew Sama himself, showed up to congratulate me on my speedy recovery. It was a good thing that Kathleeen came along, because she wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her that he said that I can fly, as long as I wear my brace. This means that Kathleen may get to see some sun on or around Thanksgiving after all.

I am one hell of a lucky guy. Once again, though, thanks for all your good wishes. They helped!

All right, not exactly at Hell’s Gate. But it’s there in the background, roiling treacherously between the Triboro Bridge (vehicular traffic) and Hell Gate Bridge (railway). Can you tell that I’m losing weight? I can, sort of. My clothes are beginning to hang on me. Which is just too bad – most of them are still new.

A word about the neck brace: it is filthy. The padded parts are covered in some sort of nylon-esque material that, after I’d worn the brace for a week, began to irritate the hell out of my skin. What to do? I learned to fold a piece of cotton flour-sack towelling into a triangle and to arrange it around my neck like a Colonial-Dame kerchief. Now the only part of my anatomy that the brace comes into contact with is the beard under my chinny-chin chin. That itches, sometimes like the dickens, but it does not raise red splotches on my shoulders. Now that the brace is so much more comfortable, I’ve come to feel rather naked and unprotected without it.

As I stood with my back to the East River, here’s what I could see just beyond Kathleen, who kindly took the picture. This is Gracie Mansion, the famous mayoral residence that the current incumbent has declined to inhabit, preferring his doubtless far more comfortable East 70s town house. As a result, the house is still haunted by the ashes of the Giuliani-Hanover marriage.

Being a native New Yorker, I’ve never taken a tour of the house. Kathleen almost went to a party there, during the Lindsay Administration, but something went disastrously wrong, and I don’t think it was the weather.

 

As we promenaded along the Finley Walk, we were diverted by the small-dog run. It is so different from the large-dog run that one’s tempted to thnk of a division in species. The big dogs gallop through thick sand and over rocks and rails in pursuit of tennis balls and one another’s rear ends. They outnumber owners, it always seems, by three to one. At the small-dog run, it’s the other way round. The people are much more parent-like, not protective so much as admiring. The small dogs are, after all, cute. I’m not sure why they rate the plastic tile, which I’m sure the big dogs would detest. But the sound of their little nails clicking across the blue surface is comical in itself.

Kathleen and I both like this photograph a lot. There’s the promenade on top, with one level of highway below. The reason for the rise in the promenade is the dip of the southbound lane of the FDR below the northbound lane – three levels in all for most of the run. I remember loving these “tunnels” when I was a child, on the rare occasions when my parents would come into Manhattan via the East Side, but I was over thirty years old before I knew what stood on top of them.

“I hope that we never live far from here,” I said to Kathleen. “I don’t think that we will,” she said, making my day.

While I wouldn’t claim to be the worst convalescent in the world, I’m certainly a very bad one. Instead of sitting quietly, reading away, doing nothing more strenuous than writing the occasional blog entry, I have been reorganizing my entire life. Stop drinking a gallon of martinis a day, and you’ll probably start reorganizing things, too. Most of the reorganization hasn’t required any heavy lifting, but…

I don’t want to think about that. My head is still erect and, if my shoulders hurt a little, they ought to. I took it much easier today than I did yesterday, which I took much easier than I did Friday – on which day I was idleness itself compared to Thursday. On Thursday, I learned how to do the podcast thingy, and that was so exciting that I had to move the Steinway grand from the blue room to the living room….

I exaggerate; there is no Steinway grand. But I did find an electronic keyboard tucked away behind some draperies. Two years ago, at least, I promised this unused article to some friends of friends who were thinking of buying one for their little boy, who is undoubtedly in law school by now. It was very embarrassing, not being able to find the keyboard where I thought I’d put it. I also found a portrait of me painted by an artist whom we used to know. It is a fiercely expressionistic work – my beard is a sort of creamy teal, while my face is painted the same red as my flannel shirt – but we find it a good likeness (a gallon of martinis per diem will do that to your flannel shirts). We really don’t have anywhere to hang the picture, and I don’t know what to do with it. But it’s not going back behind the draperies. One of my many new mottoes is: No Hidden Assets.

It was my intention to share a risotto recipe with you this evening, but what with one thing another… the day went so quickly. There were the weekend papers to read, and a novel to finish, and a long walk to take (Kathleen estimates it at two miles). Then there was dinner to make. My default, brain-dead menu: roast chicken, some sort of pasta with butter and parmesan, and a vegetable, in tonight’s case deliciously overcooked asparagus. For once, I said “to hell with the al dente school of asparagus,” and I let the tips steam for as long as the elbow macaroni took to boil, seven minutes. That’s much too long, according to current fashions, but it was just what we wanted. We got all the crunch anybody could ask for from the sinfully crispy chicken skin.

While I was in hospital, the beautiful bead chain that Kathleen made some time back for my reading glasses got caught in the neck brace and broke. The beads spilled everywhere, but we recovered most of them; some, I’m embarrassed to say, from the folds of my body. (I’d never have known they were there, but Fossil Darling was giving me an assist in the bathroom. This was shortly after he considered knifing me; see below.) I have become fatally dependent not only upon reading glasses but upon the chain from which they hang when I don’t need them, which is most of the time. For two days – I lost the store-bought backup at the movies on Friday; it was on its last legs, and I didn’t even miss it until I was on the IRT headed north from Union Square – I’ve been taking off the reading glasses and – dropping them on the floor! Not to mention looking all over the apartment for them.

Tomorrow, Columbus Day, is a local, New York holiday. Kathleen’s firm, headquartered in Chicago, does not recognize it, but she’s taking the day off anyway. Fossil Darling, who has the day off anyway – he works for a a well-known umbrella firm – will be junketing to the neighborhood for a haircut. We’re planning a penitential luncheon afterward, which should be very jolly for all the souls in Purgatory whom we’ll be speeding heaven-ward. Maybe someone will take pictures – if the crime scene is sufficiently gory. If she could read this (and who’s to say she can’t, FD’s sainted, late mother would be clucking, not for the first time in forty-four years, “Oh, you two!”

Fossil Darling sent me a lovely note first thing this morning. “Congratulations,” it was headed. “It was a lovely day, all of which is such a fond memory……….” he wrote. My first thought was that, yes, I enjoyed walking down to the river the other day and taking photographs. But, no: it couldn’t be that. Hmm.

I am pretty sharp, first thing in the morning, but Fossil Darling is a professional. I must live up to his standards. Had I been able to, I’d realized right off, instead of after a few head-scratchings, that he was talking about the twenty-sixth wedding anniversary that Kathleen and I celebrate today.

On Sunday, Kathleen and I walked down to the river. I wanted to try my hands, now considerably less shaky, at photography. The results were mixed, but I liked this picture of the river, which, as you can plainly see, is not a river, but a swatch of turbulent water churned by ever-shifting tides. I am very fond of rivers; I like their inexorability. The water keeps coming from one direction and running off in another. “Time, like a never-ending stream,” as the hymn has it. But if the East River were a river, time’s sons would still be floating back and forth perpetually.

The physical therapist who will pay four visits at the insurer’s expense but who says that there’s not really going to be any need for that many, doesn’t want me walking out in the streets unaccompanied until she gets to take a stroll with me on Monday down to Carl Schurz Park. While I observe the flora and the fauna, she will observe me.

But she did tell me that I must walk, and walk a lot, so I enlisted the help of Nom de Plume this afternoon. She’d had a long, all-day meeting, and I’m sure was hoping just to sit by the virtual fire and sip tea, but she readily agreed to walk me the two blocks up 86th Street to the “better” Barnes & Noble – better than the one across the street. I was looking for audiobooks, because sometimes my eyes just can’t take any more reading. The problem was, I’d either read the book, owned the book, or knew from the Book Review that the book wasn’t for me. I did find two titles, though, more about which later. I’m too tired to cross the room to fetch the shopping bag. We were out between five-thirty and six-fifteen. Yorkville High Street was very crowded, and I was lightly afraid of being jostled from behind. But our trip passed without incident. Somewhere between Wu Liang Ye and Laytner’s – both on the north side of 86th between Third and Second – I said to Nom that I felt that we’d walked halfway to midtown. I needed to walk!

I feel sure that I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t count on it, quite, not after I don’t know how many years of steering clear of bed until a few drams of alcohol have lulled my senses. Increasing numbers of drams. Right now, Valium is doing alcohol’s job, and I have every confidence that I’ll be able to cut back on the relaxant. Over the years, the doctors have prescribed every manner of sleeping potion (except the big guns, such as Ambien), but only one has worked, and I was dumbstruck when it was taken off the market as a recreationally-abused drugs. Qaaludes, which I started taking the day after they hit the market, worked perfectly for me, and I was amazed that they didn’t work for everyone. Typical, really. Want to know which one of a half-dozen proposed china patterns won’t sell very well? Just ask Kathleen and me to tell you our favorite. That’s the one.