We’re having hot and humid weather again, and I’m finding it difficult to pay attention to anything. Well, there have been plenty of distractions — real distractions! For example! Did you see the picture of Queen Elizabeth outside 10 Downing Street yesterday? She was wearing a printed skirt with a solid top, and no hat. If proof was wanting that Rupert Murdoch’s End Times are upon us — upon him, I mean — surely that photograph closed the gap. It is very hard not to wish for terrible, terrible things to happen to Rupert Murdoch. For many of them, he’s responsible. For others, he’s not — few people can have been coerced into watching his television network or buying his newspapers — but then that’s why scapegoats were invented, and you have to admit that Rupert Murdoch looks like a scapegoat. In the words of Ko-Ko, I don’t think he’ll be missed.

Then there was the fire, which by the flukiest of flukes I saw with my own eyes. The building that houses Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, built in 1872, was gutted by a roaring blaze last night. The fire started about five or ten minutes before I stepped out onto 86th Street, heading west to Madison to have dinner with Kathleen at Demarchelier. Because of my (painless) neck and back problems, my gaze is usually confined to the pavement when I walk, but something made me pause and look up. At first I thought that it was a violent thunderstorm sweeping up Central Park. Then I realized that this strange weather was not only much closer than the Park but smoke, not clouds. Because the wind was blowing west, I didn’t smell the fire until I was halfway between Third and Lex. (The synagogue stands a few doors in from Lex toward Park on the north side of 85th Street.) The crowd at 86th and Lex was almost impassable, and almost everyone seemed to be taking pictures with a cell phone. I couldn’t see any flames, but the smoke near the rooftops was illuminated by a hellish red glare. I happy to find that I could  cross Lex and continue on my way. (On our way home from dinner, Kathleen and I found the policemen pulling down white tape that would have obliged us to detour to the north — I was glad that I had lingered over dessert.) At Park, I walked into low-lying smoke and found it unpleasant for a moment or two to breathe.

When we got home from dinner, I was good for nothing but searching the Internet for news of the excitement. Pix (Channel 11) was first to post a story, then NY1, and, eventually, the Times. Not only had no one been injured (except for a few firefighters suffering minor injuries), but in view of its renovation the building had been stripped of all sacred objects, such as the Torah scroll. So, as Rabbi Hankel Lookstein said, it was only the building. This news made the excitement of passing a violent scene a lot less depressing and shameful than it might have been. And that’s when I spotted the picture of Her Majesty, for the first time in my experience not swathed from head to ankle in one color. How would I ever get to sleep?

Then, this morning, the sofa in the blue room came back from the upholsterer.  The sofa was built for my mother-in-law fifty-odd years ago, and we had it reupholstered when we came into possession in the mid-Eighties. If it hadn’t had a sentimental appeal for Kathleen, we might have deaccessioned it some time ago, because it is very wide for a sofa that seats only two people comfortably. (Three with drinks, if you know what I mean.) That’s not to say that I don’t like it; I do, very much. It’s a convincing replica of a Louis XVI piece, with beautifully distressed woodwork washed in pale blue. The upholstery from the Eighties had gotten very tired looking, but we had no plans to do anything about it until Will leaned over, shortly after he began to take steps, and took a bite out of the padding at the armrest. He couldn’t have done any damage if the fabric hadn’t been quite worn out, so Kathleen set to finding some new material. That was the cheap part; the fabric cost about 1/20th of the repholstery labor. But what beautiful work Jeff Alexander does!

Ray Soleil helped me carry the sofa upstairs, and later, after lunch, we drank a pot of tea while discussing the Greek debt problem and Ray’s conviction that the French really want to reinstate the monarchy. I can think of one Frenchman who doesn’t! I wrote to him just a little while ago, to tell him most of what I’ve just told to you, explaining that I therefore had nothing worth writing about here.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011 at 5:51 pm.