On Sunday, I awoke as my old self, or, rather, my younger self: for the first time in ages, I felt — I didn’t feel anything. I just got up and looked around and saw what there was to do, and I did it. No fuss, no fatigue. By bedtime, the apartment was completely tidy — even the balcony was swept — and the pantry shelves were in order. Yesterday, I made a ragù and reorganized the refrigerator. I last cleaned out the fridge so recently that there was very little to pitch out. The ragù filled the apartment with a fragrance that I can only call divine — sage, rosemary, porcini, garlic and wine floating above fennel sausage and chopped tomatoes. The recipe came from Franny’s, the haut Slope restaurant on Flatbush Avenue near Grand Army Plaza, where the Ms NOLA’s mother-in-law-to-be hosted the rehearsal dinner last Friday. The food was very, very yummy. One of the courses was a polenta with ragù that did nothing less than change my mind about polenta. Ray Soleil, also in attendance, cajoled the server for a recipe, which I printed as soon as he sent it to me. I did not try to make the polenta itself; that, I knew, would require the extra-fine polenta meal from Anson Mills that Franny’s uses, and that melts down to a completely sub-granular creaminess. (I hate grits.) I did place an order online, and I look forward to following the recipe, which calls for microplaning cloves of garlic. The ragù from Franny’s was very like one that I’ve been making with fennel sausage for years and years, only much better, owing to the fresh herbs. I had always thought, wrongly, so wrongly, that the sausage provided enough seasoning by itself.

Kathleen and I were going to go out for dinner this evening, to an Italian restaurant that we’re fond of, Luna Rossa, only not in the hot months. It’s a nice place to meet Kathleen after her periodic board meetings at a proximate academy. I strolled over this afternoon to make a reservation. But some workmen were laying the foundations for a new sidewalk, and the restaurant was closed. I decided to make a chicken salad instead, and I’m on my way to do that.

Today, Ray and I went to the Container Store, and you know perfectly well that nothing of general interest ensued. Suffice it to say that the precious Christmas ornaments (untouched by me) are in a much safer place, the silver tea service is once again accessible, and DVD storage is no longer a headache. Also — and this did not involve products from the Container Store — the operas that are packaged in boxes (as distinct from the ones stuffed into jewel boxes) have been arranged, by composer and by order of composition (roughly) behind the books in a certain low bookshelf. Amazingly, they all just fit. Mozart on top, Strauss and Puccini on the bottom, Wagner and Verdi stacked in the middle, and everybody else strewn about the remaining crannies. It was a very satisfactory afternoon of work: everything that we dealt with was improved. And a bit of clutter in the hallway was permanently eliminated.

Fun while it lasted! Now I’m back to worrying about Washington.

***

Is is 1860 again, or 1789? It’s the spirit of 1860, certainly. The country has devolved into contested territory, and each party has completely lost interest in what the other has to say. Both parties see themselves as crowned in virtue. That’s where 1789 comes in: I don’t think that anybody can gauge the possibilities for unintended disorder when the business of the government is interrupted. Determination has become generally reckless.

If I were younger, it might be exciting, but something tells me that if I were younger — a young person today, that is — I wouldn’t be paying attention. Sometimes I draw great hope from the way in which people under forty seem to see beyond the sclerosis that impedes almost all public affairs in our time. They must be seeing something, I imagine. But I’m not sure that I want to live through the ordeal of getting from here to there, whatever is that young people see. It often seems to involve little more than the death of my cohort, not the happiest of thoughts, even if I do rather agree and have felt as much since my cohort was in its teens. Boomers have no idea how thick they are, how solipsistic and incurious! But they’ve always been that, because they grew up at the center of attention. Boomers are like Long Island, the terminal moraine of generations so obsessed by the dread of decay and decrepitude that wisdom and maturity became simply unfashionable. Just as the willingness to compromise has become unfashionable in Washington.

Now, it’s true that most of the renegade Republicans are younger men; surely most of them aren’t yet fifty. But you can see that they’ve learned nothing from the past, because Boomers, the nearest witnesses, have had nothing to tell them. Nobody had anything to tell Boomers, either. I can remember that pretty clearly. Instead of being presented with living models of adult behavior, we were parked in front of the television, and most of us grew up thinking that we were too smart to fall for the pitch of advertizing — exactly what the folks on the other side of screen wanted us to think.

Do you remember the climax of that movie about Patsy Cline? They’re flying along when the clouds break and suddenly there is this cliff dead ahead. The End. Right now reminds me of that.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 8th, 2013 at 7:05 pm.