Pre-Thanksgiving (Post)

Garry Winogrand: San Marcos, Texas, 1964

Is there, really, anything sadder to ponder than Thanksgiving dinner alone?  Alone, at a restaurant, therefore alone among others?  Alone, at a restaurant like Odessa on Avenue A?

It's one week till Thanksgiving, the one holiday that so far has escaped total cooptation by pop-up stores and cynical commercial grabs; I'm not even sure they make Thanksgiving-themed Peeps, but I'm sure to be proved wrong about that.  Still, it retains a certain old-time purity, although I make it a point during the usual public grace lauding friendships and blood ties to say a silent thanks to the Indians for letting us kill them and steal their land.

I wait for my salmon burger in this place that has long meant home to me (although, truth be told, I was more of a Veselka girl myself, venturing to the Second Avenue Ukrainian coffee shop for three-dollar pierogies and potato pancakes once or twice a week).  Who can't love New York City: at the table next to me, a Jew and an Irishman talk, in a Ukrainian restaurant; then in walk four fellows who look nothing if not Mongolian.

Courtesy of the window onto the street in front of me, I practice my backward reading.  We really don't do enough of that, you know, after age ten.

A poster taped there, advertising its come-on to passersby on the sidewalk, can be read from the back:

Thanksgiving

SPECIAL

Complete Dinner

$12.95

glass of wine*

cup of cream of turkey soup

Turkey with stuffing

sweet potatoes

cranberry sauce

& fresh mix vegetables

Pumpkin pie

tea or coffee

*as I can attest, this is more likely to be a "thimbleful" of "wine"

It takes a lot to be alone for Thanksgiving, the quintessential family meal (which I haven't shared with my actual family for decades; until recently I celebrated it with my misfit friends, which meant we were more firmly cemented than by genetics, being the chosen rather than the pressed upon).  One year, and one year only, I made the bright and bad suggestion to go traveling for Thanksgiving, and we spent the meal, two of us, in an otherwise empty hotel dining room.  I've never felt quite so suicidal while still wearing a brave and utterly false smile for two hours.

My heart breaks for the people who will come, alone, to buy the Odessa special.  I wish I could invite them all to my home.  I won't serve cream of turkey soup, though.

Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.  "Familiar with misfortune, I learned to assist the unfortunate": Virgil's Aeneid.  That sounds bigger than I mean it to.  But it is a small reminder to myself, a future job.  And a wish that around every table in the Odessa there is more than one chair.    

 

Lofty

A thoroughgoing rube from the sticks now, I had almost forgotten how a city dweller is a flea in the flea circus: most of the time low, invisible, touching the ground.  Then, suddenly, vaulting high.  You can always count on unannounced possibilities for temporary transformation, the chance to spend a night passing as someone you were never born to be.  You don't know exactly where you're going, but you go; and sometimes afterward you still don't know exactly where you've been, except that the air was thin up there.

What's going on this weekend? Maybe the question wasn't even asked, it was thought, and only electrical impulses passed among friends.  Party on Lispenard Street would come to you Friday afternoon, and past darkfall you were walking alone down an empty street, watching for a single row of lights on a fourth floor somewhere along the block.  Whose place? Who knew?  Party the only information  necessary.

At one--all I remember was huge, dim, crowded--I stood in line for a drink.  The girl behind me struck up a conversation as we waited.  It was a long queue.  It was good, therefore, that I felt I could listen to her British accent, creamy rich, forever.  She wore a silk cocktail dress from the fifties; she worked in a thrift store in the Village.  Whatever it was we talked about, it was lively, full of bubbles, and once I had my chardonnay in hand I turned.  "You aren't going to be one of those people who take someone's number and promise to call but never do?" Her swift arrow flew straight.  It was one of the most galvanizing, and brave, questions I had ever heard.  The friendship it caused has spanned thirty years, three continents, and two marriages.   All from a chance meeting in a chance place.  That is why you wanted to live in the city in the first place, and forever.

Twenty years later I asked her if she knew whose place that was.  She named a famous (and famously bitchy) British expatriate fashion editor.  Who knew?  See.

To prove you can go home again, only you may not quite recognize the place anymore, this week I again received an invitation: friend of a friend, downtown, like before.  Only now there's a specific address, and there's Google.  With its real estate tabulations that tell you exactly what the penthouse loft went for last year.

Oh my goodness.

I went to survey my closet, only to find it full of the same things that were there ten years ago, and ten years before that. A shopping expedition was in order, but now there were no sales racks at Saks and Bendel's to haunt every lunch hour until something eventually showed up, in my size and in my hands: what a steal.  Feel that tissue silk?  An editorial assistant had no business owning something so fine, except she did, by effort and a little magic.

Now and here, though, the only option was J. C. Penney at the rural mall.  How is that thirty-dollar frock going to go down in the loft of today, no longer dimly lit raw space with blowers hanging from the ceiling, but the Sub-Zeroed, Wolf-ranged domicile of the one percent?

We'll see.  I'm going.

Just Grand

To get to 1928 from my house, I discover, all I have to do is drive two and a half hours west-southwest. After turning in at the driveway of the Skytop Lodge, from a deeply shaded road through the lonely forests of Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, nearly a century drops away while attaining the final hundred feet of altitude on the climb to the mountaintop hotel.  And there you are, in the heady days of the Jazz Age, when vast hotels were rising all over America as precipitously as stocks.

This one was conceived in 1925 by men of foresight, though it did not extend as far as late October of 1929.  The building is especially momentous, of stone in the Dutch Colonial style, with massive wings reaching out to either side of the entrance like welcoming arms—not a raucous welcome, to be sure, befitting a certain age-appropriate reserve, but welcoming nonetheless.  Well, so long as you are of the class that will not blanch at the tariff: $499 a night, double occupancy.  Not as much as the modern-day luxury spa, of course.  But then most spas don’t offer a Saturday-night Elimination Dance and Grand March.  (“Everyone is holding hands in a long line . . . then we weave in and out of rooms through a secret passage, outdoors, then back in the Pine Room.  The festivities conclude with punch, cookies, and dancing.”  So much more Nancy Drew than a sea-salt bodywrap, yes?)

That spa—though even Skytop has stuck a toe in twenty-first-century waters by retrofitting spa-treatment rooms into the top floor of the hotel, taking space from the diminished members-only club that was once an integral part of staying here—also probably won’t ask guests to dress for dinner, or to refrain from wearing anything too modernly disturbing; only “modest” and “generally conservative” (one in fact assumes that most of the visitors are registered Republicans) will do around these 5,500-acre grounds.

In keeping with a general theme of traditionalism, the activities speak in cultivated tones of yesteryear’s pastimes: lawn bowling, archery, skeet shooting, boating, skiing, tobogganing, and hiking.  (No way to escape golf, no matter what year it is.)

The basement game room has acceded to recent—albeit not too recent—taste with a small arcade that includes Galaga, which after all is ancient history to anyone now under the age of forty, though it happens to be my ancient history.  There remain the tables for billiards and ping-pong, and a cunning miniature golf course for the wee ones.  Upstairs are the de rigueur card rooms off the grandly scaled main room, as well as a beautiful lending library whose titles, Dewey classified, reside timelessly in glass vitrines.  The books remain also timelessly undisturbed, for no one who arrives from this century seems to know their purpose.

At dinner in the main dining room, I explained to my twelve-year-old tablemate how all these knives and forks were to be deployed, elaborating further on quaint dining customs of yore: “In real olden days, one would be given a fingerbowl.  But don’t do what a friend once did when presented with one—he drank it.”  A few minutes later, fingerbowls arrived.  “For your fingers,” the waitress offered helpfully.

My son (the aforementioned twelve-year-old) brought to my attention the detail that marked this as a veritable old hotel: actual room keys, dangling from those plastic rhombuses so redolent of vacations past.  No key cards for the Skytop.  I hadn’t even noticed, which shows how old I am.

At night we mounted four flights of stairs to the top floor pressed under the eaves, heading for the old observation tower.  At the foot of its narrow staircase, before ascending a dark tunnel-like space that opened onto a slightly less dark but immeasurably expansive space—the curvature of the earth was visible on a horizon tinged light rose under the gigantic bowl of planet-studded sky—a plaque commemorated spotters who during World War II manned the post around the clock watching for enemy planes.

What stay in a long-lost era would be complete without discharging a firearm? This is where the wheat gets separated from the social chaff—or perhaps where redneck and elite join in agreement on one thing (besides low tax rates for the wealthy): guns are fun to shoot.

Meeting at the obligatory Orvis shop down by the obligatory lake, excursions to the mountaintop skeet-shooting center are conducted by van; it takes you to 2,200 feet and a supreme view of this heavenly half-acre.  There, in the far distance, is the Delaware Water Gap, and for the first time you see exactly what it is: a symmetrical deep notch carved by a giant precision instrument.  After the Civil War, this region was second only to Saratoga as the country’s most popular inland resort.  Now, in the near distance, orange compact sporting clays are mechanically flung into space, and bang! They magically explode into shards.  Suddenly, you can’t wait for the next one to do the same.  Then the next, and the next.  It’s addictive, this focused destruction.

And, you realize, necessary: in fact, when mealtime arrives with its caloric load you see you needed to engage in every sport on offer; there are three of these abundant occasions per day (on the American plan, correctly named) plus tea and cookies in the Pine Room at four.  Though sometimes it is advisable to join the two, intake and expenditure: that is when you order a box lunch (I just love saying that: box lunch box lunch box lunch).  It will accompany you on any one of multitudinous trails, amounting to more than thirty miles, meant to guide guests to “places of quiet beauty and restful charm”; when you reach the end in addition to peanut butter there may well be Indian Ladder Falls.

At dinner you are attended with the miracle of two types of service at once: nearly invisible, and ever-present.  The menu offers delectable-sounding opportunities in the appetizer, soup or salad, and entrée categories; and if what is delivered with care to your place is just a sliver under delectable—falling rather into tasty ’n’ ample, a variety of Institutional Haute—what cynic could truly complain?  You’ll revisit your hopes at the breakfast buffet, complemented with table service of eggs aplenty as well as Belgian waffles.

The visit to another age, a black-and-white one where cherry-lipped, wool-clad, bobbed-hair women lean ever smiling against their ski poles and sleighfulls of laughing young people are pulled by strong horses through the cold air, is a reminder of what we used to be.  And trusted we would eternally remain.  Healthy, joyful, always festive.  Always beautiful.  Always well-heeled.   There was no end to the bigness: America ascendant.  The grand hotel provided the frame for the picture we wished to make of ourselves.  It was carefully posed; it seemed possible, within its bounds, that life itself could be an endless holiday with impeccable service.  This was the period Booth Tarkington compassed in The Magnificent Ambersons: “’There seem to be so many ways of making money nowadays,’ Fanny said thoughtfully. ‘Every day I hear of a new fortune some person has got hold of, one way or another—nearly always it’s somebody you never heard of.’”

In some places today you can catch the scent of the belief that the future holds the promise of permanently expanding luxury, no longer thrillingly sharp, but soft and vague, the perfume that rises from a vintage fur.  At these historic hotels that preserve the happy traditions of privilege, the past comes back as a memory you are not certain you ever had.  It is just possible you read about it in a book, or saw it from afar, in a dream from which you wished to never wake.   The times will never roar like that again.

Ancient & Underground

In 1825, the great Delaware & Hudson Canal was being built between two important rivers and passing by a small village called Rosendale.  (The canal remained in use for less than seventy-five years although it represented an engineering marvel of the most excitingly advanced sort. It should thus--but probably won't--give us pause when we become breathless about our own revolutionary devices; they too will be superseded and left to be found, containing only a trickle of water and grown over with vines, by unknowing passersby.)  There, in the rocks alongside the Rondout Creek, was discovered the presence of an especially pure natural cement (dolostone) that soon caused a boom in mining.  Rosendale cement was taken south to the big city and poured into the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge and the pediment of the Statue of Liberty.

One of these mines, known as the Widow Jane, is both forgotten and found.  Its new use is to transport those who enter: they stand dumbstruck by its enormous mystery.

In the cavern lighted by luminaria whose reflections danced yellowly on the water that stretched back into the darkness three-quarters of a mile, a stage was set.  The place for an ancient rite of some sort--a marriage, a meeting, a prayer. 

It is reputed to be acoustically perfect; it certainly seemed so to me, today, when I went for a performance of ensemble taiko drumming.  Appropriately, this is a mix of old and new, rivulets of different traditions joining together in one grand rushing river of sound and sight.  There was dance, masks, flute shivering behind the stirring percussive rhythms banged out on stupendous Japanese (via Chinese lineage) drums, gongs, bells.  The precise ballet of the performers striking the various sized drums with their bachi was an amazement of power that transcended, somehow, the human state.  It became as timeless and deep as the place we were seated, occasionally wet by drops of water falling impassively from the stone ceiling into our laps, into our hair.

The sound entered our bones.  It changed us mineralogically.  Place and history meet at one strange moment, an intersection that is counted in an infinity of seconds ticking rhythmically, and we realize we are moving down the waterway from here to there.  Ephemera laid down in stone.

Busted

So here's some of what I've been doing in the past couple of months, apart from my usual occupations of fretting, riding too little, and walking the wee beastie in the woods, where we encounter all sorts of magic, every time.


The publication of this piece, ostensibly a book review but also an essay (I did not write the incendiary head, by the way, because it does not reflect my beliefs, which are, basically, do get married, but don't get divorced) taught me a lot of things. One is something I knew before: people are impatient with others' sadness. They do not like to hear about it, they want it over and done with in five minutes, and they call you nasty names if you do not comply. Of course, one suspects that most of the commenters--of which I read the postings of about five, before deciding my skin was way too thin to withstand their rocks--are guys in their twenties who have never been married, and so have yet to experience the dissolution of the namelessly large and overdetermined experience that is marriage. I'm mean. My wish for them is to be left suddenly by their wives after, oh, some 28 years. But only after they have become fat and bald. Then we'll see what they have to say about not whining and just getting right back up on their feet.

Or maybe they will indeed do it. Maybe it's just an anomaly of me and almost everyone I know who's ever been divorced to experience it as a process, like grief (wait, not like grief; it is grief), that can't be hurried. One that does not represent a moral failing to live through in its fullness. Before getting back up on your feet. For sure.

See You in the Movies

It is a well-known fact that nearly everyone is planning on writing a movie, and the few who aren’t are wishing they would get off their cans to try. The difference between my statistically unrealizable movie and your statistically unrealizable movie is that mine actually has a built-in, sure-fire audience: starving motorcyclists. They can only watch World’s Fastest Indian so many times.

This won’t be my first attempt at the practically impossible, oh, no; I’m a slow learner. I was cutting up reels of super 8 at my kitchen table in Hoboken long, long ago. Then I took an NYU screenwriting class—of course! me and nine-tenths of New York City!—and met others with the home-splicing habit (some of whom were even on the brink of graduating to 16 mm). It may have been that era’s great democratic medium, but without YouTube it was like playing air guitar: nothing issued from the effort. The need for a venue birthed the collective called Film Crash, which favored the back rooms of bars and clubs. If you were young and had either seen a poster or attended that screenwriting class too, all of nature could not stop you from wanting to make movies then. I immediately enlisted a founding member to collaborate on a screenplay. Not my first, and not my last, to find permanent residence in a filing cabinet. The paper on which it is written is as yellowed as the idea.

Although these early efforts failed—failed in some intrinsic, fading-ember kind of way, the way most assays into making art fail, miserably—one idea I had as soon as I started riding should have succeeded. Perhaps because I conceived it as made by someone else. This unknown should have made a documentary on privateer racing, focusing on one particularly driven weekend warrior, the type who worked forty hours solely for the purpose of blowing the proceeds on fuel, tires, and inevitable emergency room visits. That level of incredible and largely inexplicable passion would have made as absorbing a film as ever took on a type of human madness, and packed an art house to unreel it.

When, more recently, I embarked on writing about long-distance riding and some of its more outrageous practitioners, I secretly figured I had found another such subject for the perceptions that only the big screen is capable of delivering. The friends with whom I discussed my book’s ongoing research would invariably envision it not written, but exposed: “I can see it now!” They would then go on, avidly, to cast it too. It was a movie forced uncomfortably between hard covers, I began to feel.

But if no one with the means to realize it in that form has yet seen the cinematic potential in a tale of weirdo cranks who sacrifice so much to gain an equal amount of ineffably personal happiness, I do. And so it is that I am once again joining the ranks of dreamers, waitresses, and the ghost of myself long ago. I am writing a movie.

In it, I want there to be plenty of pure sensation, conveyed visually and aurally: the sound of an engine in the dark, steady and unremitting; the cone of light always ahead describing the small space into which the bike forever moves; and then . . . the hours. The time that both collapses and expands at once, extending in opposing temporal directions. The long ride’s road lies on the map not from west to east but from past to future. On a bike, the present vanishes both ways.

One day it came to me (and probably should have occurred much earlier than “one day”) what the movie will really be about, beyond a slightly warped love story, or a single mother, or the bike that can always be improved, or a scenario with some valuable outsider cachet, being the heretofore unexplored minority world of long-distance record chasing. It will concern a strange familiar: the kind of person who does something that partakes of death in order to fully live.

We all know this is what we are doing, even though we also enlist denial every time we head out to ride, or else we wouldn’t. (Denial is a healthy, and necessary, part of life, until it isn’t.) It’s the other guy who is courting danger, we think. The unprepared, the unschooled. The unlucky.

When it is someone who is not like us because he is better than us—someone we aspire to be, and therefore have spent time imagining being—who is the one who gets taken, it cracks the thin glass of our denial. The possibility suddenly feels real. Very, terribly, real.

There is a motorcycle movie I hadn’t yet seen, and it came to me courtesy of my harmless dollar-store addiction. (See? Denial in action.) I have to say, the dollar store is a more or less appropriate place for this one, notwithstanding its laudable earnestness as well as its setting in the world of road-racing, which is ridiculously vastly more interesting than car racing and puzzlingly remains one of the best-kept secrets from the public at large. Idiots.

The movie is Flat Out, the 1999 story of racer Stewart Goddard, paralyzed from the waist down in an accident but determined to ride again. (Interestingly, although Goddard plays himself, co-wrote the script, and otherwise situates the film solidly in fact, the turning-point accident is onscreen transposed from racetrack to pickup truck, presumably to deflect the notion that racing is perilous. But if not, where is its meaning? And meaning it has, make no mistake.) As he says a few too many times—Note to self: don’t repeat dialogue—“I’m just trying to get back a part of me that was taken away!” But one line will truly resonate with us all. “You wanna take up something safe? Try bowling.”

That’s what the ideal motorcycle movie gets at. The fundamental fact that the thing we do in order to feel most alive could not perform its function without also showing us the view from eternity’s edge. We all go to the grocery store fully expecting to come home with the bags; too, we go on every ride as if at day’s end we’ll draw down the door to the garage once more. Just like always. Yet one day, whether on meaningless errand or mowing the lawn or Sunday ride, “always” becomes different.

The truth that we do die, inevitably and every one, is lodged somewhere in the very center of the experience. The knowledge is like salt. Brutal, bitter, desired. It makes it taste like something.

[I now write the occasional column for the estimable CityBike magazine, which is available only by subscription and to the lucky ones who happen to live in San Francisco and its environs; if you are not so blessed, I'll post my contributions here. Until you move there.]

Down the Line

Sometimes whole chunks of life go missing, only to be retrieved in an unlikely spot (always, come to think of it, an unlikely spot; the likely yields little).  In this case, the locker room of the gym last night.


There, a little latch heretofore hidden was accidentally knocked free.  Then from behind the open lid spilled sheaves of memories, some stuck together from the heat and long storage.  This little latch was in the form of the socks I pulled on before heading to the treadmill, little white socks with pompoms on the back, not decoration (though certainly cute) but functional: nothing worse than having your socks creep down underneath your heels.  Later I would find myself thinking, On my deathbed, will I remember to thank tennis?  

Tennis, for the huge chunk of my young life it made thrillingly happy.

Sweat trickled relentlessly down skin, on face, arms, thighs.  The toweled elastics around the wrist were wiped across the brow; a few drops from the wet bangs fell into the eyes.  Granules from the Har-tru made their way into shoes.  And it was all good.  It was all sense, and sensuality.  The thwack of balls hitting the sweet spot, hard, echoed from courts all down the line.  We were inside the fence, and inside the experience.

All day long in the summers we took to the courts and played for hours at a stretch.  It was like a need, to hit hard and to hit true.  The reward center in the brain lit up like a pinball game when the shot was perfect, and you wanted it, required it, again and again, more and more.  The driving shot that skimmed the top of the net--glanced the wire--was the fix.

When the Virginia Slims women's tour came to town (imagine that! the quaintness of a sporting event organized to promote a tobacco product aimed at women--the logo was a willowy Jazz Age flapper with a chiffon scarf around her neck and a tennis racket resting insouciantly over a shoulder).  This was the age of the wooden racket, and the age of Billie Jean King, Chrissie Evert, and Martina Navratilova.  Oh, how great they were!  Finesse, guts, and power.  And we were watching so close (women's sports tours were a bust, the indoor stadiums largely empty throughout the days of practice and secondary matches) that we could feel the breeze from the swung racket against our cheeks.

The players were our idols, but they were humble.  They stopped to talk with us, and they signed anything we held out to them, in no hurry and on no thrones.

I saved my babysitting money and bought a Chris Evert Wilson.  It was forty dollars.  I can't remember how much I paid for this house three years ago (honest), but I will never forget how much that racket cost.  I developed a two-handed backhand.  The racket had a longer grip to accommodate two hands.  I also loved resetting my right hand--the web between thumb and forefinger positioned precisely over the second-widest flat--for the serve, even though my serve was never up to the rest of my game.  My overheads either.  Well, let's just say that half my game was okay, half not.  I just wanted to rally.  I didn't even really like playing games, and I frequently choked in competition.

I kept the racket in its press.  Probably it should be restrung.  Twenty-five years after I bought it, it didn't seem to work as well, and the metal racket (or whatever they're made of now) never worked for me, either.  But one never can blame the equipment.  Maybe I could get it back with practice, the sensation of the ball meeting the center of the strings, pausing infinitesimally in the pressure of their meeting, then flying.  Out, arced, and over.  The endless rhythm of the game, back and forth, the suspension of time in the heat-generating friction of the good swing, the ball sent to backcourt every time.