Closing and Losing

Last Friday, on Halloween, we had the closing for the apartment, and New York, that old slut, put on a costume. The apartment gleamed as we walked out the door, with our superintendent Iggy telling us not to be a stranger. The weather was warm and gentle. On the subway, an Hispanic man gave me his seat. When we got out, a Halal food truck vendor smiled at me. During the closing all the lawyers were kind and funny. The new buyer hugged us. Behind this gentle disguise, Manhattan leered, but all I felt was loss.

I had also lost my political womb. In New York, as a thumb-sucking Democrat, all my party needs were taken care of. I closed myself in during the Reagan years, emerged to adore Clinton (who wouldn't have slept with him?), retreated again during the Bush years, and became ecstatic over Obama. But basically, I did nothing active to promote our issues. My friends and I nodded to each other in smug agreement; no discussion needed.

Up here, it is very different. They need me. When I moved to New York 50 years ago, I left 8 very old Democrats in my hometown. And, except for the city of Hudson, the numbers here haven't changed that much. Republicanism is so pervasive that I believe it has now evolved as a genetic mutation north of Westchester, entrenched and reproducible at birth.

So, over the past few months I have forced myself to knock on about 200 Democratic doors and to call hundreds of them in order to generate enthusiasm for three local candidates: Sean Eldridge for Congress; Didi Barrett for Assembly; and my personal favorite Brian Howard for State Senate. Didi was an incumbent and a solid upstater. She's tough and very local and so managed to keep her seat. Brian, a former teacher, principal, and superintendent, would have been terrific for our state, but he was inexperienced and his campaign was drowned out by Congressional urgencies, and he lost. So did Sean.

Midway through the campaign, Sean had a debate with Chris Gibson, his ultimately very victorious opponent, that I watched online. Sean appeared calm, although he betrayed some nerves by continually knocking back water from an endless supply of plastic bottles, setting each one carefully in front of him and then dipping it down somewhere by his feet after he emptied it. His answers were careful, measured, and by the Democratic Book. 

Then, in the middle of the debate, the mediator asked the candidates to rate Obama's job score on a scale of 1 to 10. Gibson, surprisingly, gave the President a six -- generous for his side of the fence. And then Sean spoke: "Well, I guess I'd go lower, 4 or 5." At that moment, I knew we were truly dead. Over the course of the next few days, a number of the Democrats in town, particularly from our most solid base -- those in the African American community -- told us they felt betrayed by Sean's low score. So did I. So did a lot of the other workers. Although we trudged on, we did it with somewhat less enthusiasm.

There are four types of Democrats in the region that form our base: old, brown, eccentric/artistic, and weekenders. That's about it. In town, the local Bangladeshi population was 100% behind us, and so were most of the African Americans, the local artists, writers, and all the men who wear boas and spikey shoes to the supermarket. On my own road, three out of the six Democratic homes, including ours, were owned by weekenders.

As for the aged voters, the responses from many of those whom I called, especially from Olga, 84 years old, suggested to me that a part of this voting population might be straying from the flock. Olga has supported the party all her adult life, but she "wasn't sure she was going to vote Democrat this year " because Fox News seemed to give "a pretty poor picture of Obama and I thought they were pretty balanced. And I voted for him twice." I learned that her beloved husband had recently died, that she had fallen in the bathroom and lay there next to the cat litter box all night long, and it was her belief that shooting every person who tried to cross the border was a simple solution to all our problems. Her best friend, also in her eighties and a Democrat, watched the same balanced news and had also turned on the President. I told Olga she should stop watching Fox News and didn't offer her a ride to the polls. Because we called everyone at least twice, I got Olga again on election night. This time I learned she was having a terrible time with her dentures and couldn't find a dentist who could relieve the pain they were causing. I asked around the headquarters' room for referrals and someone suggested "Nothing but the Tooth", a local practice, but she had used them already and they were unable to help. I commiserated about her teeth but didn't ask if her opinions had changed nor offered a ride to the polls.

During this final desperate weekend, I served haphazardly as the canvassing captain, and was in and out of the local headquarters from 8 AM to 6 PM for the first three days and 8 AM till 11 PM on Election Day. We were only calling our fans, the loyal Dems, but it was still tough. We had hit them so often, and they were getting pounded, as I was, by so many other political calls and emails, that, in the end, I could sense from their growls and desperate responses that they were becoming resentful and even bitter. And I couldn't blame them.

After the election, I kept hearing political experts claiming that one of the reasons we lost was because Obama hadn't communicated his own positive record strongly enough. But why should he? He has to run the country. Communication is what the party strategists are for, the hacks who sent out the 60 daily hysterical, whining, panicking, desperate daily emails, the shrill death throes of the election. I would think that, given their powerful verbal swords, these articulate and professional Democratic marketers could have swash-buckled both supporters and opponents effectively with Obama's important successes and political feats, with his attempts to reduce disparities between rich and poor. But they didn't and neither did many of their candidates, who simply mouthed in ads and in person the same mechanical liberal catch phrases over and over until everyone became tone deaf.

The idea of backing away from Obama was an insane strategy unless the Democrats were hoping to get Olga and her friend to the polls. But for the rest of us, who are in there for the long haul, we really like our President; we think he's done an amazing job in the face of racist, vicious, and stupid opposition. Even if we couldn't win, the best the Dems could have done this season was to embrace Obama, his record, and his efforts to reduce the wealth gaps, and then go with God. Losing would at least have been honorable.

Don't get me wrong. I like Sean a lot. He is earnest, honest, has good ideas and intentions, and his wealth allows him to be independent. However, he didn't stray far from the party pack (I longed for him to produce a spontaneous sentence). Some people complained to me that when he visited local stores and restaurants, he was too distant and he didn't buy anything. Sean also has the disadvantage here of being gay and, worse, perceived as a weekender. He owns a house upstate but, like me, he is still a cidiot, a Manhattan expat. Finally, and fatally, Sean was pitched against a large, genial military veteran, a family man, and an incumbent who personally knows half of the people in the district. In spite of Gibson's generally nasty voting record, he crossed party lines a couple of times so he could claim being a moderate. Therefore, at the end, he took all of the Republican and yanked in some Democratic votes and won.

I would like to see Eldridge run again, but by that time he needs to be rooted, friendly, and entrenched in the lives of his neighbors. And his young smart campaign workers must not be fighting the last war. The intense grassroots grunt work with its multiple hits on well-researched targeted voters that worked so brilliantly for Obama didn't this time. Our targets considered the knowledge we had of their ages, addresses, phone numbers, and voting history invasive. In addition, with the introduction of multiple emails on top of ads, phone calls, and door knocking, the noise became deafening. Certainly during the next race, Sean needs to sit down at Tansy's and have a bowl of her wonderful home made vegetable soup, even if he's already eaten Earth Food's fabulously rich Veggie Supreme for breakfast. And he also needs to find Olga a good dentist. So if Sean wins then, like the fabulous Sally Fields did at the Oscars, he will be able to yell, "You like me. You really, really like me."

A Tale of Two Restaurants

Daniel, the owner chef of DABA, a high-end restaurant in Hudson, is rushing through the aisles of a Los Angeles supermarket, peeling off boxes and produce, for his third round in the horrifying chef challenge show, Guy Fieri's Grocery Games.  His opponent is another chef, an attractive young woman who lives in California.  Daniel has made it to the third and final elimination round; the current barrier is to choose only one item from each aisle.  Daniel is making a parfait and the young woman some kind of fabulous chocolate thing.  The prize is $20,000, which the winner of this round still has to earn through a final humiliating run around the supermarket. I'm a Food Network junkie (just binged on six "Beat Bobby Flay" episodes), but I've managed to avoid Grossery Games. We are watching it now just to see Daniel. 

DABA is our favorite restaurant in Hudson, our weekly hangout, and one more reason why leaving New York has been relatively pain free.   Daniel, a bear of a young man, with a smile that manages to be both cherubic and sly, is a serious chef and great host.  Often out front, he not only makes the round of his regular customers but during busy times also serves and tends bar.  Stumbling into DABA last winter off of the bulky snowdrifts buttressing the streets and out of the miserable temperatures was like coming into a welcoming alter-home.

DABA has all the attributes that Michael and I have sought out when I have wanted to escape my own kitchen both in New York and here in Hudson:

• A bar substantial enough to be populated by Chaucerian regulars and staff who provide good stories and useful local gossip. 
• Beautifully cooked meals, with a menu that ranges from high-end items when we are flush to a low-priced selection of bar-type food when we feel broke.  
• A quiet subtle atmosphere with warm lighting and no blast of music or monster TV muscling the bar space. 
• And an owner who occasionally hangs out with the customers.

The only other time we've had comparable hang-out experiences was in the nineties at Cal's, a bar-restaurant on 21^st between 5^th and 6^th.  I still miss it.  The owner, Kahlil (Cal) Ayoubi, was the grandson of a Syrian President, whose family was exiled first to Beirut and then to Paris.  Cal took his part of the family money and moved to New York, where he first owned a restaurant in Soho and then in our neighborhood. It was a large space, with a very long dark shiny bar, subdued warm lighting, and candle-lit tables spaced reasonably apart throughout the room.  We were regulars there for about eight years and many of the customers and staff we met remain our friends today.  Like DABA, Cal's also had the price-range spread, with both good high-end food and an award-winning hamburger.

Cal was often out front, holding a glass of clear something, sitting at the bar and describing his alcohol-induced impotence and the degree to which his cirrhotic liver was killing him.  (He provided his doctor with free meals.)  He flirted hopelessly with pretty women and defended his staff over his customers, occasionally permanently ejecting those who were particularly rude to one of his waitresses or bartenders. Given all this, Cal still retained a profoundly heroic, non-American cynicism that could have rebuilt Casablanca's Rick's Place.  And at the deep end of his despair was a dark belief in his failure as an artist.  I loved Cal's work, which might be described as cheerful German expressionism (is that possible?).  His paintings enlivened the walls of the restaurant and to this day I regret not buying one of a small white cottage dancing in space among cheerful child-colored apple trees. (My desire for that painting appears now to be prescient, as we begin planning our house, which will also be dancing in space in the hollow of our apple orchard ghost.)  

Unfortunately, Andreas, Cal's young talented chef, who roller skated to work and dazzled young women, quit after a few years and moved to Long Island. Cal didn't replace him with anyone equally skilled but relied instead on the kitchen staff who had learned the menu.  Their food was ok but not fabulous enough to get the two stars Cal had earned earlier. And finally, as with everything in our neighborhood, the skyrocketing rents knocked him out of 21^st Street.  Cal opened a small restaurant on the upper east side, but it lacked the bar and our neighbors.  We went there a couple of times but it was too far away and we need a Cheers.

DABA is Cal's spiritual heir, and the food is better.  When DABA first opened, the menu heavily reflected Daniel's Scandinavian background.  My first meal there included elk and a three-herring appetizer that transformed my whole view of oily fish.  Eventually, the elk went away, but the Swedish meatballs are still available, dense and flavorful, balanced on a swipe of pureed potatoes and set off by a slash of bright lingonberry and a dish of thinly sliced cucumber pickles.  The filet and scallops are meltingly cooked, with the latter accompanied by curried spring rolls that would make a great dish by itself.  On some nights if you're very, very lucky and you get there early, you might get the special fish tacos.  

Suddenly the bell goes off.  Daniel and his opponent are grasping and hugging various food objects as they rush to their cooking stations.  The female chef is in despair: she forgot to pick up chocolate, the key ingredient in her dessert.  As with all these chef competition shows, each contestant has a background story intended to appeal to the audience.  Her husband has lost his job and they are on Medicaid and food stamps.  She could really use the $20,000 prize.  Daniel's wife had just delivered their third child back in Hudson the day before the competition. She went into labor as Daniel was driving to the airport to fly to LA.   He could use the 20K, but his tale (he and his adorable wife have two other adorable children and live above the restaurant that he owns and they'd like to find a bigger place) lacks the woe of his opposition.  Now, Guy announces that Daniel had won an advantage when he responded correctly to some inane quiz question: he can choose any food product he wants from any aisle.  Dan pauses and, unlike any Food Network contestant I've ever seen under this pressure, he becomes calm and thoughtful.  He shrugs and turns to his opponent.  "I've got all the stuff I need.  Go ahead and get the chocolate."  An enormous virtual crowd roars silently across the TV universe.  The woman wins the contest but Daniel becomes the first Food Network hero ever! 

Like Cal's, DABA will not be our source of warmth, comradeship, and culinary happiness forever. But I know that, unlike Cal, Daniel is young and eager for a more expansive venue for himself and his family.  So someday I expect to see him impressing us in the Iron Chef Stadium or moderating some show where chefs compete by cooking with utensils made out of bark with ingredients they have to find in a field.

As for Cal, I just Googled Khalil Ayoubi and found a show of his paintings in Beirut from last November.  One of them was of a house lodged in green space within a grove of child-painted trees. I emailed the gallery owner and asked if it was still for sale.

The County Fair and the Thrill Continues

When I was kid, growing upstate in the middle of the woods, going to our county fair in Schaghticoke, New York was my annual vision of the World.  My mother would give my sister, brother, and me a dollar each and send us off to ramble about the fairgrounds by ourselves. (Mothers did that then.) Here, I believed, was what a city must be like, full of excited people, crazy technological miracles, color, movement, music, and shady men with scary eyes and false seductive voices urging us on rides and to play unwinnable games.  (This early infatuation was, in fact, a pretty accurate preview of my future experience of NYC.)  One year, I think I was about eight, I spent what seemed like hours talking to a mechanical farmer, entranced by the magical feat of conversing directly with this robotic creature.  Best day of my life up to that point. 

I still love the county fair, but with the irony that time presents us with, it now literally means country to me -- not city.  When we first started coming upstate on the weekends, we went to the very extensive and grand Duchess County Fair.  But now we favor its much smaller Columbia County neighbor, which smells like grease, hay, and a hint of cow manure no matter where you are on its grounds.

After arriving this year, we first aim for the animals: floppy-eared bunnies, humps of warm thoughtful cows, sheep staring vacant-eyed at nothing, and cages of chickens -- feathered bimbos gloriously clothed and rackety with silly chatter.  I'm especially searching for the goats, who, unfortunately, never warrant their own section at the Columbia Fair.  Now, I can't find them at all.  A couple of young slow sheep men point vaguely in the direction of the back end of their large area.  There, we find only three young kids huddled together in one pen.  Where were the goats this year?  I find this disconcerting. Our family had in fact raised some goats for a few years and we loved their goofy looks and cagey intelligence.  If I had retired when I was younger, I would have taken on a few.

Michael and I next check out the winning vegetables, studying with scorn the blue ribbon won by the flaccid Anaheim peppers withering in their baskets, and I remind myself to enter my far superior Big Jim chilies next year.

We skip the awful games along the runway, with the hanging corpses of large unattainable panda bears and stuffed Looney Toon characters and where small children aim semi-automatics at cute metal animal heads.

We are hungry now and ready for the terrible irresistible fair food, which has, like the world, evolved since the corn dogs and cotton candy of my youth.  Ethnicity bellows from each stand, democratically displaying foods with equally uncertain bacterial counts. Michael buys lamb souvlaki, and I pick up a taco, an unfortunate choice of bland chicken chunks drippy with bright yellow cheese food suffocating in a thick flour tortilla.  Ugh.  I throw it away and eat instead a Polish sausage with sauerkraut and mustard, which is fine but tastes suspiciously like a big hot dog.  We are eating at a battered wooden picnic table, and I stare longingly at a meatball sandwich and a blooming onion, that miracle of deep frying, with horse radish ranch dressing pooled lavishly in the center of golden oily petals, being enjoyed by an appropriately overweight couple across from us.

After lunch we head for our main objective.  This year, the Columbia State Fair has a special focus.  The mechanical marvels we seek out now are not ungainly talking metal farmers but shiny green John Deere tractors, which growl about heavy lifting, snow plowing, and the transformation of our land.  It is not clear yet whether we'll need a Mama tractor in the 2 series or a smaller version.  We'll have to pay an excavator to rough out a road and the building site in order to determine the horsepower we'll need.  But before we head home, today I sit happily in the clam shell of a 2032, and poke at the handles, envisioning the fields of wildflowers and native trees and fat shiny blue-ribbon winning vegetables that our property will produce with the help of our steel-clad pal.  

And while the fair of my childhood gave me my view of the future, so now we beat on, tractors against the furrows, back ceaselessly into my past.

Joining the Roosevelt Ghosts of 129-131 Fifth

The buyer has signed the contract for our apartment, and our family will soon become one more set of ghosts to inhabit the spaces of 129-131 Fifth Avenue.  Within two weeks of it being on the market, our place had over 50 visits and 11 offers.  We accepted that of a young single woman, a lawyer, who "loved it immediately" and is already planning to redo the kitchen (a wise first decision).  She will soon own a wonderful apartment in a wonderful building, a modest gem of Manhattan history.  

The address of the original site that later launched our building was 4 East 20th Street, and the first known ghost in that space belonged to Teddy Roosevelt's uncle, Silas Weir Roosevelt, who, with three of his brothers -- Teddy's father, Robert, and James -- owned homes on the south side of 20^th Street between Fifth and Park.  They were all sons of Cornelius Roosevelt, one of the founders of Chemical Bank (now Chase) and the fifth richest man in New York City. (Teddy himself was born a block and a half from our building, and his birthplace was reconstructed and memorialized in the mid-20^th century as an appealing little museum.)  

Silas, the owner of our space, was a Commissioner of the Public Schools and a lawyer.  He had a wife and children and seemed to be well liked by his peers.  He was also an amateur poet, whose verses, although conventionally Victorian, showed a warm and sensitive nature.  Sadly, Silas only lived to be 47, dying in 1870, I assume in some dark room on our mutual site, after what was described as a protracted, painful, and "tedious" illness.

Since the late 1860s, the neighborhood around the Roosevelts' homes had been transforming into Ladies Mile, the hot Manhattan shopping center of its time. In 1870, the year Silas died, Lord & Taylor claimed the corner of Broadway and 20^th with a five story cast iron building and one of the earliest steam elevators.  Two years later, Teddy's father, unhappy with the commercialization of the area, particularly at his doorstep, and perhaps affected by his brother's death, moved uptown.  The other brothers deserted 20^th Street soon afterward. However, although the family didn't want to live there any more, they were not opposed to taking financial advantage of the new environment.

In the late 1870s, the Roosevelt estate converted James Roosevelt's former home at 6 East 20^th and Silas' at 4 East 20^th street for commercial use.  The latter building (and, as a reminder, our future site) became the location for the New York Exchange for Women's Work.  This organization, founded to provide Civil War widows a living by selling on consignment "almost everything that is useful or beautiful that can be devised by the quick ingenuity of a woman's brain, from the darning of a stocking to the adornment of a plaque" lasted an unlikely 125 years.  (The Exchange only stayed on 20^th Street for a few years, however; it moved to Madison Avenue, where it continued to sell consigned hand-made items until high rents and a dearth of knitters forced its closure in 2003.)

In 1890, the Roosevelt estate replaced James' old house with a leased extension to Lord and Taylor's store.  Then 10 years later, in 1900, they unsentimentally knocked Silas' house down and replaced it with the Beaux Art structure that I know and love today.  This became a further addition to the ever-expanding Lord and Taylor and was linked to a building at 129 Fifth, allowing the store to stretch down 20^th Street and gain a Fifth Avenue entrance and address.

Shortly after the turn of the 20^th century, Lord and Taylor moved uptown, along with most of the other large department stores that had flourished between Fifth and Sixth. The splendid spaces of those "commercial palaces", as they had been described, were subsequently humbled with small industries and dusty wholesale showrooms, although with the basic bones of the structures preserved and ready for their 21^st century resurrections.

Our small Beaux Art wing of the Lord and Taylor palace, which faces 20^th Street, spent most of the twentieth century as a humdrum place for glass dealers and importers. At some point, it was severed from its long departed Lord and Taylor master by a parking lot.  This half of 129-131 Fifth has been described as "framed by piers, with the [neo -Greco] façade divided into three bays by slender columns resting on high bases and topped by imposts decorated with stylized paterae [which I Googled and found were ancient Roman shallow libation bowls].  These support lintels are decorated with incised ornament and simple projecting cornices.  At the second and third story levels spandrel panels are set beneath the windows; those on the second story are ornamented by recessed panels but have lost their sill moldings, those on the third story are decorated by raised panels." 

In 1979, 129-131 Fifth was converted to a coop, and in 1989, we purchased our apartment on that third floor. At the time, Michael and I were merging two families, and the previous owner had cleverly duplexed and designed the place so that we could squeeze our five kids, if needed, into its 1300 square feet. When we moved in, Willie, my younger son, was six and our other four kids, Geoff and Jill (mine) and Sarah and Jeremy (Michael's) were either 19 or 20.  Geoff, Jill, and Sarah generally used the apartment as a way station, but Jeremy and Will lived there for the duration.   Our daughters moved west, but for years, every Friday, Geoff, his wife Kim, and their three sons came in from Queens for family chaos night. The walls of those rooms were warmed by the art of my family and friends. I cooked for and we celebrated in the large downstairs living area our wedding, our tenth anniversary, dozens of holidays, and countless insignificant events that served as excuses to feed people we were fond of. Michael and I built businesses there, crouching in corners over our computers. These are the ghosts -- people, things, and events -- that are now drifting randomly within the newly painted walls and spruced up floors.  Leaving this apartment and walking out the door of that building for the last time will be very hard. 

Leaving the neighborhood, however, will not be.  History does not repeat itself but sometimes it seems that events may resonate over time in certain spaces, re-emerging in similar forms later on.  A version of Ladies Mile has now erupted like some plant that lay dormant for 100 years, emerging as a giant invasive weed, sending out its sprawling tendrils to produce high-priced toxic franchises across Broadway and Fifth Avenue, smothering out the native stores and attracting homogenous squeaking consumers, chewing and bagging up goods and spewing back cash. (Too overwrought?)

 Like Teddy Roosevelt's pragmatic family, we are both escaping this new commercialized version of our neighborhood and unsentimentally taking advantage of its opportunities, selling our apartment at a price way above the one we bought at.  So we'll build a new home in Hudson, where noisy birds replace noisy girls and scary dark woods replace scary dark streets.  

And maybe Silas' ghost even influenced our decision to move here, whispering his modest Victorian verses to us while we slept in the spaces where he spent is last sad years and where we spent are latest happy ones:

"For the Hudson runs like molten gold

His purple hills between;

And the hazy distance lies unrolled,

A fringe of sliver sheen,

Till earth and the horizon blend

In the faint hue of even,

As if the curse were at an end,

And the world mixed with heaven."

And of course, James Roosevelt's ghost may also be whispering from the house next door: "It's time to sell."