Dear WBW Followers
As I may have already noted in a previous Weekly BiWeekly (I’m starting to lost track), but my father, Jerome Harry Claster Lowengard, was born on June 6, 1925 and throughout my childhood I honestly believed that D-Day stood for “Daddy’s (Birth) Day.” Yesterday there was much reminiscing, Toblerone eating and even an emissary (Alexander) dispatched to check to make sure his gravestone was still upright. My brother Henry recirculated a Roz Chastian illustration of a posthumous encounter he had with our father in 2003, a year after his demise and we kept it up throughout the day. Just because he’s been missing in action (or rather, missing THE action) the last 17 years is no excuse for not celebrating.
Lowengard birthdays were and continue to be always a big deal. For Henry (the brother), there was a Civil War reenactment party with his five year old chums serving as a regiment of the Union, complete with a Fife-and-Drum Corps leading a parade around out Wiltshire Lane neighborhood; and another year a train excursion for 20 from Hartford’s Union Station to Berlin, CT (and back. The soirees for my father were legendary. I missed his 45th birthday, when my mother drove to roundtrip to Croton-on- Hudson one morning to pick up reels of Casablanca, my father’s favorite movie, and a projector, for a party that evening at 727 Prospect that included a showing and A Night in Casablanca menu. With caviar. There was always caviar. I was in England that year and always regretted not coming home for this.
Five years later, my mother topped the Casablanca production by inviting all nearest and dearest, probably close to 70 people to a 50th birthday concert at The Hartford Seminary featuring the Bartok String Quartets played by a Hartford Symphony quartet, followed by a party at 727 with all the usual fixings: two bars, live music and full spread from Mrs. Kraus, the caterer, the speeches, the champagne and the caviar. 11-year-old Jeremiah Lowengard played the curtain raiser on his violin, a scratchy rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. Nobody dropped a knee.
For the JHCL 70th birthday (a number I’m veering dangerously close to myself) there was another large patio party at 727 Prospect Avenue for friends and family and a luncheon in New York at the St. Regis Hotel for further flung (New York, Baltimore, Philly) pals. Someone thought Play Doh (which I banned in my own household) would make a nice distraction for my three-, four- and five-year-olds in attendance. I tried scraping it out of the carpet with a knife to no avail.
The last of my father’s Big Number Birthdays was his 75th, two decades ago. ET reserved a large chunk of the orchestra section at Goodspeed Opera House and brought in a busload of guests from Hartford who met up with others who journeyed on their own for the show, quite significantly Man of La Mancha, which my father invested in in 1965 after attending an investor reading at Goodspeed Opera House, a longtime PR account of his. In theory he shouldn’t have made such a killing on it but in one of those quirky turns of fate he was left holding a large chunk when others he’d recruited to go in on it with him backed out. The La Mancha checks paid our weekly grocery bills for years and subsidized a couple of Mexican vacations as well. Following the performance, which I recall was a little dark for my kids at the time in spite of the dreaming the impossible dream stuff, guests were bussed up to Costa Del Sol on Wethersfield Avenue in Hartford for a repast of huge platters of paella. As a small aside, my father wasn’t quite as prescient in his investing prowess a decade after La Mancha, when he passed on another show that had its start at Goodspeed. “I liked the comic strip,” he said. “But on stage a singing orphan just doesn’t work.”
Anyway, yesterday was a special day.
ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS IN PRINT
It’s been quite a week (or two) in New York City. To paraphrase Michael Corleone, just when you think things are settling down, BAM! They pull you back in. My favorite tweet of the moment is I always wanted to know what it would be like to simultaneously experience the Spanish flu, Great Depression, and 1968 mass protests while Andrew Johnson was president. Says it all, I think. Sorry I can’t claim credit for it.
Needless to stay, I’ve been demonstrating in spirit, keeping my immuno-challenged, asthmatic, eczema-riddled (but getting better), high-risk-age categoried body at home. And now they find out that us special type A, I mean BLOOD type A’s have a higher risk of intubation if infected.
I opened my front door last Monday at about noon to pay a visit to the third floor hallway garbage chute and there, on the floor, was a paper copy of the New York Times. At the beginning of the coronamess, residents at 1270 sere advised that we would not receive door-to-door deliveries and that our papers would be left in the lobby for us to fetch. Suspending “for the duration” was encouraged.
I did this, going all-digital, setting June 1st as a pie-in-the-sky restart date. I was confident that by then that this would all be over. The suspension expired and slipped by me. I’ve been extremely busy trying to stay on top of all the one-week and one-month special free subscription offers for off-the-beaten-track digital services I sign up for so I can cram in shows I want to watch and then cancel but the Times slipped right by me. Turns out the reason the June 1 issue was delivered is my friend the felonious neighbor was picking up his issue and saw my paper copy at the front desk and hauled it up to spare me the trip. He did the same on Thursday, apparently flinging it at my door from the elevator which might have been fine if it had been folded in half and bound with a rubber band, but it wasn’t, so it landed in a windblown mess on my doorstep. I called to thank him but warned that if this continued I would be reducing his Christmas tip in December.
I have now put another delivery suspension in for the Times until the Monday following the Fourth of July. Trying to imagine what the world will be like in another month boggles the mind. So maybe July 6 will be OK. I’m not betting the farm on it.
PERSONAL BESTS AND WORSTS
I gave up CNN and CNBC cold turkey on Memorial Day. I had been using these stations as conduits for the Cuomo (Andrew) daily reports but then would be too lazy to turn the TV off after the press had been dismissed with the governor’s signature (I’m going to work now” and it was crazy-making. The same thing Over and Over and Over. So I started pulling the presser feeds directly off governor.ny.gov which does require a certain tolerance for such timeless tunes as “Timeless Journey” by Thierry David, “Aromatic Candles” by the Network Music Ensemble, “Rodar” by SaraoMusic and “Morfineer” by Moth Electret – that loop prior to the Governor confidently striding in and pointedly removing his mask and taking his seat. Yes, I actually Shazaamed these one day when the show was running late. Is not he Governor the godfather (small “g”) to Billy Joel’s two most recent kids? Would not “New York State of Mind” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire” be more appropriate?
I made it 18 days between grocery store visits this go-round, heading out to ShopRite in Tuckahoe last Sunday morning. It gave me a false sense that the food panic was finally over when I arrived at 6:35 AM and there was no line and practically no one in the store. Turned out, last Sunday was the first day that the store had pushed its Senior Hour back from 7:00 AM to 6:00 AM unannounced. I drove out early expecting to join a line but was let right in. Ir was like I won the Supermarket Sweep, and I swept up big in the Haagen Daz/Talenti section in frozen foods ($2.99 a pint!). I was able to go so long in part because I had overstocked the trip before, and also supplemented with a bag of farm-fresh vegetables and fruit I signed up for through the GROWNYC program which is, technically speaking, not shopping but rather showing up at one of its outdoor markets to pick up a pre-ordered, prepacked pay, grab and go bag. I also had leaned on the kindness of neighbors willing to add four pounds of cream cheese to their shopping lists when they called to inquire if I needed anything.
WHEN POSITIVE IS NEGATIVE AND NEGATIVE IS NEGATIVE
The community-wide testing at Brookdale took place, as scheduled, the Tuesday and Wednesday after Memorial Day and by Friday I was informed that ET was Covid-19 negative. Then, s few days later we learned that this effort had exposed (so to speak) 15 residents who were Covid-19 positive and 14 members of the staff --- all asymptomatic. This was a shocker. Even more dumfounding was that ET tested positive for antibodies. I celebrated for about 10 minutes and then came to my senses, believing this had to be a false positive. I explained it – several times – to ET, that the results of blood tests that were taken a few days after the Covid-19 testing were all normal, and that she had tested negative for the virus, which was positive and positive for Covid-19 antibodies, which was also positive, which she then proceeded to tell everyone meant she was going to get in her car and drive herself home soon. Talk about the theater of the absurd. Even Ionesco and Beckett and Groucho Marx couldn’t have collaboratively scripted this conversation.
Other positives in my week included discovering a shelf I hadn’t known existed in my new refrigerator, the one around which I am in the process of renovating my kitchen to fit in the space it’s too big for. I dropped something on the floor while the right side French door was open and on glancing up, found that underneath a shelf that overshadowed it from above it (the one designed to hold milk cartons and bottles of Sauvignon Blanc), was a condiment shelf I hadn’t realized existed – with condiments in it I thought my sister had thrown out when she transferred the Igloo’d contents from the old, malfunctioning fridge into the new one.
Fixits in the last fortnight have included a highly technical procedure on Speedy the Turtle’s tank filter that was rattling like crazy, solving this problem by extracting two scutes from the tubing. Scutes are the plates on the turtle’s shell that shed over time. Then they get sucked up into the filter mechanisms and sound like rumba shakers. My expertise at animal (or rather, reptile) husbandry expands daily. I learned after an extensive conversation with a member of the Terra Whisper Power Filter customer service team that the filter impeller contains a magnet that is susceptible to reversing its polarity, and that by soaking it in vinegar it will right itself. I’m not sure I buy this but perhaps will try it anyway. Too bad soaking my head in vinegar for an hour is not possible.
And, best of all, I was inches away from buying a new dishwasher as mine had been underperforming for weeks. In very short order, I became a graduate-level student in the mechanics of rinse aids which I thought should have solved the glass clouding and general lack of cleanliness of the dishes just dishwashered, but did not. Then, the situation became serious with the sudden alarming appearance of a a kiddie pool’s worth of water failing to drain after the cycle. A dozen or so You-Tube videos later, I determined there wasn’t a backup in the drainpipe or an air gap. I do not have a good history of messing with plumbing in the building, which is nearly as old as I am and not aging nearly as well. As a Hail Mary play I decided to try granular instead of liquid detergent which solved the problem immediately in an Occam’s Razor fort of way and spared me the time and expense of installing a new $250 dishwasher.
VERIZON OFF THE HORIZON
Now that my taxes are filed, I am filling the hole in my schedule by embarking on another months-long project to procrastinate by divesting myself of my longtime mary.lowengard@verizon.net email address. I have had a gmail account since 2008, but continued to straddle both email addresses out of fealty to Verizon, my internet provider, and abject laziness. The notion of informing everyone and changing over all those logins was daunting.
Plus, when I was at Bloomberg there was a strict policy forbidding emailing work home, necessitating use of a cumbersome and often flaky security system that required logging on with a special card yaddayaddayadda that didn’t work half the time. Besides I wasn’t sending myself source code but rather stories to edit for the employee blog. Bloomberg had a system set up to catch flaunters of the rule but it only sought out emails going to gmail, yahoo and AOL accounts meaning I was free and clear to email away to verizon.net. Those who were trapped in the gmail/yahoo/aol trap weren’t so lucky – after three offences, you were docked a PTO day.
Apparently the loyalty I felt for verizon.net was quite requited because in 2015 when Verizon acquired AOL it turned all its URL business over to this unit and I had to fill out the equivalent of a Tier 3 Security Clearance form to keep my verizon email which is now passed through AOL on its way to me where I’ve set it up to forward automatically to gmail. That’s a lot of mileage for my emails. Once in while I find out something sent to verizon.net didn’t make it, and I have to go and fish it out of the AOL holding pen, and I swear I’ll get rid of this account and don’t.
So I have finally taken the plunge and am in the process of transitioning, so to speak. If any of you happens to email me at my verizon.net address you will receive a brusque note requesting that you use mary.lowengard@gmail.com henceforth and if you are a vendor, or a Republican, or newsletter don't bother. Please don’t take that too personally.
FREE FALLIN’
As the weather’s warmed and the death rate in New York continues to diminish daily, I’ve been evolving a reentry plan based on both fact and fancy. I’ve had a couple of days “out” including an excursion to Sloan Kettering for labs two weeks ago that included a negative Covid-19 antibodies test. While in the empty waiting room at the Rockefeller Outpatient Pavilion I slyly pocketed 12 packets of pre-wrapped graham cracker squares while waiting to be called to the phlebotomist’s den. The labs were only so-so but I was able to convert my cracker booty into a cheesecake the day after making it justifiable pilfering, I thought. Besides, I was careful to select the packages where the cookies contained therein were already broken, which is most of them anyway. The cheesecake was delivered to Elise and Aaron as part of their two-meal-plan weekly plan, accompanied by a stern warning to refrigerate it for four hours before digging in as I hadn’t had enough time for it to chill. They then returned almost half back to me over the weekend to taste myself and distribute among deserving friends.
I have been busy the last few weeks shamelessly solicited sublets at 1270 on behalf of the newlyweds, whose lease expires at the end of July, and even ventured out in the building, along, in a mask, to preview some for them, though the bright idea to resettle them here rapidly lost steam. While I correctly guessed that there was a certain demographic (DISKs: double income, some kids) who would be looking to leave town (or might already have), that particular demographic did not buy their apartments in 1997 at a ridiculously bargain price and thus they carry large mortgages that made any “deals” for sublets unattainable.
Subletting is also kind of a dead end for anyone with any ambition to stay in New York. In our building legal sublets are restricted to just two years and carry a hefty poll tax of 25 percent of maintenance charges to the cooperative. There’s no long-term payoff that a renewable lease might promise, like the one Sarah and I got our mitts on in 1978 for $400 a month in a rent-stabilized building that she still resides at -- at a somewhat higher price but still a very friendly rent. I was kicked off the lease a couple of years ago following an investigation and Sarah nearly was too, as for some reason she was listed in whitepages.com as residing here at 1270. Whitepages.com is probably about the extent of the scoobydoo-ing the management company undertook. Sarah’s apartment was actually a sublet originally but our benefactress never returned to it, except for one evening about three years after we held the proper lease, to remove all her furniture which was almost everything. I hid an omelet pan that I still have, however.
Back then $400 was a stretch for us but in time we outran it. Meanwhile Elise and Aaron kept looking on their own and last weekend they ventured out in a socially acceptably distant way to see a place on Third Avenue at 95th Street, fell hard for it and will move in mid-July. Aaron made me an adorable narrated video that included a sweeping shot of the street below to show me where I could park when delivering meals. It’s smack next door to the Barking Dog, our longtime favorite family burger place (especially my son Henry’s, who requested his high school graduation dinner be held there) so the new apartment’s locationlocationlocation is ideal. And if something dire happens workwise, there’s always waitressing and bartending to make ends meet.
THIS CREATURE WAS STIRRING
I’m with Mr. Jinx: I hate those damn meeces to pieces. After trapping quite inhumanely three (plus retrieving one rather petrified specimen from under a cabinet), I set the score at Mary 3, Mice 0. Not so fast. On Thursday night after I’d shut the kitchen down, I returned to fix a glass of water and there was a TAIL waving out me out of the exhaust grill of the stove. Like, eeeeeeeeek. He just stayed there too, like a bird-brained ostrich. So when the exterminator showed up on Friday I insisted he move the stove out to see if there was a mouse colony behind it – or at least some hole perhaps around the gas line that might be plugged with steel wool.
There were about seven antique glue traps back there, a lot of dust, a spoon from a three-utensil second-hand set my grandmother gave me when she helped me furnish my first kitchen, a long-forgotten-about about set of tongs . . . and a plastic (not glass) menagerie of animals the kids must have dropped back there, I know not when, how or why. The exterminator swept it up for me and replaces the packets of mouse poison the he had previously shoved under the stove saying it would “slow him down” long enough for the rodent to step drunkenly on one of the glue traps. Why they aren’t out frolicking in this glorious weather is beyond me.
LOST AND FOUND
I am spending way too much time walking around the apartment, muttering to myself, turning over pillows on my couch looking for things I know are in here but can’t find. My much-adored red Maine hoodie sweatshirt went missing last weekend. It seemed to have grown legs and walked out. I thought maybe I had washed it in my last laundry adventure (only the second time I’ve approached the laundry room since the beginning of confinement, a testament to the stockpiles of underwear and yoga leggings I have accumulated over many years) so I checked there even though it was perfectly illogical that I would have left it behind as it is not a sock and it’s red. Was it possible that on one of my spins around the Meer I took it off, tied it around my waist and then it fell off me without my noticing? There was no rational reason it had disappeared – like the two headsets for my mobile I can’t find and the pair of reading glasses that disappeared many weeks ago but still compel me to rifle around under my bed on the theory they’d fallen off the night table and then were kicked into a dark corner.
It made no sense and I let this bug me for too many days. I am trying to be careful about stuff like this, lest I collapse from the weight of being overannoyed. Now, when I first at my desk in the morning, I try to ration what I’m going to let myself get hot and bothered over that day. Should this be the day I place a call to Citibank, which continues to regularly close my account even though there are written instructions on my record not to shut it down as I still have incoming direct deposit funds and still need to access my transaction history of past months and years that will not be available once it’s closed?
Or perhaps Ikea, where I’ve been trying to change an order I have on hold but has yet to be adjusted, and where they can’t even be bothered putting you on hold. After pressing several options, one is tartly informed that all agents are busy, try again later. Or my retirement funds management firm, where a muddle was made of a transaction I set up last February that still isn’t right? Or maybe just for kicks I should call Sanofi’s patient support program, Dupixent MyWay, no relation to Sinatra, which makes me a very impatient patient as they get all wrapped up in determining if I am indeed deserving of another two syringes and eight freezer packs or if I should still have one left after my last dosing. I deeply appreciate their generosity in allowing me to get this miracle drug for free, but really, who in their right mind would pay $1,350 every other week for this stuff? I’d rather use to pay my mortgage and just continue to rip the skin off my ankles scratching.
And of course, there’s always dutiful daughterly stuff to work on for ET that goes round and round the Mulberry Bush. If a Zoom doc appointment is on the books, that’s enough tsuris for two to three days just getting the call set up to include me as well as my poor hapless technologically challenged mother – and she doesn’t really have to do anything but sit there, a nurse at Brookdale takes care of the computer stuff for her. In the meantime, the 11:30 AM appointment that we all agreed to set up at 11:15 AM is still not up and running at 11:45 AM and at 12:15 PM the doctor appears and quickly asks a lot of questions that ET can’t quite fathom and then goes off to tend other patients.
FREEDOM – SORT OF
Last Wednesday, the New York State Covid-19 death rate fell below 50 for the first time, a magic number I’d been waiting for. I decided it was finally safe to let someone other than the exterminator into the apartment and invited Sarah to come up be the almost-first to breach the threshold of Apartment 3R in 12 weeks.
The plan was to stroll to 125th Street to pick up our GROWNY order which we agreed to split this time round. When she arrived, it had just started to rain and was threatening a downpour, so we jumped in the car instead of walking. Parking was ridiculously easy, and we had some found time so decided that if we got to 112th St and Park and there was a parking space, we’d check out the huge new Covid-19 testing center set up in trailers in the playing fields of Mosaic Academy (formerly PS 101). There was indeed parking on the street, so we went in to check the facility out, emerging 15 minutes later with sore nostrils (yes, you do see stars when they stick that stick up there) and a promise of results in two to three days. There was almost no clientele, so the staff greeted us with open arms. Metaphorically.
From there we proceeded to 1270 to divide up the spoils in the bag (kale was earmarked to go down the hall to my neighbor Regina) and I then enticed Sarah to help me remove my kitchen cabinet doors and drawer facings and hardware. At some juncture the previous week it dawned on my that I needn’t wait to bring in someone to paint in the kitchen but could instead take the kitchen to the painter, kind of like that mountain and Muhammad thing. I wouldn’t be breaking any 1270, City, State or federal statutes and there would be no fuss no muss in my apartment. But before we started, I told her, I’ve got to run to the bathroom. Which I did. And because someone else was in the house, I closed the door. The door with the hook upon which the Maine hoodie was hanging. Double kudos to Sarah for being the cause-and-effect for finding my hoodie and for sticking around for two hours helping me loosing up the screws on cabinet doors and drawer fronts installed 23 years ago and yanking them off their hinges. After she left I went through two boxes of Mr. Clean Miracle Erasers scrubbing the dirt of the ages off the tops of the doors, inventorying and transporting the lot to my car for delivery the next morning. They should be ready for pickup today though late breaking news last night of a tree falling on the garage here at 1270 may throw a wrench in this plan. I am truly hoping the Subaru was squished which will same me the anguish of deciding whether to have the keying that adorns its exterior repaired before returning the vehicle at the end of the leasing period.
ON THE SMALL SCREEN
I have completed the trilogy of dark, middle eastern terrorism-themed shows which boiled down to Jews versus Palestinians, Jews versus Jews and then No Jews at All (Fauda, Hostages and Caliphate), each episode or couplet of episodes followed by a Schitt’s Creek chaser. I took a couple of days off and then jumped into a coordinated screening with my regular screening buddy Jane Safer of A Confession, a British police procedural that was satisfyingly complex and creepy. I have taken in all but one of the National Theater NT at Home screenings, even this week’s bloody and incomprehensible production of Coriolanus though admittedly I was multitasking throughout. Sadly, theater not in the theater just isn’t the same as being in the theater, and never will be. And watching with Jane in the same room is far superior to watching apart even if we coordinate start times.
I’m starting to feel it’s silly prattling on about broken dishwashers and Netflix series when so much that’s horrible and consternation-provoking (to quote Justin Trudeau) going on. But I don’t think I can possibly top what George Will has already published on this topic so will leave it at that.
I hope you are well and good and will check in in a week or two or so.
Cheers
mbl