WIND OF CHANGE 6-28-20
Celebrating Phase 2, Socializing Distantly, Making Focaccia and Working It All Out
Dear Bi- I Mean Tri-Weekly Readers,
Well, New York City officially slid into Phase 2 last Monday and I celebrated by scooping up my sister at the corner of Park and 88th at 7:15 AM, stopping to collect shockingly price-inflated app-ordered Starbucks and heading directly to the Jersey shore. The last time I’d gassed up the car was April 23 and I had more than half a tank left.
This was the first time I’ve left the Empire State since I returned from my North/South Carolina trip on March 8. Three months, two weeks and then some without stepping a foot over the border, that has to be some sort of record in my coming-up-on-Golden Jubilee in the City. Must I to subtract the California sabbatical in the mid-80s and time spent wandering up and down Hudson County, New Jersey from Hoboken to Jersey City to Weehawken in the early-to-mid 90s? My heart was always here.
Sarah helped me negotiate the new traffic pattern into the Lincoln Tunnel by pointing out I needed to cross a solid line (doing that on Route 4 in New Jersey once cost me $440) and by 9:15 AM we had established ourselves a beachhead in the sandy sands of Sandy Hook. Absolutely everything I researched on the Internet about the opening times and restrictions were wrong, but never mind. We got in. I had been irrationally concerned we’d be that car just after the last car to be admitted.
The sun was just how we like it – blistering -- and the water icy. The lifeguards slept in and showed up at 10. With them a light breeze arrived which helped cool us off throughout the morning as we sat and read, applied and reapplied sunscreen, ate cold pineapple and vegetated.
My Manta Portable Beach Tent, an end-of-season impulse purchase two years ago that had been living in the back of my front hall closet made its debut and provided shade and shelter. It was “activated” by removing it from its zippered flat circular bag the size of a truck tire, at which point it exploded rather dramatically into the shape of a bandshell. It was light as a feather. Included were stakes that were of no use in soft sand, so we anchored it with our bags and flip flops and backed our beach chairs up to hold it down on its outermost edge. This relieved me of the vision of it being picked up by the wind and whirling it away to land in the Land of Oz, or the Meadowlands.
Not until she folded up the storage bag did Sarah notice the warning printed on it. Apparently, the contraption should only be removed from its “container” with eight feet of clearance and never indoors. I guess we were lucky there was nobody nearby to maim in the process of opening it. Except ourselves.
There wasn’t much to do for the next four hours except nothing, which is kind of the point of the beach. We had planned to leave at one-ish and pushed that off a bit. Forty minutes later the borders of our little private paradise at the far end of the lifeguarded area began to shrink so we decided it was time to pack up.
A flyer included with the Manta demonstrated how to fold it back up again in eight easy steps. Here, see for yourself:
After 15 minutes we had mastered steps one through four, but after that things went awry. Sarah thought it was indicating we should be twisting the tent back on itself into a disk, I pointed out the grey part was never on the outside in the illustration in the folding process but Sarah said maybe the pictures just didn’t show the grey part and it might be on the bottom. We returned to the beginning of the instructions again and again.
It started to get loud. And late. The wind was blowing the Manta hither and yon as we tried to hold onto it. Nearby beachgoers were being highly entertained by the drama of these sexagenarian sisters, with two bachelor’s degrees, three masters and a doctorate among them trying to figure this out. They weren’t pointing and laughing but it was heading that way. Nobody offered to help. Finally, we gave up and awkwardly hauled the tent, along with our bags and towels and beach chairs, back to the car. It was a long, long journey. Kind of like the Bataan Death March.
There, we started all over again, this time following a helpful YouTube video because the Manta website wouldn’t load on my low-battery, overheated phone. We watched it three times and bam! It was folded and tucked into its zip bag. At least we did better than the guy who put the first comment on the video noting he had to watch it 10 times.
We were back in the City in a little over an hour, sunburned, sandy and a bit groggy but still on speaking terms. Elise’s Pre-K and Kindergarten teacher, Yvonne Smith, loved to say that “There’s never a bad day at the beach,” which she put into action by scheduling multiple class trips to Orchard Beach in the spring. I’m with Yvonne on that, and it’s an even better day without a clutch of kindergarteners to pull out of the undertow.
On Wednesday I packed up my bag again, picked up my pal Mary Hedahl (mother of one of Elise’s classmates in Yvonne’s class) and spent another day at Sandy Hook. This time I skipped the tent.
UNFAZED
It’s a whole new world out there, none of it turning back the clock to recreate the life that late I led a year or even six months ago, and most of the most recent relaxed regulations and protocols are not affecting me, at least not immediately. I note for the record that weirdly on June 8th I finished up the last of the supplies of toilet paper and paper towels that were in the apartment when the iron curtain came down and that very day ran out of the refilled-to-the-brim bottle of Mrs. Meyer’s Lemon Verbena Hand Wash. I restocked the paper goods a few weeks ago and Amazon delivered a refill of the Mrs. Meyer’s, the smell of which I am sure in months or years ahead when all this is over will transport me back to this exact moment in time. Happily, the hand soap is longer on the verbena than the lemon as the smell of lemon cleaning products make me gag. That’s another memory that is called to mind. Long story, another day, or ask Jean McCoubrey.
Meanwhile, your reporter on the scene has observed that Upper Madison Avenue has turned into an ersatz Trastevere with restaurants al fresco’ing their dining rooms by setting up on the sidewalks and over the curbs into the street, with sawhorses and potted plants marking the territory. One shudders to consider the havoc a single drunk driver could wreak along Madison Avenue.
Construction is going on all over the place, with workers readily identified by their masklessness and their expressions broadcasting “I ain’t wearing no stinking mask.
I am steering clear of both eating out and construction. Neither seems worth the risk.
In general, there’s more vehicular traffic, though still not much compared to back when. And more noise, most notably past the midnight hour when the neighborhood appears to be celebrating Guy Fawkes Day, every night. The rockets are red blaring both on the Fifth Avenue and 108th Street-sides of my apartment so there’s no escaping and there seems to be an unwritten pact that the police should not be called as they have better things to do. It does sound like gunfire and on more than one occasion I have awakened believing I’ve been transported back in time to the Blitz. It seemed to subside in the last week but then picked up again Friday night, perhaps in anticipation of the Fourth of July. I haven’t been in the City for Independence Day since 1987 and imagine it will be noisy. Perhaps earplugs are in order. I may also move to Elise’s childhood bedroom which is further removed from the action.
In other ways the last three weeks of Phase 1 and Phase 2 have shifted life and my routines quite radically. The whole structure of my days before June 8th had been anchored around catching the Cuomo presser at 11:30 AM (more or less) which ended a week ago last Thursday. And sometimes I watched the DeBlasio, Lamont and just for good measure the Justin T. Show just to check out the status of his overnight beard growth and to join the in Canadian national sport of counting how many times he moves the flop of hair out of his eyes with his left hand.
The GROWNY grab bag I order and pick up every Wednesday has changed the way I’ve been gathering nuts and berries; I’ve become more brazen about dashing in and out of the Westside Market to fetch my own ground Columbia decaf instead of dispatching a neighbor or calling and asking the store to prepare it for me ahead, and I just went a full 26 days without doing a Big Shop, supplementing what was in my freezer and pantry with quick runs through Fresh Market (somewhat of an misnomer) at 110th and Madison. Last week I discovered that the deli manager, Gabriel, creates spit-roasted chickens that are so far superior to Whole Foods and Fairway’s. This good news of this I have tried spreading among my neighbors but apparently everyone already knew this except me. His concoction of lemon and garlic and probably Adobo is amazing, but I’ll never ask for the formula because I have absolutely no ambition to ever roast a chicken again so long as Gabriel’s are available.
This revelation is right up there with detecting the hidden lower shelf in my French-doored fridge that I documented (and gushed over) in the last WBW. Then, just this week I realized the “other” French door has the same shelf too. Not only that, it was storing several fancy chocolate bars I’d assumed Sarah had thrown out (or consumed) when she was dealing with the death of the old fridge and the purchase of the new one(s), and there they were. On the secret shelf. On the other door. Parity in the world of GE French-door bottom freezer refrigerators.
I’ve been widening my social circle, unrecklessly but geometrically. I am not yet entertaining in the apartment but have invited a selective number of individuals in for essential tasks. Sarah broke this sound barrier a couple of weeks ago, and of course the exterminator was a necessary charter member of my Covid-19 3R Club. Then I added Javier, the artisan who painted my cabinet doors to the list (no plus-one) to help me rehang them, as Sarah and I had meticulously removed every hinge screw and it turned out that had I bothered to watch any of the 298 videos on YouTube on the topic of Ikea Akurum cabinetry, all we had to do was snap a lever and the doors would have come right off.
The kitchen minirenovation creeps along. Javier does excellent work and nearly cried when I dinged up the paint on a couple the cabinets transporting them back from the studio where he had sprayed them, but with some leftover paint and the sacrifice of an eyeliner brush I dug out for him he fixed them up. They look great. Next up he will build a garage in a space under the kitchen window to hide away my trash and recycling bins and eventually will take charge of staining the butcher block a dark grey, sparing me the bother of installing new countertops. Kitchen reno anxiety has almost completely overshadowed my Covid-19 anxiety, which is not to say I am being uncautious, just less paranoid.
I hosted neighbors Nikki and Michael, masked, into the kitchen to show off the “new” cabinets. They are considering asking Javier to help with their kitchen. I also finally booked Brandon, the world’s best TV mounter, to get the flatscreen up on the wall and move its predecessor, the antique Sony, to up over Speedy’s tank in the guest room which now is as ritzy as the . . . the Ritz. That room will be my refuge when the temps soar and the oscillating Lasko fan in my bedroom just can’t cut it. Brandon did a great job which had I attempted myself would have resulted in large holes in the walls and a whole lot of frustration.
And just this last week I crossed Jane’s threshold to resume our program of supper-and-a stream, in a Phase 2-sh sort of style. This week: the three parter Quiz. Hers is the first residence I have visited.
The rest of my socializing has been out-of-doors which these days is only barely coronacheating. On Friday, June 12 I hit the first official tennis ball of the 2020 season, meeting Liz Wald at 7:00 AM at the Riverbank courts. I crammed five cans of Penns and Wilsons into my backpack. I had hoped that some of last year’s balls might have held their bounce, but they didn’t. I had hoped I might have held some bounce myself, despite the late start, but I didn’t. Still it was fun and now Liz is off on the West Coast and LeeAnn still away and every couple of days I remind myself to try to think up some way of filling in the gap but then get distracted.
Ah, distraction. My game is clearly suffering from the absence of Adderall that I was still partaking of throughout last tennis season and also a February-imposed ban on Aleve decreed by Dr. Gastro, which I had thought was OK to take since it wasn’t specifically mentioned when I was told to stay away from Tylenol and Vitamin-I products.
That Sunday, I joined up with two of the three Goffredo-Pohls(Christine and baby Leah) for a stroll over the 103rd Street Footbridge to the islands on the other side, Wards and Randalls, which offer pretty pathways, parks, saltmarshes, freshwater wetlands, birds, athletic fields and legal places to ignite a portable BBQ. Also, two psychiatric hospitals, a couple of homeless shelters and the Fire Academy distinctive for the wooden structures regularly built and burned down for practice. And, the Icahn Stadium, the John McEnroe Tennis Academy where I used to play once or twice a year because the courts are available to New York City Tennis Pass holders. Somewhere out there is a golf course. In other words, it is a microcosm of New York City life, complete with tennis players, Wall Street moguls, birdwatchers and crazy people.
I met Terry Trucco for a cocktail one balmy Wednesday evening in Central Park on the stretch of green I consider my “backyard,” just up from the Conservatory Gardens at 106th Street – and also up a steep hill, thereby forbidding for families hauling small people and/or BBQ grills. I spilled almost all the wine I’d disguised in an OGGI bottle. Twice. But it was fun and social, and we’ll do it again next week.
And one more shout-out (though I fear I’ve overlooked several others) to Anita Kawatra, who proposed a fair trade of fresh-from-Salzburg Mozartkugel, eight of them for the trifling task of driving her to Central Park South for a quick dip into her dentist’s office last Thursday. The answer was YES. As of Sunday evening, there is one left.
MY THURSDAY OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Here’s a day-in-the-life.
A week ago, before I headed off to rendezvous with my ex-Bloombergian colleague Chuck Stevens who was coming into the City from the suburbs of New Jersey for an early dentist appointment midtown, I took the big plunge into the wonderful world of bread making, mixing up a batch of focaccia. While this wasn’t my maiden voyage with yeast -- I made pizza crust a few weeks back, pizza is not quite the big leagues. I left the dough to rise and jumped on a Citibike down Fifth.
I made the journey in record time (and alive), thanks to empty Bus Only lanes and capriciously running lights on the Park side. We picked up coffee on 58th Street, wandered over to take in the amusing Bergdorf Goodman Men’s Store windows and then on to Central Park where we commandeered two benches. We hung out well past the time I should have left for home, thus I had to pedal furiously up Madison to catch the weekly Brookdale Family Zoomerang update.
Then I entered the kitchen, to discover that yes, if you leave dough to rise an hour and a half longer than specified, this happens.
Sarah counseled not to sweat it, just punch it down, which appeared to work. No harm, no foul. Then I read the recipe through and realized it needed a second rising, so I turned my attention to starting another project that would keep me close by:. I put together the second in my series of cheesecake experimentations. The focaccia made it in and out of the oven no worse for the wear and then the cheesecake went in which I realized would be done half an hour after I was due to be seeing Dr. Macular in person. I located the instruction manual for the oven and deciphered how to set the automatic turn off feature, which I hoped would still work on the 23-year-old GE Profile.
The plan had been to Citibike to the appointment, only a mile and a half away. But I was late in leaving and I’d been cautioned to be on time so as not to screw up the carefully scheduled patient load in the office. A couple of friends had been of late extolling the next-to-godliness condition of the subways, clean enough to eat off the seats apparently, though I wouldn’t want to try it. I wasn’t sure I was yet ready to take the subway plunge, and besides there was no subway line that wouldn’t take me way out of the way to get to Park and 72nd. How bad could a quick bus ride down Fifth be?
Answer: Bad.
It’s OK to describe this now, since I’m almost out of the incubation period for the virus to show up, but this ride was scary. I was waved away from the front door by the driver, entering through the back which was puzzling and also free – no place to insert my Senior MetroCard back there. That alone should have made me happy. But it didn’t. The bus was way too full and those who wore marks were featuring them in that current fashion of pulling them down on their chins. I took a seat on the back bench, warily eyeing the other passengers, who didn’t appear to be wondering if the AC was blowing little coronas all around, bouncing off the windows and landing on my face. I was. A stop of two after I got on, a grizzly unmasked rider entered, with an unbagged bottle of Jameson and took the seat one away from me.
The bus was moving quickly down Fifth, but I was considering just jumping off and making a run for it. I had my Citibike key, but I feared that by the time I got off the bus, located a docking station that actually had bikes in it and made my way I’d be at least 15 minutes late. Yes, a taxi was an option. But my general aversion to cabs, much less in this brave new world, is well documented. The Jameson guy then inexplicably got up and moved to a seat closer to the front of the bus. Might I have scared him off? It was a long ten minutes holding my breath to 72nd, and if there had been a Karen Silkwood shower at the other end, I would have headed straight for it. But I made it alive to the doctor’s office and shut myself in the bathroom for five minutes scrubbing as if I were prepping to perform brain surgery, even washing my face with Dial Hand soap.
Compared to that, having both eyes dilated, photographed with disco lights flashing, then fluorescein angiography -- that’s why they inject food coloring in a vein while a tech photographs how it travels to and, in my case, leaks out of, the blood vessels in my eyes, was a walk in the woods. I was all chirpy, declaring that I thought my eyesight hadn’t deteriorated in the four months I’d been rescheduling appointments. Alas the test showed otherwise..
So, I had to return this week and get the Ozurdex injection – Ozurdex being an ocular-friendly version of the coronavirus darling du jour, dexamethasone. Sexy Dexy and I have a long history going back to 1979. And I have had a more recent love-hate relationship with it as a chemo prep and then when it was prescribed to rid of last year’s measles-like rash. I actually have a fairly decent-size stash in my shoebox of over-ordered drugs of the last four years, and am waiting for the report on the morning news that the price of this stuff that’s $3.00 a bottle for 30 tablets has skyrocketed a thousandfold or more. Preferably more.
Meanwhile, I still had to get home, home to rescue the cheesecake from the (with luck, cold) oven and into the fridge to chill before delivery, and the paella I planned to make and deliver with the focaccia. But how? Subway, bus and taxi were out of the question. What I needed was a nice, clean, fast, ambulance. Or I could walk. Or grab a bike. With the double dilation, even with sunglasses the sun was brutal and blinding. And the sunglasses-mask combo was making me all misty. I started walking but it just wasn’t my style.
So, I biked. Blind. And lived to tell the tale.
And the doctor was right, my eyesight had degenerated. I can see clearly now, the rain (and fog) is gone.
Aside from getting in the car to deliver supper to Elise and Aaron, there was nothing risky about the rest of the evening. I settled in to watch the NT at Home production of Small Island and retired to bed early. And alive.
AND MANY OTHER HAPPY RETURNS
My much loved and deeply appreciated longtime housekeeper/executive vice president in charge of my small but sentimental assembly of houseplants, Lupe Tejada, returned after a 14-week building-imposed ban on outsiders. She was bearing gifts: the five plants that I’d farmed out to her to foster during the crisis before I killed them all. I was thrilled to see her and the plants.(three birthday orchids, a calla lily and a much-welcomed-back Chinese Money Tree left by Monica and Roberto Calzolari who borrowed the apartment for a weekend in 2014) .The apartment was restored to a healthy state of cleanliness, saved from the edge of qualifying as a Superfund site. Because she was wearing a mask I couldn’t tell if Lupe was amused when I asked if I had done at least a B-/C+ job in cleaning in her absence but she refused to take the bait. In her family, that would be a failing grade anyway – her six kids are all college grads, have professional careers and so many grandchildren I’ve lost track. She proudly showed me a Zoom clip of her oldest grandson in full graduation regalia delivering the valedictorian speech for his middle school class in Inwood.
NOTHING SUCCEEDS LIKE SUCCESSION
I’m two years and 24 days late to the party, and sometimes I think it’s a sign of incipient dementia that the most recent series I’ve streamed always usurps the one before it as my favorite and the best work I’ve ever seen, but there’s absolutely nothing not to like about Succession, from its complex yet classic interwoven plotlines, to the sumptuous sets, to the revealing opening credits, the remarkable music, even the costumes and hairstyles are all perfection. That is, there’s nothing not to like about anything except the conniving, dishonest, unstable, scheming, controlling, weak-spirited, morally compromised characters. So that’s the challenge in watching it; so often a show presents a bunch of likeable folks who then over time reveal their tragic flaws. Now two seasons in I am getting a whiff of goodness buried in the evil that is the predominant genetic trait of the Roy family.
As has been our pattern since the beginning of the pandemic, on suggesting a new series to my Lexington KY-sequestered pal Caroline Green, she takes the ball and runs with it, often completing a season by the next morning. She then coaches me as I work my way through one or two episodes a night, advising on how large a pitcher of cocktails I should fix before viewing. She is literally my own personal showrunner.
I took a couple of nights off between seasons one and two to regain my balance and reestablish sleep patterns and I dove back in, finishing a week ago over a supper of white wine and semi-sweet chocolate chips, right out of the bag. Succession really is remarkable, on the same stratospheric plane as The Godfather. I have been told on good authority it holds up well on second viewing. Yes, it’s about the Murdoch clan (sort of) but also the Lowengards (in a benign sort of way) or any family dealing with the politics of governance. See it and tell me otherwise.
THE THREE R HEALTH & RACQUET CLUB
The second week in May, I realized my dream of joining another Livestrong/YMCA 12-week program for the cancer addled was not going to happen any time soon and I was going to have to find the time and the discipline to shape myself up by myself. As I was contemplating this, I cleaned out a drawer which contained a brochure stolen from Canyon Ranch in 2008, a wall chart from GoFit, the maker of the 65 cm GoFit Swiss Ball that’s been bouncing from room to room in my apartment for, hmmmm, maybe 15 years, and a book that looks as if I picked it up off the $1 table at Barnes & Noble that has three levels of four Swiss Ball workouts each in it.
On May 9, 2020 I embarked on a daily (well, near-daily) routine of brief warmups followed by 10 exercises with the ball, moving on to the next routine and then the next week by week. It’s been great. The only weights in the house are my wussy 3-pound dumbbells and a set of one-pound soft walking weights; after allowing myself a break-in period I was able to cobble the two sets together into 4 pound weights and one of these days will order up some real 5 pounders. But for now, this is working great for me, I roll out of bed, the mat is right there on the floor so there’s no escape. I then head out to the Meer to walk, jog or walk/jog it twice around. And am done.
When there is an exercise that is beyond my capability or comprehension (i.e., the side bridge, or the pushups with my ankles up on the ball) and threatens to bloody if not break my nose, I just sub in another option, like chair dips or a plank.
I am up to the last set in Level 2. A week ago, the ball was getting really squishy from my sitting and reverse-bridging on it. I’d tried to pump it up a couple of times without success (amazingly I knew exactly where the pump that came with it was stashed) and wondered if I needed an inflation pin which at one time I had a box of 15 somewhere. So, I turned to YouTube for guidance. Turns out I’d been trying to pump air into the ball without first removing the plug. Once I pulled that out, it was a whole new ball game.
MEERLY MIRRORED
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CREDITS FOR THIS ISSUE
The new banner (if you’re reading this via email) is courtesy of my incredible talented and adorably droll nephew Raymond, who I teamed up with last summer to attend to the design end of a website project I was commissioned to do. He always just “gets” it, whatever I ask him to do. One of my lost ambitions for this past spring was to try and find more work we could collaborate on. Maybe this summer.
Credit for this week’s WBW headline goes to Catherine Russo Ali. She casually mentioned in an email that she was captivated by the Wind of Change podcast. I checked it out and it had me at hello. Which is pretty amazing because I don’t really like podcasts. I don’t have the listening skills necessary. Especially when there’s no Adderall in my system. It’s the same for Books on Tape (or whatever they’re on these days). I will listen for seven minutes and then start making grocery lists in my head, then have to figure out what I missed and how to back it up. It’s a tribute to Wind of Change that I didn’t have to rewind even once. And it’s sort of made a Scorpions fan out of me.
THE BOTTOM LINES
Next week I cycle through a couple more doctor appointments, will have my every-other Wednesday Covid-19 nose poking a day early and hope it doesn’t take a week to get the results like it did two weeks ago, weirdly since Sarah had her test seconds after me and had her results in 24 hours. She suggests they were preparing a room in a nursing home for me before they released them.
Assuming the result of the test is positive, which is to say negative, I plan to drive to Hartford Thursday morning to have a 30-minute “in person” visit with my mother which is the new routine at Brookdale. I believe the rules were adapted from the Connecticut State Department of Correction General Visitation Guidelines. After a temperature check and strip search, I will meet ET at an outdoor shelter that’s been set up with tables marked at six-foot intervals. Masks and gloves are mandatory. No smoking no food, no drinks, no passing razor blades for garlic slicing. I’m wondering if she’ll recognize me. Maybe I’ll wear a name tag.
Then I may or may not stay overnight. And back to the City for Independence Day.
And maybe, just maybe next week I’ll get the two sets of taxes still waiting for my attention done, the four articles I’ve been meaning to write drafted, the recipes for lasagna, cheesecake, almond cakes, Israeli chicken and the 18 others that are backed up like planes at LAG into Tourtles, another photography project launched and put away the Christmas decorations. And get started on reading all of Barbara Kingsolver’s life’s work, which I vowed to do back in March.
This is, not for nothing, if my math is correct (it so often isn’t) the 49th Weekly BiWeekly. What a long strange trip it’s been.
Cheers
mbl