NOTES FROM AN IMPERIAL CITY

Russia, light years from Vermont... 

Church of the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg

Detail, Church of the Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg.  (The story below.)

After assuming power in 1855 in the wake of Russia’s disastrous defeat in the Crimean war against Britain, France and Turkey, Alexander II initiated a number of reforms. In 1861 he freed the Russian serfs from their ties to their masters and undertook a rigorous program of military, judicial and urban reforms, never before attempted in Russia. However, during the second half of his reign Alexander II grew wary of the dangers of his system of reforms, having only barely survived a series of attempts on his life, including an explosion in the Winter Palace and the derailment of a train. Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by a group of revolutionaries who threw a bomb at his royal carriage.  The church was built on the site in 1883.

The church and canal, with the ubiquitous electrical wires overhead

BIG COUNTRY

A recent New York Times crossword clue was “Yakutsk river.”  I figured it was somewhere in Russia, although I’d never heard of Yakutsk, so I cheated and looked it up.  Yakutsk is in Siberia and is said to be the coldest city on earth (temperature hovering around -55F in winter).  Unreachable by train or by road most of the year, it can only be reached with certainty by plane from Moscow.   The flight takes eight hours.  When I looked at photos of this strange place I was struck by how familiar it looked. So far from St. Petersburg, it might be expected to look different. Think of comparing, say, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Better yet, consider where you could end up after eight hours of flight time out of New York.  Photos of city buildings in Yakutsk looked like the looming apartment buildings of Petersburg, with the same multitude of electrical wiring hanging over streets and buildings, and south of the city were the same traditional wooden houses––houses I never thought I’d see around St. Petersburg; I thought they were only found somewhere in the vast interior––and the same mud and standing water we saw on the way to Novgorad.  (But to be honest, the mud near Yakutsk looked worse than any I’d ever seen anywhere.)  

The point is, if you flew to Yakutsk from St. Petersburg, you'd know in a second you were in the same country. Russia is big, big, big.

One of the canals in the old center of St. Petersburg

A typical apartment block away from the center

Deep in the mud in the streets of Moscow at festival time, 19th century painting in the Russian Museum

Before we moved to Vermont we had been thinking about riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, a seven-day trip.  Apparently this is only a tourist’s idea of fun.  Not a single Russian we talked with had the slightest interest in traveling to the east.  Nor had any of them been east.  They were as indifferent as we might be about spending a vacation in the middle of, say, Kansas.  Actually, more.

GLIMPSES

Members of a wedding party. St. Petersburg

The first Russian we met, originally from the Ukraine, sat next to us on the flight from Berlin to St. Petersburg. He had been teaching graphic arts and animation in Berlin for the past six months, and lived for the most part in the west.  He was returning to Russia to see family and friends, but had no intention of returning for good.  People from the former Soviet republics and from the countryside are moving to the cities, he said, and people in the cities want to live in the west.  As for him, he would never live in Russia again.

Shoppers and strollers on Nevsky Prospekt

The guy who drove us to the opera one night and later to the airport has a wife and young daughter, and has been driving for our hotel ever since he lost his job at an electronic assembly plant.  His English was not bad although he often fumbled for a word.  His father had been in the Russian Navy.  In 1982 he had been serving in the nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea that developed a leak in its steam generator that led to a release of two tons of liquid metal coolant from its reactor.  Some of the crew, including his father, were severely exposed.  His father’s health, he said, is not good.  How hard is it to get to the US, he asked?  (We’re not the ones to ask, because we really have little idea about the obstacles that exist for others.  To get to Russia we had to jump through a few hoops, but there was never any doubt that we would get there.)  He’d heard it was very difficult, insurmountable for him anyway, to get to the US.  You have to prove you have money and don’t really need to get to the US, so it’s a catch-22 situation.

Ken and Olga

Our guides for the day, Oksana and Arkady for the Novgorad trip, Olga for Pushkin and the Summer Palace, spoke fluent English.  Oksana and Olga had both spent time in the US, Oksana as a student (in Texas and Mississippi), and Olga as a translator (New York City and Denver), both capacities smoothing the way for extended visits.  Arkady was so intent on delivering information––I hesitated to leave his side to take photos as I feared he would continue talking to the air–– there was little opportunity for a more personal exchange. When we pressed him a bit for his political views he assured us he favored stability above all.  Oksana and Olga were less conservative and cynical about the role of new wealth––several answers to our questions ended with “Well, if you have money, you can do anything.”

Arkady

Pushkin Statue, with fresh flowers. Olga could recite his poetry at the drop of a hat.
Honoring the poet this way felt very Russian.

A SENSE OF HISTORY

Arkady was our guide to the eleventh century churches and Kremlin of Veliky Novgorad––a town on the road to Moscow two and a half hours south of Petersburg that was settled in the ninth century, one of the oldest cities in Russia.  In 1941 during World War II the city was occupied by the German Army and only liberated in 1944 by the Red Army.  We stood on the banks of the river Volkhov on one side of which had stood the German forces, and on the other side the Red Army.  

The Volkhov flows north into Lake Ladoga, the largest lake of Europe––who knew?––and eventually into the Baltic Sea.  According to Wikipedia fewer than forty out of  2,536 stone buildings in Novgorad remained standing after the war.  The central part of the city was gradually restored and in 1992 its chief monuments, the Kremlin, the ancient churches, were declared to be the World Heritage Sites.  In 1999 the city was officially renamed Veliky Novgorod (Great Novgorod).

The 13th century Novgorad Kremlin (fortress) and church (foreground)

The beautiful St. Sophia 12th century church,and the Millennium Monument (1,000 years of Russian history!), Novgorad

The Volkhov River, Novgorad

Seeing St. Petersburg today it is hard to grasp that in World War II St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, was under siege by the German Army from September 1941 until January 1944, one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, and an incredibly costly one, with up to a million and a half deaths of soldiers and civilians by starvation and bombardment.  

The palaces of the Tsars, including the Catherine Palace in Pushkin and other historic landmarks located outside the city's defensive perimeter, were looted and destroyed and many art collections transported to Nazi Germany. I remember reading about the siege in the 1970’s in Harrison Salisbury’s “The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad.”  After the breakup of the USSR in the 1990’s there was a burst of restoration and it was only then that the city’s name was changed back to St. Petersburg.  We read about, but did not see, a sign that still remains on Nevsky Prospekt warning citizens to stay on the other side of the street because of air bombardment.  The name change and the extensive restorations seemed to push this history further back into memory below a sheen of fresh gold.

The Winter Palace (and Hermitage Museum)

The Summer Palace (Catherine Palace) in Pushkin

Ballroom of the Summer Palace

Nicholas II, deposed by the Revolution and killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, his throne in the background.

The same throne, same ballroom, the Winter Palace

Lenin in front of  an example of Stalinesque architecture. Stalin was bad, but Lenin is still admired; fresh roses could be found at the feet of his statue in Novgorad

In the theater's "grotto"

AT THE OPERA

The opera theater, the Baron von Derviz mansion

In St. Petersburg we saw––appropriately, I thought––“Boris Godunov,” the convoluted tale of an actual sixteenth century Tsar, in a production that could easily have been at the ART (American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, where we have long had season tickets and where the production qualities have on occasion exceeded the product).  The singing was excellent, I thought, but the audience, so unlike the appreciative and sophisticated Vienna audience we were part of at the Vienna Philharmonic the week before, seemed unimpressed.  In Vienna everyone was dressed up––men wore ties, the women looked smart––but here most of the audience was garbed more for Sunday dinner with the family.  One enthusiast seated behind us shouted out “Bravo!” after impressive arias, but most of the audience clapped feebly.  A few left at intermission, and two ladies next to me left immediately after a simulated sex scene.  

At the end everyone simply got up and walked out as if they were heading for their next meeting.  As we waited in the theater lobby for a taxi––you don’t simply hail taxis in St. Petersburg, especially if you’re a tourist, as you’ll be taken for a ride, in the other sense of the word, and you’ll never see legitimate taxis sitting around waiting anyway––we saw the singers heading for the door one by one. They looked like some poorer members of the audience, wearing baseball jackets and jeans or the like, with no flowers in their arms, and no accolades or even acknowledgements from people they walked past.  They might as well have been stagehands.  I waved to one singer and he nodded back at me.  In retrospect I wish I’d waved more enthusiastically, blown a kiss, or something. Lieselotte, my cousin’s wife whom we visited in Vienna, is a fervent opera buff.  I wonder what she would have thought.  

LITTLE HOUSES

Along the St. Petersburg-Moscow highway (video)

The road to Moscow––I can vouch for the two and a half hours worth out of Petersburg––is severely potholed from one side to the other.  There’s no way for the huge trucks and car traffic zooming along at speed to avoid the cracks and holes. Oksana, our guide, pointed out the piles of tires here and there alongside the road–along with considerable amounts of trash; recycling has yet to come to Russia––that are the sad result.  People buy all these fancy cars, she said, but they only last a year or two because of the roads.  So why don’t they fix the roads?  Well, they will come and fix a part, said Oksana, but then another part needs fixing and there aren’t enough people to fix them all.  This explanation seemed incomplete.  Did I mention their contempt for seat belts?  Taxi drivers tie them behind the seat so as not to be bothered.  Americans, they’re so safety-conscious.

A dacha on the road to Moscow

Then there are the little wooden houses.  They fascinated me.  So many log houses, almost all of them with three, occasionally four, small windows in front under the gable and small fenced yards with newly cut wood piles, lined up close to the busy highway.  Muddy roads led to many more in the distance, tiny settlements.  These houses were identical to those we saw in the Russian Museum as examples of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century peasant homes as recreated in the Sturbridge Village-type park in the town next to Novgorad, with the same number of windows below the gable.  

Mostly old people live in these houses now, Oksana said.  No one wants to live outside the city now, and no one wants to farm.  But, I wondered, are there that many old people?  Well, young people who live in the city like to have dachas in the country and so they like these old houses.  In the flat muddy land between Petersburg and Novgorad it was hard to imagine country life as lived in a little wooden house while the traffic goes roaring by.  

Wood and more wood; churches and elaborate peasant houses on exhibit near Novgorad

VIENNA, The Gabron Side

I wish I were a better listener.  Or a less diffident interrogator.  Family information I thought I had correct is often not.  Even now, after talking with my cousin’s wife Lieselotte in Vienna, I’m sure I still have some wrong information.  The Gabrons, my father's side of the family, were scattered to several countries before and after the Second World War, and not accessible to me.  I never met my paternal grandmother, for instance.  Gabrons were not given to talking about family.  Maybe there were too many tensions, maybe there were too many unhappy memories.

My father had four sisters, Ella, Adele, Irma and Ida.  I used to get their names confused because they have such a similar rhythm.  Most of their lives were lived without their husbands.  

Schönberg ("pretty mountain"), where my father and his sisters were born, founded by Germans in 1269, now part of the Czech Republic and called Šumperk,.  Painted in 1864 and found on Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Šumperk

Schönberg again, the subject of a painting in Lieselotte's apartment

Ella’s life was the most tragic.  She died young, shot along with several other people by Czech partisans (?) during the Second World War.  (I don’t know why.  Perhaps she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I don’t remember the details, if I ever heard them.)  George, her only child, managed to escape.  “Run!” she had said, handing him her jewelry, and George ran.  Ella’s husband was a monster.  That’s what George told us some years ago.  He hated him.  He was so horrible, said Lieselotte, that I can’t even talk about him.  Ella was my father’s favorite. When he mentioned her name his voice was touched with sadness.  His feelings for his other three sisters were mixed.

George, alone now, wanted to run as far from his father as he could.  Australia would be far enough; Ida was there and could sponsor him.  But it wasn’t easy to get out of Austria at that time. (Or was he in Czechoslovakia?)   He told us of a train ride (in Germany? In Austria? ) when he disguised himself as an American soldier, praying no one would speak to him as he knew not a single word of English. More daring misadventures later, and after several entreaties to Ida, she finally agreed to be his sponsor, and he was allowed to emigrate. 

Violence in stone:  at the entrance to the Hofburg Palace

More mayhem around the corner from the Hofburg
 (If only our enemies were always slimy lizards)

Ida was the strange one.  Before the war she had fallen in love with a man named Hans who took off to Australia to seek his fortune in gold.  Which he made, lost, remade and lost yet again.  Anyway, she followed him, and they eventually settled in a remote area (no longer so remote; now it has a paved road and tourists) on the Daintree River where they established a small plantation.  Without children, she and Hans did not exactly welcome George, and they treated him badly.  Ida was merely eccentric but Hans was ill-tempered, opinionated, and surly.

George soon fled Daintree, to Melbourne this time, to find some way to make a living.  There he eventually met and married Nelly (how she came to be in Australia is yet another story), and they had three children:  Peter, Sonia, and Karin, who have numerous beautiful children and live today in Melbourne and Noosa.  George and Nelly’s family is the only branch I know of that still bears the name Gabron.  But of course George’s last name was not originally Gabron.  He couldn’t bear to carry his father’s name (was it Drobenko?) so he took the name of his mother.

Adele lost her husband in the war, and ended up living in Germany’s mid-section, near Kassel. She had two daughters, Heidi and Margita, both of whom had children, one or more of whom may be living in South America.  No more is known.

Irma's, then Lieselotte's apartment on Paniglgasse.  The painting of Schönberg is on the right. The apartment looks much as I remembered it.

Irma also lost her husband in the war.  My father bought––or perhaps only subsidized––the apartment at 9 Paniglgasse somewhere between 1945 and 1948 for his mother Josephine, daughter Irma, Irma’s son Gernod, and daughter Inge (that odd rhythm of names again).  When Josephine died in her nineties, the apartment became Irma’s.  Daughter Inge wasted no time getting herself out of post-war Vienna (Paniglgasse was in the Russian Zone after the war) and came to the US to marry an American soldier––landing in Gary, Indiana, of all places––divorced him in short order, remarried, and reportedly divorced the second as well.  There her trail ends.  

In Vienna meanwhile, Gernod eventually married Lieselotte whom he met at university. They had much in common.  She had grown up nearby, her father had also been killed in the war, and they both enjoyed mathematics.  And travel.  (Lieselotte worked for Austrian Airlines for over twenty years.)  They lived in Paniglgasse 9 together with Irma until she died around 1984.  After Gernod’s sudden death––he apparently dived into the Danube one summer’s day in 1987 at age 44 and was not seen alive again.  (His body was found days later, but as there was no water in his lungs, it was assumed he did not die by drowning.)  Lieselotte continued to live in #9 Paniglgasse.

Lieselotte, a huge opera fan, at the Vienna Staatsoper stage door where she is a frequent visitor. 

What do I know for certain?

I met Adele and daughters Heidi and Margita when I was 17 and they were living in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.  I never saw them again, although I heard later that one or both lived in Switzerland, and one or both had children.  Lieselotte traveled to Australia once with Margita. As for the children, the trail is cold.

I met Irma too when I was 17. I visited the apartment at 9 Paniglgasse.  Irma was utterly self-centered, and seemed to be someone who loved a good party. (Lieselotte, who with Gernod had to live with her for seven long years, had much more to say on the topic of Irma.)  Daughter Inge came to New York City and stayed for a while with my family when I was about twelve years old.  She was beautiful and snobbish, with no interest in a twelve year old, so naturally I didn’t like her.  

By the time Ken and I met Ida and Hans they were living in an nursing home in outback Australia, if  “met” is the right word, as they were both in wretched condition and had no idea who we were.  

The first time we met George and Nelly was at our house on Dexter Road in Lexington when my mother drove them up from New York City on their first trip to the US.  Leah took up their invitation and visited Australia the summer after junior year in high school.  We visited them ourselves on our first Australian trip in 1989.  George died that same year at a time when Lieselotte happened to be there.  She made four more trips to Australia after that. We visited Nelly and family twice after George’s death. We met Lieselotte for the first time on this trip and she became our de facto guide to the best of Vienna.

Karlskirche, near our apartment and Lieselotte's 

Paniglgasse:  Five front windows on the second floor are Lieselotte's apartment

The "heurige" (traditional Viennese wine bar) we visited with Lieselotte in the outskirts of Vienna.  Beethoven lived next door.  Below, a pour of the new wine.  The asparagus are in––with hollandaise!

Paniglgasse 9 is in what’s now considered a trendy urban area of Vienna:  near to the beautiful Karlskirche and Karlsplatz, a short walk to the opera, museums, theater, the old and imperial parts of the city, and steps away from the Naschmarkt, a daily cornucopia of food––meat, fruits and vegetables, cheese, spices, pastries, flowers, restaurants and more.  

At the Naschmarkt the food shops and eateries go on and on for many blocks.  On Sundays it vanishes.

ADDENDUM:

What didn't I know?

After writing this I heard from Australia, from Karin, who said she knew my cousin Margita lived in Switzerland; her daughter Christina visited Australia with her boyfriend (and later husband) Romano; my other cousin Heidi lives or lived in Kassel, Germany, while cousin Inge lives in Indiana and has a married daughter Julia living somewhere in New York State, and two sons named Steven and Troy.  Why didn't my father know any of this?  Or was he just not interested?  Or did he know and not tell me?

SPRING CLOUDS AND OTHER THINGS

It seems only right to start with our only shrub that's blooming right now:  our variegated forsythia. Suburbs have many more ornamental bloomers than Vermont, in case you wondered!

Looming over the Adirondacks to the west is a menacing range of clouds.  Opposite, to the east, are equally dark masses of cloud.  In between there is blue sky and sun.  And wind.  This sense of what is happening in the sky is so intimate, so much a part of our experience here, that I find it hard to remember all the years of unawareness, of not-caring, not-seeing.  It surprises me that there can be a day of snow, or rain, over the mountains, and spring sunshine here, all within my view.  When I stop to think about it, of course, there were all too many times that we left Boston on a perfect fair day to hike in the White Mountains in New Hampshire only to say “Uh-oh,” as Franconia Notch came into sight, and we could see ahead to the high peaks covered by leaden clouds.  The mountains have fooled us plenty of times.  One spring (or was it fall?) hiking season I remember starting on out on promising mornings about five times only to end up each time in fog and rain and, worst of all, no view at the top for a reward. 

Sugarbush ski area closed over a week ago, but don’t imagine the skiing was anything to brag about near the end.  The Snow Bowl and Rikerts cross-country gave up earlier.  It was a winter that was on the edge of being not-winter.  Yet below is a photo that a die-hard skier took yesterday (yesterday!) at Stowe where they had 24 inches of new snow.

And this, at Mad River Glen, taken–not by me!–on April 12:

In a few days we'll be leaving this behind, flying over the clouds headed for Vienna and St. Petersburg.

So, why Vienna?

My father was from Vienna.  I was last there, my only visit, when I was 17,  traveling with my parents.  It was then I first met my aunt Irma, one of my father’s original three sisters.  (His favorite sister was shot and killed during the war.)  We met Irma at her apartment in Paniglgasse, today a trendy hotspot, a place my father had bought for his mother after World War II.  It had been in the Russian Zone where living was especially lean in those days.  Tante Irma had a son, Gernod, my cousin, who was somewhere else when we visited, away at school maybe.  I was curious about him, but I guess not curious enough, as I never made any effort afterward to get in touch.  I imagine he was indifferent too, because I never heard anything from him. For instance, I never heard he was sorry to have missed meeting me.  His mother, according to my father, enjoyed living the good life, having fun, maybe a little too much. From the time we spent with her on that short visit, I thought he may have had a point.

Led by Irma, we spent a raucous evening that first night in Vienna––my mother, my father, Aunt Irma, assorted friends of hers whose names I probably never knew, my best friend Diana who was traveling with us, and me––visiting what I learned later are called “heuriger,” traditional wine bars serving Austrian wines in the Vienna Woods outside the city.  As the night wore on, our group, I remember well, grew louder and larger as we moved from one heuriger to another.  My parents didn’t seem to notice when not-so-young race car driver (so he said) from Argentina sidled up to Diana and me and started making passes at both of us. I figured they had forgotten we were there.

I never met Gernod, but I was to hear things about him years later, suggestions of drinking and gambling in different countries.  He had some sort of job connected with airlines, so he traveled a lot.    Nothing was ever very specific.  Again, I was uncurious.  He was, after all, someone I had never even met.   With his wife, Lieselotte, Gernod visited our mutual Australian connection, my cousin George and his wife Nelly, as we did.  So we heard a little about him, discreet stories that didn’t exactly burnish his reputation, one occasion beyond mentioning in polite company.   After his mysterious death some years ago (suicide in the Rhine, I heard) Lieselotte continued to visit Nelly, a widow herself now, on her own.  More than once we were in Australia just before or just after one of her visits.  

So it came about that a desire to see Vienna again began to grow.  I wondered if I could find that apartment on Paniglgasse.  I wondered if I shouldn't try to meet Lieselotte.  It turned out to be incredibly easy.  We rented an apartment in the general area that by chance happened to be steps away from Paniglgasse.  Finding Lieselotte was even simpler.  I found her address more quickly on the internet than I got it from Australia. She lives in the very apartment I visited those many years ago.  We have been in touch and plan to meet.

Why St. Petersburg?

Before we had any idea we were going to move to Vermont we had come up with the idea for an interesting trip.  We would get on a train in Poland or someplace in eastern Europe and head for Moscow where we would board the Transsiberian Express.  We would opt for the Beijing train, ferry to Japan, and fly home from there.  It still sounds interesting, but all that time on a train…hmmm.  It lost its lure.  The whole thing sounds a little tiring.  (How could we leave Vermont for so long?  And our dogs?)  A visit to St. Petersburg is the remnant of that imagined trip.

DOG DAYS

DOGS

It’s a good thing we love Rufus, our adopted beagle.  Very good, because he’s been costing us a small fortune.  He has already set a record as the most expensive dog we’ve ever had.  It’s kind of an erosive process.  It starts off with one obvious thing that needs specialist-type fixing (cataracts, in his case; he would bump into things, fix you with his clouded gaze), and before you know it, you’re off and running.  Treatments that carry warnings along the lines of  “in a few cases, there could be complications…” often don’t get my full attention.  Rufus, however, is in that small percentile of dogs in that category.  Removal of cataracts was not a straightforward issue.  Resulting eye issues, ongoing eye issues–including reactions to eye medication–led to more treatment. He’s now in recovery from both the latest specialty treatment (laser eye surgery) and his medications.  Our senior dog Harry, getting into the spirit of things, developed an eye problem last week–a minor one, happily–so he’s been getting eye drops as well.  We are developing close relationships with our vets.

DOG DAYS

View from the hammock

Like everywhere else in the Eastern half of the USA, we’ve had a few samples of the dog days of summer as well as the sweet days of spring.  Except for the fact that it was still mid-March when this happened, everyone found it hard to actually complain about the balmy weather.  The alternative, after all, is the rawness of mud season. 

It is weird, though, because everything seems to be happening at once and at full speed.  In March the grass began to green almost overnight, and then it started growing (are we going to have to mow the lawn in April?) and the weeds are sprouting as if it were summer.  Buds are opening.  The forsythia is in bloom.  Ducks have been visiting our pond in the mornings, a month earlier than last year.  The chorus of frogs in our pond is already creating a din.  Last year I commented on the frog sounds in mid-May.  Granted, they probably began chirping well before I wrote about it.  Still–mid-May? I picture creatures out there in a crazed rush to do what they have to do because spring already turned into summer and whatever happened to winter anyway?  Talk about living in fast forward!  Only two weeks ago we were skiing at Sugarbush in cold weather with good snow.  Maple sap was running then and we made syrup.  But the sap run was over shortly after it got going. We barely finished boiling a couple of barrels of sap when it got so warm the sap stopped running.  Maple season is officially over, and major producers say the season gave them 50% less than last year. 

The evaporating pan over a wood-fueled fire

Part of our sugaring crew (the next weekend we were fully staffed with Leah, Cliff and Olin)

DOGGED LAWMEN

Notes on our local law enforcers from the police blotter of our local paper:

“On March 6 at 4:24 AM responded to a call for help from a Chipman Hill resident who said her toilet was overflowing and her plumber was in the hospital.  When police arrived they found that the overflowing had stopped.”

“On March 6 at 5 PM responded to a caller who reported a barefoot man standing next to a white truck on Merchants Row, possibly parked in the handicap parking and with the truck radio playing loudly.  The man told the police officer that he was cooling his feet and would be leaving shortly.”

“On March 9 at 8:30 PM were called to a Middlebury home by a woman who said she heard footsteps downstairs and when she asked who was there, the footsteps stopped.  Officers went to the home and found it was the husband who had come home without telling his wife.”

(Of course there’s more going on than this; I’m not bothering to cite the more prosaic arrests for drugging, drinking or fighting or driving while drugging, drinking or fighting.)

Goodbye, old dog winter!
(Last bit of snow in the woods behind our house, just a few weeks ago.)

I STILL CAN'T STAND QUEENS

As I was saying...  (see previous blog post)


About a year or so I came across a couple of pages of writing on a yellow legal pad, something I must have written in the late 1970's or 1980's while I was staying at my parents' house in Queens for a longer period than the usual weekend visit.  Don't remember why.  But I was going stir-crazy for sure.  That I remember.  


Here it is.

65-19 78th Street, after an outdoor clean-up, 1952

The sky is pink at night, a lurid color, hinting at some violence happening somewhere, not so far away.  I hear police cars heading east, south, west, every direction, just not down these particular streets.  Only chance, of course.  “Don’t go out at night,” he says.  “A woman down the street, she was attacked, and they took her purse.”  No saying exactly when this was, or how, or even why.  Maybe she’s the only one.  Maybe she’s one of thousands. Maybe rapists and muggers and killers with long knives are crouching behind the few pathetic bushes that pimple the tiny five by five plots of grass that reside redundantly before each nearly identical house.  Maybe.  I don’t really know.  It’s easier just to stop going out after dark.  Except to the mailbox or to the corner.  I kind of enjoy sort of sneaking out to the mailbox, defying danger, as it were.  All those hairy dark men won’t get me.  If they’re there.  Which I doubt.

But why push it.  There’s a black world out there–not just evil people, evil things–but the raw, unbuttoned grotesqueries of life itself.  Sloppy houses, dirt, unkempt people who are all right otherwise–you never know, give them a chance, right?  Things said and done that you wouldn’t believe.  Everyday.  Things to be afraid of.  All of them.  Yes, even nature.  Scrape, scrape scrape, each morning.  Neighbors raking leaves off chipped cement sidewalks.  What a mess.  Nature itself, so filthy, so disorderly.  Just a few miles away, the sea. True, one must travel miles of too narrow streets, traffic lights, turn onto tightly compressed highways onto other highways that all look the same, all built too long ago, under-maintained, rutted, with rusted dented railings that bear the marks of accidents, years of accidents, weedy shoulders on which reside the deserted wrecks of more recent disasters vandalized now–each day another tire gone, door hanging.  And beyond that, just another couple of miles–I know it’s out there–the sea breaks on the shore carrying the rumblings of water from far away to New York City which, to the sea, is just another place.  Here, this tiny part, is a complete universe.  The smallest one I’ve been in for a long while.

Keep it away, keep it away.  It must be that there are too many risks–could that be?–letting in the sea, all that unkempt life.  Is that it?  Risk of what?  I have talked with many people this week, and yet, with one exception, the world, the rest of it, has not entered this small universe.  Women in their sixties and seventies who can’t drive, never did.  While their husbands were alive they transported these women.  The women served their husbands, served good food I’ve no doubt, agreed with them or went along. (I‘m just guessing on the evidence, the ready simple phrases, the sighs, “Well, that’s just the way it was,” which passes for thought.)  Another phrase, about the world “What can you do?” No choice, you see.  One cannot hope to change anything, much less one’s own self.  Her husband and mother to care for, for nearly fifty years.  He worked, she cared for both.  In a tiny house–another in one of those endless rows.  Finally, finally, because it was a strain, they both died, and she was now free to roam the world (and she travels mightily, even to Russia, but it doesn’t show) and move to an even tinier place.  Big sigh.  Acceptance.  But wait.  She has a friend. (I hear this all from my mother.  Is the story screened at all, I wonder?)  Her friend, frail and old now, was building a boat, a goddamned cabin cruiser, in the basement of her tiny home.  Yes, really.  He began it years ago when he was in better health, and has had to let up when he grew too weak to lay wood, beautiful wood, carefully smoothed and sanded and fitted.  But surely here is a romance, a story of yearning and hope and desire and beauty.  That’s what I think, but that’s not how it is told.  He just stopped, you see, and now they have to get rid of it.  (Will it fit through the door?  Can it get to the sea?)  Maybe he built it out of instinct.  Maybe he had nothing better to do.  Like a weaver bird knitting its delicate nest–what else could it do?

The right thing to do, of course, is to have a nice house, something well kept up, you know, always dusted, always neat, good solid food, not too spicy (spicyness allows that unwashed world to enter), nothing extreme, muted colors are safest but bright ones would be all right if the house was really nice and the car large, comfortable (no stick shifts) and clean.  And the husband in a good job (doesn’t matter what kind, that won’t be discussed) and the wife (not me!) a good housewife, nothing extreme.  No job for the housewife, but if there is one, best it have a low profile.  Of course it won’t be discussed.  Except to say, “How’s it going?  Is it all right?”  “Yes, it’s all right.”  “Good, good.”

One can get by here with very few words. “Look at that.  They never clean it up.  Even in the winter.  The snow.  They don’t shovel.  It’s a mess.”  (Fall leaves cover a brief skirt of a yard, the sidewalk, a car.)  “Oh, look, it’s really beautiful today.  I wish it wouldn’t get cold.  Look at the color on the trees.”  (Eroded shades of dark red, an occasional yellow, mostly brownish trees–pollution-resistant oaks–lining the highway.)

Those aren’t the few words, just some that come to mind when I think about the sea, such a few short miles away…

The words to get by on have to do with food.  What shall we eat today, how should we make it, where to we need to buy it.  It’s bought European style, a bit here, a bit there, and takes an enormous amount of time.  It is the main event.  It doesn’t allow for other highly theoretical main events.  What could they be?  No time to see the ocean until at least perhaps Thursday of next week, if there’s no traffic, if the weather’s nice, if, if.  Keep away a possibly frightening search for other occupations.  (What else is there to do?  In such a city?) 

If there’s rain, close the windows, keep inside.  If snow, move it away.  Sun, stay in the shade.  Tick, tick, tick.

Don’t analyze.  No need to question.  Ask why?  Why?  Avoid unpleasantness.  “You know how it is.”  “That’s the way it is.”  “Well, what can you do.”  “That’s nice.”  “It’s not the way it used to be.”  “The politicians, they’re all the same.  What difference does it make?”  “Everybody’s lazy, they don’t care.”  “They’re only out for a buck.”  “People don’t keep things up like they used to.”  “Well, I don’t know.” 

Sigh.