I'm Not Sure What Normal Is

In New York, I am as far from the commuter rail as I am to the airport in Beijing.  In twenty minutes, I can make my way to either location.  Thirty minutes would be safer, but it never works that way. In Beijing I am in an Uber or a cab.  (Uber has just thrown in the towel and invested in DiDi while I was on the road.  Will Uber still work when I get back?)  I’ll drive if I’m going to pick someone up.  In New York, heading from New Paltz to the Poughkeepsie train station, you’d never think of doing anything but driving yourself.

There is a long stretch of single lane road that always has me wishing it were China.  If it were, I would blow past the other people recklessly and save at least three minutes from my ride.  If I try that in Ulster County I might get a ticket and I might get shot.  I behave myself.  And nearly everyone else does too which allows you to go faster than you would ever feel safe doing in China, where someone is always poised to cut out unexpectedly, opportunistically.

Today I’m dropped off at the station. “Thanks. Bye.”  I’ve got time to buy a ticket properly from the man behind the 1940’s counter, sample what they have at the station store, which isn’t very much.  I didn’t have lunch.  Should I get a Snickers bar?  I don’t really want a Snickers bar.   I shuffled over here to buy something but there’s nothing I want.  It will be a big dinner. 

Down to the stairs and on to the seat I always get, the riverside view right where the long window begins.  It isn’t but it may as well be the same seat I sat in on the very same train doing this run as an eighteen year-old thirty-two years go.  Etiquette on trains is different from etiquette on the highways.  Before we’ve left Poughkeepsie the young man in front of me has struck up a conversation on cell phone with someone.  “I TOLD you.  Are you gonna be there or what?  WHAT?  Look, just BE there.  Yeah.” 

From the sound of things he’s meeting someone in Beacon, which is only nineteen-minutes away now, as we sail out of Poughkeepsie.  In Japan he’d have been asked to keep quiet by now.  In China he’d be just one more loudmouth without the least concern for who else hears what. Here, on Metro North, I’m not sure what normal is.   Now that he has soured the atmosphere I feel uninhibited about starting my own phone call.  Who cares?

He Would Be in Beacon Today

Beacon had a bad reputation when I was young.  So did Poughkeepsie.  But Poughkeepsie was tied to my family and I heard all the stories of how it used to be and I knew the drama of its ups and downs since the day it was a wailing port.  Beacon however, was two stops down river on the train, off from Route 9, hidden from the train stop, I never really saw anything of the town.  And when I was a day student in a boarding school in Poughkeepsie, the Beacon kids were tended to occupy the aggressive, dim, burnout side section of the aquarium.

I rang a friend down in D.C. to see if perhaps we could find a way to meet while I was home.  Remarkably, he would be in Beacon today, which is a hell of a lot closer than Philly.  Sure.  I’ll be there.  My mom suggested one restaurant that was closed. So was a second.  But it was clear that there were many, many choices. 

The main street that runs up from the river is fascinating.  Lots’ of evocative nineteenth century brick facades.  Rising up is that hill which one passes as one goes east on 84, from Route 9 towards the Taconic Parkway.  It was framed beautifully from the town.  More beautifully than I've ever seen it from the highway.  Someone noticed that a long time ago. Turning left towards where our restaurant surely must be according to the numbers, we came upon a waterfall.  "Oh yeah.  Beacon has a waterfall." I recalled.  

My friend looked great and we picked it all up as though we’d seen each other just the other day.  After a lunch we went across the road to the churning water.  Before long my friend's son and he were seeing who could throw the stone the furthest.  And it was the young man who bested the dad,  Pop had a respectable toss himself, mind you.  But soon the daughter said: “Let’s change the game” and she pushed us to see who could land a stone on a ledge, which required less muscle and more finesse.  And in that moment she reminded so clearly of her mother, who had recently passed.  

My Day

I hadn’t made the left off Route 9 into the Franklin D. Roosevelt estate, for many years.  And though Franklin is certainly in the air, I am heading towards a ceremony that honors his wife.  Notably, Eleanor gets nearly equal billing to FDR as we crest the hill and enter Hyde Park.  There are banners on the street lamps, showing a silhouette of Franklin and then one Eleanor, one of Franklin, one of Eleanor.  What other presidential estate does that?  None, I’m sure.

My older daughter has spent the last nine days in the Girls Leadership Worldwide program that is run in conjunction with Eleanor’s Val Kill estate.   But today’s ceremony is at Frank’s spot. 

I can remember working here one summer.  I must have been around fourteen.  I volunteered, certainly, as it was before I began a series of dead end jobs in pursuit of record shopping money.  I can remember FDR’s model ship collection, and the story of when there was a fugitive on the loose when his father stayed up at night with a gun, just in case.  And I recall a cartoon from a magazine cover where a child had written “Roosevelt” on the sidewalk and the caption was “Mom, Billy wrote a bad word!”  That summer I was there the park rangers found a copperhead in a garbage can, which I thought was pretty cool.  The only poisonous snake we had in upstate New York. 

The program afforded each of the thirty or so young ladies a chance to step up on the stage and summarize their experience.  Each one spoke of the quality of the connections they’d enjoyed with one another.  It’s one thing to expose kids to lofty ideas and arrange for talks with powerful women but facilitating them to trust one another and befriend one another seems a much tougher undertaking.  It was all my daughter and all these daughters could talk about.

And nearly everyone had an Eleanor quote:  “A woman is like a teabag.  You don’t know how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”  Nice.  And I was reacquainted with the idea that she wrote "My Day" her column every day of her life except Sunday’s from 1936 till 1962.  I’m coming up on a three-year anniversary of just such an exercise, albeit with a much more modest readership.  Clearly, that is where all her quotes must come from.  And I’m awed and inspired that the great lady kept it up for as long as she did.  I’ll have to dig a few up and see what it was she tended to communicate to the world, every day. 

I skimmed a few and I'm thrilled to see they were somewhat informal and notably approachable.  Here is one I found from my birthday, in 1941  . . . 

https://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1941&_f=md055866

I Actually Have To Put One On

I’ve a tale to tell.  I stood in line with my nephew yesterday at the corner Starbucks, here in New Paltz, New York.  My nephew and I had walked into town along the rail trail.  I tried with get him to listen to the birds.  I wasn’t successful.  I didn’t want to listen to birds when I was his age either.  But the birds were varied and remarkable.

He has wanted a slice of pizza, but when he saw the hot dog man, and piped up, I got him a hot dog.  I asked the guy under the green umbrella if we could sit join him on the free chairs.  “Sure.  I’m not biting, just yet.”  I pondered this and took a bite of my nephew’s dog. 

I asked my nephew twice if he’d like one of the hot dog man’s beverages and he declined.  Heading up the road he regretted this and soon desperately wanted a SOMETHING to drink.  This felt like time to suggest a lesson to learn, rather than to immediately acquiesce.  Fortunately the wine store we visited had water and he was soon sated.  I always visit this wine store when I’m in town because I can generally have an intelligent conversation about places and tastes and preferences.  And then I pay a third of what I’d pay in China for a mediocre mystery bottle.

“Sure, we can stop in a book store.”  The town has three, or four of them.  I wasn’t looking for anything.  But I spied “Father’s and Sons” and which I’d wanted to get for my older daughter.  My nephew found a Star Wars book to his liking.  And then again, at the check out counter, “Slaughter House Five” was staring up at me.  I’d recently searched for that as well in Beijing, unsuccessfully.  My daughter had asked for novels about World War II. 

And by now it was time to head to our rendez vous spot at the Starbucks where I started this all off.  And standing in line my nephew wanted a “pink drink” which is apparently Starbucks hot new drink for youthful refreshment.  I got my triple espresso on the rocks.  When it came up I saw the barista reach for a lid.  I told her “that’s ok, I don’t need a lid.” “I actually have to put one on.” She replied with a bashful smile.  I didn’t protest but I didn’t understand, either.  “That’s funny.” I thought.  And as I went to my seat and began the first page of the Vonnegut novel, I thought about China where I always instruct them to keep the top off.  And they always oblige.  I would most assuredly have pressed if someone told me they were not allowed to do something that seemed stupid to me.  “Why?”  “That’s ridiculous.”  “You should be empowered to respond to customer requests.” I probably would have gone on for a bit in Chinese, trying to prove a pointless point.  But here, there is something unspoken, conveyed, beyond the words that suggests to this young lady and I both that it is a rule, a dumb rule, and it probably isn’t worth the time to debate or investigate it or indeed, discuss it at all. 

Back on Bleeker Street

Back on Bleeker St.  How do you explain Bleeker St.?  I have to because my wife doesn’t really understand it as any different from the next block.  There is the washed up carcass of the Village Gate.  I worked there briefly, you see.  Hundreds of albums were recorded there.  Countless performers mounted one the venues’ three stages.  Now you can get throat lozenges and toilet paper there.  It is a CVS pharmacy. 

But this block was very important.  It was important before I ever visited it because all the people I idolized worked this block around the time I was born.  And by the time I was old enough to come here it was a unique place where you could travel to buy things and hear things and see things you couldn’t get anywhere else.  Mamouns’ falafel were $1.00 in 1982 if I remember correctly.  You couldn’t buy falafel in the suburbs.  And Bleeker Bobs has the latest Minor Threat single in 1982 and there wasn’t any place else that had that single, that music.  There was the place were you could get a tapestry for your room or a bong for your head, or visit Café Del Artist that had couches, (imagine that?, ) and of course there were all the music venues and all the people in their plumage.  

And as I tried to explain what that was like it quickly dawns on you that it isn’t so much that Bleeker St. has changed over the last thirty-five years.  Rather, America has become more and more like Bleeker St.  The tastes and the products of this street have become mainstream.  Starbucks and their comfy chairs are ubiquitous. No one needs to travel here to buy music.  It is all available anywhere, all the time, on-line.  The pressing physicality of cities, the criticality of this block, right here, doesn’t make much sense any more. 

Still, it’s a sunny day.  There are lots of NYU students bouncing around who I’m sure would beg to differ with my old fart reduction of Bleeker St. to an anachronism.  And the buildings are all still standing and they tell silent stories.  And the old couple at the adjacent table who are shuffling off now, they are still here.  I don’t know if they miss the Village Gate but perhaps there are glad they don’t have to walk so far to get toilet paper. 

I shouldn’t worry too much.  Neighborhoods change and migrate. But people still seem to want to meet somewhere, that isn’t virtual.  For now, at least.