To Announce That Question

Glad to find I’d misjudged the work I’d only just started yesterday: “Our Holocaust” by Amir Gutfreund turned out to be disarmingly inviting and this morning tempted, challenged, by the quote on the cover, I too read it straight through.  Children spend the first part of the book trying to pry stories about the Holocaust from their elders, their grandparents, the survivors there in the town of Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee.  Survivors are reticent about sharing much with small children, so we get glimpses that suggest horror or courage, or indignity.  Later, confronting mortality, the stories burst forth from characters like Grandpa Yosef.

These tales are difficult to put down.  Sunrise waxed into mid-morning without my even knowing it, touring through, camp to camp in the grim normalcy of Nazi occupied Poland.  One after another I looked up the litany of place names that were unfamiliar, each with its own terrible history, its own grim photos, its own Commandant, its own statistics:  Gross Rosen, Majdanek, Sobibor, Plaszow, Stuthoff.   I think I was brought back to Jonathan Littell and the expansive nightmare of “The Kindly Ones.”  Human evil, normalized, regimented, rationalized.  The vile part of you and me and him and her, held in check, barely by our beliefs, turned then upon its head.  Vile now proper.  Vile permissible, celebrated.  Vile, vile, it speaks to us, to shore up the flimsy protection we have from some contemporary return of pure evil, ascendant. 

I’ve only one more novel left from the purchases I made before this recent trip.  “Only Yesterday” by Israel’s Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon describing a period in Israel before the Shoah, looks to be a satisfying read.  At six hundred and fifty pages it won’t be anything I read in one-sitting . . . but who knows?  It is Sunday after all. 

The Mrs. and I went over to Stone Ridge last night.  Yes, I know the way.  No.  We don’t need the GPS.  A couple we’d met at my daughter’s school own a liquor store out there and my wife was keen to visit.  Up past Mohonk, along the rural isolation of Mohonk Road, into High Falls.  High Falls is an interesting settlement I’ve driven through a few times.  My wife, was considering it anew and we looked but didn’t agree on anywhere we might consider for a dinner.  By the time we found the liquor store it was getting dark and I suggested a drive through Stone Ridge, with its early eighteenth century buildings that somehow survive there, along the main drive.  One wonders what it was that anchored people here on this strip, two hundred years ago.  On our way back to the mini mall where the store was located, we spied a restaurant up upon a hill that looked promising.

The couple we knew weren’t in the liquor store.  We chatted with the well-informed young men who manned the shop.  Yes, they had local rye.  Sure, they stocked a few Gruner Ventliners.  And on the way out I waited for the woman in front of me to be done to ask the gent behind the counter about the restaurant we saw.  I had this inquiry elaborately planned out in my mind.  I’m not sure why I was being judicious.  I suppose I didn’t want to seem like I was from too far away.  But before I could ask, my wife came up and inquired audibly if I was going to ask the man about local restaurants.  And in my mind the who place stared at us.  He mentioned that the place next door, Butterfields, was part of the the Hasbrouck House, and was well regarded.  Another guy piped up and said he went frequently and recommended we try it. 

I nodded and thanked them and bought a bottle of Southern Ulster Rye and left.  My wife went off to have a look at Ming Moon, the Chinese take-out place in the mall.  Chinese immigrants, they didn’t want to talk to her in Chinese.  “I can't understand you.  We serve American Chinese take-out.”  She came back to the car annoyed.  And I suggested that I too was annoyed.  It wasn’t “cool” to announce that question so loudly, the way she did.  I then imitated her asking the question in voice much louder than what really happened.   This escalated into a good old-fashioned fight.  And though I admitted, upon not much reflection that indeed, it had been I, who’d lost my cool, and regardless of the countless times I’d had my Chinese tone corrected, in the parallel world, across the sea, none of it mattered.  We drove home, she sullen, me sheepish.  We’ll have to try Butterfields, some other time. 

Sunday, 2/16/20

Last of the Suet Cake

Finished up Ron Leshem’s “Beaufort” this morning.  A client, who’s become a friend, had recommended it to me, as I was considering Israeli novels to read.  A band of brothers, held out in a not so beau Crusader Fort in fin de siècle southern Lebanon.  The Lieutenant Erez is only a kid himself at twenty-one and he swears and insults and loves and grows cold, watching men he was tasked to protect die from the mortars and the rockets and the snipers of Hezbollah.  Rough language, a simple plot, it reminded me a bit of the “Naked and the Dead” perhaps.  But more importantly it gave me context for my friend and for the many other good people I met who’d suggested they’d served in Lebanon at that time.  What a terrible experience it must have been. 

I’ve only a few books left from the dozen I’d secured before heading over to Israel.  They are among the larger works, not surprisingly.  I decided to start off on Amir Gutfreund’s “Our Holocaust” this morning.   Thirty pages in, it seems a rambling recollection of grandfatherly tales and though it is fiction it is beginning to remind me of Amos Oz’ “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” which was supposed to be “astounding” but left me flat.  Perhaps it will pick up soon. 

I was forgiven this morning.  That’s important.  There’s a gent I’ve been trying to reach in Sao Paulo for weeks now.  He’d reschedule Thursday night and last evening, halfway through a leg of duck I realized that I shouldn’t have ignored that buzzing in my pocket.  Missed our call.  Tried him.  He wasn’t there.  And when I wrote him to explain, I blamed St. Valentine.  “Incurable romantic,” was the charge which he readily acknowledged was a legitimate excuse. 

Sharp, clear winter’s day outside.  The squirrels are eating the sunflower seeds I’d tossed out on to the yard, without a care.  Over on the feeder to my left, a downy woodpecker is making short work of the last of the suet cake we have in the little green cage.  The sparrows seem to be the only ones that can use this heavily fortified squirrel proof feeder I’ve hung down under the porch. I’ll need to stop by Lowes today and get a bit more of bird food.  I’ve been wondering what would happen if I simply poured out an entire bag of seed down there on the lawn.  Would a few squirrels ferret it all off or would a larger collective of seed eaters materialize?  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also eager to see more hawks and foxes show up, in response, as well. 

Saturday 02/15/20

At the Host’s Expense

I can’t get enough Harold Land.  I was listening to an album of Donald Byrd’s the other day, which I’ve heard many times before and only just realized that the esteemed Los Angeles tenor-man was also on the session for “Ethiopian Knights.”  This set me off to consider his discography and all the albums he appears on.  The Wiki page lists nearly one hundred such sessions.  I’m not familiar with the pianist Dolo Coker, nor bassist Curtis Counce, but typing away today, I’m well accompanied with lots of fresh hard-bop.

It’s very beautiful outside.  And I like Fridays.  I had a call at 1:00AM and another at 5:00AM.  I remembered the one at 8:00AM.  But after that marathon, I could begin to properly enjoy some repose.  Once China settles into the end of its Friday, my New York weekend can begin.  Of course, come Sunday evening, local time, its back to work.  I caught up on old emails.   I caught up on writing and I even remembered that it was Valentine’s Day and brought my wife a hot cup of coffee to the bedroom once I heard her stirring around. 

We’ve decided to finally catch up with the rest of world and see “Parasite.”  We’ve decided to take a walk.  We’ve decided to have lunch and perhaps choose a place for dinner.  I suit up for a stroll, but the walk gets cancelled.  We’ll never make the movie.  I’ll have to eat popcorn without having earned it. 

I haven’t been to our local New Paltz movie theatre.  I’ve been warned its small.  It is but it seems as though regular people run it, rather than a multi-billion-dollar homogenized chain.  At the outset of the film they show what seems to be a rather complete listing of all the businesses in town, who pay for advertising spots.  I read my book.  But again, its’ preferred to the slick previews your bombarded with at the Galleria Mall.

An organism that lives off another organism at the host’s expense.  No epiphyte, the Kim family’s infiltration is only interrupted by the presence of another parasite, Kun-sae, who’d long since been drawing from the Park family teat, down in his basement hideout.  I greatly enjoyed the film but having been told about its profundity by multiple third parties before actually viewing things, much of the surprise had already been defanged.  I knew the rain would build.  I knew the party would be ruined.   I didn’t know my wife would focus her empathy on the Park family, and how terrible it would be to have the growth of such a malignant chancre on an otherwise upstanding family. 

A Valentine’s Day dinner then?  I suggested Lombardi’s in Gardiner.  We could tell by the jam-packed parking lot, before we even stepped in that there wouldn’t be any places to wax romantic.  There weren’t.  We called Garvin’s and they were not able to accommodate us either.  We settled on the Main Course, on Main Street, which has good food, but you must serve yourself.  There were tables.  We took one by the window and ate duck and scallops and it was all rather pleasant.  But no one else appeared to be celebrating the evening as a couple, there in the main dining room.

Friday 02/14/20