Me, My Elf & I

I am what my husband likes to refer to as "Jewish enough."  Raised though I was in that Other Religion (or, as my husband likes to call it, "the Spin-Off) I have no deep-rooted affinity to the faith of my upbringing and am not, in fact, a believer.  Therefore, it was no great wrench for me to agree to be married under the chuppah by a broad-minded lady rabbi.  She had to be broad-minded, because I did not convert to Judaism, since, truth to tell, I didn't believe in that, either.  However, since my husband-to-be and I were swiftly cresting middle age at the time of the ceremony (yes, Gentle Reader - sadly, it's all downhill from here) there was no question of quibbling over How Will the Children Be Raised.  There weren't going to be any children - barring one of those ludicrous Abraham-and-Sarah scenarios that make it so hard for skeptical people like me to take the whole thing very seriously in the first place.

Mind you, every so often I have sat in shul on a Friday night and enjoyed the music. After awhile, I even got so I could hum-sing along without getting caught. Having seen the baroque church architecture of Bavaria in my younger days, and turned away with a shudder as visions of demented pastry chefs with glue-guns and gold leaf danced through my head, I have to say it was also quite refreshing to sit in the relatively chaste decor of B'nai Jeshurun when we still lived on the Upper West Side.

And since we are the kind of people who perk up and start concocting menus and guest lists when somebody says "holiday"and "party" in the same breath, we have simply doubled up on the celebrations, and that seems to work very well.  Pass the matzah ball soup and crack the shells on some of those oddly-tinted eggs, please.

However, even after ten years of seasonal togetherness, it never fails to take my husband by surprise when December rolls around and I am overcome by nostalgie de la Buche de Noel and start decking those halls like an ambitious designer who has just been handed the contract to bedizen the Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas windows.

This year I am worse than ever, for several reasons.

1. We have a much bigger house.  Hence, I have a much larger canvas.

2. The former owner not only left behind an incomplete set of Spode china, two Wusthof knives, an unbelievable amount of dirt and rubbish, and - the jewel in the crown - a minuscule plastic wind-up phallus that hops up and down on two wee plastic feet, she also left us a ton of Christmas decorations, including (but not limited to):  A fake fir banister garland entwined with crimson silk poinsettias, blood-red silk roses, and tiny white lightbulbs; a wreath made entirely of jingle bells; an enormous pair of red metallic-toned Christmas bells; thirteen whimsical little china buildings that have lightbulbs inside them and look remarkably like the annual choo-choo display at the Bronx Botanical Garden if you don't look too closely (the buildings include several churches, a tea room, a lighthouse, and, strangest of all, a lobster restaurant - somebody must have gone to Maine); a slew of large plastic candy canes (for lining the walk to the front door); three fake poinsettias in gold-foil pots; umpteen strings of holiday lights; and quite a lot of pieces of Styrofoam gaily wrapped as holiday gifts, just to put everybody in the mood.  Add to this the enormous amount of holiday kitsch I lugged along from our apartment-dwelling days and well, you really have something.

I have also discovered, with a touch of dismay, that the former owner, a fragile elderly woman who probably weighed about 90 lbs. soaking wet, managed to drive four nails into the solid stone fireplace wall - for hanging the stockings with care, in the hope that You-Know-Who soon would be there, dontcha know.  So that was where I hung the little felt menorah with the Velcro'd fabric  flames that get stuck to the menorah one-by-one to the right of the fireplace, and the fake mistletoe that the former homeowner left on the other side, till I can find a place to hang the mistletoe where somebody might actually kiss under it.  The little wooden King Nutcracker who turned up in the silverware drawer is on the mantelpiece. I had tried him on the hearth at first, but the dog was inclined to think he was a new toy and I got tired of fishing him out from under the bed.  I think it must be the fake fur beard that's confusing her.

3. Now that he's safely at college and in no danger of being mistaken for a Child, my Son and Heir has stopped being Cynical about Good Old Fashioned Holiday Cheer and become Sentimental (which is, of course, a sign that he's actually getting Old, but don't tell him I said so.)

4. Nobody is home during the day to make me stop.

So I have been elfing away like mad, and I'm having a great deal of fun with it.  But every night my poor dear husband comes home from work, puts his head into his hands, and moans, "Tchotchkes! More tchotchkes!"

I haven't had the heart to tell him that I've found a place where they sell really big trees.

O'er the Fields We Go, Cussing All the Way

Happy Thanksgiving, my leetle cabbages!

In honor of all who are presently cooling their heels in an airport lounge in Chicago as the Thanksgiving feast cools upon the table in Connecticut... in honor of those who are now sitting in their automobiles on a parkway that has turned into a parking lot, wondering why they didn't have the foresight to bring along a bucket of Kentucky Fried before embarking...in honor of those who are currently thinking, "To hell with this - next year, let's just stay home and send out for pizza!"  :

I bring to you a Guest Blogger.

Here, without further ado, are the less-than-merry misadventures of my cousin Christine, who guilelessly agreed to visit us from Canada two weeks ago in honor of my mother's birthday party, patriotically entrusted herself to the tender mercies of her national airline, and is here to tell us the tale, after learning for herself that, in sorry truth, no good deed goes unpunished.  But I'll let Christine tell you about it....

I am not a morning person, and would have been grouchy all the way to the JFK airport were it not for the beautiful sunrise and spectacular view of the Hudson River and New York City along the way.  I was supposed to leave at 5:30 p.m.; that's what I booked and that's what I paid for, but a certain national airline of a certain country bordering the USA to the north has decided that I should leave at 10:30 a.m. instead, and has graciously changed my flight without asking my permission. 

Unfortunately, my connecting flight in Toronto was not changed, leaving me with a 9 hour layover.   At check-in, they assume my final destination is Toronto.  When I correct the nice gentleman at the counter he replies "Wow, you have such a long layover - your connecting flight doesn't even show on my screen!"  I thank him for reminding me, but tell him that customer service has told me there are no earlier flights.  "On the contrary", he replies "there is an earlier flight which appears to be fully booked, but when you arrive in Toronto, you should ask to be put on standby".  I thank him and check in. 

After an uneventful flight to Toronto, I head over to the customer service desk, where a clerk informs me that she is not allowed to put anyone on standby for the earlier flight.  "Fine," I say "then perhaps you could give me a complimentary pass to the lounge so I can at least be comfortable for the 9 hours I will spend here."  I am informed that the lounge is only for elite passengers, which makes me feel highly valued. 

Speaking a little louder now, I wonder how an airline could steal an entire day of my vacation and offer me absolutely no compensation.  This prompts the clerk to check with her supervisor, which results in her obtaining permission to put me on the standby list for the earlier flight.

When my name is called in the departure lounge, my heart skips a beat.  I joined another lucky standby passenger, and, trotting down the ramp to the aircraft, we giddily comment on our good fortune and pinkie swear that we'll both buy lottery tickets as soon as we land. 

Settled in my seat and waiting to push away from the gate, I notice a couple of drops of liquid dripping on the head of the man in front of me.  He notices, too.  He calls the flight attendant over and informs her that something is leaking.  She indicates that it is likely condensation caused by the cold weather.  I point out that the liquid is bright yellow (obvious on his snow-white hair).  She calls for a mechanic.  The mechanic comes and checks out the situation.  Shortly after the mechanic leaves, the captain announces that de-icing fluid is leaking into the cabin, which is indicative of a hole in the fuselage, so we will not be using this aircraft today.  We are directed to disembark and wait in the lounge area for instructions. 

The lounge lady tells us that they will be securing another aircraft, which will leave gate D28 in two hours.  In the meantime, we can go to any food kiosk, show our boarding pass and have up to $10 worth of food at the airline's expense.  I am not particularly hungry, but am genetically predisposed to frugality and therefore decide to get my $10 worth of food.  I try two different kiosks, where they have no idea what I am talking about and looked at me with such suspicion that I feel like a criminal. 

I give up on food and go to gate D28.  Unpack laptop, get to work.  Next gate over, they are preparing to board a flight from Vancouver and announce that instead of a 777 they have received a 767, so about 40 passengers will not be boarding the flight.  The guy sitting next to me freaks out, as he has been away from his family for 3 weeks and doesn't want to miss his kid's birthday.  Mayhem ensues, and 40 ticked-off people shuffle off.  Things are quiet again.

Looking up from my keyboard I notice that the board at the gate in front of me no longer lists my flight, but a later flight is up there.  I pack everything up, go find a monitor, and discover that my flight has been moved to another gate.  Find gate, unpack, check monitor 30 minutes later, notice monitor has changed, pack up, move to new gate, unpack, and FINALLY board my flight at five minutes prior to the rescheduled departure time.  Wait and wait for de-icing and, fortunately, there don't seem to be any holes in this aircraft.  Takeoff is about 30 minutes late.

So, in the end, I arrive in Winnipeg at 9:30 p.m.  One hour earlier than my originally scheduled flight…the 5:30 p.m. one that they cancelled on me in the first place.

In Winnipeg, I wait for the longest time for my luggage and just when I decide it probably didn't make the flight, someone from my flight comes over, taps me on the shoulder, and suggests that if I didn't find my bag on the carousel marked AC 267 Toronto, I should try the carousel marked with a Calm Air flight arriving from Thompson.  Sure enough, that's where it is.

I think WestJet really needs to speed up their expansion plans.

Giving Thanks

I know someone who likes to say, "I'm grateful today for everything I have, and for everything I don't have... And what I don't have today is pain, misery and suffering."

It's a funny thing about the nature of discontent.  Much of the time, it seems to be a matter of comparing oneself to the wrong people.  I could, with perfect reason, wake up every morning overwhelmed by my good fortune at living in a house whose roof does not leak, and whose mortgage is paid (this month, anyway), as opposed to waking up freezing in a tent in Afghanistan, or in a cardboard box under a scaffolding off the West Side Highway.  And some mornings, I do.  I am cognizant of the fact that a series of lucky breaks - among others, having been being born in this particular country, having been given a free education, having had parents who gave me a good start in life, having a mate whose business had managed to survive the economic roller-coaster of the last decade - are the reasons I'm waking up in a warm bed, instead of on a sidewalk or a dirt floor.  I did not reap these advantages because I am intrinsically more deserving of them than is anybody who did not get them.  I just got lucky.  I have these blessings for no discernible reason, and all I need to do now is to hold onto them, and not throw them away with both hands.

But there are the mornings when I wake up in a bad mood, and suddenly I want what I don't have.  Suddenly I'm comparing my Blooper Reel to other people's Highlights Reel.  And suddenly, all my blessings become my burdens.  For, as Lucifer remarks in Paradise Lost, 

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

Those are never the good days.  It swiftly becomes apparent what they mean when they say, "Compare and despair."  Compared to me, everybody is suddenly more successful than I am.  Compared to me, everybody who lives in Manhattan is luckier than anybody who no longer lives in Manhattan - i.e., me.  Compared to me, everybody I ever attended school with made better career choices than I did.  Compared to me, everybody is in better physical shape, and compared to me everybody looks like a gym rat.  Suddenly, I have become the only three-toed sloth on the planet.  Compared to me, everybody is winning either the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, or the National Book Award. (Seriously.  All of a sudden, I'm the only person I know who hasn't swept all three.)

So today, I'm going to think about what I don't have, and I'm going to think about what I do have, and I'm going to be grateful for both.

1. I don't have an incurable disease, chronic pain, or severe mental illness.  I have known people who have these things, and their lives are heroic daily battles just to survive and make it through the next 24 hours.  I do have a good chance of staying healthy if I take care of myself, eat right, and exercise. And for that - I am grateful.  This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

2. I don't have a miserable marriage to somebody who does not love me, or who, God forbid, actively mistreats me.  I do have a loving and supportive spouse who has stuck with me through thick and thin for the last ten years, and whom I can always count on to try his best to do the right thing, every single day since I have known him.  And for that - I am grateful.  This is a blessing many people would give anything to have.

3. I don't have a child who drinks, drugs, or gets into trouble.  I do have a child who is healthy, who has all his limbs and his organs intact, who is polite and well-spoken, and who is attending college and working hard to make good grades.  And for that - I am grateful.  This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

4.  I don't have to visit a cemetery if I want to see my parents.  I do still have both my parents, alive, and even still married to one another.  And for that - I am grateful.  This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

5. I don't have to break my brain wondering how on earth we are going to scrape together market-rate rent in Manhattan by December 1, so that we can do it all over again and break our brains wondering how we'll do it again on January 1, at which point the rent would be going up because the lease would have expired. I do have a beautiful, spacious home which we will own outright in a relatively short time - short, that is, compared to the 34 years I spent paying rent and never actually owning anything in the city. Oh - and when I get home, I don't have to circle the block for thirty minutes looking for parking, because I do have space for one-two-three-four-FIVE cars in my very own driveway.  And for that - I am grateful. This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

6. I don't have blindness.  I can read anything I like, anytime I like.  And I do live in a country where books and journalism representing a wide variety of views are readily available, and where artistic creativity is not censored and free speech is considered a right.  And for that - I am grateful.  This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

7. I don't have to go dip up unsanitized water with a bucket for my daily washing and drinking needs.  I do have an abundant supply of fresh, clean water, and all I have to do is turn on a tap whenever I want it.  And for that - I am grateful. This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

8. I don't have to depend on the fruits of my own labors to produce enough food to get me through the winter.  I do have a car, gas to make it run, and plenty of places to buy food - both supermarket and local farm stands - and have never yet had to face the prospect of being hungry because there was literally nothing available to eat.  And for that - I am grateful. This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

9. I don't have to be alone if I don't feel like it.  I do have an abundance of cherished friends who love me, and whom I love in return.  And for that - I am grateful. This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

10. I don't have somebody who cleans my house for me.  That's because I do have sound limbs, the willingness, and the energy to do my own cleaning.  As I get older, I realize that the day may come when I will wish I was still able to mop my own floor and do my own laundry.  Right now, I still can.  And for that - I am grateful. This is a blessing that many people would give anything to have.

I feel good now, and I hope that you, Gentle Reader, feel good now, too.  And, as another friend of mine used to say, "If nobody told you today that they love you - I love you."  The fact that love exists in this world, and that all I have to do to get my fair share is be willing to give it and receive it - for that, too, I am eternally grateful.

She's a Winner!

I hate to say "I told you so" (that's a lie - I actually LOVE to say "I told you so") but -

I TOLD YOU JACQUELINE WOODSON'S BROWN GIRL DREAMING WAS DA BOMB!!!

Thrilled, excited, delighted, and absolutely chuffed-out-of-my-mind that Jackie Woodson's memoir in verse has won

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

for

Young People's Literature

Congratulations, Jacqueline Woodson! Long may you write!

The Relatives Came

Sorry for the silence...

We have been having (as Martha memorably informed George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) "Guests...GUESTS!" 

Ours was a somewhat larger, yet withal less pyrotechnically-inclined crowd than Albee's, and the occasion was my mother's birthday.  She won't let me say which one, because at the age of (cough-cough) she is still working and she says that no one she works with has any idea that she has passed the possible age of retirement.  Since I'm a writer, I guess I retired for her - in any event, I have no steady source of paychecks or health benefits in that capacity, although I do have endless available time to drive visiting relatives around to see the local sights,  hit the German bakery in Hoboken for a special eggnog-flavored birthday cake, and select nice wrapping paper for birthday gifts.

The last time you heard from me, Gentle Reader, I was hoping very hard that the Kindly Carting Man would take away the unsightly pull-chain toilet that was adorning the top of the stump where I leave my garbage twice a week before the Guests arrived.  I am happy to say that the Carting Man was Kindly and did so.

The jamboree began last Thursday with the arrival of my cousin Christine, who flew in from Winnipeg with my aunt and uncle, who were to stay in my mother's guest room while Christine came to stay in ours.  Christine was one of my favorite cousins when we were children, and that hasn't changed, although we had not seen each other for many years because we live so far apart.  On Friday morning, my brother arrived from Sacramento and was assigned the living room sofa as his dormer.  He was the Surprise Guest - at least, we hoped he would be a surprise.  It seems that, as soon as we'd decided it was the better part of wisdom not to spring too many family members on my mother at once - in particular, not the ones who would be staying at her house - and agreed only to conceal my brother's attendance at the party from her ("You don't suppose we'll give her a heart attack?" he'd asked anxiously, to which I'd replied that I hoped not, but that if worst came to worst, at least we'd all be assembled for the funeral) she called my brother up, told him all about the party, and demanded, "Don't you want to come here for my birthday, too?"  At which direct question he rather lost his head, foomfled, and blustered, "Uhhh...what kind of question is that? Now if I do come, you won't be surprised."  Which left me, as they say, SMDH and groaning about the fact that I am the only sibling who's ever mastered the art of Lying to Mother.

Christine and my brother were rewarded for their early arrival by a Friday afternoon at Spa Castle in Whitestone, Queens, where we lolled around in the varying saunas and hot tubs and got all pruney before the Big Day.  Since my husband, thankfully, used to be a professional chef, I could relax and take his word for it that everything would get cooked in time for the luncheon party. We finished up with dinner at Elias' Corner in Astoria, where we ate far more charcoal-grilled Greek seafood and French-fried potato chips than was good for us.

The next morning was all about cookery.  When my husband starts thinking about a simple buffet luncheon for 12, this is what he comes up with:

- A 3 lb marinated roast salmon

- An entire braised brisket

- Fresh fettuccine and gnocchi tossed in a cream sauce with roasted garlic, eggplant, red peppers, and wild mushrooms

- Lobster, shrimp & langoustine salad (home-made, of course)

- Sauteed mushrooms & shallots

-An enormous salad of baby greens tossed with avocado, local tomatoes, and a home-made maple balsamic vinaigrette dressing

- Mashed potatoes

- Fresh-baked ciabatta rolls

For afterward, of course, there was coffee, birthday cake, and a platter of fresh berries.

The party was supposed to begin at 1:00 p.m.

At 11:30 a.m. sharp, a car door slammed in the driveway, and, to my consternation, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin from South Carolina all tumbled out of it, looking, to my startled eyes, like the clown car in the circus that never stops disgorging passengers.  We barely had time to take our places.

After I'd hissed at my brother to "Get in the bathroom, get in the bathroom!" I hurried downstairs to greet everyone. After coats were hung in the downstairs closet, I adroitly maneuvered everyone upstairs by shrieking, "Mom! You simply have to come upstairs and take a look at the brand new toilet in the powder room!"

(Note to other potential Surprise Party Throwers: This approach works beautifully if the subject of the surprise happens to be a real estate agent - they will look at anything in the way of home improvement, and not find it a bit odd that you want to drag them away from all their friends and relations to look at a toilet.)

True to form, my mother opened the powder room door with an imperious shove, only to fall back with a scream when my brother, who was seated (fully clothed) on the commode, lowered his newspaper, raised his cell phone camera, and calmly inquired, "Lady, don't you ever knock?"  He not only succeeded in surprising her, he also succeeded in obtaining a photo that is going to be making the family rounds for the next twenty-five years, and that my mother made me swear upon the head of my only child not to share on the social media. (Sorry, Gentle Reader - you would have loved it.)

The party was a splendiferous one, and, having traveled this far to attend it, many of the guests stayed on for a few days afterward.  Which I why, once again, I didn't do my homework.

Death of a Pull-Chain Toilet

As my Gentle Readers know, we bought the kind of house commonly known as a Fixer-Upper.  As my Gentle Readers doubtless also know, Fixer-Uppers gobble up money like voracious Congressmen on a meth spree in a department store full of costly armaments and cheap hookers.

As a result, we ran out of the Ready.  As a result of running out of the Ready, the charmingly wonky pull-chain toilet in the powder room has not worked since we moved in, because we never seemed to have enough of the Ready to fix it.  As my Gentle Readers may recall, we moved in last June.

I haven't made an issue of it, since the house had three full baths and so to whine about the powder room toilet would have been what my teenage son elegantly terms "A Dick Move."  However.

The However is, we're about to have guests.  Lots of guests.  International guests.  (Okay, they're my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin, and, being family, they will probably be kindly and forgiving of such small flaws as toilets that don't do what toilets are supposed to do,and they are actually coming from Canada.  But that's international, isn't it?) And there are other guests besides the International Guests.  There is the Transcontinental Guest. (My brother is coming from Sacramento.)  And there's the Southern Lady Guest, winging in from famously Gracious Charleston. (Well - technically - she's my father's cousin once removed, and she actually lives in a steel town 45 minutes away from Charleston, and speaks with a truly fascinating accent that combines the German inflections of her childhood with more than forty years spent living in South Carolina, heavily seasoned with 20 years spent living in Queens before that.  Hmm. Maybe I should re-categorize her as an International Guest.)

The reason for all these Guests is that my mother is turning - well, another year older - this weekend.  It's one of those landmark birthdays, and so we are having a party, and the Relatives are coming.  So naturally, I want the house to look nice.  And naturally, I want to be able to take down the piece of    8 1/2" x 11" paper bearing the legend scrawled in black Sharpie:

Out of Order!

Do Not Use!!!

Water's Turned Off!

And so, Gentle Readers, the quaint and entirely useless pull-chain toilet with the charmingly dated brass fittings and the flush tank the hovered above the head of the sitter like an especially large and cumbersome Sword of Damocles had to go.  But not yet.

Not yet - because first my Dear Husband decided to have a go at repairing it.  It was a noble effort, and it was, indeed, Dear of him.  But after five hours of labor, two trips to the Home Depot, and an awful lot of cursing, he finally had to admit defeat.  I wish I had been a better sport about the fact that, in the process of his being such a Dear, the freshly-painted walls of the powder room got rather scratched and dented and no longer look quite so freshly painted as they did before he was Dear.  But as I say, I was hoping that the house would look nice for the Relatives.

In any event, he deconstructed the old toilet and put it outside to await the coming of the Carting Man on Thursday, who I hope will remove it, as it looks rather awful sitting on a stump next to the driveway and would fool no one into thinking it was merely us being Witty and Artistic.  The party is on Saturday, so if the Carting Man balks on Thursday (and who could blame him if he did?) I will have to think of something else.  Fortunately, there is an unattended dumpster that I know of behind the local Starbucks.

After the deportation of the Old Toilet, we got back in the car and made a third trip to the Home Depot, a store I am heartily sick of, and whose door I never, no not once, darkened in those dear dead days beyond recall when I lived on the tenth floor in a Manhattan building that had a super.  As I write this, it occurs to me that in the 34 years that I lived in Manhattan, I never once had occasion to buy a toilet, either.

But times have changed, and not necessarily for the better, or at least that's how it feels when you are comparison-shopping in the toilet aisle and you realize that it's come to this, and that there's hardly any point in comparison-shopping anyway because you know good and well that what you're really looking for is the cheapest toilet, because all the rest of the money that you thought you were going to spend on getting highlights and a trim so you'd look nice at the party is actually going to be handed over to the local handyman who already installed the dishwasher you found on Craigslist last week, and who was clearly thinking the entire time he fiddled with the hoses and gaskets and doohickeys under the ugly brick-red kitchen sink that the former homeowner had inexplicably installed - on purpose! - that City People are idiots for not being able to install their own dishwashers.

So now we have a new toilet, and it works, and I can hold my head high when the Relatives are here, and not shame my mother on her birthday.  And I only wish we had a little extra cash, because I'd really love to do something about that ugly red sink.

Be the Reason Somebody Smiles Today

Today I got my tires changed, and, in the process, changed somebody's day.

We've been putting off buying the tires, because as all car owners know, four new tires add up quickly to a staggering sum. But it made sense to do it before the snow flies, and I had a new store credit card for a national chain that was supposed to get me a 5% discount; I had the cash to pay the credit card off on the spot; and I had a handful of those slips of paper that the register spits out when you buy anything at this chain, which supposedly will get you a further discount. It never works out that way - there are a million exceptions to the offers, and frankly, it's a classic bait-and-switch.

But the salespeople are invariably kind, hardworking, service-oriented people who do their best to accommodate your requests and expectations, despite the fact that they are hog-tied by company policy if they want to retain their jobs.  But one thing that goes with this job is that customers get crabby when they don't get the discount they're expecting.  I seemed to have walked in on the tail end of one of those conversations this morning.

From my place in line, I could see the back of the woman customer's shoulder-length hair, and the tired face of the sales associate.  Although it was only 8:30 a.m., he looked like he'd already had a long day.

"I'm doing my best for you, ma'am," he was saying in that lovely lilting accent that means a childhood spent in Jamaica.  "I'm just saying - people have to understand.  You get up.  You go to work.  You have a good attitude when you leave your house, and you want to give people good service.  And then some people think they can treat you any which way, just to save five dollars. I'm just trying to tell you, there's only so much I can do."

To her credit, the woman seemed abashed into better behavior.  She finished her business without an argument and quietly took her departure.

Now it was my turn.

It was not my best morning of the year either, for reasons I'll go into later.  But now I had a choice. I could either sour this man's day still more, or I could try to lift us both into a better frame of mind.

I looked him in the eye, gave him my best smile, and told him what I was there for. He nodded wearily and came out from behind the desk.  As he fell into step beside me, I blurted, "Excuse me. I couldn't help overhearing the end of that last conversation, and I see your day got off to a rough start. I think you need a hug."

And I gave him a hug.

He looked a bit surprised, but the ghost of a smile formed at the corner of his lips, and he thanked me. A little alacrity came into his step as we went outside to inspect my tires.

Of course, the tire change cost a lot more than I had budgeted for when my husband and I looked at the website.  Which was not a surprise, because it always does cost a lot more.  The website doesn't tell you about things like the "valve kit" and the "state environmental fee" and so naturally you can't have the slightest idea how much you're actually going to wind up paying.  And yes, it's a shame, and yes, it's a nasty surprise.  But it's not the fault of the sales associate.

So we went back inside, and he ran some estimates for me, and gave me some sound advice on what would be best for my particular car.  As he clicked away on the keyboard, I watched his hands.  One hand was missing its middle finger - there was a stump just above the knuckle, right below where the first joint ought to be.  The index finger was heavily scarred, though the scars were clean and well-healed.  Long ago, this man had had a traumatic accident.  A terrible day involving a lot of unanticipated pain, and a slow recovery that meant learning to live without a part of himself he'd always taken for granted up till that moment.

I called my husband, gave him the estimates, and he said not to get the tires yet, because he wanted to check a few websites once he got to the office.  The fact that my husband was able to get up and go to the office at all on this day, November 3rd, is in itself such a miracle that I wasn't going to argue, so I said okay, hung up, thanked the sales associate (whom  by now I was mentally terming "my friend") and said I would be back if we didn't find a much better deal, which, of course, being a man who pays bills, he understood.  He shook my hand fervently, wished me a beautiful day, and made sure I knew which days he'd be on duty so that he could be available to make sure I got the best possible service.

I said, "I'll bring you a cup of coffee if I come back and get them here," and he said, "I don't drink coffee - I like hot chocolate."

By the time I got home, my husband was calling to say that after some comparison shopping, he'd decided that I might as well go back and get those tires after all, because they were a fair deal.  Which was what my new friend had been telling me all along.

So I made a cup of hot chocolate - the kind I used to make for my son when he'd had a long day at school and the weather was horrible and he came home exhausted and in need of some pampering. Two spoonfuls of Dutch cocoa, two of sugar, plenty of milk, finished off with a good-sized glug of heavy cream.  As I stirred it together, I thought about one of those inspirational slogans I'd recently seen online -

Be the Reason Somebody Smiles Today

I hopped in the car, drove back, and was greeted by a huge smile that got even bigger when I handed over the hot chocolate.  My friend was smiling like he meant it, and that put a smile on my face, too. He did his best to get me every discount he possibly could, went to bat to get me 10% off on aligning the front tires, and gave me the best service of my life.  

I knew it wasn't about the hot chocolate.  It was about the fact that somebody on the other side of the counter had taken the time to see him as a person, another human being - instead of just a visible extension of a huge corporate entity that had to be harangued and bludgeoned into coughing up discounts.

After I'd paid for everything, he shook hands again and thanked me once more.  I thanked him for all the effort he'd put forth on my behalf.  

I thought about whether or not to tell him what was on my mind, but decided against it.  Instead, I just smiled and said, "Promise me you'll remember - you can start your day over at any time."  

 I never did tell him the thing I was really grateful for: The fact that today, on the second anniversary of my stepdaughter's death, my trying to make his day a little nicer had given me something to smile about. 

My stepdaughter had been a server in a national restaurant chain.  She'd battled clinical depression for much of her life before her death at the age of 23.  Once in awhile, she'd mention that it was difficult to keep smiling and provide good service when customers got nasty or impatient.  But she always showed up at her job with the aim of giving the best service she possibly could, and she never missed a day of work.

Not all our scars are visible upon the body.

The $8 Movie Theater

Suddenly, I go to the movies again.

You would think that anybody who likes going to the movies would go all the time, living in Manhattan.  But the only time I ever went to the movies on a regular basis, during my last decade of living in NYC, was during the summers when I would be in a tiny Adirondack town whose restored Art Deco theater had one show a night at 8:00 p.m., and the movie changed every Friday.  What was so great about that theater?  Well - it was charming.  It looked like the movies looked when I was a kid.  And the movie started on time.  And people shut up during the movie and actually watched the movie.  And - the icing on the cake - they only charged $7.00 per ticket.

That was one of the problems with New York movies.  Sure - we got everything first, and we got the little oddball indie films that didn't open everywhere, and that was nice.  But it was ten dollars more to go to the movies in Manhattan than it was to go to the movies upstate. If I was going to pay $17 a ticket, I had to know for a fact that I was going to love that movie.  I was not about to take a chance on something that might prove mediocre.  I didn't want to walk out feeling ripped off.  And, far too often, the movie was over and I walked out of the big AMC near Lincoln Center wishing I'd saved my money.

Oh, there were some films that were good.  Almost good enough to be worth $17.  But would I have enjoyed seeing Daniel Radcliffe play Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings a lot more if the ticket had cost ten bucks instead of seventeen?  You betcha.

So it was an unexpected bonus when I moved to Rockland County and found there is a small indie cinema chain, Bow Tie Cinemas, that is run on the order of the art movie house a few blocks south of the Lincoln Center AMC behemoth, and that Bow Tie Cinemas charges only $8 for an adult ticket - in fact, it's $7 if you're in before 6:00 p.m., and $6 all day long on Tuesdays.

And I started going to the movies.  Because at these prices, I wasn't worried about making a mistake.  And, to my joy, the features are a mix. There are some blockbuster commercial pictures (my son and I sat through Dawn of the Planet of the Apes rolling our eyes and muttering "I can't believe how bad this is"), some indie offerings (Belle, which I'd seen and liked at the small Lincoln Square theater before we moved showed up here, and I wished I had waited and saved myself nine dollars), a couple of things for kids, a drama or two - there are six screens, so there is generally at least one thing I'll take a chance on seeing every week.

So far, I have seen and enjoyed Chef, The Last of Robin Hood, The Hundred-Foot Journey, St. Vincent, and that Woody Allen thing with the seances and the scenery and Colin Firth playing Woody.  I walked out of The Trip to Italy because I found it excruciatingly dull and talky.  And you know what?  It felt wonderful not to have to sit there through the whole thing, gritting my teeth and inwardly bemoaning the fact that I had just thrown seventeen dollars out the window.  No hard feelings.  No regrets.  It just wasn't my thing. So I left, feeling good about leaving.

The movie industry wonders why people don't go to the movies anymore, and frets over how to get us out of our comfy home theaters and into the movie houses.  Well - I can tell them.  Lower the ticket prices, and we'll go a lot more.

One more thing.  No matter where you are, the popcorn is a rip-off.  Bring a bag from home.

Show Me Your Friends & I'll Tell You What You Are

Somebody said that today.  "Show me your friends, and I'll tell you what you are."

A feeling came over me, and I'd be hard-put to describe it.  Exaltation. Awe. Humility. Wonder. Those would be some of the words, but they aren't enough.

Yesterday Alison and Suzanne, whom I have known for a long time, and who are very dear to me, drove up from Manhattan to have lunch, see my new home and spend the afternoon.  I introduced them to some of the new people in my life - women I have met up here in Rockland.  I was so proud to have wonderful friends like these, who think enough of me to drive nearly an hour both ways, just to see me, knowing that I miss my home and my homegirls.  Bright. Talented.  Creative.  Warm-hearted.  Gentle.  Kind. Funny. Beautiful, yes - that, too - but not just on the outside.  Real beauty of spirit and intellect. Women of integrity. Women of value.  Women whose worth is above rubies.

We went to visit another friend of mine - my screenwriting partner, Margarette Gulinello, who moved to Rockland a year before I did, after growing up in Harlem and spending most of her life as a New Yorker.  Margarette is one of the main reasons I even considered Rockland County.  I can see her now - nine months pregnant, literally in early labor (she birthed Nicky early the next morning, and I kept staring at her with rude fascination, fearing he would drop out on his head, right there on the floor) sitting in the cafe at Whole Foods on Columbus and Ninety-Seventh, munching on a salad and giving me a characteristic piece of her mind.

"Well, all I can say is, you have to be crazy, thinking about spending that much money on some shitty little co-op apartment in Inwood.  Chris and I got a whole house for half that much - and when I get home from work, I have a parking spot! Pfft!" With a snap of her fingers, she scornfully dismissed Manhattan.

I must have been hypnotized by magic of the pregnant lady.  The very next week, we started house-hunting in Rockland.

Now, here we were, at Margarette's house, her two small sons bouncing around like unusually vigorous particles in a cloud chamber.  Like us, she'd bought a fixer-upper.  The once-dilapidated split ranch is now a warm and gracious home, firmly imprinted with Margarette's personality and her passion for beauty and creativity.

Alison and Suzanne had never before met Margarette, but the embraces were immediate and the friendship was instant.  We couldn't stop talking,  We couldn't stop laughing and smiling and cuddling the kids and telling stories.  As it turns out, Alison and Margarette had even attended LaGuardia High School at the same time - Alison to study acting, Margarette to study dance.  Why were we not surprised?

Since yesterday, I have been thinking of the people I call my friends.  Some of them are writers, poets, painters, photographers, actors, musicians.  Some are lawyers, businessmen and women, entrepreneurs.  Some are professors, or teachers, or work in some other capacity at a school.  Some are social workers.  Some are activists - for the environment, for LGBT rights, for civil rights. Some are more than one of these things.

All of them are the kind of people who would go out of their way to do the right thing.  All of them are the kind of people who would stop to assist an injured animal, or intervene if they saw an injustice being perpetrated, or a child being bullied, or a purse being snatched.  I have been on the receiving end of unsolicited acts of kindness from each and every one of them.  They are, one and all, the kind of people who take pleasure in doing the right thing and in putting a smile on somebody else's face as often as they can.

And so today, when I hear the words, "Show me who your friends are, and I'll tell you what you are," my eyes fill up with grateful tears, and my heart with pride, and I think, "Oh, I hope so... I will truly try to live up to the amazing people I am blessed to have in my life."

Octember

Suddenly we have gone from basking to shivering.  It must be Octember.

Octember is when you get three consecutive days of chilly rain, and the leaves that fell onto the driveway are too wet to rake, so they just pile up and get squooshy track marks across them where you went over them with the car.

Octember is when you wonder whether you need to call the oil company, because God forbid it gets any colder inside the house (which, of course, it will, because you are nowhere near Decembuary yet.)

Octember is when it's 10:00 a.m., and you need lights on in the house or you can't read your library book.

Octember is when you hear all the trains tooting their horns five miles away, and it brings it home to you that you never hear trains when it's sunny.

Octember is when you want to light a fire in the fireplace, but you hesitate, because that would mean that the next time you want to light a fire in the fireplace, there won't be any dry kindling to light it with, because you forgot to go foraging during those 3 hours of fretful sunshine last weekend.

Octember is Halloween decorations that keep appearing in different places on your neighbors' lawns, because the wind blows the decorations  down at night and the increasingly frustrated neighbors slam the fallen plastic skeletons, perambulating pumpkins, and the inflatable black cats down in great haste, in approximately the same place where they think the decorations were the night before, as they sling down their coffee and hurry off to the commuter bus.

Octember is the dog contentedly lying on her back on the sofa, wet paws drying in the air, dreaming of treeing more squirrels.

Octember is wondering whether you'll have enough money to buy that new dishwasher before Thanksgiving and its guests arrive, and still have enough left over to buy some food to put on the plates. 

Octember is realizing that all the umbrellas have, one by one, made their way to your husband's office and stayed there.

Octember is bringing the potted plants in from the deck, and wondering whether dahlia bulbs really will produce more dahlias if you shake the dirt off the roots, pack them in Styrofoam peanuts, and stick them in a dark closet till you can plant them again in the spring, the way they said to do on the Internet.  And then realizing that you may as well give it a shot, because the things will die anyway if you don't, so wotthehell.

Octember is picking all the leaves off your basil plant before they turn completely yellow and making pesto to freeze for the winter.

Octember is root vegetables and slow-cooked meals that stick to your ribs, after a summer of salads and panini.

Octember is the somber light that the Impressionists caught in their more melancholy moments.

Octember has its chagrins, but Octember also has its charms.

Brown Girl Dreaming: An Appreciation

I don't often write a  personal response to a recently-published book, but on occasion, when I am blown away by admiration and delight, I will make an exception.  Jacqueline Woodson's memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, is one such occasion.

I might not have known about the book if I had not happened to know the author in a very six-degrees-of-separation way already.  I was having dinner with my friend Odella, and we were, of course, talking about books.  She casually tossed in that she has a sister and that her sister writes books.  I said, "Oh, I wonder whether I've heard of her."

"You might have," said Odella.  "She's pretty well-known in children's  and young adult literature these days.  Her name's Jacqueline Woodson."

"Holy shit," I yelped.  "You mean the one who's friends with my poetry teacher Pam Laskin from the CCNY grad program?  I was always a little jealous of her, because she lives on Pam's block, and every time Pam talks about Jackie Woodson and what a great writer she is and how much she loves having Jackie as a neighbor, I start thinking, 'Wahhh, Pam likes this Jackie better than she likes me!'"

I was half-kidding, of course.  But the fact is, I'd heard Jackie Woodson's work spoken of with enormous respect and admiration by my friend and writing mentor Pam Laskin (herself no mean poet and children's writer) many times before I ever picked up a book Jackie had written.  And one memorable day, during last winter's blizzard season, I'd gamely agreed to mush down to a small theater on the Upper West Side because Pam had tickets to a play that was a dramatization of Jackie's picture book Show Ways, about the legacy of quilting in a Black family, handed down from woman to woman since the days when the quilts were pieced by slaves as maps to show the northward route to freedom. Unfortunately, although we made it to the theater despite the chest-high piles of dirty snow lining the streets, the cast did not - so the performance was cancelled. Our outing turned into lunch at Zabar's and I never got to judge for myself whether Jackie Woodson was as fabulous as Pam kept telling me.

The poetry world is a small one, and people in it run across one another at regular intervals, so late in the spring of last year I had the opportunity to hear Jackie speak at a Poetry Outreach event at CUNY/CCNY, where I learned that she was funny, profound, succinct, and brilliant - basically, no surprise, because so is Odella.  And in any case, I could have spotted Jackie in a roomful of strangers as Odella's sister, because they look very much alike, which is a plus on both sides, because both of them are beautiful and have smiles that light up the sky.

A confession: I have stopped reading the New York Times Book Review.  Most of the time, when they are raving about some book and telling me I have to read it, I go to the bookstore, pick the book up, look it over, and quickly find out that the New York Times Book Review's tastes are no rule for mine. Nowadays, I just browse the books that catch my eye in the New Arrivals section and see if they grab me.  Much of the time, I am sorry to say, they don't.

So I didn't know about Brown Girl Dreaming until Odella mentioned on her Gratitude List that her sister's latest book had been well-received and was being considered for a National Book Award. And that it was a memoir of their childhood, written in verse, and that - another item on the gratitude list - Jackie had only put in her nice memories about Odella. (Odella hinted darkly that this might not necessarily been a given, but I feel this was merely her usual self-deprecating wit.)

A Digression: What, my Gentle Readers may wonder, is the Gratitude List?  Very simple - I am in a small group of women who daily exchange emails regarding things we are grateful for in our lives. We try to come up with 5 items a day, and it gives me a shift of perspective whenever I am feeling like my entire life had been nothing but a series of hoagie-sized shit sandwiches.  There is something about being forced to acknowledge that I am looking at my blessings through that shard of distorting glass immortalized by Hans Christian Andersen in "The Snow Queen", perversely and deliberately turning them into burdens, that gives me a very healthy dose of Reality Check.  And even when there is something legitimately dreadful going on in my day, usually one of the other ladies will say something so funny or profound that it kicks me off the pity pot. (Recent Gratitude Items, for example, have included "Husbands who make weird noises" - as it turns out, all of us married ladies have one of those.  The married are grateful that the husband is around to make some of the weird noises and to be sent out of bed with a flashlight at 2 a.m. to investigate others, and the unmarried among us are grateful not to be hearing the weird noises generated by the husbands.)

Today I am grateful for Brown Girl Dreaming.  Here's why.

1. It is wonderful to find a new author you love, whose books you haven't read all the juice out of yet. The fact that I loved this book means there are more of Ms. Woodson's books out there to gulp down in a day (as I did this one, reading it cover-to-cover, non-stop, all afternoon) and then revisit to savor afresh, time after time.

2.  Having been fortunate enough to do a postgraduate degree in writing has given me an appreciation for craftsmanship that I didn't have before.  When an author is in complete command of her voice and, with apparent effortlessness (the kind that betokens, as I well know, hour upon hour of painstaking and agonized revision and excision that the reader of the finished product never suspects took place, because everything on the page flows like silk thread off a spool) shifts us back and forth through time, perspective, and theme, all I can do is gasp with awestruck envy, thinking, "Wow, I can't believe how well she did that!  Brava!  Brava!"

3. I love a writer who can juggle a lot of balls at the same time. Take, for example, Part I - "I Am Born."  Well, right there, I smiled, because it's an allusion to the title of Chapter 1 of David Copperfield, and so I know that a Bildungsroman is on its way.  It is definitely cheeky and audacious to steal from Dickens, so that earns points with me as well - let's remember, as T.S. Eliot pointed out, that "Good writers borrow - great writers steal."  

Ms. Woodson proceeds to lay her cards on the table with a magisterial aplomb that left me reeling with admiration.  She instantly establishes that this is a book about legacy . . . the legacy implicit in being born, as the title poem "February 12, 1963" states, in

a country caught

between Black and White.

By the second day of her life - and the second poem of the book, "Second Daughter's Second Day on Earth," she is juxtaposing herself and her tiny, yet-barely-awakening consciousness, against the monumental events of the day.  Martin Luther King, Jr. is planning the March on Washington; Malcolm X is preaching revolution from a soapbox in Harlem; six-year-old Ruby Bridges was walking into an all-white school past the jeers and threats a mere three years before, so that brown children not yet born or dreamed of would be able to follow; James Baldwin is writing novels and essays that would change the world; Rosa Parks is reflecting that seven years have now passed since her historic bus ride.  It is an impressive heritage to live up to; how will she do it?  The poet pans back on her infant self like a camera, focusing at last on those small, helpless baby hands that adults love to marvel at -

My fingers curl into fists, automatically
This is the way, my mother said,
of every baby's hand.
I do not know if these hands will become
Malcolm's - raised and fisted
or Martin's - open and asking
or James's - curled around a pen
I do not know if these hands will be
                 Rosa's
              or Ruby's
           gently gloved
      and fiercely folded
        calmly in a lap
            on a desk
        around a book
               ready
     to change the world...

4. Who doesn't like to glimpse people we only got to know as grown-ups through the lens of "Tell me a story about when you were a little girl"?  Especially when you find out that you were that same little girl?  Here is my friend, doing exactly what I did at her age when, like Odella, I was known as:

The Reader

When we can't find my sister, we know
she is under the kitchen table, a book in her hand
a glass of milk and a small bowl of peanuts beside her.

We know we can call Odella's name out loud,
slap the table hard with our hands,
dance around it singing
"She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain"
so many times the song makes us sick
and the circling makes us dizzy
and still
my sister will do nothing more
than slowly turn the page.

It's Odella under the table; it's me in the forked branches of the pink crab apple tree, licking a Good Humor bar I'm holding in my left hand while awkwardly trying to turn the pages of The Secret Garden without getting ice cream drips on them with my right; it's Francie Nolan on her Williamsburg fire escape, in the shadow of the Tree that Grows in Brooklyn, noshing from a little blue bowl of dime store candy and perusing her cherished library book (she is reading her way through the stacks, alphabetically), "as happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy."  It's Everygirl who ever got teased for "always having your nose stuck in a book" but who knew being ragged on for being a bookworm was small potatoes compared with the the magic of being instantly transported into another and vastly more interesting world, merely by turning back the front cover with the alluring title and the fascinating picture and reading, "Chapter 1...I Am Born."

5.  It is an immense joy to open a book by a living author and feel the tingle down my spine that tells me that greatness on the printed page still exists.  In the age of the e-Everything, we bookworms get kind of nervous about that, you know.

The Belle of Amherst and the Belle of Rockland

Last week, as threatened, I rebelled against the Life Bucolic and spent the day in Manhattan.  I saw some friends, had lunch with my husband (Thai) and, since I'd refused to go when the place first opened (because, according to the newspapers, the over-crowding was insane) and because the place is right down the street from his office, I said, "Hey, let's check out Eataly."

So I finally saw Eataly, and it will probably be the only time I see it - once was enough.  I mean, they had nothing that you can't get better and cheaper up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, and it all costs three times as much as it does on Arthur Avenue.  Everything at Eataly was very slick and streamlined; it looked like a glossy food magazine photo layout.  For the record, the over-crowding is still insane.  The ambiance and the chichi customers reminded me of the food court underneath the Plaza Hotel, where I also went exactly once (that, too, was enough to satisfy my curiosity.)

The Big Treat I'd planned for the day was seeing The Belle of Amherst in the evening with my dear friend Carrie.  We had a nice Italian meal at Amarone on Ninth Avenue, where I'd last eaten a number of years ago.  It's not the finest Italian I've ever had, but the food is good and you get your money's worth, and for a pre-theatre dinner it's perfectly fine.  We split an arugula salad with thin-sliced pears in a lemon juice dressing; I had the home-made gnocchi with fresh mozerella and basil in tomato sauce, and Carrie had the linguine puttanesca, and our server was very kind about letting us drag out our meal for a long, long time, because the play didn't start till eight.

After dinner we walked down Ninth Avenue.  At the corner of Forty-third and Ninth, just as I was pointing westward across the street, saying, "There's the theatre," Carrie gave a little shriek and pointed eastward, exclaiming, "Oh, my God, it's still here!"

"It" turned out to be a pawnshop that is an absolutely perfect time capsule.  As I'd walked around Manhattan all day, I had been getting a trifle depressed about the way nothing in New York looks the way it did when I moved there 34 years ago.  For example, Times Square in 1979 was squalid, dangerous, and, consequently, marvelous.  It was a lot closer to the days of Hubert's Dime Museum and Diane Arbus photos than it was to Disney.  There were sex shops and junkies and prostitutes in thigh-high boots, and a tired old HoJo's that sold flaccid, greasy clam strips and hot fudge sundaes that tasted like my childhood.  It was easy to walk around Times Square then, too, because a lot of people were scared to go there.  And now, there are about 5,000 tourists crowding the sidewalks day and night, and the crazy people wearing the Elmo costumes are scarier than the junkies ever were.

But this - this.  How had I missed this wonderful little shop all these years?  It belongs back in the old Times Square - my Times Square.  I must have walked past it hundreds of times.  I was always too intent on getting to the play on time, I guess.

In a trance of delight, I followed Carrie into a shop packed with bric-a-brac, used books in all stages of repair - from Fine to Deplorable - all priced at a dollar to three dollars.  Carrie was explaining with great enthusiasm to the two elderly men who own the place - and Brooklyn Dickensian, is the best description I can come up with for them - that she used to live in Hell's Kitchen - back in the Good Old Days I've just been describing, when it was actually Hellish - and that she had been in the habit of dropping in frequently.  The proprietors were nodding back and saying, "Of course, I remember you, you haven't changed a bit.  Where have you been all this time?"

The shop had been on the verge of closing, but the owners let me poke around the stacks of books,  while Carrie reminisced, agreeing with her newly re-found buddies that she'd made a huge mistake by ever moving to the Upper East Side. I found a biography of Roald Dahl that I hadn't read yet (Condition: Deplorable, but for $2, who was I to quibble?) When I fumbled for my change purse, the proprietors affably waved my money aside, insisting on making a gift of the book to me.  In addition, they offered "you two lovely ladies" a couple of shots apiece from the bottles of Johnny Walker Black and Absolut with which, it seemed, they were wont to celebrate the end of the workday. (We declined with thanks.)  After asking us repeatedly if we were sure we didn't want to raise a toast to the Return of Carrie to the Kitchen of Hell - No? - Are you sure? - and being apprised of the fact that we had to stay sober enough to watch a play about Emily Dickinson, our amiable hosts rolled up the steel gate (remember those roll-up gates that clatter like a subway train?) and bid us Godspeed.

Now, as to the play.  I knew that the fact that I had last seen this one-woman play performed by Julie Harris, back in the days when Times Square was Times Square, was going to be a problem.  Julie Harris, I knew, sets a standard that is hard to equal when she creates a role.  So I tried to forget her performance and her inflections of the lines, and to give Joely Richardson a fair chance.  But, inevitably, I was disappointed.

Ms. Richardson, to give her her due, takes on a heroic task in holding the stage solo for nearly 2 hours.  It is a tremendous feat of memorization, just for a start - all monologue, with very little action.  The actress playing the part of Emily Dickinson has nothing to hold her audience's attention but the playwright's words, and the words of the poet herself, for a number of Dickinson's poems are woven in as part of the monologue. Ms. Richardson was also suffering from a horrendous head cold, and had to keep sniffling and dabbing at her nose.  (I had to wonder why it hadn't occurred to anybody to write in an impromptu line about Emily Dickinson's awful, awful hay fever, and have the props department equip her with a little white lace-edged hankie.)

Perhaps the fact that she was not feeling well accounted for the way that she rushed the delivery of the lines.  The problem is - her timing was off.  I only saw Julie Harris in the part once, but I perfectly recall her strategically-times pauses that gave the audience time to laugh appreciatively at an understated bit of wit.  Ms. Richardson barreled through her lines like a freight train, as though she was afraid that if she didn't keep it rolling at top speed, she might lose her place and forget what came next.  Indeed, several times she misspoke in her haste, and had to corrected herself in mid-word.  It reminded me of little Tony Buddenbrook trying to recite her catechism in the first chapter of Thomas Mann's novel:

"What does this mean?" she slowly repeated. "I believe that God..." and then,her face clearing, swiftly continued, "made me, and likewise all other creatures," - and now, finding herself on smooth ice, raced along, beaming and unstoppable - she rattled off the whole article, true to the newly published catechism of anno domine 1835.  Once you got going, she thought, it was just like being on the sled with your brothers and pushing off from the top of Mount Jerusalem - your thoughts flew past you as you pelted along, and you couldn't stop even if you wanted to.

In Ms. Richardson's favor, I will say that she was at her best when declaiming the actual poems.  In those moments, she showed a fine understanding of the poet's delicate poetical structures, in which Dickinson's metaphysical speculations are so often expressed through her minute observations of Nature.  I would hazard a guess that, long before taking on the role of "the mysterious E. Dickinson", the actress had often read the poet, with great love, and with the sensitive intuitive grasp of sense that only a reader's great love of a writer's words can impart.

In short, a noble effort.  In a nut-brown wig and the obligatory white dress, Ms. Richardson looks the part of Emily Dickinson.   The lighting for the production is so exquisite that I often thought I was viewing a tableau vivant  of a Berthe Morisot painting - that "certain slant of light" here is a lambent, flattering glow - it kisses the actress like a sunbeam pouring through a window on a late-June afternoon. If Ms. Richardson can bring herself to slow down and take as much time delivering her lines as David Weiner took in designing the lighting, this could yet become a memorable evening of theatre.

Oy, Pioneers!

Today was the day that my life was supposed to change significantly for the better.  But you know what they say.  If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.

Our new electric dryer was delivered today.  That was supposed to mean that I would not have to wait for a sunny day to do the wash so that I could string it up between the trees in our backyard.  It did not work out that way.

Now, I already have a dryer,  It is a very nice, top-of-the-line dryer, and it is attached, as space-saving apartment-style appliances tend to be, to the top of the wonderful high-end washing machine I insisted was moving to Rockland County when we did.  The problem with my Old Original Dryer is that it runs on gas.  Guess what we don't have, out here at the end of the long, lovely woodsy road that the deer and the antelope play upon?  That's right.  Gas.

"No problem," said my husband.  "We will be getting a propane hook-up.  Then I can have a gas range in the kitchen, and you will be able to use your dryer again.  Plus, we will need to get a generator for when the power goes out, and we will get a dual-fuel model so we can use our propane tank as a back-up in case the gas stations run out of gas due to the emergency, like they did right after Hurricane Sandy.  Not," he added hastily, seeing my face, "that I expect the power to go out."

This was back in June, and I have been hanging the laundry out on a wash-line ever since.

The propane people have made innumerable trips, taken a great many measurements, given us an enormous amount of contradictory information, and the upshot of all this waiting for the Propane Miracle was that it made no sense to put in a propane tank, because it turns out that installing a propane tank costs a lot more than just buying a new dryer, dishwasher, and high-end stove, and since we need everything on the list, we abandoned the idea of propane and went out to buy an electric dryer last weekend, that being the most pressing item on our list - at least, if I am to stay married to my present husband. (Divorce, as it turns out, costs even more than a propane conversion.)

I was sort of glad, because I had been afraid the propane tank would explode and blow us all to Kingdom Come.  My husband said that would never happen, but then, he also said I wouldn't be hanging the laundry up outside past the first couple of weeks we were living here.  We moved here, as you may recall, in mid-June.

After we bought the dryer, I assumed a lot.  Chief among these assumptions was that I assumed the brand-new electric dryer was going to work.  So I gleefully did a load of laundry this morning, planning to pop it all in as soon as the nice delivery men brought me my lovely, lovely dryer and I could stop living like a latter-day Ma Ingalls.  (Let me state for the record that, while I enjoyed reading the Little House on the Prairie books, I never actually wanted to be in one.  Eloise at the Plaza is more my speed.  Room service, and charge it, please.)

And so, as I say, I did laundry.  Lots of laundry,  The kind of laundry you don't do when you have a wash-line instead of a dryer, because the big stuff trails on the ground and gets all dirty again.  But now, with the dryer on its way, I turned reckless.  Clean sheets for everybody!

Did you know that just because the former homeowner had a clothes dryer in the laundry room (which didn't give off any heat, now that I come to think of it) and there is a vent in the wall for the lint to blow out of through the duct that hooks up to the clothes dryer, and just because there is already a big enormous outlet in the wall to accommodate the big enormous plug that is attached to the new electric dryer, does not mean that your home is wired for the big new electric dryer?  And that, if your home is not wired for this machine, then the machine will turn on, and the drum will spin, and the clothes will turn and tumble and lollop briskly about, but they will never get dry, because there won't be any heat?

Gentle Reader - neither did I.

So there was, thank God, enough sunshine to get the clothes mostly dry, and the electrician is coming next Monday.  And I planted another 33 daffodil bulbs, which leaves 32 for Thursday.

But, you will say, today is only Tuesday.  Why not put those 32 daffodil bulbs in tomorrow?

Because, Gentle Reader, tomorrow I am going to catch a ride into Manhattan with my husband, see a few friends, eat a proper bagel, and then go to see a play in the evening.  I will not do one damn pioneer-type thing  all day.  And they will have to tie me up and load me into the trunk of the car to make me come back, if the electrician calls between now and then to say he isn't coming after all next Monday because it's Columbus Day.

Let Daffodil the Gardens Fill

There is a contemporary fairy tale I read when I was a child, about a princess named Daffodil.  At Daffodil's christening ceremony, her fairy godmother gifts her with the following dubious cadeau:

Let Daffodil
The gardens fill.
Wherever you go
Flowers shall grow.

Needless to say, this results in certain inconveniences, once the poor girl outgrows baby bootees and strolls through the palace.  Poppies, coreopsis and goldenrod spring up in her wake, and before you know it, the throne room needs mowing.

I am no Princess Daffodil - flowers do not spring up for me without effort on my part.  When I want flowers in my yard, I generally wind up grubby, covered in sweat, and compulsively searching myself for ticks for days after I've finished planting.

Having yielded to temptation in the form of two fifty-bulb bags of daffodils at the Home Depot (they were under $17 for each bag, which seemed a bargain, and I was so very tired of looking at all the things in that store that are made of wood, metal, or bathroom porcelain) I realized in short order that the reason the previous homeowner had not planted any daffodils next to the long, long driveway that seems to cry out for such splashes of springtime frivolity is that the dirt off to the side of the driveway is clay-ey, full of rocks, and back-breakingly difficult to dig.  Undeterred, I went at it, and today I managed to get 35 out of the 100 bulbs into the ground.  This involved wheedling the dirt and rocks out of the holes to a depth of about 5" using a sharp digging instrument that resembles a pogo-stick designed by Professor Van Helsing for slaying vampires, throwing in a gloved handful of rich black garden dirt (also bought) sticking the bulbs into the ground pointy-end up, and then covering the darlings with more of the nice black garden dirt, finishing the job by tromping everything down with my ugly green rubber boots that, I hope, will keep the ticks at bay.

I turned up more broken bottles - the previous homeowner, it seems, was exceedingly fond of Bud Lite - and quite a number of recently-interred acorns, which of course set the squirrels to scolding violently. (The squirrels already dislike me because I let the dog out several times a day.)  The sound of their chirruping naturally made the dog, who was locked up in the house, entirely frantic, so I carried out my peaceful task of ensuring us of a Beauteous Springtime to the cacophonous din of the dog and the squirrels shrieking insults at one another.

But I always think that beauty is more important than, say, nicely-ironed shirts, and anyway, I don't particularly like to iron, so tomorrow I will go out with another 35 bulbs and get all sweaty and itchy thinking about ticks and Lyme disease, and I'll piss off the squirrels and the dog all over again.

Unless, of course, it rains.  Then I'll read that book about the Romanov sisters that I got out of the library.

My & My Library Card

We left Manhattan in June to move to a small suburban county about half an hour north of NYC on what I persist in referring to as "the wrong side of the Hudson".  In early September, I voted for the first time in my new town's primary election.  Yesterday, I got my first town library card.

I grew up on Long Island, and idea of the town library as sanctum sanctorum is nothing new to me. When I was a child, I practically lived in our town's library.  I was one of those bibliovores who would lug home a bag of books nearly the size of myself a couple of times a week, always to my mother's cries of, "Put those things back in the grown-up section!"  A sort of Matilda-in-training, as it were - minus, sadly, the extrasensory telekinetic powers that would have livened up my early years to a considerable degree.

 My first career ambition was to be a librarian.  The other kids on my block wanted either to be the garbage man (as sanitation engineers were known back then), because it looked like such subversive fun to ride on the outside of the truck - the kind of job that would really get a rise out of your mother - or to drive the Good Humor Ice Cream truck and then, of course, be your own best customer.  I'm not denying the allure of either of these career paths.

But the idea of being surrounded by books all day long, in a hushed atmosphere imbued with an overall aura of reverence for the printed word?  That prospect put access to unlimited Strawberry Shortcake Bars and Rocket Pops into perspective.  No question about it - I'd rather have the books.

I also had the charmingly muddled notion that a librarian's sole duty was read to books all day long and get paid for it.  I'm still looking for a job of that description.  And don't tell me college English instructor, because I happen to know better.

After college, I worked in a number of bookstores, and then eventually wound up owning a bookshop, which finally cured me of the notion that all I had to do to make a living  was sit behind a desk reading books and collecting money, occasionally swapping literary chit-chat with people on the other side of the desk.  It didn't work out that way at all.

I did have access to an unlimited supply of books so inexpensive as to be practically free, and so I built my own personal library into what once was referred to, in a somewhat different context, as a "large, loose, baggy monster".  Moving the saggy, baggy elephant to the wrong side of the river was, as you may imagine, a project.  I've never actually counted my books, because it would take far too much time.  I estimate it at about 4,000 volumes - and that, of course, is after the obligatory purge of stuff I hadn't looked at in years and reluctantly consigned to the local thrift shop, after considerable nagging on the part of my husband, who was not at all enthusiastic about transporting my darlings, ten boxes at a time, in the trunk of the Saab.

Yes - as I say, originally, there were about 4,002 volumes. Surrendering the fantasy that one day I was going to get around to reading Simon Schama's Citizens and, after having done exhaustive period research, write a prequel to Jane Eyre about the adventures of one of Mr. Rochester's  discarded mistresses was accompanied by the kind of tears and hand-wringing one associates with the biblical mother who was casually instructed by King Solomon to chop her baby in two and go halfsies with the other nice lady.

All the time I lived in Manhattan I had a library card.  But I never used it. The inexpensive copies of good books flowed like tap water - there was always something interesting on the tables of the sidewalk vendors, or at the thrifts, or even at the big library fundraising sales. I think the only time I ever took out a library book was when I was studying for the GRE and didn't want to shell out $22.95 for a new copy of the exam practice book at the B&N.

But now it's different.  Now the Local Used Book Pool is neither as freshly-supplied nor as widely variegated as what I've been accustomed to.  And so, I got a library card.

I tell you, Gentle Reader, it's just like riding a bicycle.  Right back in the saddle.  It's as if I'd never stopped doing my Library Card Cardio.  After ten minutes of intensive speed-stacking (similar to speed-dating, but with fewer potentially catastrophic results if you happen to select a dud) I joyously skipped over to the check-out desk with a teetering stack of Five Big Fat Books and drove happily homeward for an orgy of novel-reading.

I could have taken a lot more, but I didn't want to seem greedy.

Not yet.

Fleur-i-dation

It's that sad-happy time of year when I take down my cottage garden - all in all, a little more complicated than folding up a beach umbrella, but the idea is the same.  Summer is over, and Life is about to get Real again.  I know there's a lot of that going around now and you, Gentle Reader, can relate.

I've always liked flowers.  I grew up in the 'burbs, and my father grew roses, espaliered against the backyard fence.  Most were the standard crimson, but the ones by the house were fancier - I recall one bush that yielded a bright, egg-yolk yellow bloom, and another, my favorite, was called "Tropicana" - deep orange, with the barest hint of cream staining the petals at their base. A magnificent wisteria grew up one entire side of the house - I could lean out my second-floor window and pick its flowers, if I so fancied.

The neighbors had an immense lilac that spilled over into our yard, and, feeling like a thief, I used to cut sprays of the pale purple flowers, dripping like grapes, and perfume my bedroom with my spoils.  I would put them on the nightstand, next to whatever book I was currently reading under the covers by flashlight and by the side of the glass of ice water I never went to bed without, and I recall that I was as happy as a little girl with a good book and a bunch of heady, redolent blossoms to refresh her nose with from time to time could be - a latter-day edition of  Francie Nolan on her fire escape in Chapter One of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.  

When I was in college, I became one of the founding members of the Friends of Moningside Park, which, at the time (early 1980's) was in dire need of friends.  It had been badly neglected for decades at that point, and I was told during Freshman Orientation to stay out of Morningside Park if I didn't want to be murdered. They weren't kidding.  But since I never do what I'm told, and since I had a chainsaw and an ax to chop down the underbrush that had taken over the sinuous lines of this Olmsted gem, I wasn't too worried, and I went in anyway.  Nowadays, like everyplace else in New York that was grungy and kind of dangerous when I was young, it's prime real estate and you can't get an affordable apartment within two dozen blocks of it.

But I had wonderful times grubbing away there, and as I worked, I would hum and sing to myself, and think of the words of Mary Lennox that  I'd read under the covers on that glorious occasion when I first happened upon The Secret Garden  (and I have to say, anybody who is reading that book for the first time has my envy):

"It's a secret garden, and I'm the only one in the world who wants it to be alive. . . It's the best fun I ever had in my life--shut in here and wakening up a garden."

Then I graduated, moved into an apartment, and didn't even have a window box for a very long time.

But about nine years ago, I began to spend my summers in a small Adirondack cottage that has a yard behind the house.  That first year, John Wirenius and his wife Catherine came to visit.  I had quite forgotten about gardening as a pastime or a pleasure by then, but my guests were living on the first floor of a house in Queens at the time - and they had a backyard.  Catherine had caught the gardening bug, and she'd caught it bad.  Before I knew it, there was a small patch of turned-up dirt edging the tiny patio that I'd never thought of using for anything but putting the grill  and a couple of Adirondack chairs on.  An unbelievably large pile of rocks and pebbles she'd dug out of the dirt was heaped on the patio itself, and Catherine, sitting on the back steps of the cottage, her hair tied back in a whale-spout, a smudge of dirt on her nose, pounding together a witch's brew of cow manure and rich black dirt that she'd bought in a bag, was explaining, "Your soil is very poor, and I've never seen so many rocks in one place, so we're going to have to put down some decent dirt or nothing's gonna grow here.  By the way, I'm putting in a raised bed over there."

I was dubious, but interested.

Never one to do things by halves, Catherine spent much of the visit hollering for us to "Pull over - I see a plant nursery!"  I quickly discovered that it's more fun to buy plants than jewels. Plants are bigger, the colors are brighter, and their sheer variety puts Tiffany's to shame.  Pretty soon I, too, was squinting judiciously at the astilbes and muttering, "Well, yes - these will do for the shaded area next to the woods, but what about that sunny patch by the patio?  Astilbes don't like too much sun . . . what about some black-eyed Susans?"

We drove our husbands crazy.  Mine was waiting impatiently for us to get back in the car so we could go have some real shopping fun at the Organic Food Co-op, and hers was rolling his eyes and wondering whether there would be enough room in the car for all the books he was planning to sneak past Catherine as soon as we spotted a secondhand bookstore.

Over the years, the garden expanded, which is the way these things go.  My husband has grown somewhat resigned to the fact that there is always dirt in the trunk of the car, and refers sardonically to our Saab as the Rolling Greenhouse.  Pretty soon I discovered that the bright hues of the garden were attracting hummingbirds, so then of course we had to put up a hummingbird feeder.  A romantic trip to the Gaspé  Peninsula turned into a quest for the Perfect Birdbath, which I discovered in a shop in North Conway, NH on the way home.  (It has a little mermaid perched on the edge, and the finches like to sit on her head.)

In short - I was obsessed.

Since the backyard is small-ish, I very soon found that, like Alexander the Great before me, I was grieving that there were no new worlds to conquer.  Fortunately, there is a wooded area just past the lawn, impenetrably overgrown with scrub pine, maple saplings, and crappy-looking underbrush that I refer to collectively as the "Nobody-Invited-You's."  Majestic pines and lissome birches are barely discernible through the thickets of junk that had sprung up over decades of neglect.

Do I have to tell you that I bought myself a present, and that it was a pair of loppers?

So I have been having a grand old time clearing out all the Nobody-Invited-You's, and every day I totter in happily after a morning of lopping, all covered in scratches and with twigs in my hair, but supremely joyful that I can now see blue sky and dappled sunlight when I look up the hill.

If there is any truth to the theory of reincarnation, then in a past life I was Pa Ingalls.

His In-Finn-ite Variety

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of . . . Phineas at Bay.

My copy arrived in the mail a week after publication, just as Amazon promised it would, and I unwrapped it with whoops of delight.  When the cardboard had fallen away, I gazed reverentially upon the novel by my good friend John Wirenius - a novel that I'd had a hand in midwifing . . . er, I mean, editing.

It sure was pretty. Green wraps, which by coincidence happen to be in precisely the shade of the sign that used to be above my late, lamented used bookshop, The Last Word (1993-2005, corner of 118th & Amsterdam in NYC).  My partner and I had dickered endlessly about the shade of green to use on the sign, and decided at last that the green on the Poland Springs bottles was it.  Here was John's book, and at very first glance it recalled many happy hours of breathing in that particular brand of old-book fragrance that, were it ever bottled and distributed at the Macy's perfume counter, would swiftly reveal which of us seemingly mild-mannered citizens are, in fact, ravening beasts consumed by book-lust.  It was a good omen.

The cover art - a vintage Vanity Fair caricature of the Duke of St. Albans, purchased by the novel's author a quarter-century ago from an Upper West Side street vendor . . . another propitious provenance, or so it seems to me - depicts a casually natty late-Victorian gent with his hands in his pockets, a gold watch chain bisecting his middle, just as the author's own watch chain invariably does.  I have known John Wirenius since he was attending Columbia University's School of Law, and our friendship, rooted as it is in the love of literature and all things throwback, has ripened over time.  I believe the only time I have seen him without his pocket watch was when he was in swimming trunks.

The curious thing about my friendship with John is that we don't always like the same books.  We can agree on Saki, but his urgings of C.P. Snow and John Galsworthy as "must reads" leave me politely evasive.  He, for his part, can drive me to frantic sputtering with a well-placed jibe at some of my own favorites.  I did, some years ago, at his behest, undertake to read Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels - six books that follow the fortunes and follies of a series of interconnected characters, and two of which, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux, share the eponymous protagonist John chose to center his own novel upon in Phineas at Bay.  

A confession: I did not become a rabid Anthony Trollope fan.  The sorrowful fact is, I petered out after The Eustace Diamonds - a book I rather enjoyed, as it had that delightful creature known to fans of East of Eden, Gone With the Wind, Forever Amber, and Vanity Fair as "a good bitch."  Lizzie Eustace, pilferer of the diamonds of the book's title, is one of those monumentally selfish, unlawfully charismatic, and entirely mendacious women of fiction who seem to have gotten in line twice for Seductive Charm and not at all  for Moral Rectitude or Sensitivity of Conscience, thus making them an enormous pleasure to read about, if not actually to be in the same book with.  (I'd hate to be Suellen O'Hara and have my unattractive middle-aged beau stolen for the sake of his paltry bank account by my older sister,wouldn't you?)  The problem with Trollope, I decided, was that there were not enough Lizzie Eustaces, and since leavening the story about the Good People with a generous sprinkling of gargoyle-like grotesqueries à la Dickens is not in the Trollopian style . . . well, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no further.  There was the additional problem that Trollope has a way of writing labyrinthine sentences that meander on for much of the page - and so, in short, I quit.

Luckily, John Wirenius has taken into account that not all of us have read the entire Trollope oeuvre.  If you have been fearfully contemplating the sextet of nineteenth century tomes you think you must plow through in order to tackle Phineas at Bay - fear not, I didn't read them all, either, and I had no trouble whatsoever figuring out what was going on.  Fortunately for the reader, John is gifted at weaving exposition into his tale without making it glaringly obvious that he is weaving in exposition.  If you need to know what happened in earlier books for purposes of understanding the actions and character motivations in this one, he will let you know, and he will do it far more subtly than J.K. Rowling, who, by Volume Seven, was clearly getting tired of telling people just how Harry Potter got that scar.

Furthermore (and the Trollope Society will probably descend upon me with pandybats and howls of execration for this) I happen to think that Phineas at Bay, while scrupulous in its adherence to its progenitors in terms of the integrity of its characters and its overall tone, is a better read than the other six.  A certain sly literary wit that I associate with this contemporary author threads sinuously through the book, like the violin solo of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.  And, like that fabled storyteller to the Sultan, John Wirenius is a spellbinder, a Pied Piper of the Pallisers, hypnotically leading us along from page to page, until, like the Sultan, we realize that dawn has broken and we've spent the entire night immersed in the tale, because we simply had to find out what happened next.

Having read through the book three times already, with gun and magnifying glass in hand to search for typos and root them out, I was already familiar with its contents.  Another confession: There are still typos, and I am both mortified and mystified.  In some cases, I am ready to swear in open court that I took them out and the nasty Bot-Gremlins put them back!  (In others, I simply screwed up.)  Feel free to hunt them down yourself and to berate me for them (privately) so that we can take them out of the second printing.

So I wondered, as I opened the book, whether it would pass the test I apply to any work of fiction that aspires to take a permanent place on my bookshelves.  Do I still read it with pleasure, after the first time around? Or have I already read all the juice out of it?   And - the real acid test, which even fewer books pass - do I get more enjoyment, as well as more food for thought and a keener artistic appreciation of its structural beauties, out of it with each subsequent re-read, rather than less?  Most of us read for plot the first time around.  At least, I do.  It's on the later read-throughs that I begin to appreciate subtlety and nuance.  I begin to note literary references that may have escaped me the first time around.  I start to notice themes.  I am startled into a bark of astonished delight at an audacious risk on the author's part. (What other author, for example, have I seen depicting a certain Irish-born playwright - under a pseudonymn, of course -  at a Christmas party, acting out scenes from his forthcoming drawing-room comedy that involve a harridan and a handbag?)

For this is another of the delectable departures from Strict Trollopian Form that John Wirenius has chosen to utilize - the cameo appearances of sundry real-life historical personages, some under their own names, some not.  The fun, of course, lies in spotting the Nots.  (I'll give you a hint - one of them, who has more than a cameo role, will grow up to become a Prime Minister who looks remarkably like a bulldog. His enchanting American-born socialite mother is recognizably the subject of a best-selling two-volume biography, as well as of a television miniseries. )

But John Wirenius doesn't stop there.  Having gone this far, he adds an assortment of fictional characters, as well - only not, necessarily, out of the fiction of Anthony Trollope.  An admirer of G.B. Shaw, he coolly appropriates several of the dramatis personae of Candida, adroitly endowing the love-addled secretary with a more prominent part to play than he gives the pontificating pastor.  The nonexistent Barchester Cathedral that lends its name to another Trollope opus is back - and so is a sinister trio of statuettes that aficionados of Victorian ghost stories will recognize, with a start, as having crept in from M.R. James' classic tale about that imaginary Cathedral and its stalls.

As for the dramatis personae drawn from the source material - it should come as no surprise that I hailed the return of Lady Eustace - a.k.a Lizzie the Liar - with enthusiasm.  If anything, she's better than before.  Without giving away too much, I will merely state that, should Masterpiece Theatre have the good sense to option this novel, they would be well-advised to approach Nina Arianda on bended knee and beseech her to reprise her recent Broadway triumph, this time in the character of Lady Eustace.  Let's put it this way - in a slantindicular (a word that I first encountered in Phineas at Bay, and that I have adopted with relish) nod to dear Charles Dickens and his giddily evocative nomenclature, Lady Eustace's law firm of choice is known as Rushforth & Bindtheboy.  Need I say more?

Lizzie the Liar has a worthy foil in her former husband, the Right Reverend Joseph Emilius, returned from a sojourn in the American West to win her back.  A charming and entirely amoral scoundrel, Joseph is Rhett to her Scarlett.  Joseph Emilius knows Lizzie Eustace through and through, exactly for what she is.  And frankly, my dears, he doesn't give a damn . . . he wants her back at his bed and his board, and is willing to go to any lengths to get her, including putting in a midnight appearance in a certain Irish barrister's office that had me exclaiming, "Good Lord - Amadeus!" ("Oh, you noticed that, did you?" the author said offhandedly, when I excitedly called him up to report my discovery.)

The orphaned Finn niece, Clarissa Riley, is a spirited variation on the dewey-eyed ingenue so beloved of nineteenth century fiction, profiting as she does from her close association with Marie Finn (formerly Madame Max Goesler), the enigmatic Continental  cosmopolite who married Clarissa's beloved Uncle Phineas.  Marie is a heroine worthy both of Clarissa's admiration and emulation - she is her husband's partner as well as his closest friend and companion, Penelope to his Odysseus, fully his equal in both cunning and kindness. One of the book's great assets lies in its wealth of formidable female characters, all of them different, and each of them endowed with a peculiar fascination all her own. Among the many pleasures of this novel is the fact that each of the various characters is so distinctively drawn, and that the point-of-view shifts so seamlessly from one character to another, whether we are seeing events through the keen eyes of Phineas Finn, or the luminous blue orbs of his wife Marie, or through the bloodshot eyes of Sir Felix Carbury, dissipated sot and one of the novel's most delicious sketches in drawling, languorous villainy.

True, as well, to the conventions of the Victorian novel as a microcosm of the world of Society and its mores, John Wirenius has deftly woven a tapestry of plot and sub-plot, in which one event leads inevitably - if, at times, surprisingly - to another, and nothing is either wasted or left dangling in midair.  His invented personae behave as they must behave, given the rich and complex psychologies with which they have been endowed.  Never once do they step out of character in service of the exigencies of the plot - the action is propelled by the force and energy of the people with whom the author has populated his imaginary world.

Which is not to imply that this is a novel that touts the haut monde to the utter neglect of the less fiscally fortunate members of Victorian Society.  One key plot line follows Phineas' attempts to obtain justice for Ifor Powlett-Jones, a young Welsh miner being railroaded into prison for the so-called crime of having rescued a dozen fellow miners from certain death during a cave-in, thereby disobeying orders from his foreman and inadvertently damaging company property in the course of the rescue.  Ably assisting Phineas at every turn is his stern, yet withal warmhearted, majordomo, the German butler Meier - Marie's mainstay, Phineas's impromptu fencing master, and Clarissa's horticultural docent (the author is a fan of Nero Wolfe, and Meier raises prizewinning orchids in the Finns' conservatory.)

But why should I go on?  Surely by now you are aware that, for the lover of Victorian fiction who has read everything on the library's shelves and despaired of ever finding another book "as good as the ones they used to write," this novel has the tonic effect of a long, newsy letter from  home to an expatriate who has vainly longed for the beloved homeland.  If you, like myself, are sorry that nobody seems to write a book anymore that doesn't teem with incest, rape, dismemberment, and casual  violence . . . if you have been yearning for the happy days of yore, when novelists assumed that they had an intelligent, well-informed readership to whom they need not condescend with tiresome explanations of what they were up to with a literary reference . . . if you have sharp wits, a discerning critical faculty, and a taste for political intrigue, discreetly dangerous liaisons, philosophical and theological cogitations, and House of Worth couture, then waste no more time on this blog post, but go immediately to

http://www.amazon.com/Phineas-at-Bay-John-Wirenius-ebook/dp/B00M4M3L1C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408213820&sr=8-1&keywords=phineas+at+Bay

and order your copy at once!