Late Bloomer Note:
Adorable
6 January 2015

Happy Birthday, old bean. I know for a fact that you never thought you’d make it this far. (While at the same time blithely sharing youth’s belief in immortality.)

This has long been my favorite picture of me. It captures how I feel when something interesting and exciting comes up — nowadays, generally, in a book. I want to read it aloud, share it with somebody. The image has been lost in layers of files transferred from one computer to another — and as to where the original snapshot is, who knows? I consider it an auspicious sign for the New Year that I made the effort to track this down and found it.

Run your cursor over the image to discover its title — which ought to embarrass me, but doesn’t; rather the reverse. By the time I was old enough to speak English, I was told that I had been an adorable baby. That my adorableness had regrettably evaporated since then seemed to be the implicit point of this praise.

And now, to find myself in the orbit of seventy! Dissonance in the music of the spheres: while the Times is full of obituaries marking lifetimes not so very much longer than mine to date, my conviction, as uncritical as this child’s eagerness, is that life is just beginning.

Or is it, perhaps, relief that the beginning is finally over? Now I really begin.

***

As we walked into the apartment last night, after my first time away from it, I was “shocked by its beauty.” (Hat tip to Lillian Roberts.) Hitherto, my idea of roughing it had been living at home. Now I thought: wow, all the comforts of hotel suite, plus being at home. Or vice versa.

Sadly, however, room service has not been introduced with the New Year. One remains reduced to restaurants. I’ve just taken our former/upstairs neighbor out to lunch at the Café d’Al, and then made a reservation for dinner at Demarchelier with Kathleen. I must nevertheless run across to Fairway for groceries. How I wish I could think of Fairway as a colorful local market that I visit every day in search of the best ingredients. Talk about pretty to think so! All that distinguishes Fairway from Times Square Station is grime and uneven lighting. On the plus side (for Times Square), subway riders usually know where they’re going and how to get there. This is probably the most sexist thing that I am ever going to say — indeed, I hope that it is — but the world would be a better place if women relied on the Internet and Fresh Direct, and left in-store shopping to men. Children requiring carriage ought to be banned. They were, informally, when I was a child, and Eisenhower was winning the Cold War. Exceptions will be made for infants who can demonstrate a desire to go shopping.

San Francisco was different this year — rather, it was back to being the same old strange place. Last year, Thanksgiving 2013, was so oddly disappointing; everything that made San Francisco unlike other American cities appeared to have evaporated, leaving only the terrain. It was probably a mistake to stay at the Fairmont, which had indeed become very ordinary in the fifty years since my previous visit. This time, we stayed at the St Francis, which my mother always looked down on. It had its motellian edges — the elevators, which required room-key cards, were kludgy, and there were no real doormen — but we were very comfortable, especially in bed, and the Oak Room, the hotel’s default restaurant, served rather good food in a richly-paneled dining room. Say what you like, but the hotels of the modern West have been our palaces of democracy, where anybody with sufficient simoleons could be king for a day. An astonishing number of modcons have made their first appearances at hotels, although don’t ask me, after my nice lunch, to list any. (Take, rather, the doubting-Thomas position of M le Neveu: “Egyptian beer? Pshaw!” Then see what happens.) The best hotels are still engines of advance, but not, I fear, on the old humane front of grandeur and comfort. Even if the grandeur is all but in ruins, the St Francis remains a monument to the advances of the past that gave us the “grand hotel.” There is even, for example, an occasionally-manned shoe-shine stand.

Right outside the door is Union Square, which is what such a square would be like if it were in front of the Museum, or, even better, the museum on the other side of the park, plus a lot of stores. As a central plaza it is hopeless, most of it hidden away on shrub-screened terraces, and the palm trees send the wrong message. (The underground parking lot, once so progressive, has become a monument to the folly of the last century.) Union Square seems imported from somewhere else, but then, so does ours here in New York. (A sardonic comment on what “union” really stood for? Secular, materialist commercialism?) It did when I first laid eyes on it fifty years ago. But it’s a convenient location.

We went shopping, twice. The first and far more serious round took us to Gump’s and to Rochester. Rochester, which sells quality clothes for men of my build (and bigger, much bigger), has a branch in Midtown Manhattan, and I’ve been meaning to get to it, what with the state of my belts and my sock drawer, but the branch in San Francisco is the first one that I patronized — I don’t think that they’d opened in New York back then — and it was somehow easier to get to (at Mission and Third) than 52nd Street (or is it 51st?). As it happened, the branch is about to close, not because the rent has gone up but because the building is coming down. Everything was 20% off. I bought a Calvin Klein topcoat and a Jack Victor sportsjacket. The salesman, appreciating my feeling for color, dug the jacket out of the back. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that it suggests a somewhat distant wooded hillside seen through a light fog at the peak of autumn, only with the sky blue mixed in with the colors of the leaves. I’ve never seen anything like it. Kathleen fell in love with it even quicker than I did. I also bought a Robert Talbot tie that will attract a lot of attention when I wear it to a cocktail party. How to say “flame stitch electric purple” without evoking the Seventies? Which I assure you it doesn’t.

At Gump’s, we went straight to the display of table lamps and found a salesman to sell us the small trophy lamp that we wanted to buy last time we were in town but didn’t. What we had done was to copy down all the numbers on the ticket, and a lot of good that did. While the lamp was being written up and the shipping address noted down, Kathleen found place mats. They were somewhat nicer versions of the place mats at the Oak Room that I had shortly before commented on at lunch. “Now, this is the sort of thing we need,” I’d said. Now we have eight of them. We took them with us.

The other shopping expedition was a quick tour up and down Grant Street. I shall have to describe the romance of Chinatown some other time; it is the romance of a memory. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I did find a marvelous little metal box featuring a woman in Chinese opera getup next to the words “Random CRAP from Here and There.” The box wouldn’t begin to hold all the random crap from here and there that’s in this house even after the move, but it’s coy enough to place in the living room, and a suitable container for the best of my random crap. It’s a start.