Daily Office:
Friday
¶ Matins: JR continues to roll out his incredible pictures of Manhattan. I thought that this shot was some sort of “architect’s rendering,” but it’s really just the new Westin, on 42nd Street, there for anybody who will look.
¶ Tierce: Next Friday, the Pope outide my window.
¶ Sext: It’s only a movie — or is it? Set-designers re-create the 9/11 Tribute at St Paul’s.
¶ Vespers: Even though it didn’t start until 12:30 — an afternoon-denting time to go to the movies — I stayed uptown and went to see Smart People. I almost made a new friend at the concession stand…
¶ Compline: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico: Tony Judt on American Amnesia, in The New York Review of Books.
Oremus…
§ Matins. The magnificent thing about JR’s photos is how dark they are, how they seem to be shot, with a big spotlight, at midnight on Mars. But it’s no surprise that JR effortlessly recreates New York en français. He changes the look of his blog every other day, it seems, but the writing — well, it’s worth having kept one’s French up just to gasp.
§ Tierce. St Joseph’s Church, on 87th Street, often shows up in the snapshots that I take from my balcony (I’ll be sure to run one next week). A blandly romanesque building with a baroque-accented cupola, St Joseph’s is one of the few remaining holdouts of “Germantown,” as this neighborhood was called prior to the 1920s. Mass is celebrated in German every Sunday.
From the roof, I might even be able to see Benedict XVI, but it seems hardly likely that I’ll be allowed to do that. And yet who will prevent it? Will there be security people on top of every building in the quartier? I guess I’ll find out.
§ Sext. I still haven’t been anywhere near Ground Zero. A corner of it could be glimpsed from Kathleen’s office on Wall Street, but that’s all I’ve seen. My feelings about the World Trade Center are enormously conflicted. It’s clear that, beneath all the politeness, the devastation that hit the towers revealed the social gulf between Manhattan — to which the Towers seemed only notionally attached; islanders disliked them — and the boroughs and suburbs, where people refer to Manhattan as “the city.” The differences aren’t socio-economic in the usual sense, but rather contrast a cosmopolitan population, made up largely of immigrants from within the United States, and a more patriotic crowd consisting of people who were either born where they live or very far away, in another country.
§ Vespers. Everyone in the ticket line was, to my eye, “older,” although probably not that much senior to me. If senior at all. I made a point of not asking for a senior discount’ my practice is to accept these as they’re bestowed. “One adult?” screeched the lady in the cage. I nodded.
A few minutes, while I was waiting on line for popcorn, the woman standing behind me asked me why I hadn’t asked for a senior discount. I explained that I wasn’t sure that, merely sixty, I was a senior. Oh, she said, she was only fifty-eight, but she always asked for (and got) the discount. “It’s three dollars in your pocket,” she said with a tinge of bewilderment, as if I hadn’t yet learned that night follows day. Unwilling to appear to be cavalier about small sums — a habit of mine that some New Yorkers find downright offensive — I settled for giving an impression of pusillanimity, as if I didn’t dare insist upon my rights. Whatever the woman thought of this, she didn’t lose interest in me, and I was presently aware of being appraised for various and sundry potentials.
Welcome to seniorland. When you’re young, girls play hard to get. A single man of sixty who gets around without a walker, however, is the one who’s going to have to learn that game.
At a lull in our exchange, my new friend took a call. I overheard her admonish a young man that he was going to have to go to gym class even if he didn’t like it, because life is full of things you don’t want to do, “later on.” No, she wasn’t going to call in an excuse. I assumed that this must be a grandson, and a few minutes later she was telling me that she, too, had a daughter aged thirty-five. “We both started early, eh?” That was pretty chummy, I thought. But she saved the best for last. “Do you live in the city?” she asked. Mishearing her, I said that, yes, my daughter lived in the city. “No, you,” she asked again. I said that I did. “You look more like a country guy,” she said, cheerfully.*
And here I thought I was looking pretty snappy. But it was Westchester snappy, Greenwich snappy. Herringbone tweed jacket. Khakis. Loafers. And too much green for an academic.
Still the kid who took a train in from the suburbs — too dense to demand a senior discount!
*Usage note: When employed by New York City natives, “country,” or “the country,” means the environs within a seventy-five mile circumference. It suggests no familiarity with Loretta Lynn.
§ Compline. It’s late in the day for a Friday Front, but I was unpleasantly surprised that I missed last week’s altogether. Last week, of course, I was a bit distracted by the death of the new computer within hours of installation. The machine was easily revived, as it turned out, but my head was a bit scrambled. I’m not sure that I was aware of the lapse until this evening.
Among my “one of these days” projects is the organization of all the Friday Fronts, going back to 2003 at least. In those pre-blogging days, the Friday Front was my solution to the question of minimal posting: there would always be an essay on current — more of a memo, really — every Friday. With the launch of The Daily Blague, Friday Fronts went into abeyance, but I revived them early last year.
A more important “one of these days” jobs would be to shunt all the long pieces that ran at the old, Movable Type DB into proper Portico pages.