Hospitality 2

While the Thomas Wolfe title and clichéd aphorism says You Can't Go Home Again, I think you can.  It's not the going-- that's kind of a geographical distance, but the coming that's tough.  'I'm going home', one says, bored at a party, annoyed with a social event-- exhaustion, a literal boundary-- a statement.  But 'I'm coming home' is something you say after time-- to your estranged family, to your ex... to your children, after an absence.  'Come home, baby,' your boyfriend says on the telephone at 3 AM and you cry, because it means a reversal of heart-- a reconciliation, a reunion.  You are not just leaving one place for your own apartment... you are coming 'to' someone-- a safe, familiar reality.

When my mother was in the throes of dementia, she'd phone me and beg me to take her home.  Where are you, I'd ask, and she'd reply she was at 'the apartment'.  Of course she was at her lifetime home, but her altered brain no longer recognized this.  Her heart, however, longed for what she had known and lost. It was poignant and heartbreaking for me who longed only for the mother I had known and lost.

Nearly thirty years ago after renting and resettling many times, I bit the bullet and bought an apartment here.  I searched and investigated and looked at hundreds of candidates... calculated what I could manage and picked a place.  It's old-- it's funky, and for me, living in a studio/loft with my son and sundry stragglers, it seemed palatial. I bought into a coop-- with many wonderful people who wrote for the New York Times, composed music, taught art-- creatives who made this like a sort of communal old home.  There was a live-in Super who'd been born here; single-handed, he kept the building immaculate and repaired things with pride.  It was his home. It was our home.  

As time went on and the city economy evolved, this old economical investment became more of a 'find' for people with money. Lured by modest prices, they bought in, renovated, sold.  The building profile began to change-- the old tenants dying off, and the new electing to have doormen and amenities I would never have preferred.  I realize I am not a homeowner but a shareholder in a corporation whose priorities are no longer mine.  People have combined spaces which were not meant to be combined-- violated wall insulation, installed cooling and heating systems whose noisy apparatus sits outside my courtyard windows. Our monthly costs have nearly exceeded my income.

Sell, my friends and neighbors advise me.  Daily I read real-estate emails listing the various moves of celebrities and investors-- from home to home, from design-space to new design-space.  I look-- I read, I wonder how I will survive.  I have given up most luxuries; I cannot even afford summer air-conditioning bills. My plumbing needs replacement; coop laws require professional insurance certification that is more than I can bear.  So many of my friends have left the city. 

I can remember the first nights I spent here-- the strange sounds in the walls and old radiators... will I ever feel 'at home' here, I wondered?  Gradually I spread out-- I built walls of bookshelves for my library... I hung artwork from friends and acquaintances.  My things occupy niches... furniture has been handed down from various sources.  My son has long ago moved out on his own and more than ever, this place has taken on the shape of me and I have morphed into the shape of this home.  It's old and it's packed with interesting things that inspire me.  I walk the halls at night and look at these things. I have records-- cds, cassettes-- guitars, basses, tools for creating... piles of old fabrics for quilts and small stamp and rock collections. It's a sort of home museum.  People come here-- not frequently the way they used to, but occasionally-- and they marvel at what is sort of my own portrait-- or a mirror of what matters to me.  

For true New Yorkers, we are first of our city, then perhaps Americans.  We love our home town-- huge, complicated, dangerous, overcrowded... endlessly fascinating and thrilling.  It's like a dysfunctional relationship I will never give up; I am married to my city, even in its current love affair with money and the corresponding cultural decline.  I watch the World Cup with interest, but it's the Knicks that have my heart.  The home team. 

The note left by the Iranian soccer team-- thanking America with great sarcasm for 'hospitality' (the lack thereof) was upsetting.  I wonder whether they would have been treated this way in New York City; somehow I think not. It was a complicated issue but in the end this is sports, not politics.  Besides, very few national teams are limited to their own countrymen; players come from everywhere.  I read somewhere that of the many sets of brothers participating in the World Cup, only a few played for the same nation. 

Today in the first real demonstration of dramatic summer heat, I walked from Soho to East Harlem. It was a little brutal... but opening my door-- I felt embraced by the sense of 'coming' home. This has become my family-- the walls, the furnishings, the lights and the old floors-- it's as though we've exchanged DNA. I've absorbed the ghosts and the invented narratives of former tenants from more than one hundred years ago.  There is no one waiting here for me, sadly... and yet there is everything else.

So I began tonight thinking about the Venezuelan earthquake victims... I have had nightmares about these kinds of catastrophes forever.  There is nothing more terrifying than a large-scale natural disaster that erases all safety-- all stability, all sense of home-- of life, family... it is unimaginable and so much worse than tragic. The collapse of buildings... the destruction and death and unspeakable horror of the lost and missing. And yet we still make wars and simulate this kind of destruction.

I guess the graphic news images reminded me of the great blessing of my home-- in the heat, in the absence of luxury, to be able to walk uptown and greet people who sit on stoops in summer evenings... the man with the curved back who sleeps on Madison now and is fed by neighbors... the dreadlocked young man who has built his cardboard castle at the entrance to the Q train-- who has amassed a little library and is writing The Great City Novel in minute ink lines in a tiny notebook.  He gets his morning coffee free from Starbucks and sleeps well these days, he tells me. He would not trade his home, he swears on a dog-eared Bible, accepting into his shopping-cart shelf an old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo which I have no doubt will be well read.

So America has a large birthday coming up.  Here in New York, people are excited about the colossal spectacle of Taylor Swift's wedding.  If one searches history sites, there are several dates for the birth of our city-- typical of its diversity and concurrent narratives.  As for me, I'll catch the fireworks, celebrate as an urban patriot, watch the ships in the harbor.  Somehow after midnight I'll manage the crowded journey back uptown after which I will be (God willing), in the words of Van Morrison, Coming Home.

Hospitality

When I was younger I loved entertaining. I loved cooking a large meal-- baking, spreading out copious plates on a table where my musician and artist-friends would gather on unmatched chairs-- two on a piano bench, a few on Fender or Ampeg amplifiers which provided extra seating and wheeled conveniently.  For the most part I loved my guests, although occasionally I had a few undesirable intruders who drank too much, sloshed red wine on the rugs, stayed too long. Generally everyone seemed to enjoy these evenings-- like a kind of salon, with some guitars inevitably pulled out as inhibitions waned. In later years people commented on the company-- they wanted to know who was coming and who wasn't. And one night some unidentified person walked off with a painting-- took it right off the wall and I assume stuck it under their coat. It was brazen and hurtful and I still have not forgiven whomever it was who violated my hospitality. 

Once I had a baby I limited these evenings to holidays or celebrations and they were considerably less wild, less generous, less hospitable. As my resources shrank and living costs blew up, priorities had to change. I often remember my mother-- her dinner parties for my father's business associates-- how she fussed over hors d'oeuvres and menus-- place settings, silver service and wine choices. By today's standards her dining room was very modest-- the table extensions made it cramped but she persisted-- with her crystal chandelier and the fancy china. There was something positively homey about it all. Today, corporate dinners are most often catered or moved to restaurants. 

I can remember sitting at the top of my family's staircase, eavesdropping... sometimes I'd sneak down and open the hall closet where I could bury my face in the ladies' furs, and try on the men's hats while the grownups chattered on.  The dogs were locked in the alcove, we were sequestered, and the house smelled of perfume for days. There were place-cards, invitations, gifts to amuse us.  There were formal thank-you notes and after-gifts my mother would display on the mantelpiece, all mentioning her stellar and warm hospitality.

The word confused me-- I'd broken my leg and been x-rayed and treated in a local hospital.  Why were people mentioning this sterile awful-smelling place in relation to my mother?  It was also ironic that grandparents ended up in the very place they felt least welcome, and most uncomfortable, with the deceptive name. No one has really ever explained this semantic discrepancy with any finality.  

Most Saturdays I work at an art gallery.  I'm generally there alone and it's a vaguely intimidating place, as many galleries have become in recent years. It's as though they establish an aura of exclusivity and discourage average people from entering-- a social boundary which walls off the often baffling and exorbitant pricing of art-- intentionally intimidating, implying only the gallerists have the key to the mystery of collection and value. I am there alone; I'm careful to welcome people, to dress casually and encourage a positive experience looking at exhibitions. 

By contrast, at home I've become a little reclusive. Maybe since the pandemic I lost the habit of hosting groups of people. I'm more private and less sociable; I'm covetous of my time. Gigs used to give me an opportunity to welcome friends and socialize behind the curtain of music.  Everyone had a good time and then I could go home and be alone while staff cleaned up. Personally I don't use instagram and refrain from posting family and private events on my limited social media. I don't share health status or much besides my work and maybe my son's when he solicits this.  Raising kids, the very idea of solitude became impossible-- a lost luxury some of us rediscovered in older age.  And good fences good neighbors do make.  City dwellers in apartment buildings tend to keep healthy distances from our neighbors. We hear too much, we observe more than we should and we try to ignore over-intimacy and establish boundaries. It's an art-- to be warm and friendly but not invasive.

Last Saturday a woman came into the gallery, pulled up a chair and began a conversation.. She'd somehow been personally stalking me... after a convoluted soliloquy about her lifelong pursuit of the arts, she tried to convince me to let her stay in my home.  But it went on --- it became unsafe and alarming.  There was no 'no'.  There was just more manipulation and pleading.  She would not leave when guests and clients were asking questions... she sat herself in an office and just stayed. In the end I asserted the meanness I reserve for extreme situations. It had gone on for hours and I was literally shaking.

To distance myself from the episode I walked a good five miles uptown.. ended up passing my son's favorite Mexican restaurant where the doors were open, welcoming customers in the early summer weather.  I took out the phone he makes me carry to take a photo to send him and there in the corner of the frame was a young rat-- as nice looking as they come-- sniffing around outside... and then it entered. Slipped in. I wondered whether I should interfere and alert staff but I watched as it casually crawled underneath a table where two well-dressed women were sitting.  It explored their feet.. unobserved... did that hesitation dance rats do... walked itself around the place, and carefully left.  Totally unnoticed... that little rat taking advantage of city hospitality and beyond... or finding the place not suitable-- who knows why it left? 

I couldn't help drawing parallels to some of the characters of my recent weeks-- the stalker in the gallery, those few who have invited themselves into my home... and the places I've been where I felt strange or judged or misplaced. Being on an extreme budget, I do not have air conditioning.  It makes my home less hospitable for sure in the summer. It's a kind of protection. I'll do my socializing off-site. And God-willing I will manage to avoid any seasonal hospital hospitality.