Attacked by Real Estate

For more than a couple of decades, we enjoyed the incredible luxury of a house in the country.  The one we owned is a beautiful place on a historic road in Garrison, New York, in the majestic Hudson Valley.  We loved it well.  I planted a garden.  And we put in an authentic Italian terracotta wood burning oven.  We threw parties. It was the scene of enormously loving and joyful family gatherings.  We all fell completely in love with the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, which performs under a gorgeous tent on a lawn with the most magnificent view of the river.

But in recent years, I've known that the responsibility for our second home was becoming more than could be borne.  We would have to sell.

Reluctance delayed the decision: the emotional wrench of parting, the terrible disappointment to the family, the price we could ask during a real estate debacle, the enormous difficulty of emptying the attic, where we had been running the Patricia and David Free Mini-Storage for twenty-seven years.  Postponement was the easy option.

But the house began to take an active role in forcing my hand.  Rising real estate taxes were bad enough.  Then, the well pump broke.  Jimmy Erikson came to replace it and discovered that the water treatment system was failing too.  Then the over-flow tank for the furnace started to leak.  The house seemed to be firmly pushing my resolve.  The demise of the washer/dryer and an invasion of mice, populations ballooning after the mild winter, did the trick.  I bit the bullet just after New Year’s.  I told a neighbor that I was about to sell.  He had a friend who might be interested.  The prospect showed up, liked the place a lot, but took her time deciding.  Late in February, she began dating a local billionaire (I kid you not!).  So much for that easy sale.

Then, another neighbor’s best friend came to see the house with his family.  They fell in love.  OKAY!  This was going to be easy, after all.  Except, of course, for the accumulated junk in the attic, the underground oil tank, and the asbestos they discovered in the basement.  (Who knew?)  I dealt with all of that.  (Six words to describe an enormity.)

We closed.  The delightful and thoroughly simpatico new owners made a generous offer.  They would not be in residence during the beginning of August.  In fact, they would never be there in August.  If I liked, I could return for a couple of weeks each year to take in the glories of the Shakespeare Festival and even fire up the pizza oven once more for old time’s sake.

Three of us arrived there last Saturday, looked around at the newly-painted walls and made for the pool.  After a refreshing swim, while we were chatting on the patio, one the tinier denizens of 699 Old Albany Post Road decided to make the divorce final.  A bee stung me—a first in my life.  The stinger it left behind proved it had been a suicide attack.  I now have a place on my body about the size of a salad plate that is puffy and looks like a gigantic blister, in the center of which is a circle about the size of a teacup saucer, that glows with the deep, vivid magentas and purples of a Namibian sunset.  It burns like fire.  I have used up half a tube of cortisone cream and numerous doses of Benadryl.  I am on antibiotics.

If I tell you I am going back there next August, PLEASE handcuff me to a radiator in my New York apartment and don’t feed me until I come to my senses.

 

Annamaria Alfieri

My First Library

It was really just a room in our school. It had big windows on two sides and shelves on the other two. The shelves were low so people less than 4 feet could reach them easily. It was called “The Little Library" to differentiate it from the big library where all the older kids went. In the middle of the room were three round tables with small chairs tucked around them. This is where we sat to read our books. You could go in there anytime you had free time, before school, if you came early, after school if your mother was late picking you up. Or, after lunch, during recess, etc. It was a hideout, a shelter, a sanctuary.

One day I was in the library during lunch. I had found a wonderful book. It had a battered orange cover and the illustrations were all in black and white silhouettes. It was called The Railway Children. Suddenly the door opened and Miss Harper, my Third Grade teacher, looked in.

“There you are!” We were looking all over for you.” She came over to see what I was reading and her expression softened. “Oh, that was one of my favorite books,” she said. And she showed me how to sign the book out so I could take it home with me.

All the way home I kept wondering: Why would Miss Harper have wanted to read a children’s book?

Robin Hathaway

The Price of Peaches... or... Quid Pro Quo...

(This blog is dedicated to Verlyn Klinkenborg, distinguished member of the New York Times editorial board, a Princeton Ph.D., who lives on his farm in upstate New York and writes literary meditations on rural farm life.)

Here I sit, relaxed, gazing at amber waves of grain under spacious skies…

Just kidding! I've been spending too much time with Nelson DeMille's John Corey and have picked up his bad habits!!

I'm actually chained to my non-functioning A.C. in sweltering Manhotten... while Con Ed plays games with our electricity!

But back to my bucolic VK mode… today I paid $3 bucks for 5 measly peaches! And one was already rotten by the time I got it home!

I sat on the kitchen floor and recalled another time of peaches in my life… from a plantation near Augusta, Georgia.

I was visiting the Episcopalian St. Helena sisters in Augusta and promised to help them raise funds. The next night, at dinner with the family of one of my Sewanee students, at their enormous peach plantation near Augusta, the student's father offered to donate" some" of their produce to the good sisters, being a good Episcopalian that he was.

The next day a truck pulled up at the convent with tons - yes, tons - of Georgia's finest! All hands sprang on deck. You never saw so many peaches in your life!!!

The good ladies fed every hungry mouth for miles around from that bounteous truck load. As well as filled every can and jar and pan they could find!

If I'd weighed all that fruit at my local NYC market they'd have cost, I'm sure, tons of dollars! But nothing like 5 for three $$$.

The next day I had an appointment with the manager of a big, fine department store in town. Before I met with the big guy I did some shopping on my own – a lovely evening gown, a pink raincoat and a pair of heels.

Then I went to my meeting. After several minutes of pleasant conversation he handed me a sealed envelope.

"My contribution to the dear sisters," he said, ever the charming southern gentleman.

When I gave the envelope proudly to the head nun, I imagined vast sums. After all, it was bigtime philanthropy! It was the finest store in town!

She showed me the check. It was the EXACT amount I'd spent that day at the man's store!

You want to talk about the meaning of Quid Pro Quo?????

T. J. Straw

Losing It

You will recall how a few weeks ago I declared my intention to go crazy in the service of Art, in order to better understand my protagonist's usual frame of mind. It worked pretty well, as methods go. The first draft of Monkeystorm (current working title) is just about finished. Carina has managed to elevate her craziness to the level of a superpower.

The problem with mental exercises of this sort is that they tend to distract a writer from important details of her own life. There are things I haven't been attending to. There are things, in fact, that I have out and out lost this summer. My mind may be one of them, or not, but I certainly can't find, for example, the new camera. I know we brought it back from Mississippi because I downloaded pictures.

Or my summer clothes from last year. A divine bathing suit I bought in the Florida Keys. Two pair of white jeans that fit me. That suit with the bright-colored flowers that everybody likes. Gone.

Most likely I packed the clothes away last fall and forgot where. But I've looked all over, to no avail. I tell you what. If you see some woman about my size wearing a skirted suit with big gaudy flowers and using a little black Canon digital camera to take pictures, and she isn't me, drop me an email. There may be a reward. Or my mind. If you run into my mind (I know, I know, it's too weak to get very far) hang onto it and give me a call. I'll be most grateful.

Kate Gallison

Update, Saturday morning… I found the camera just now, you'll be happy to know. In searching the house for it, however, I uncovered many levels of chaos. Next Friday I hope to be able to report that my office is clean, my clothes are in order, and five bags of trash have been put on the curb.

Learning to love Jazz from Joe Williams

Over this past weekend, I had the chance to present Invisible Country at the wonderful, independent bookstore, Canio's in Sag Harbor.  While there, I noticed, on the wall of my friends' house, a picture of my host Paul with Joe Williams.  We talked about how Paul knew Joe, and Paul said Joe was "the best." Paul used to arrange weekend jazz concerts in New York, so he really knew Joe.  I agreed with his assessment, but my connection with the great jazz singer from afar, just another face in the crowd.

I have no recollection of how my first love in jazz came about.  We were working class teenagers going to Catholic high school next to the Paterson, NJ jail, in a school building condemned by the fire department in a moribund city that is still in its death throes more than fifty years later.  Somehow, some way, we decided it would be cool to go to New York City, less than twenty miles away, to a club called Birdland on Broadway to hear the Count Basie band with Joe Williams.  I was sixteen the first time we went.  Whatever took us there, we returned every time Joe and the Count came back, for three years running.  Perhaps the whole thing began because the boys a year ahead of me in school got drivers’ licenses and wanted someplace to drive.  Maybe the New Jersey eighteen year olds among us wanted to get over the New York State line where they could legally drink alcohol.  Whatever took me there, I fell in love with the music and especially with Joe’s voice.

The Kid from Red Bank, Count Basie, played splendidly to be sure.  (On one visit, I sat where I could see his fingers, chubby they were, dancing on the keys. That was decades ago, but I still see them now.)  Great Stuff, but it was Joe's singing that knocked me out.  It still does. In all those years, not a fortnight has gone by that I haven’t listened to my favorite, “I’m Beginning to See the Light.”

YouTubes of Joe are sparse and to my way of thinking do not capture him at his best, but I share a couple here.

 Here he is with the GREAT George shearing:

Many, many of Joe’s recordings are widely available.  Check out a few.  I think I have most of them and know they will be keeping me company for the rest of my life.

Annamaria Alfieri