I, the Jury Member

I’m a little disappointed these days. That's because I feel like I missed out on a great civil ritual. This ritual is something people gripe about, but find worthwhile. 

I”m talking about jury duty. How many of you have been on a jury? Over the summer, I had a summons for the federal court of the Southern District of New York. 

The opportunity intrigued me. I’ve never actually been on a jury. I see it as a civic duty, as vital as voting. I was called to jury duty in Stamford when I lived in Connecticut. I sat all day for a personal injury case, a fall in the parking lot of a big retailer. At the end of the day the opposing attorneys asked about my background, readiness to serve and attitudes relevant to the case. One asked, “What’s your view of personal injury lawsuits?”

My response: “I think a lot of them are opportunistic, people looking for a payout.” As you can imagine, the defense attorney’s eyes sparkled with otherworldly delight. The plaintiff’s attorney was aghast and made sure I was never, ever on that jury. A court official thanked me for my service and sent me on my merry way.

I have been in court before, as a participant--divorce court, traffic court, experiences that I don’t want to replicate, as I was on the defendant side of the equation and once was more than enough. 

Jury duty is something else altogether and I wanted to do that. The federal court summons required me to get from Katonah down to Pearl Street in lower Manhattan. As the instructions made clear, I could forget about serving at the federal court in White Plains wasn’t an option.

I carefully prepared for the first day, where everything from process to location was new to me. I painstakingly prepared people at work for my absence. I figured out how to use e-tickets on my phone. Checking train schedules, I decided to take the 5:55 to make sure I got to court by 8:30. In fact, I was an hour early, so I rambled around Chinatown and the court district until jurors could enter. I was on my way, baby! Ready to serve the cause of justice!

I wasn’t chosen for a case on the first two days. On the third, I made the cut for a civil case. The next day was Yom Kippur and then something else came up, so court would resume the next week.

Then Sunday a court official called to say don’t come down on Monday, the case was being held over to the next week. OK. The next week I called the court to check and to my utter surprise, I learned my service was done, I didn’t need to come in. I didn’t get many details of what was going on and I didn’t ask, being in shock. I should soon get my certificate confirming I served. Several weeks later I printed the online statement confirming my service, and soon got the check for my days and travel expenses.

So, there we are. My thoughts? The judges impressed me with their careful questioning of jurors on our backgrounds, our interests, any factor that could keep us from being impartial. This took hours but resulted, at day’s end, in juries that plaintiffs and defense felt could judge fairly. 

Listening to fellow candidates, I got a glimpse into so many levels of society. Blue collar, white collar, union workers, Wall Street executives, immigrants. Every day, several were excused, for reasons obvious and also unknown. This spoke to a process that was deliberate and thoughtful.

I also liked the chance to get out of the home office for an urban experience. Granted, I felt nervous being on the subway. The pandemic and rising crime spooked me. I wore an N95 mask in response to the first, and for the second, well, I crossed my fingers and hoped. 

I also enjoyed wandering around with my trusty camera. At the end of my first day, I stumbled upon a raucous anti-mask mandate protest in Foley Square. The number of people stunned me, right there in the blue state! I documented the scene with my cellphone, the kind of street photography I miss during the pandemic. 

So now I’m back in the home office. No more trips to Pearl Street. Can you volunteer to do jury duty? Maybe that’ll be a post-retirement project in the future. I still want the opportunity to sit in judgment. I’ll  see if I can get the coveted White Plains assignment the next time, thanks.

Big demo at Foley Square, near the court.

My First Time to Vote and Assorted Election Adventures

 Voting has always been a favorite civic duty of mine. I look forward to casting my ballots, even if I’m usually backing the losing horse in the race. I have always liked observing the political process and taking part in it on every election day. 

Chalk that enthusiasm up to my 1960s-70s civics education in public schools. I learned voting is an essential part of democracy. As soon as I turned 18 in 1975, I registered. This was in Texas, back when the Texas Republican Party wasn’t the well-oiled political juggernaut we know and love today (well, maybe not everybody loves it). Indeed, the party infrastructure was so minimal that its primaries had voters stick paper ballots in shoe boxes, or so I heard. That lack of political presence didn’t appeal to me, the GOP didn't offer enough candidates and electability, so I registered as a Democrat. That act didn’t stop the local GOP contingent in Hidalgo County from asking me to start a “Youth for Ford” group at my high school as part of the 1976 campaign. I didn’t do that, although I kept the campaign swag, like a groovy “President Ford ‘76” T-shirt and a roll of President Ford stickers.

Still wearable, 45 years later. 

My maiden voyage voter came on May 1, 1976, the Texas Democratic primary. I proudly cast my vote for  . . . Jerry Brown, yes, Governor Moonbeam, who was young and dynamic and dating Linda Ronstadt. People said if Brown were elected president, Ronstadt could hold the role of “First Chick.” I must have been in the hip, aware, forward-looking youth demographic that Brown wanted to reach. Voting for Jerry Brown was the first of many times I’ve supported off-brand candidates to give support to the independent thinkers and protest the limitations of the two-party system. I’m still doing that and still getting the same results. Some things never change. 

In October 1976 politics became up close and personal for one afternoon. I joined the Princeton University Student Democrats for a trip up to Newark for a Columbus Day parade. Vice presidential candidates Walter Mondale and Bob Dole both appeared. I must have had glimpses of both of them. I cannot imagine two national-ticket candidates from the GOP and Democrats appearing at the same event these days, especially not Columbus Day, now that most reviled of civic observances among some political factions in our troubled times.

Anyway, I voted absentee for Gerald Ford, so the t-shirt and stickers must have swayed my opinion. Then in 1980, Carter vs. Reagan squared off in an election colored by a terrible economy, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Three Mile Island and the Iranian hostage crisis—names and crises similar to the current situation. I cast my ballot for the thinking man’s candidate, John Anderson, a breakaway Republican. I even have a Princeton Students for Anderson button somewhere. Needless to say, Anderson didn’t move into the White House but he impressed me then and he still does. 

The campaign cycles rolled through. I took notice of Jesse Jackson’s confident, plainspoken presence in the Democratic primaries of 1984 and 1988. I might have even voted for him, as the spoiler candidate in the New York primaries.  And don't forget idiosyncratic Ross Perot in 1992, with his slide show.

The grimmest election day involved a voting place where I didn’t even vote. This was November 3, 1992. I was the east coast editor of a trade magazine called Video Store. On October 31, MCA Home Video president Robert Blattner was killed in an airplane crash in Colorado. His funeral was on election day, at Congregation Agudath Shalom in Stamford. In my role as an industry reporter, I attended the funeral. Agudath Shalom was also a polling place, so I had the unsettling experience of attending a funeral where the mourners and voters were streaming into the same building. 

Fast forward to election day November 2008. I’m living in Stamford and go to a school in the Springdale neighborhood to vote. Compared to the short lines I’d always encountered, I had to wait at least an hour. That’s the kind of enthusiasm Barack Obama created. In a notable coincidence, I lived on Hope Street at the time the Hope and Change candidate was elected. 

My adventures in voting in 2016 and 2020 weren’t just political—they were visual. Sensing the 2016 election had great historical consequences, I ran around Manhattan taking photos of news crews, police, TV network booths, anything to capture the moment. I especially photographed the news trucks lined up on 6th Avenue, next to the New York Hilton Midtown where Donald Trump had his headquarters for that world-historical night. I didn’t get to the Javits Center, where Hillary Clinton’s supporters had gathered for a celebration that never happened.

Avenue of the Americas, across the street from the New York Hilton Midtown.

The 2020 election also gave me visuals, up to a certain date. I happened to be in Boston the last week of February, perfectly timed to check out a Bernie Sanders rally at Boston Common on February 29. The weather was freezing, my cold stiff fingers struggled with the camera, the crowd was a sea of pro-Bernie blue and the onrushing pandemic turned the world upside down 10 days later. Bernie soon got frozen out of the campaign. The rest is history still unfolding.

Bernie blesses the masses.

So here we are, another election done. I did my part in the Town of Bedford and Westchester County. I didn’t find any dramatic photos to take, since town elections rarely generate visual excitement. But 2022 and 2024—if I can get into Manhattan after voting locally, that’ll be another story.

Have camera, will travel, at least to Grand Central for an election.

The Case Files of Jerry Kat-Onah, Private Eye

The photo shows an intense literary collaboration with Jerry. He's calling our project "Jerry Kat-Onah, Private Eye." Here's the story:

She sashayed into my office, claws clicking rhythmically on the hard wood floor, looking like she owned the place.

She didn't have an appointment, but in five seconds I cleared my schedule to hear her out.

"Are you Jerry Kat-Onah, Private Eye?" she asked, settling in a chair across from my desk.

"That's me. What's on your mind, Miss . . . " I asked.

"Miss Kitty."

"Last name, Kitty."

She looked anxious. "Frisky."

"OK, Miss Kitty Frisky, now we're getting someplace. You wanted to see me about something."

Miss Kitty looked around, fearful to say what's on her mind. Sensing her unease, I said, "This is a private office and nobody will hear what we discuss. It stays between us."

She clicked her claws together and curled her tail into her lap. "Somebody is following me and I want it stopped."

"Do you know who it is? Why's this happening?

"Oh, he's a tomcat in my neighborhood, always prowling. He took a liking to me," she smiled, "that has been known to happen, you see, but he became a nuisance, always yowling and scratching and knocking over the milk bottles to get my attention." 

"Have you taken any measures to keep him away? I take it he's not reasonable."

Miss Kitty jumped up and ran around the office a few times, then rolled around under my desk, a subtle "tell" of anxiety. 

"Do you mind if a scratch your cat tower for a moment?" she asked.

"Please do, that's why it's there."

Scratch, scratch, stretch, yawn. Miss Kitty Frisky was a client who would move at her own pace.

"Yes, to answer your question, I have tried to reason with him, but those efforts always degenerated into, you might say, a cat fight. Nothing is working. That's why I came to you, Jerry Kat-onah. You have a reputation as a private eye who can fix things."

I smiled. "I like to think of myself as a problem solver," I told her as she idly flipped her tail.

"If you can't, I don't know what I'll do!" she burst out sobbing. This happens in my line of business, when clients get rattled by their situation. Part of my job is to calm them down. So I offered her a bowl of milk and a fresh can of liver pate. 

"Thank you, that was very kind," she sighed after she daintily slurped the milk and licked the can clean. "I just want this problem fixed. Or, if it comes to it, 'fixed.'" She made air quotes around the second mention of "fixed."

"So, do you mean fixed in a normal sense or 'fixed' in the other sense? There is a difference, you know."

"Fixed or 'fixed,' so long as the problem goes away," she said, a hard light coming into her luminous green cat eyes.

"'Fixed' carries a higher hourly rate, just so you know, Miss Kitty. That's a special order."

She reached into her purse and pulled out an expensive mouse chew toy. It looked special.

Miss Kitty purred, "Look at it, an Internet of Things-enabled, CBD-infused, top-of-the-line chewy mouse, endorsed by Wirecutter!"

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's the stuff that dreams are made of. Take it, consider it a down payment," she said.

"I like your negotiating style, Miss Kitty Frisky. I'll look into both approaches."

She jumped, stretched and smoothed out her fur coat. I noticed the perfect lacquer on her claws, all of them. "I need to go to the ladies room and powder my whiskers," she said. "Give me a few minutes."

"Take your time." Her shiny claws clicked on the floor toward the door, then stopped.

"When I get back, how about you show me your cat tower? It's ever so climbable."

"That's what it's there for."

"Lovely. Then you'll see why they call me 'Frisky.'"

The Next Generation of Wallachs Says Goodbye to Gotham

New in town, Brooklyn, September 1980

Members of my family are drawn to New York City. It’s an old story, going back to when my great-great-grandfather Adolph Lissner moved to New York from Germany in 1854. He became a citizen in 1860—I have a microfilm copy of his 1860 naturalization certificate. A death notice in the New York Times of January 21, 1914 said he served with Troop E, Third Regiment, New York Cavalry in the Civil War.

Other family members would follow. My father lived there from 1967 to 1978, then me from 1980 to 1991, and most recently my nephew Tyler, from 2010 to, well, last week, when he left New York to return to Houston. I’ve done the math—we all stayed for 11 years then decided the time had come to say good-bye.

The typical attractions drew us to Gotham. A fresh start, careers, romance, adventure, creativity, getting out of small-town America or repressive Europe. My father left Grand Rapids, Michigan with his second wife for a career as a self-employed industrial designer, engineer and bon vivant. He finally ran out of money and moved to suburban Nyack, New York. He lived in the same apartment on on Gedney Street on the shore of the Hudson for 40 years until he died in 2018.

I got the big-city bug from visiting my father and his wife in the 1970s with my brother when they lived at 220 E. 63rd Street. We arrived wide-eyed from Mission, Texas, a small town on the Rio Grande. After picking us up at LaGuardia, Dad took us on the Circle Line tour. I was hooked on the place and kept coming back while in high school, despite my troubled relationship with my father. I moved to Brooklyn a week after I graduated from Princeton in 1980 for a job as a reporter-researcher at Forbes magazine. That start on a communications career swiftly cratered as I was way out of my depth with Forbes' hyper-aggressive journalism. I went from Princeton to Forbes to a trade magazine called Quick Frozen Foods to an unemployment line within three years.

I could have gone home at any time, after job losses or my mother’s cancer diagnosis, but I hung on. My inner action junkie thrived on affordable apartments (a $300/month studio on Amity Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), the Jewish scene, the personals section in New York magazine and no obligations, not even a house plant. I did freelance writing, searched for romance and traveled to places like Australia, Europe, Israel and the USSR. I finally found a steady job and that long-sought romance in the magical summer of 1987, then got married. The crack craze and the desire for suburban family life sent us packing to Connecticut in 1991, 30 years ago. My then-wife and I delighted in driving our used Saab to the Caldor department store (you must remember Caldor) and supermarkets to shop. No longer were we lugging groceries and laundry up the apartment stairs in a rolling cart!

Tyler and several theater friends moved to the city as a group after they graduated from Texas State University in San Marcos. After seeing Tyler star as Bobby in a college production of  “Company” in 2008, I knew he had the skills and personality to make it in the Big Apple. And he did, just not in theater. After appearing in “The Drowsy Chaperone” in Brooklyn, he pivoted to self-taught graphics work, starting with adhesive stickers and hustling all the way to high visibility as a queer artist with a website for his brightly colored fashion and art line, murals at Art Basel in Miami, exhibits at the Brooklyn Brewhouse and the Rag & Bone fashion chain, and a stint as artist in residence at Barneys department store (you must remember Barneys) when it still existed. I documented as many of the events as I could, as the historically minded uncle with a camera coming in from the ‘burbs.

But after 11 years, Tyler has decided to move on and move back to Houston. That's his story to tell. I wish him all the best in taking his show back on the road. Living in Fairfield and Westchester Counties, I never cut the cord so boldly; instead, I spent 20 years commuting to Grand Central, keeping one foot firmly planted in the city to feed my action junkie jones until the pandemic ended all that.

Still, the appeal of bright lights, big city continues. What started with Adolph Lissner in 1854 never stops. The latest generation of Wallachs living down on a ranch in Texas might very well be inspired by Uncle Tyler and wacky Great-Uncle Van to see what all the fuss was about. Pre-schoolers now, they could be the starry-eyed Brooklyn hipsters of 2040. I hope to be around and welcome them. Just wait until they hear about my $300/month studio in Cobble Hill! 

Bon voyage dinner at Havana Central, August 9, 2021

Notes from the Libraries' Media Departments

I have long been a passionate patron of library sales. They can be spectacular, those treasure houses in  Westport, Katonah, Wilton and Southport’s massive days-long Pequot Library sale. I’ve attended these for decades and can remember where I found some of my favorite buys. I scooped up books in Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, and a gigantic coffee-table-covering novelty, Leslie's Official History of the Spanish-American War from 1899.  

In recent weeks I’ve enjoyed the twice-weekly sale right here at our own Katonah Village Library. My full attention goes to the CD sales racks. Ever since I got a Victrola multimedia player on my last birthday, I can finally play CDs, vinyl and cassettes all day long, and I do. The library sale and the price of 10 CDs for $4 freed my inner consumer, so I now have relieved the library of at least 25 CDs, mostly Latin, jazz (lots of Bill Evans and Nat King Cole), some Israeli, plus CDs by the Grateful Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Confederate Railroad. Confederate Railroad—now there’s a transgressive band name that sounded a little jarring for Katonah.

  

I’m happy to do my bit to support the library. It’s in a financial squeeze, so buying CDs helps keep the lights on. Still, I’m unsettled to think that all these CDs are for sale because nobody’s checking them out any more. They’re just taking up space. This shows how libraries are a prime signal of technological and social change. Online listening has become so prevalent that libraries are ditching CDs, a trend that goes back to the late 1990s with Napster and kept on going. With budgets pinched, libraries put the money where it brings patrons in. and if nobody’s grooving on the Grateful Dead or the New Riders of the Purple Sage except us senior citizens, they are shifting the resources to something else.

I wonder, though, about the long-term trends. Will users’ preference for everything digital ultimately make libraries become a nonprofit model of the retail experience, where you go to stores to sample and shop, then buy online? 

Fruits of the hunt for cool tunes. 

Fortunately, the Katonah library still stocks DVDs. Getting movies at libraries seems common now, but at one time there was a huge legal question about whether libraries could loan out movies, at the time in the VHS format. I worked for Video Store, a video retailing magazine from 1987 to 1995 and followed the issue. Ultimately, libraries could loan out movies, first in VHS, now DVD. As the video retailing industry collapsed (remember Blockbuster?) libraries became the last man standing in video retail. And truth be told, you get more variety from a multi-branch library system like Westchester County than streaming services. That’s especially true with my favorite genres, like film noir and foreign movies. Some of the greatest films I’ve ever seen came from libraries—Daughter of Kheltoum, set in Algeria, Alexandra, a Russian movie set in Chechnya and film noir like Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum. The Westport, Connecticut library even stocked the Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow), which was seized by the U.S. Customs Service, banned in Boston and the winner of major First Amendment lawsuits. From banned in Boston to available in the public library, that's social change in action.

Libraries also became a necessity for me in keeping up with cultural trends. In years past I had a low level of cable TV service, sticking to basic cable, so I didn’t get Mad Men on AMC, much less The Sopranos on HBO. As a result, I could only find them at the Westport library, waiting YEARS after episodes appeared on TV for seasons to finally reach libraries in DVD sets. In these days of instant streaming and availability of everything, it must sound bizarre to wait until the library gets DVDs of these series, but I’m a patient man and I waited.

So call me old-fashioned, but I’ll be going to the Katonah and other libraries as long as they’re around. I like flipping through newspapers and magazines that I can hold more than I want to read them online. I like checking out armloads of CDs if I can find some I really want. What’s the next tech or social lurch to be reflected in libraries? Your guess is as good as mine, but they’ll keep coming. And please— support your local library! Make a donation and buy up books, DVDs and CDs that catch your fancy. Let me know if you find any Latin or Brazilian CDs and maybe I'll buy them from you. 

A Greco-Latin Odyssey, on the Shores of the Wine-Dark Sea

Who knows the motto of New York. Excelsior! What does it mean! Upward (although nobody thinks in terms of "excelsior taxes.") 

What’s written on the Great Seal of the United States, on the back of the dollar bill? That’s “ Annuit Coeptis,” which means “God has favored our undertaking.” Below the pyramid is “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” or “the new order of the ages.”

What unites them? They’re all in Latin. That language is literally in our wallets and on New York and other state flags.

These thoughts come to mind since the study of Latin and Greek has been in the news lately at my alma mater (Latin phrase), Princeton University. This spring, Princeton announced this: 

In classics, two major changes were made. The “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, was eliminated, as was the requirement for students to take Greek or Latin. Students still are encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department. The breadth of offerings remains the same, said Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics. The changes ultimately give students more opportunities to major in classics.

The discussions about these changes predate [President] Eisgruber’s call to address systemic racism at the University, Billings said, but were given new urgency by this and the events around race that occurred last summer. “We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.”

The announcement generated a lot of commentary pro and con. I avidly followed it because for one brief time in the Bicentennial summer 1976, as a new high school graduate heading to Princeton, I mused (from the Greek Muses, get it?) on the notion of majoring in classics at Princeton, which had a world-class department.

I had always liked reading Greek and Roman mythology. The interest spread from literature to languages. From my church years, I knew two of the four Greek words for love: "agape/ ἀγάπη" and "eros/ἔρως." (Note that you can visit many Agape Baptist Churches, but I couldn't find any Eros Baptist Churches, for reasons I didn't quite understand until I reached a more mature understanding of life. Still, "Eros Baptist Church" shows great potential in a branding sense.) 

The Latin interest became clear in a journal entry from May 1972, involving my 8th grade science teacher, Mrs. Morris. By the way, the passage also reveals the manic and growing confusion in my religious identity, between Christianity and Judaism:

Before taking the test I asked Mrs. Morris to sign my annual with something in Latin, because on the Convention trip she said she knew it. She gave me a phrase ‘ego amo tu” to figure out on a slip of paper. She wound up writing no Latin on my annual, just modern English. I wrote in Latin on hers that she passed around. It started ‘Iesus Nazaranium, Rex Judeaum’ with some English stuff and finished with Shalom.

With no background at all in Latin or Greek, I set my mind on learning Greek that glorious summer. I didn’t know an alpha from an omega, so I checked out “Introduction to Greek” from the Mission Public Library and diligently applied myself. I still have a page of my efforts to learn the Greek alphabet, as written on May 2, 1976. The page of exercises begins, appropriately, with the ominous word “nemesis.”

Learning Greek, summer 1976

I never took Latin or Greek at Princeton. I instead opted for Spanish, which I had studied in high school. Once I met the language requirement, my study of languages ended. Ended at Princeton, that is.

\Still, my interest in the classical world remained. Honeymoon in Rome 1989, Latin everywhere! In 2005, on a whim, I bought Wheelock’s Latin, a classic textbook, and I thumb through it every now and then to see what I missed at Princeton. In 2012 I published a memoir with a classic reference right in the title: “A Kosher Dating Odyssey.” In the text, I used the names of Greek mythological figures as code names for women I met. One was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy and mother of Hector, Paris and Cassandra (the real Hecuba lives in a country on the shores of the wine-dark sea, to borrow a phrase from Homer. Another was Calypso, the dangerous and alluring nymph who held Odysseus captive for seven years.

Still worth flipping through.

In recent weeks, Latin and Greek and the classical world came at me like a minotaur. First I read “The Order” by Daniel Silva, followed immediately by “The Last Odyssey” by James Rollins. Both begin with ancient documents housed in the super-ultra-secret Vatican Library, then branch out to secret societies with world-changing agendas. The Order, concerning a plot by European right-wingers to appoint the next pope, has more Latin, including passages from "Evangelium Secundum Pilati," or "The “Gospel of Pontius Pilate.” The Last Odyssey, which treats the journeys of Odysseus as factual, starts at the “Holy Scrinium,” the private library of the popes and reads like a classical version of the movie “National Treasure,” the one with the treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.

The Last Odyssey has a satisfyingly bonkers conspiratorial plot that could easily accommodate the conspiracy cult in The Order, you'll need to read them both to get the point.

I can't say I'll be donning my toga and poring over my Wheelock anytime soon. I've got a couple of languages of more pressing relevance ahead of that Latin—Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew, the ones that power the music I like to listen to on the Latin Alternative, Kol Cambridge and Israel Hour Radio podcasts). 

Still, I like the idea of Greco-Latin awareness. This is my modest attempt to tend to the roots of Western Civilization. Somebody's got to do that. Meanwhile, back at my alma mater, the motto remains "Dei sub numine viget," technically meaning "Under God's Power She Flourishes." Of course, every Tiger knows it really means "God Went to Princeton," where the Almighty no doubt aced all those challenging Latin and Greek classes. 

Mission Across the Tracks: The Unspeakable Number Cuarenta y Uno

Almost everybody reading this has heard or been called a slur, something related to your race, religion, sexuality, politics or identity. Have you ever heard an insult so obscure you knew it meant something but you couldn’t tell what it meant?

During my 1960s days at William Jennings Bryan Elementary School in Mission, Texas, boys regularly invoked the number "41" to signify that something. What, nobody knew. But the implication spanned rude to vile to shameful. I never asked, and I wonder if anybody, kid or adult in my town on the Rio Grande knew. Some did, I'm sure, but nobody was talking.  

 

When smirked on the playground, it had vague but alarming vibrations, something best avoided. The forbidden number sank like a stone to the bottom of my consciousness. But it's there. To this day I can't see the number on a sports uniform or license plate without a tiny shiver of recognition. There’s 41. 

Almost 50 years later, at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, I read all about what it meant at an exhibit called "Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950." The exhibit showed a poster with the title "Los 41 [Quarenta y Uno] Maricones" and below that a poem "Aqui Están Los Maricones . . . Muy Chulos y Coquetones," based on a 1901 high-society scandal in Mexico City where 41 men were arrested at a private social event where 19 dressed as women. The exhibit translated the title as "The 41 Faggots . . . Very Cute and Coquettish." 

So 41 is a direct allusion to homosexuality that nobody, but nobody, back then on the border would explain or acknowledge. The number and the episode behind it referred to matters far beyond social propriety. It made sense to encounter this jagged edge of Mexican culture in South Texas, given that Mission was three miles from the border. 

I can't imagine the pressures facing friends with questions about their sexuality back then. I had changed my religious identity in high school; acknowledging my Jewishness was hard enough in the Valley. Dealing with a sexual identity outside the norms? I knew nothing definitive about friends' experiences--and why would I? Some people stayed in the area, others moved as far away from the Valley as possible. I understand that urge to leave, since I did the same thing.

June being Pride Month, I did more research. Netflix just released a fictional movie about the episode, called “Dance of the 41.” Few facts are known about the episode. Still, the core is there: an ambitious politician, Ignacio, marries Amada, the daughter of the Mexican president, Porfirio Diaz, but his heart’s not into straight marriage and sex. REALLY not into it. Dance of the 41 has the most painfully awkward wedding night scenes since the hit Jewish-themes Netflix series “Unorthodox.” Miserably vacant and distant with his wife Amada, Ignacio only comes alive with his lover, a lawyer named Evaristo, who he calls Eva. You can imagine the rest. You don’t screw around with men and make the autocratic president’s daughter deeply unhappy.

The 1901 scandal still resonates in Mexico, as an insult. One essayist said in 1965 hotels and hospitals lack a room 41, military units, street addresses and license plates do not use the number. People don’t celebrate their 41st birthday! Could that (still) be true?

But change does come, as Netflix showed with its Mexican-made movie. In the U.S., one group even took the number as its name to invert the number's shameful meaning into an affirmation. Honor41.org is a Latino LGBTQ group that says this:

The number 41 has a derogatory connotation in Mexican culture. For over 100 years calling someone “41” or associating anyone or anything with that number labeled them maricon/joto which in English translates to calling someone faggot/gay.

By adopting 41 in our name, we take away the negative, oppressive power associated with the number; we educate others about this important moment in LGBTQ history; we honor their legacy; and honor our own lives and contributions to society.

I like that approach. Take the term, turn it around, own it, use it for good. Take all the other 41s, crackers, bitter clingers, honkies, kikes, sheenies, fascists, wops, guidos, dagos and others and nullify their sting. In this polarized time, turning insults back on the haters makes a lot of tactical sense.

And if somebody throws a slur at me, my response would be, “Thanks! From you, I take that as a compliment.” 

After 15 Months, Back on the Train to Gotham City

After 15 months away, I recently boarded Metro-North in Katonah for the long ride to Grand Central and a day in the city. After talking earlier about the pandemic shutting down patterns in life, then the gradual reopening, how did I experience this major milestone of the gradual return to normality like?

First, it would never have happened without the Pfizer vaccine I got in April at the County Center. Have vaccine, will travel. My partner Naomi and I took vacation days, I bought a 10-pass of tickets and we were back on the train.

Riding the train from Katonah felt so natural, after decades of traveling back and forth on it. Wearing a mask on the train, not so natural. The hour and 22 minutes ride took longer than ever due to making more local stops, but it gave me more time to read.

Finally the train slipped into the tunnel at 96th Street for the subterranean last 10 minutes to Grand Central. The station was quieter than usual, with stores still shuttered. I didn’t see paper schedules in the information booth with the fabled clock on it, a meeting place for travelers for generations. Who needs paper schedules when everybody has a smart phone to thumb through www.mta.info?

NYPD in front of Temple Emanuel on 5th Avenue.

5th Avenue on a Thursday morning, around 10:30 am.

A low-level anxiety seeped into me as we stepped out of Grand Central on to the short stretch of Vanderbilt Avenue east of Madison Avenue. After reading about the rising crime rate and Mayor de Blasio’s blas

é

 response to violence in the city, I had emptied my wallet of most credit and store cards before I left home, in case the worst happened. I hit the streets in full situational awareness mode, looking for any source of trouble.

Instead of instant menace, I first experienced a city in snooze mode. The honking, the traffic, the midtown crowds—mostly gone.

Heading for the Metropolitan Museum, we strolled up 5th Avenue. The streets felt eerily empty for a bright spring morning. The place felt more like a late summer Sunday, even on the most touristy stretches of 5th. But why expect otherwise? What tourists want to visit New York with the pandemic on and attractions like Broadway theaters still shuttered? Plus, hundreds of thousands of office workers—like I was for over 20 years until I started working remotely in 2018—are still pounding their laptops at home. We’re gone. How many are ever coming back? How many want to, anyway, after experiencing the lower costs and time savings of working at home?

But I'm glad I took the step out of my suburban comfort zone, since our museum visits were a treat. At the Met we viewed the retrospective of portrait painter Alice Neel, "People Come First." I’d never seen her work before. That was worth two hours of strolling and reading, followed by an iced coffee and caramel brownie in the cafeteria.

Next stop: a bus down 5th Avenue to reach the Morgan Library & Museum on Madison Avenue. We saw the amazing exhibit “David Hockney: Drawing from Life,” Its brilliant idea was to gather portraits Hockney did of four people over the course of decades, along with self-portraits. One of the subjects was Hockney’s mother. Hockney’s ability to capture the aging process over 50 years of relationships is striking. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Nothing happening in front of an ultra-high end jewelry store. 

Open later, maybe?

We had dinner at Jackson Hole, a burger place on 3rd Avenue, dining al fresco in a sturdy tent set up outside. From there we walked up Madison to Grand Central, on the train, back home.

Looking at the photos I took, they show a lonesome city of famous stores with nobody in front of them, wide open avenues, cops guarding a synagogue from the marauding Jew haters making their bones in the city these days. New stories paint a hellish vision of a city sliding backward; Mayor Nero fiddles while Rome burns. I’m reading about more attacks, more graffiti, more anti-semitism, more drug dealers recreating the “needle park” era, and even the return of the pestilential squeegee men. All we need now is to restore the 70s-80s urban collapse vibe is for CBGB & OMFUG to reopen, the Bronx to start burning again and the defunct Village Voice to start publishing again. To be fair, my narrow view from 5th Avenue was sunny and surprisingly hopeful, cleaner than I expected. Friends who live in the city sound happy enough, not crazed. One man, an essential worker who kept going in throughout the pandemic, said the situation is vastly better than a year ago, which is encouraging. Still, the feeling of light-hearted safety I enjoyed for decades has vanished until proven otherwise.

Next trip: Museum of Art and Design and the Museum of Modern Art. I’m sure we’ll have a great time. I’m pulling for New York, where I’ve lived or worked and visited for over 40 years, to bounce back. Maybe it will. I've lived in its gravitational pull since I left small-town Texas. The city clawed its way back in the 1990s, after 2,000 murders per year, after 9/11, after the financial crisis, after Superstorm Sandy. As corporations start prying workers back from their home offices and businesses open up, the critical mass of people could create more dynamism and get the tourists in to enjoy theater, museums, shopping and all the sights; if they crave a rancid taste of "Taxi Driver"-style grime, crime and decay, they're in for a real treat. Tough-minded leadership to replace the feckless Mayor de Blasio could also make a big difference. Rudy Giuliani may be way past his sell-by date, but a hard-edged facsimile could work. I don’t live in the city, so that’s not my call to make. 

I'll close with a look on the bright side. Remember my crack about the “defunct Village Voice?” I should retract that, since the Village Voice published its first print issue since 2017 in April. So, hope springs eternal.

5th Avenue at Central Park South. 

 

My Parents' Airmail, 1959-1960

A cousin in Texas recently sent me stacks of letters that my late mother saved. After she died in 1984, Mom’s sister Charlotte and other family members preserved them and now they’ve come to me. They are from 1959 and 1960, when my parents had separated. My father was in France, where my parents had moved after their 1955 wedding, while my mother had returned stateside with my brother and me to Tyler, Texas, where Charlotte and her family lived.

The letters come from the era of airmail, before email, texts and WhatsApp obliterated the need for elegant envelopes with multiple stamps. Most were from my father writing in longhand on his stationery. My mother typed her letters on carbon paper so she would have a copy for herself. Twenty years later, I would also make carbon copies of letters I typed to my mother; she taught me well the value of saving communications. 

These letters are a harrowing glimpse into what parents in conflict say to each other. In my father’s letters, I can hear the wheedling, browbeating tone that sounded so familiar from tense visits to him as a teen, when he lived in Manhattan. He alternated between trying to cadge money from Mom for his dubious car-related business projects, and berating my mother for her personality, her post-childbirth appearance and her baffling need to work to support herself. On December 4, 1959, he wrote, “Since you are still sulking in your shell I’ll say a few things, as you can see I am in no position to send you money. . . If you have confidence in me then do what you once proposed, sell everything and come back, or bring the stocks and some money or get a loan on the stocks.”

On January 12, 1960 he wrote, “I only remember before our marriage and that other girl I knew and loved, not the middle aged woman I lived with. So I wipe away the five years because I hardly remember anything happy or pleasant and unhappiness fades away. Now there’s only the boys to show for it and soon they too will lose their meaning to me because I can’t see them grow or help raise them. They are just a couple of boys who have my name.”

What a charmer! And he was true to his word. My brother and I saw him one weekend in 10 years, in 1970, when I would have had a bar mitzvah (I didn't). 

In March he wrote, “There was a lot you gave to your father, [who died in October 1959, six months after his wife died] where is the money from the estate? Anyway, I am super broke.” In other letters he told my mother to go to charm school and made snide comments about their sex life. Oh, and he ordered her to hock her wedding ring for cash.

My mother’s letters start in a wistful, even loving mood, but they soon turned to exasperation and her steely determination to move on with the life of a divorced working mom in Mission, Texas, the hometown she returned to from Tyler in 1960. She would not hock her wedding ring and return to France. 

On November 28 she wrote, “If all your troubles were just plain hard luck I could be sorry for you but I think you brought so much of this on yourself. The day I married you you didn’t have a dime and now you are broke again but badly in debt, this time you work it out alone. I am going on with the divorce—this life is going to get me if I don’t, you know a person can stand just so much.” Over 50 years later my partner Naomi, who met my father numerous times, aptly described him as a narcissist, and I've summarized him as a "naive con man" who, nevertheless, had a huge influence on me. 

These letters are grueling to read, knowing my brother and I were ensnared in them. Admitting he had made mistakes, my father returned to the U.S. in 1960, but my parents never lived together again. He lived near us in Texas, they divorced, he remarried and in 1962 moved to Michigan and then in 1967 to Manhattan. 

If my father skimped on the personal communications, my mother kept up a long family tradition of letters. I have scores of letters she wrote to me when I was in college and starting my career as a journalist in New York. They are much more enjoyable to read than the airmail collection. She remained a salty, engaged mother, sister, friend and letter writer until her death at 63, back in Tyler, where she lived with her sister. 

And my father? He never changed his tone, only his targets. When I was a teenager, he said I walked like a girl. He also waved a check for $100,000 in front of me and declared that would send me to college; he never paid a dime for my education. The worst insult he could throw at me was "you're just like your mother." In my 40s he told me to lose weight. In my 50s he hung up the phone on me when I told him my brother and I wouldn't bail him out of problems with the IRS. In 2017, he asked me to get a copy of my parents' divorce decree from Hidalgo County, Texas, to help him get an increase in his VA pension, and I did that. 

He lived into his 90s, long enough to become a great-grandfather. He showed as little interest in that role as he did in being a father and grandfather.  And why should he be interested? We were just boys who had his name. I know because he put that in writing.

In 2018 I spoke at his memorial service at the VA cemetery in Rockland County, NY. He left no personal effects for me, no summary of a relentlessly unreflective life, to the end a confounding enigma. The airmail collection told me more than I ever expected to learn. 

The Pandemic: The End to a Beginning

I realized how deeply the pandemic has colored my behavior when I realized I didn’t have to wear a mask outside, in uncrowded areas. Since I’ve had my second vaccine, that CDC guidance applied to me. The shock of the new happened when I was walking toward Katonah’s main business street and I instinctively reached for my mask.

But my partner Naomi reminded me I didn’t have to wear a mask. With our second shots done, we’ve moved into a new status.

Evidence of that is growing. One big change: Naomi and I ate dinner inside at an Italian restaurant. Inside! We were amazed at the strange sensation of sitting across from each other, rather than fetching takeout on Fridays and munching at home as cats nosed around trying to get a bite of something tasty.

So we’re transitioning to a new phase. I call it the end of a beginning. This hit home the two times I’ve been to the Westchester County Center in White Plains for my vaccines. Both times I marveled at the semi-religious nature of the moment. I joined hundreds of people streaming into the classical looking building dating to the 1920s. Whatever our backgrounds, we came with one act in mind, to get that Pfizer shot. Inside, the polite, well-trained volunteers kept the process moving smoothly. I didn’t have to guess where to go or what to do. One stage followed another, like a ritual leading to the climax of accepting the vaccine. I entered a small room where two priestesses of the pandemic gave me the shot and updated my vaccine card. I left the sanctum sanctorum and began the gradual return to the rest of the world.

Westchester County Center, White Plains

In White Plains, the return took place in the recovery room. It had dozens of chairs, well spaced apart. People sat, mostly absorbed in their phones. They looked up to check the clock that gave the time. We counted down the 15 minutes until we reached the exit time written on name tags we wore. And then we could leave, into a brighter day.

If the vaccine reminded me of a religious experience, something yesterday on Saturday really WAS a religious experience. I attended an outdoor service of my synagogue, Chabad of Bedford. For the first time, thanks to CDC guidance, we didn’t have to wear masks. I saw complete faces I hadn’t seen in over a year. As I arrived, I put on my tallis, prayer shawl, and instinctively kissed two parts of it. Without a mask, why not? But I thought, “Can I really do that?” Yeah, I could.

Monument of the exit name tags. 

And that was just the start. The service included the weekly reading of the Torah, or Bible, when congregants come to a table, or "bima," to read blessings in Hebrew before and after the reading of portions of the Torah. Going up to read the blessing is called an “aliyah.” In fact, aliyah in Hebrew means "going up." For a year we performed our aliyahs standing far away from the bima. But why was this service different from any other service (since March 2020)? Because at this service, people walked right up to the bima, touched the Torah scroll with the corner of our sprayer shawls, and recited the ancient Hebrew blessings. And I was honored to be one of congregants to have an aliyah. I’ll always remember this electrifying moment.

And there’s more! On the way back to my chair, I could shook hands with other congregants, just as I had with them after their aliyahs. We wished each other “Yasher koach.” Literally meaning "straight strength," the colloquial meanings are “good job” or “more power to you.”

Like I said, this is the end of a beginning. Other pandemic challenges remain. Mutations, booster shots, reopenings, setbacks, all mixed in with layers of social convulsions. Still, I’m looking forward to being on trains and subways, visiting museums and theaters—going places. Where will we go, what will that be like? I don’t know, but I’d rather be in May 2021 than May 2020.

So, to all those tenacious visionaries who imagined and drove Operation Warp Speed and the vaccines: YASHER KOACH.

Leaving the County Center.