Motif Number 7 - the Hotel Del

The cure for anything

   “The cure for anything is salt water -- tears, sweat or the sea.”  

          Isak Dinesen

Private party

Back in New York for a conference, I head out of my disappointing hotel for dinner, which I plan to have at A Dish of Salt –- the Chinese restaurant where I had dinner the night after I took my first deposition ever, in Rockefeller Center, on a snowy night in December, just days after I was admitted to the bar.

I set off down 5^th Avenue, past the places that I know.  FAO Schwartz, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s.  Along the way I angle around a bit, looking for stores or buildings or anything that catches my eye and triggers some memory of a place I walked to just once before, years ago, in the same way that I can walk up a stream for just the second time, years after the first, and remember riffles between the rocks where I found trout. 

Sure enough, by following the little things that catch my eye, I come right onto A Dish of Salt.  “Closed this evening for a private party,” the little sign says.  Ah well.

I set off down the street again, looking now for inspiration.  Along the way I remember reading something in a magazine about the Oyster Bar at Grand Central, so off I tack in that direction. 

And so, at my little table among the other crowded little tables, I have a Brooklyn Pilsner, some Duck Point oysters, and then a plate of grilled smelts, which I sprinkle with sea salt, and coleslaw.  All of which seems fabulous.

You can have your private party this evening.  And I will have mine.

China Mist Jade Dragon Garden Palace

   If I owned a Chinese restaurant I would name it the China Mist Jade Dragon Garden Palace.  And if it did well, and I opened another one, of course I would name it the China Mist Jade Dragon Garden Palace, Too.  And if these did well, and I opened a restaurant downtown, just for dim sum, I would call it Some Yum Yum Dim Sum.  

   I need to get some matchboxes made.

So much chemistry

   One morning, walking to the train, awash in high spirits, good humor and good will.  That evening, overrun by agitation, which one seeks to dissipate with booze –- or better, hard exercise.  

   So much chemistry, accidental and otherwise. 

Liking this

     I am working away on a brief when a small box appears on my computer screen with this notification from Facebook:

Fred Mikkelsen To all the doubters and nay-Sayers -- Red Sox won! Julie Lefebvre and 5 others like this.

      How much I like that Julie likes Fred's post is hard for me to say.  These are people I went to school with from kindergarten all the way through high school, the way you do in a small town.

   Julie was Julie Houghton, a cute girl with nice clothes whom all of the boys fell in love with at one point or another, including Fred, a perpetually awkward kid who never stood a chance with girls like her.

   After high school Julie went off to the Bauder School of Fashion, or something like that, in Atlanta, where she quickly fell in with a sorority and acquired both a southern accent and an engineer from Georgia Tech, who soon married her and just as soon began hitting her, until Julie's dad went down to Atlanta to bring her home

   And then before too long she was Julie Lamb, having married a Brit -- the unfortunately named Graham Lamb -- and spent some time in England where she quickly acquired a British accent.  Julie and Graham had two children, now gone.  Graham, too.

   And now she is Julie Lefebvre, married to an older-looking, heavy-set, goateed coach for the San Francisco Giants baseball team.  Her Facebook page has photos of her in a Giants jersey, drinking beer, not so thin as she always used to be.

   I met the first two husbands, but not this Joe Lefebvre.  I wonder what he's like.  And what he thinks the odds are that this love of theirs will last.  Who knows, maybe the third time is a charm.  Or maybe Joe is husband three of four, or five, or six.

   The husbands may come and go.  But Julie and Fred, who met when they were five or six years old, in 1967 or '68, are friends on Facebook.

     Daryl likes this.  

After ours

   The last high school basketball game that I played ended the way that most of them did for me.  Spent, and losing.  I got fouled with two minutes left.  As I went to the line for my free throws, Coach Collins pulled someone off the bench to sub in for me when I was done.  Perhaps he was giving me a chance to be applauded by the home crowd in my last game.  Perhaps he was just knew that I had emptied the tank and was ready, finally, to sit down.  Either way, I knew these two foul shots would be my last.  I made them both.  This happened over thirty years ago.  But I remember how it felt to sit down at the end of the bench -- tired, sore, sweating freely, my face buried in a white towel.  

   I always said that I would not care, and then, when the time came, that in fact I did not care, if my kids were athletes, as long as they did something -- music, dance, art, whatever.  And that was true.  But I have also said that I was happy my girls were athletes.  And that is also true.  

   Rachel's last high school volleyball game was this past week.  She doesn't plan on playing club volleyball this season, so this was the end of the road -- the last real game, in a real league, with uniforms and coaches and officials, the score of which will end up in a newspaper.  Her team was up two games in a best-of-five match with Weston.  Her turn to serve arrived when the score was 16-15.  You play to 25 and up by two.  I wasn't taking pictures this day, just enjoying her last match.  But this was the last time she ever would serve -- the signature part of her game.  So I took a couple shots of her in the ready position -- focused, calm, looking like she is ready to shoot an arrow through the heart of something.  She makes three serves in a row, with an ace.  The other coach calls time-out to stop the momentum.  Rachel comes back with more, and another ace.  Another time-out.  And now we're thinking, could she really serve this thing out?  It means not just making nine serves in a row, but of course having your team win all those points to keep serving.  Why yes, she can, and they can, and so this is how her volleyball career ends -- running the table.  

   These are, I know, small moments on small stages.  But ours.

I only have eyes for you

You are here and so am I.   

Maybe millions of people go by,
   

But they all disappear from view.

And I only have eyes for you.

Ramble on

  

   Picking apples on a perfect Saturday afternoon in October, we saunter down a dirt road between Courtlands and Macouns.  

   A less used lane bears off to the left, along a small swamp and up a hill.  "Let's go that way," I say.  But no one in our little group wants to.  There are plenty of apples right here.  And who wants to lug them so far.  And besides, we want to get cider doughnuts.  

   This is how it is.  And why, forgive me, I like sometimes to travel on my own, going for great rambling walks, letting my eyes pull me down the next lane, up the next hill, around the next bend.       

   Ah, well.  I give the lane one last look and stay with my little tribe, happy with the day and time with family.

   And the next day, Sunday, is a fine day, too, with time enough to ramble before brunch.  

   "Leaves are falling all around.  It's time I was on my way."

  

Or you could just call it a tricycle

Apple surprise

The builder who developed our street back in the 1950s planted crabapple trees in the front yards, some of which remain.  In a good year the pink blossoms make a fine show in the spring before the wind and rain knocks them down.         

And later, as summer winds down, the crabapples themselves deluge the driveway and the lawn.   

Early one morning these three deer were after them like they were vacuuming.

   Along with the crabapple trees we have another apple tree that never belonged.  It looked like a crabapple, to our unsophisticated eyes, but the blossoms were more white than pink and instead of prodigious numbers of crabapples it produced only a couple of odd little green apples.  Or none.

      And so it went until this year - our twenty-first in the house - when the odd tree on the end pushed out a bumper crop of big, red, actually edible apples.  We don’t know what variety, but the ones that don’t have bug holes and brown spots, of which there are a few, are actually pretty good.  

   Why the tree would suddenly produce this year, out of nowhere, is a mystery.  We wonder if it has to do with the big wasp nest that appeared in the adjacent crabapple this year, also a first.  We think the wasps have taken care of the moths that used to plague the crabapples. 

   But really, as with much of the actual world, there is so much we just don't know.

The Constituent

   So my older brother likes to snap photos with his cell phone, which is good, and to share his better snaps with me, which is also good, but then he goes and shares this photo of Senator Leahy, which is so not good.  

     Think for a moment about how many times our good senator has been photographed in the course of his life.  Thousands and thousands of times.  And yet my brother finds a way not merely to take but also to not immediately delete and instead remarkably to share what must be the worst Leahy photo ever taken.  

     It's not Leahy himself of course -- the walking-with-his-mouth-full notwithstanding -- but the constituent in back smelling his fingers.  ("Did I wash my hands?  I think I washed them ...")

Fly fishing - season 1

   I have been out only a handful of times with the new fly rod and have not done too badly.  Two rainbows and a brook trout at Meccawe Pond, on small black flies that actually looked like flies.  A yellow perch and a rock bass at Woodward Reservoir, on woolly buggers.  A small sunfish and a calico bass at Lake Cochituate, on a gray and silver-bodied streamer.

     Still do do:  brown trout, any trout in a stream, bass with mouths large or small, pickerel, whitefish, and so much more.

Spring training

     They pay a tall, skinny guy with a beer belly to come out between games with a hose to spray down the infield and then rake the mound.  The infield has nice, thick grass.  The outfield, where I patrol, is mostly sand and weeds. 

     Your spikes push small craters into the sand as you jog out to your position, slowing to a walk and then stopping when you know it is far enough.  You take a few kicks at the weeds that lay flat against the ground, then turn to start throwing with the center fielder.

     It is hot.  So much hotter in the sun, even for the morning games, than it was just a moment ago in the shade of the battered green dugout.  You are sweating already and wipe your forehead between throws with the terrycloth band on your forearm.  You squint up at the sun, rising high above the palm trees that line the field on the first base side.

     The catcher yells, “Comin’ down!”  The second baseman and shortstop line up for the throw, which invariably skips in the dirt ahead of the bag. 

     You take a final throw from the center fielder and lob the ball in a long arc toward the dugout.  One of the lanky pitchers leaning on the corner takes a casual step out to snag the ball on its fourth hop, tuck it into his back pocket and step back again into the shade.

     The starting pitcher finishes scuffing a hole in front of the rubber. 

     You bend over, settling in with your glove and your bare right hand firmly planted on your knees.  Without standing up you swing your weight around and look back over your shoulder at the fence.  Always the fence.  This one has narrow wooden slats, three feet high, strung together an inch or two apart with stiff rusted wire.  Half falling down, but sturdy enough to really hurt you if you forget it’s there and run into it.  And so you don’t forget.

     You look in to the pitcher, who is sweating freely and swiping at his face with the back of his glove, waiting for the leadoff man to finish digging his own hole.

     We are all set, now.  The pitcher takes the ball from his glove. 

     You take your hands from your knees, and lean forward on your toes, feeling the sand give slightly. 

     As the pitcher winds, and you breathe in and tense your legs.

     It is about to start, right now, this thing that is so repetitive and familiar but also, with each pitch, is fresh and clean before you.  Anything can happen next.

     And with every pitch, every single pitch, you think, “Come on, hit it here.”

Postcard from Miami

   Half an hour until dinner with my partner at eight, which is “early” for dinner here.  I head for the bar at our restaurant, Novocentro, which appears to have Guinness on tap.  A pleasant surprise.  Or so it seemed. 

   One of the bartenders comes over to take my order.  A thin girl with bleached blond hair and a skimpy black tank top, which barely restrains false breasts of science fiction proportions. 

   “Hola,” she says. 

   “A Guinness, please.”

    “Guinness?  Would you like Stella Artois?  It is a special for happy hour.”

   “No thanks.  Guinness please.”

   She retrieves a tall, frosted pilsner glass, into which she dispenses the Guinness in the same three seconds it would take to pull a Coors Light.  No head.  No foaming carmel tides surging from the dark depths.  It tastes like Guinness soda.

   "Nine dollars." 

   Welcome to Miami.

Moxie

She has it, all right.

The gospel

I think of something that seems worth writing about, but instead of just writing about that, I seem compelled to begin by setting some scene, which could be fine if in fact a scene were set, but instead I find myself writing only a stupid report of having done this and then that. 

I must commit myself to the gospel according to Hemingway:  Write one true sentence, about how it really was, and what they really said; not what you wish it had been, or even how you remember it, but how it really was.  And if you can write down one true sentence, then write another one.  And if you can’t, then cross out what you have done and start over. 

Maybe if I had a café to write in, and a cahier, whatever that is.

First to third

   I played my first organized baseball as a sophomore in high school on the JV team.  We had baggy white uniforms with dark green pinstripes – hand-me-downs from the varsity team, which had gotten spectacular new green and gold uniforms that looked like the Oakland A’s. 

    I ran fast but didn’t hit well, so mostly I hoped for walks and a chance to steal second base.  Or to try the play that Donnie Webster came up with, when we played up in Woodstock. 

    I led off.  Donnie hit second, not because he hit well, but because he could bunt.  And he was clever.  He told me that if I got on first, he would bunt down the third base line, and when the third baseman came in to field the ball I should round second hard and just keep going all the way to third if, as happened in JV ball, the shortstop forgot to cover. 

    I think it actually worked once.

    We drive by the baseball field in Woodstock, right off Route 4, whenever we go up to Rutland by way of 93 and 89.  Some day I’ll stop and walk over to the field.  Maybe stand in the batter’s box.  Who knows, maybe even go stand on first base.  And then, if nobody’s covering, run like hell all the way from first to third. 

  

Things keep changing.

I don’t remember much about law school.  I think that I am not repressing those three years – but rather that not much good or interesting happened then.  My “existence period,” as Richard Ford called it, or something like it, in Independence Day.

I arrived in Chicago on an overnight train from Springfield, Massachusetts, because I could not afford a plane ticket.  I came with a big suitcase and a footlocker which held all the clothes I had and the small white alarm clock and desk lamp from my old room at home and the new radio/tape-player my parents had given me to celebrate my graduation from college.  And both my baseball gloves.  I brought, in short, everything I owned in the world, except for my bike and my books. 

I took a cab from the train station to the law school, which I was seeing for the first time, and checked in, whatever that involved.  And then I went looking for lunch.

I told myself that I was a sophisticated, mature graduate of maybe the best small college in the country, ready to take on whatever this Midwestern city, and its second-best law school, had to offer.  What I actually was was homesick, not for my parents’ home in Vermont, but for the home that college and my college friends had become.  And I felt poor, figuring and re-figuring the reserves in my modest checking account that would have to last until next summer against every out-of-pocket – the books for two semesters, each newspaper, each beer, each meal or snack that wasn’t on the dining card.  Including this first lunch, as the dining hall would not open until tomorrow. 

So I had walked west, away from the lake, a couple of blocks, until I saw an Italian restaurant advertising an all-you-could eat pasta and pizza buffet.  It cost more than I wanted to spend for lunch, but I thought I could eat a lot and then not eat much, or maybe at all, for dinner.  So I went in and ate bad pasta, bad pizza and bad salad, by myself, stuffing my face and feeling bad about all of it. 

Ten years later I had a chance to go back and wander around the law school neighborhood for the first time since I had graduated.  I looked for the Italian restaurant.  Not to eat there, but to stand outside and look at it and know that I wasn’t going back there – or how it felt there – any more.  But it was gone.

I went into Gino’s East first, the deep-dish pizza place, which had been a real treat during law school.   The black, graffiti-covered interior did not amuse, as it used to.  It looked stupid. 

The hostess asked me if I wanted to sit at the little bar, which was “not non-smoking, but nobody is smoking now,” she said. 

I said I preferred a table, please. 

A supervisor of some sort cruised by and told the hostess, as if I wasn’t standing right there, to offer me a table in the smoking section.  And so the hostess did, telling me again that no one was smoking now and showing me to an absurd little table with a single booth-style seat on one side and a small wooden chair on the other, in front of a curtain.  A man sat smoking at a table not five feet away. 

I told the hostess that I would go somewhere else for lunch.  And I left.

No big deal.  But something I would not have done until well into my thirties.  For way too long I would have sat in the pitiful chair, breathing the rancid smoke, and rationalizing the decision not to leave on some vague notion of not wanting to be discourteous to the waitress I did not know who worked for people who treated their customers like shit. 

And so I did not sit down at the sad little table in front of the stupid curtain in the smoking section where people in fact were smoking but instead walked a short distance to a place called the Red Rock Grill, where the host showed me to a big booth raised above the floor (which somehow makes the booth seem like a special place), over which hangs a terrific stuffed boar’s head, where I consume a local brew, half a barbecued chicken, coleslaw and spicy baked beans and it is fucking great.

The Red Rock Grill wasn’t there when I was in law school.  Things keep changing.  All the time.