Winter is beginning to set in, and I still will myself to hobble to my gym, and have a coffee daily in a characterless diner that suits my needs. I try hard to avoid succumbing to paralyzing self-pity, and continue to attempt to think about other things besides the state of my health.
Of course the impeachment hearings are continuing before the Judiciary Committee, and the chair, Jerry Nadler, my long time local congressman, makes a strong opening statement stating: “The patriots who founded our country were not fearful men but as they met to frame our Constitution, those patriots still feared one threat above all: foreign interference in our elections.”

I watch a bit of the angry contentiousness between the parties, promoted mainly by demagogic Trumpian congressmen like Matt Gaetz and other loyalists, whose major defense of the president is obfuscation and fallacious conspiracy theories. But despite my intense desire to see the ultimate fall of Trump, I am not convinced that the wall-to-wall coverage will make a difference with either Trump’s base or with the craven Republican Senate. So I hope that MSNBC and CNN will focus on other issues and events as well, like Brexit, the riots in Iraq and Chile, and especially the growing threat to the environment and planet. I know the public often cannot focus on more than one political issue at a time, but I always feel that when the media takes a leap and covers a range of political and social issues, they may whet the interest of some viewers who were blind to their existence. The viewers will learn that the world not only consists of Trump vs. Pelosi or Nunes vs. Schiff, but also that complex conflicts and problems occur everywhere in the world, from Iran to Puerto Rico and from London to Seattle.
As always, I muse about the city, which, these days, I explore less extensively. My wife had a fall, and we were forced to visit the Lenox Health Greenwich Village center (housed in a building that once was headquarters for the National Maritime Union), a full-service emergency department that is staffed with board-certified emergency medicine physicians and specialty-trained nurses. It opened July 14 after the Village’s only hospital, St. Vincent’s, closed in 2010 for financial reasons. Of course, the St Vincent’s site was quickly snapped up for luxury housing, the developers adhering to their cardinal rule: Turn everything one can into profit.
Still, though Lenox Health is not a hospital, it’s clean, bright, spacious, and it contains advanced life-support services and full-service imaging capabilities, including a digital X-ray, computed tomography (CT) and ultrasound. It has gotten rave reviews for its committed care from everybody I know who has used the facility. And though our wait was too long (there were only two doctors on call), everyone who worked on the floor was kind, sensitive and utterly professional. It’s always nice to report on institutions that operate effectively in the city.

On another day I was riding in a bus on Madison Avenue and passed the 6.2-acre Madison Square Park, just north of East 23rd Street, which has been transformed into a truly handsome urban oasis. It contains art installations, gardens, playgrounds and even a Shake Shack. Its resurrection has meant the renovation of old office buildings into residential apartments, but also some oppressive luxury towers (the 777-foot Madison Park Tower) that clearly are inappropriate for the neighborhood. The park has become an asset attracting residents, tourists and office workers, but never feeling too crammed or cacophonous.
The bus moved further up Madison Avenue, where stores like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Gucci dominate amidst a sea of vacancies. It’s New York’s Bond Street, Paris’ Rue de Rivoli — an upscale walking street that every city needs. I lack interest in shopping, but I appreciate the serene flow of life on the avenue. I just hope the vacancies don’t undermine its character and turn it into a skeleton of itself.