New York — Early morning on the eve of the New Year, and I’m walking along the gray, desolate Village streets to visit my barber and shop at the neighborhood’s only decent supermarket. Necessary mundane tasks, but it always feels good to be out on the street watching even the little of life’s daily drama that erupts on a quiet day like this. I feel more alert to various sensations when I’m walking. Too many hours working on my computer and passively watching television leave me benumbed. I see a short erect man walk by me with two dogs — a Japanese-American painter whom I knew merely in passing over forty years ago. It sets me thinking about the past, which at seventy-six I spend too much time mulling over.
I briefly met the painter at a party during my early years teaching at an experimental city college. It was a job-calling that coincided with the turbulence of the sixties, and I felt then I was playing a key role in the transformation of America. A grandiose notion, but it was in harmony with the mood of the era. And even if none of my utopian fantasies would ever be realized, I loved going into class each day and teaching and interacting with my white working-class students who were then mostly confused dreamers. Many were a bit older than the average college students — a few had been in Vietnam, others were mothers in their early thirties returning to college. A number of the students absurdly acted out against authority in the hope of shaping less parochial identities for themselves, and out of their own nebulous vague notion of changing the country. Those memories are vivid, even exhilarating ones (I was consumed by the job), and I resurrect them often.
On New Year’s Day the early morning streets are even more barren and silent, with most stores closed and the endless construction work on the streets and buildings halted. My wife is asleep, but I go alone to seek out a stylish French café that is open, where I order a latté and oatmeal, and look out the window at the many new buildings being constructed or renovated on one block. That’s the Manhattan norm, but today I don’t feel like railing against developers, just observing the progress of the buildings without comment.
In the afternoon I travel up to the Upper West Side to meet my wife for a walk, The subway car has a few more homeless people than usual — a man and a woman with matted hair, unwashed clothes, and hiding their heads beneath Jackets. The season is the worst time of the year for those who are desperate and alone, and this man and woman dramatically embody that anguish.
I meet my wife, but our proposed long walk is aborted, because neither of us feels physically up to it. On the bus trip down Fifth Avenue I see hordes of tourists shopping at Saks and Lord and Taylor’s whose extravagant displays and lights remain aglow. Of course, an avenue dedicated to merchandizing and consuming never wants the holiday to end. And for many tourists New York is merely a glorious shopping mecca to visit once a year.
I have gotten through the holidays with more pleasure than I expected. We go to an adult animated film (Anomalisa) on New Year’s Eve by a truly original American director Charlie Kaufman. He wrote the scripts for Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich, and though the film is truly dark and idiosyncratic, it’s the perfect holiday film for my sensibility. We then have dinner with good friends at a first-rate French restaurant where we end up having a lively argument about the merits of the film.
When I was in my twenties, the holidays meant a frantic race from party to party. They were usually unsatisfying, even alienating, experiences. With the passage of time that desire has all but disappeared, but a small part of me still feels a hunger for the cheerless cacophony that once was.
