We Had Some Rain

February 14, 2008

I spent yesterday dodging the drizzle. It came down steadily, and I had to get some things at the A & P which is some half a mile from here, so I knew I had to go out. It meant putting on the snow boots I had bought in Switzerland 20-some-odd years ago.

The day wasn't all that cold. The temperature went up to 53, but there was snow all over from the previous day. It was turning to slush and puddles. It wasn't pretty.

Imagine my surprise after I got home and saw the rain coming down pretty steadily, and spotted the above picture on my favorite local website, Hoboken Now. To those of you who are curious about the conditions of Hoboken, it sometimes floods. Having lived near Mobile, a below-sea-level city which normally has a lot of rainfall and often has streets that look like rivers, I didn't take this seriously. And when I went out, I didn't see this wet scene. What I saw was patches of melting snow and gutters flowing with water. I wouldn't have thought that just a few blocks from where I was conditions were like this!

It's an old city, Hoboken, straining with outdated drainage systems, and when the weather bad those systems break down.

Something must be done, and it will. In the meantime, I'm lucky to be on the other side of town on wet, cold days, cuddled up with a cup of hot chocolate, and looking for a little spot of sun to come out.

Today the sun is shining, and it's all over -- for now.

Braving the Elements

February 13, 2008

I felt like a wuss yesterday, posting about the weather when so many life-shaping events are happening.

But when I woke up this morning I find that the weather is the hottest topic on the news. Obama made a sweep of the Potomac primaries, drew a crowd of some 15,000 as he spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, but the most important thing is that it's snowing and so cold in the New York City area that lots of people, like me, are staying home.

Today that snow has turned to rain and the temp is up to 50, which means it is possible to go outside wearing snow boots and carrying an umbrella. This is the kind of weather that happens up here in February. Maybe I'll be used to it in ten years or so.

I'm told that Hoboken floods. There are flood advisories up. I don't think it floods in the part of town where I live, but I shall see. The light drizzle I'm looking at doesn't cause a flood in Lower Alabama, but there must be something at work here that I don't know about.

I've got to go out today anyway. Yesterday, with snow blowing about me, I made it out and around the corner to the gym to work out. The two-and-a-half block walk there and back, with snow crunching under my Nikes, was not particularly daunting. In fact, the careful steps onto the snow-covered sidewalk made me feel powerful because I knew how to do it without slipping. You may laugh, but as a young woman who had grown up without seeing snow or walking on patches of ice, I had to learn how slick it can be. I learned the hard way. Now I must be more careful and I've still got all my marbles so I know that and I can do it. Some power, but it's mine and I own it.

I'm out of groceries. I must go out, all the way to the A & P to pick them up. All I need is a warm coat and an umbrella. And those boots. And my mittens. And my handy dandy shopping cart. I'll let you know if I see anybody in rowboats.

Oh Groundhog, Where Art Thou?

February 12, 2008

The trip back from Kingston Sunday was a harbinger of Hoboken weather to come. I enjoyed The Fantasticks with my family -- even though I was sitting next to Andy, the ten-year-old, who squirmed mercilessly during the love songs, on Saturday. Afterwards, we ate in a very popular, very trendy Japanese place in the East Village and drove together to Kingston.

I had expected a little more feedback about the play on the 2-hour ride, but when that didn't happen my daughter and I had a nice time for a gabfest and the boys mostly slept.

Sunday the snowflakes fell in huge chunks, huge for snowflakes, that is; and I feared a difficult bus ride home. It turned out I had nothing to worry about as the weather cleared and the temperature was in the 40's, melting the accumulated snow and providing a nice, early-spring atmosphere. I hung around with the family until after lunch, leaving on the 3 P.M. bus.

The trip back should have been a warning to me. We drove through what I would have called a blizzard if I had not just enjoyed early spring. (I know February isn't spring, but indulge me here.) The snowflakes were so thick they obscured the view. It was almost like fog, it was so difficult to see. Trees frosted in white appeared and disappeared at the windows like ghosts, and the bus was slowed. Then by the time we reached the New Jersey shopping malls the weather was clear again. When I got off the bus all I had to do was walk across the Port Authority Terminal and take an escalator to the Hoboken bus, and I was home in 15 minutes.

The two-block walk from bus stop to house was when I got my shock. It was 27° in Hoboken, and destined to go down to 11 before the night was over. I've spent two days shivering and will have at least one more before the weather is bearable again.

I'm going to have to give myself time to get used to this. It's winter, and I have had 19 years of winters that you hardly notice. It's not like that any more. I feel like a stranger in my own land. Just a few more weeks of this and then we'll have spring, which I remember vividly. And as often as I can.

It Will Be a Fantastick Day!

February 9, 2008

The Fantasticks is an off-Broadway play that began life in 1960, apparently a college project of a group of earnest and impecunious youngsters yearning to express themselves. That 48 years later it is still winning hearts and sending audiences home humming and smiling is something of a small miracle.

When I first moved to New York in the mid-1960's, The Fantasticks had surprised its critics and the theatregoing audiences in that it just kept running. An allegorical fantasy, based upon Edmond Rostand's Les Romanesques and borrowing from such classics as Romeo and Juliet and Pyramus and Thisby. An unpretentious, low-budget production, it ran steadily until 2002, and is now being seen in a revival that will close at the end of the month.


The original production starred the youthful Jerry Ohrbach as El Gallo, the narrator and singer of the show's most-sung tune. To hear a snatch, go here, or if you're not up to it, you know what song I mean. Sing it yourself and see if you can keep from choking up.

Since I moved back to the North, my daughter has urged me to expose her sons to the theatre that I know so well. Checking with local friends on how to get discount tickets online, I discovered that I could get tickets for all four of us to see The Fantasticks today at the matinee. I took them all to see a rather forgettable offering over Christmas, but I think this one will be the real deal. Elias, who is 13, has said he wants to go, even after the rather dumb other experience, and Andy, 10, will soon be playing Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream. Much as I know they want to be cool, seeing this little play is just bound to be an adventure. Alison has never seen it, and, as a matter of fact, the only production of it I ever saw was at the International School of Geneva in the early 1980's. It was beautiful, but I suspect this one will be even better.

The three of them will drive down from their home in Kingston to meet me at the theatre just before 2. If I know them, I'll be lucky if they make it by 1:55. The more I thought about this excursion, the more I wanted to be with them all after the show, so I invited myself to join them for the ride home and return to Hoboken by bus tomorrow. I wanted to be part of their discussion of the play, and hear their reactions first hand. If they don't like it, I want to know why, but if they love it as much as I expect them to, I want to share that.

You'll hear more about this in future blog posts. I wish you could be there too.

How To Have a Popular Blog

On my former blog, Finding Fair Hope, I still get as many hits as this one, even though I haven't posted over there since November. Most of the hits are sent there by the search words "Anderson Cooper," about whom there are several posts.

Okay, I admit it. I have a thing for Anderson Cooper. It’s no recent crush; I’ve been following his career since I discovered him about ten years ago. At that time he helped me with my insomnia on a latenight news show called ABC World News Now which took place in the wee hours and was a combination of irreverent comedy and straight news. The show had a spontaneous, antic quality, complete with Friday night appearances by an accordion player and two campy backup singers who burst on the scene playing and singing something they called the “World News Polka.”

The co-anchors were Anderson Cooper and Alison Stewart, who played off each other in a snappy, brother-sister kind of way, and their comments brought off-camera howls of laughter from the crew. At the time I thought this attractive young Anderson Cooper was a dead ringer for James Glassman, the Libertarian columnist and sometime news talking head. I decided Anderson was his son. When Anderson left the show, I hoped he wouldn’t just drift off into obscurity.

Boy, was I wrong. It wasn’t long before he was the head news anchor at CNN and the talk of the airwaves, to say nothing of the cover boy on all the magazines. He covered Katrina and appeared on talk shows, revealing that he was actually the son of Wyatt Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper. I had followed the story of this family and the tragedy of Anderson’s older brother who committed suicide at the age of 14.

Now that I think about it, I’d known about the Coopers, individually and collectively, for some time. I read Aram Saroyan’s book Trio, about the glamor-girl-best-friend-debutantes Oona O’Neill Chaplin, Carol Saroyan Matthau, and Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper (“Oona, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, married Charlie Chaplin; Carol married William Saroyan and Walter Matthau, and Gloria married everybody else.”) I read Little Gloria, Happy at Last about Anderson’s mother’s wretched childhood as a pawn in a disturbed super-rich family. I read Wyatt Cooper’s tender memoir called Families: A Memoir and a Celebration about growing up in the South. (I even read that it’s one of Anderson’s favorite books, so I looked it up on amazon to see about picking up a copy to re-read it. The going price is $90, and there's one on eBay that's already gone up to $1,500 -- so instead I checked it out from the library.)

Anderson has a real story to tell. A recent issue of Vanity Fair includes a chapter from his inevitable book, revealing how his dealing with the coverage of the devastation of Katrina opened him up to his own repressed pain. The early death of his father had been traumatic for both him and his brother, and, until confronted with commensurate personal loss as being experienced by families in the storm-ravaged areas of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, he wrote that he had not dealt head-on with his own sense of the loss of his brother. Like his father, he can write; and time will prove whether his real place is as a broadcast newsman or in some loftier field of American life.

I wrote most of the above in June of 2006. Since that time he has only risen in the consciousness of the world. I felt I discovered him, but by now he belongs to just about everybody, and I feel a little less possessive. His private life is his own, but he is now a part of American life, almost as Johnny Carson or Walter Kronkite was. If I mention his name on a blog post, I can expect a jump in readership. Thanks for proving me right!

Bloody but Unbowed

February 6, 2008

I am not disheartened. A little discouraged, but not disheartened.

Barack Obama and his troops did well against almost impossible odds. Ten days ago nobody would have predicted a tie on Super Tuesday. What we got was a tie.

A tie at this point means this fight is going to go on, and it is clear the Clinton organization has all the cards. For years it has been assumed that they had the Democratic nomination locked up; but thanks to a minor miracle named Barack Obama who inspired Independents, young voters, blacks and mavericks (I suppose I fit into the latter category), it's still too close to tell who will pull off that victory.

I've got the talking heads doing their thing on my tv at the moment, analyzing this, analyzing that, and apparently enjoying the heck out of this neck-and-neck race. They have seen what I saw: A grueling, grinding, plot-filled drama enacted since Christmas -- at which point it looked as if Hillary Clinton would be declared the candidate by now -- coming to a head last night when the last-minute polls and predictions turned out to be right. The race is still a tie.

I can't help but wonder whose minds will have to change to break this deadlock. Women? Not on your life. Blacks? No way. How about the Independents and the mavericks? I think they've found the candidate they want. It's all up to the undecideds.

The political junkies relating the narrative as I write say there's still a good chance for Obama. So I am not resigned to his losing, even though I voted for him and the rest of my state pretty overwhelmingly didn't. I am not disheartened that they didn't do as I told them. Only about 15 of them read my blog anyway.

An interesting sidelight on all this is that I just moved here from Alabama. Down there, I was accustomed to being on the losing side. I have a friend in Alabama who is a passionate Hillary Clinton supporter. Now that I'm not there, my side wins there, and now that I'm in a locale that should be somewhat more in tune with my predilections, my guy loses here.

Lucky I'm used to that. I'm not disheartened.

Cast Your Vote

February 3, 2008

I'm old enough to know better, but now that I'm living in a Super Tuesday state, I feel it is not only my responsibility and privilege to vote, it's also my obligation to beat the bushes to get others to do so. The excitement and chaos about the 2008 Presidential election has me in its grip.

I used to live in Alabama, which has always been pretty much a one-party state. Growing up -- and don't forget I'm the same age as Tom Brokaw -- that one party was the Democrats. Over the years, since the Dixiecrat splintering of the party in 1948, the later Goldwater takeover of the South, and Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, the same folks who once were yellow dog Democrats now pledge the same unthinking loyalty to the Republicans. Alabama is so close to 100 per cent Republican that casting a vote for a Democrat is an exercise in futility.

You may perceive that I'm pretty much Liberal. That will color much of what I write here. Try as I might, I cannot think of any way to persuade anyone to change his way of looking at politics. It's tribal -- we are conditioned from childhood to align with one party or the other, often sticking with that party in spite of who heads the ticket. I can't say that I have an open mind, but I must admit to being an eccentric voter. That is, I vote for the best person in the race, whether or not I see any chance of his being elected.

I don't know what led me to do this. It began in the 1960's when the major parties offered no one I could support. Good as he had been in the past, Hubert Humphrey was not a man I trusted with my vote in 1968. He seemed to be supporting a war he didn't believe in, and he refused, in that two-faced way politicians have, to separate himself from Lyndon Johnson, who had drawn the country deeper and deeper into the Viet Nam war, whom he had served as Vice President. On the other hand, I could not cast a vote for Richard Nixon. My vote that year went to . Dick Gregory, who at least made sense on the issues that mattered to me. It was a protest vote, admittedly, which my friends said helped elect Nixon. Trying to comprehend the traditional thinking that the Democrats and Republicans are all we have, I have had to hold my nose and vote many a time since that year.

I may have to do that in November, but I don't have to on Tuesday.

We are on the threshold of an era not unlike the 1960's, a time when Americans have the chance to be a part of a seismic shift in the way politics works in this country. If Barack Obama is only fractionally as good at governing as he is at delivering a victory speech, we have a chance to become a better country and a better world.

I feel sorry for the Clintons this year, the year they saw their opportunity to get Bill back in the White House through the side door; the year Hillary saw her chance to fulfill what she has apparently always assumed was her destiny as the first female President. When she choked up after losing the Iowa caucus, she was indeed human. My heart went out to her at that moment even though it seemed to be triggered by the sudden realization that she might not win. She went sorta female; her husband then went sorta ballistic. But that's all in the past now. How short our memories are when it comes to our leaders and their little public moments! Sen. Clinton has extraordinary focus and resilience, but whether she can grok it or not, she is up against something bigger than herself or her husband.

I don't pretend to know how this thing is going to go. Personally, I am moved by Barack Obama in a way that I have not been by any politician since John Fitzgerald Kennedy (and I was 20 years old the year Kennedy was elected; too young to vote). I remember the extraordinary well of hope he tapped into in young people -- at last there would be someone in the White House with purpose and vitality, someone I wanted to speak for me, someone willing to consult and sometimes defer to the greatest minds in the nation, someone who could lead us forward with idealism toward a new way of thinking and the chance for a better way of being.

That election was not a landslide by any means. Nor will this one be. Big events and small will occur on this journey to the election that we cannot imagine. If Obama actually does win, I can't predict that he will actually deliver on all he promises. But his campaign will invigorate and mobilize a nation for the good. And that's more than can be said for any candidate I've seen in my lifetime.

We've been through many traumas since the death of John Kennedy. We've engaged in way too many wars and we've tolerated too many mediocrities in the White House. I have no doubt that many women respond positively to the notion of a woman President, even this woman. But the baggage she has with her is too much for our country to deal with once more. She and her husband and many of their fans seem to be convinced she is not only up to the job, she's entitled to it. But that dysfunctional union does not have to be supported by a dazed and confused electorate. Let us take the step of trusting our ideals and put our support behind a candidate who offers more -- a vision for growth that transcends personal ambition.

All this being said, I'm sure you will vote the way you want. And this year, at least, there will be more Americans voting, more young people committing to be a part of the process, and more people inspired to commit to accept the small changes that could transform a nation. This is not a year to be cynical and sophisticated. If you're in a state that is part of the primary process on Tuesday, do me, yourself and the country this favor: Vote for Barack Obama.