Up the River

Recently I caught up with a really old TV drama series—The Newsroom, from 2012. I don’t know how I missed it when it aired, because it has one of the great rousing speeches of TV-dom. In the first episode, a college student asks a star newscaster what he thinks makes America the greatest country in the world. Excerpts from his rant: “And with a straight face, [you’re saying] that America is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The U.K. France. Italy. Germany. Spain. Australia ... Belgium! has freedom ... 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of ‘em have freedom … “Just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know. One of them is: There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest country in the world. We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality...

 Why do men like to tweet their dicks and force women to watch them masturbate?

You would think having a superior sense of smell would be a good thing. Like having a brilliant brain or an athletic gift. But no.  Having a really great nose is like having a psychosis. You sense dangers where nasonormative people don’t. You recoil from stinks to which they are oblivious. You’re distracted by their expensive perfumes, their body odor, the cooking smells on their clothes. Everyone thinks you’re hallucinating—and kind of annoying. But consider the facts. A year ago, I smelled a rat—literally. My concerns were brushed aside, but the odor lingered. Lo and behold, a few days later, the super pointed out mouse turds and urine under the kitchen sink when he came to fix a pipe.  Natural gas is an unrelenting curse. I smell it often, and there’s always a reason, if I’m rude enough to investigate; sometimes a neighbor’s pilot light has guttered out, sometimes our own. Don’t even get me started on the water. About once a year it smells—exactly—like dirt. My husband...

According to the Mayo Clinic website, insomnia is the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep or the propensity to wake up too early. Insomnia that lasts days or weeks is acute. Insomnia that lasts more than a month is chronic.  Hmm, I’ve struggled with all three types of insomnia, sometimes simultaneously, my entire life. The only time I’ve slept well is when I had pneumonia my senior year of college. I was so sleepy, and it was so blissful to be so sleepy, that I delayed going to the infirmary until it was “almost too late,” according to the doctor who saw me. What do I do during those long wakeful hours? I go over all the mean and horrible things I did that day, all the things I said that I shouldn’t have, all the things I didn’t say but wished I had. (There’s never a lack of material—each day brings new misbehaviors and missed behaviors.)  I do 4-7-8 breathing. (Inhale through the nose for 4 counts, hold for 7, exhale forcefully through pursed lips for 8; repeat 4 times. Y...

 Even now that it seems possible that Trump will leave office when his term is up, a certain puzzlement persists. How is it that the President convinced wearers of the MAGA hat that true is false, evil is good, losing is winning, smart is stupid, bullies are heroes, and only chumps do the decent thing? There are a lot of these mad hatters. Can they all be morons? Or has he bewitched them with his squinty little eyes and his twitchy little hands and his nasty little smile? I was taken in just one time, when he said “Sleepy Joe” Biden was senile. It seemed plausible. Other people chimed in to support the claim. I think a lot of Democrats got an anxious little frisson. I did. “He’d better choose a good V.P.,” everyone said. But then Biden, despite his stutter, demonstrated that he could speak in full sentences, and we realized we’d been had. So, what happened? Perhaps endemic ageism. And something else: Trump created an ethos where sweetness equals weakness. If you aren’t a wrecking b...

 When I get a piece of mail with my address handwritten on the front, I get a little excited. A real letter! Then when I open it and see handwriting inside, I get even more excited. Maybe it’s from a friend! But after I find my glasses and start reading, I get pissed off. Someone, or some organization, manipulated me into opening that envelope under false pretenses. It’s not a message from a friend but a request for my money or my vote. It’s a scam. It’s a Trojan horse, sneaking junk mail into my home. I haven’t answered my landline for years—if you want to reach me, you’ll have to leave a message. I’ve never opened my door to strangers. And now snail mail is trying to trick me. So it’s with qualms that I embark on my next round of writing to voters who don’t always make it to the polls. Incredibly, studies show that handwritten postcards and letters boost voter participation by up to 3.4%. I guess not everyone is as cranky as I am. When I was 8, I spent a year practicing for the p...

It’s probably true in other cities too, but in New York, park benches are often adorned with tiny plaques inscribed with epitaphs to the people who once sat on them. Dump my ashes in the dirty waters of the Hudson. I don’t need a tombstone. But a modest bit of tin with a few lines to read between, sure.

As others lose their livelihoods—and their very lives—to the pandemic, I inhabit an isle of security amid the treacherous waters. I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a companionable husband—and a little room I can escape to when I’d rather be alone. At 70, I have Medicare, Social Security, ample savings—plus a part-time job I can do from home. My salad days may be over, but then so are my sandwich days: the senescent parents I struggled to care for are dead, their ashes scattered, and my kids, now grown, are scattered too—though just a borough away. The shadows that darken my life are cast by awareness of others’ misfortunes, not my own. When the pandemic hit, it became clear that as a member of a “vulnerable” population, I am a nuisance, as are any activities I engage in outside my home. The most helpful thing we O.K. boomers can do is stay home and stop hogging hospital beds.  For many New Yorkers, the lockdown has been catastrophic, but for me it is a weird adventure with many nov...

I was recently asked to provide a personal reference for a friend who’s buying a co-op in New York City. And as I wrote, I thought back to the stress Other and I felt when we bought our own co-op four years ago. No matter how straightforward you think your situation is, it’s always more complicated than co-op boards like to see: news stories abound of mean-spirited boards refusing applicants for ridiculous reasons—or no reason at all.  As I thought about what to write about my friend, I flipped through the file folder that contained our own closing documents. And I fell upon the letters of reference written for us—all 10 of them. I think the number required by the board was two. But we were insecure, so, well, yeah, 10. Reading them was like dying and going to heaven—but being conscious and able to hear your own eulogy. Years ago, my father had wanted me to arrange a living memorial service so he could be present to hear what people said about him. I put it off. And then it was too...

Fourteen years ago, inspired by blogs that had helped me through a bout of illness, I started writing a blog called Under the Stinkwood Tree. I lived in the Bowery then, in an artist’s loft that had a deck shaded by an ailanthus tree—a.k.a. stinkwood, because its blossoms smell like cat urine. Then a few years ago, after our kids had fledged, my partner and I moved north, to the Upper West Side, and into an apartment overlooking a locust tree. And I began a new volume, Days of the Locust. Sadly, the namesake tree died over a year ago, and although there was once hope that the city would replace it, that seems unlikely now, as New York faces more urgent concerns. So, welcome to my third volume, Up the River, named for beautiful Riverside Park, and for the mighty gray Hudson that forms its western margin, and for the haplessness of the humans who pace its paths.