The City & the Country nos.32 and 33 – October 5 2014

Autumn comes to the city. My Wednesday morning visit to Columbus Circle brings me up and out into a darkened morning, with Cristoforo Colon ominous on his pedestal. Ah Cristoforo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, little did you know what you started.

Off to Jimmy’s, and noticed for the first time that the little piece of 103rd street that takes me from Broadway to West End Avenue (sometimes, recalling North-west London, I think mistakenly of it as West End Lane) is called after Humphrey Bogart – thanks, Jimmy tells me, to long and patient work by a local resident. The late Lauren Bacall came to baptize it. Soon I’ll get Jimmy out there in a Bogie-style hat and trench coat (he owns both) to bring the great man to life.

Back to BC and my Fascist Literature class – this volume is the ‘packet’ for the class, full of Fascist tidbits, speeches, definitions of Fascism etc – a class which is becoming more interesting by the week as the students become more vocal, more involved. I tried to get the department to let me teach this for years, and now that they finally relented I couldn’t quite figure out how to teach it and what my syllabus would be. But it’s coming together.

Back in Woodstock, another fine creation for Bread Alone by flower-arranger Nataka. And up on the hillsides, the ‘Leaf Peeper’-paradise is coming into color. We drove up perilous Platt Clove Road. Usually we do this on 2 wheels but I thought, Play it safe, don’t want anything to go wrong just as I’m about to sell the bike – and the Platt Cove climb is genuinely dangerous, very very steep and very badly paved. It was once ‘Legs’ Diamond’s whiskey-smuggling route from Canada, and over the side, beyond the guard-rail, you can see the rusted remains of a car from that era, perhaps – certainly from before there was ever a guard-rail.

My dear former student Andrew Blais, with wife Elana, came to see us and the leaves – Andrew looking just as he did, but (like me) silvering now, just turned 45, with a son soon-to-be if not already a grown-up – I remember Andrew and our work together so clearly from 20 years ago.