Only Morningside, excellent and fair...

After an exceptionally busy week in Buffalo that included a party for 60 here at my apartment on Friday night, I flew down to NYC for a couple of days and then ventured out to the North Fork of Long Island. All in all, an embarrassment of reconnections, remembrances, and the riches that are relationships.

I flew into JFK after getting almost no sleep. Cleaning up after the party lasted until one, one-thirty in the morning, then I had to get up early to pack since my clothes were still in the dryer. The flight downstate isn’t long enough for real sleep, but I tried. The biggest drag was the long, complicated subway ride into Manhattan. AirTrain wasn’t so bad, but the E was running local and along the F line on a construction schedule, so I transferred to the D at Rockefeller Center. Instead of getting off at Columbus Circle for an uptown local, I stayed on and ended up having to backtrack along Central Park West on a local A. Two and a half hours after my plane landed, and after turning on the AC as high as it could go, I crashed on the couch of my friend Deanne’s Upper West Side apartment and slept for a while. It was hot and sticky in NYC, the sort of weather that makes you hate the city in August.

I went down to the Village for coffee with my friend Harry, then headed up to Lincoln Center for a free dance performance at Damrosch Park. The two companies were those of Ben Munistieri and Mark Dendy. The work by the former was simple and inoffensive, if unexciting; the single piece by the latter, set to a mix of Tibetan bells and instrumental versions of Metallica (I recognized “Enter Sandman”) was long but thrilling, the kind of modern dance that makes you want to stand and cheer—which we did. The piece had about 24 dancers, and boy, did Dendy know how to use them! After the performance we headed to The Red Cat for dinner, and we were treated to some tempura of green beans and baked fontina. We ordered a variety of entrees, and the management sent out nearly a dozen desserts. It was really humbling to be treated so generously.

The following day I visited with a friend in the morning, then called on another friend who is leaving NYC for Fort Lauderdale. She and I went for a snack at Westville, right on West 10th, in my old neighborhood (1994-2001). Then I headed uptown to change my shirt (not because of the heat, but because of the coffee I spilled!) and grabbed a cab up to the Columbia campus. I hadn’t been on that McKim, Mead, and White-designed Morningside Heights main campus in several years, and unlike other places I’ve been after many years, it didn’t seem smaller; it seemed even larger, just as grand and impressive as the first time I saw it in the fall of 1987—though perhaps the lack of people helped. I met my colleagues from graduate school on the steps leading up to Dodge Hall, and instead of feeling like it had been 14 years, it felt like it had been five minutes since our last class. Yes, some gray here and there; yes, some body mass and wrinkling. But overall, it felt like a time warp. We quickly moved from one conversational knot to another, sometimes in twos, sometimes as an entire group, filling each other in on what we’d been up to. Some of us had seen each other since. Because it was so hot and humid, we quickly took some pictures by the statue of Alma Mater, then adjourned for a nearby Ethiopian restaurant called Awash. The reason for the choice was that we were there not only to reconnect with each other, but to remember our dear friend Andrew (see the post from June 22, 2009). Because Andrew lived in Brooklyn and was a writer and because of other correspondences, some passages from Sophie’s Choice were read; remembrances were offered. Photographs were passed around. Laughs were shared; tears were shed.

Grieving someone is necessarily a process, a work in progress. It goes on. It can’t be forced to closure. Seeing my friends, seeing the campus, made the reunion bittersweet and my sense of the loss of Andrew stronger. Sometimes it was so sharp and painful as I was sitting there that I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes I was comforted by the others’ presence; sometimes I felt saturated by sadness yet was numb to it. I was struck by one individual who insisted on a way of remembering Andrew that in my opinion resisted to admit the truth of how he died. Maybe if you refuse to admit how someone dies when he takes his own life, then you are also refuse to admit how he lived. I don’t know. I was able to offer some of my own thoughts and feelings about suicide, having been so close to it at one very painful moment in my life. I felt that I understood very, very clearly where Andrew had to go to do what he had done.
To be continued…