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Uptown View: An Elegy

Uptown View: An Elegy

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Yesterday I learned that a friend I’d corresponded with for years, the editor who hired me at McCall’s Magazine, passed away in May. I hadn’t seen her in years, but I was always fond of her. She was the second person gone on my Christmas card list this year (the other my old boyfriend Gerry, who I eulogized seven months ago in this blog) and I was so sad to learn of her death. Sad for her family above all, but sad also for the passing of an era that she represents.

Lisel was first an agent and then an editor. She was smart and funny and wore her hair in a simple page boy style. She was the one who called me after I dropped off my resume and clips a few days after finishing up a graduate program in journalism. “Well, you’re sort of old to be an intern,” she said, with an endearing New Yorkish bluntness I was just beginning to understand. “But we’d like to have you for the summer.”

The summer turned into five years, and I went from editorial assistant to articles editor. Lisel became executive editor. She was always the calm heart of the magazine, which (like all the “Seven Sister” publications at that time) was edited by a man. I can still recall her big-looped script and her slightly distracted air. She was an intellectual, as many women’s magazine editors were then, and though we had our share of “Lady Di” covers, inside McCall‘s you could still find splendid fiction, elegant essays and controversial reports.

The magazine offices were housed at 230 Park Avenue, the ornate building which straddles that great thoroughfare. The elevators had painted clouds on their ceiling; they made me feel like I was in heaven. And in so many ways, I was. I’ve thought a lot about that place and those people since hearing the news of Lisel, about the long hall where she and other top editors had their offices. They all had an uptown view of Park Avenue; the whole world was at their feet.

Last Class

Last Class

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We gathered for the last time last night. Eighteen people more different than alike, drawn together to explore the special places in our lives, whether real or metaphorical. Whatever lead me to the class — call it grace, serendipity or dumb luck — I am grateful for it. And I will miss these folks; we have come to know each other well these last few months.

I haven’t quite figured out how to tackle the big subject that intrigues and bedevils me. I’m still “in process.” But I’ve had a few epiphanies along the way and the class readings, discussions and blog posts have dug deep furrows, turned soil that will produce something in the future (at the very least the required paper due next week!).

As I made my way home last night, though, it wasn’t place that was on my mind; it was people.

Neighborliness

Neighborliness

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Last night I went to our neighbor Jeanine’s house for an in-home shopping show. The clothes were beautiful, finely cut and tailored, the fabrics a pleasure to touch. At the end you get to try them on. The point of the party is to buy stuff, of course, but I went for neighborliness. For connections.

We chose our neighborhood because of its friendliness, and in large part we have stayed here for the people. In the suburbs you don’t rely on folks the way you do in the country. When we lived in Arkansas we never went “down the mountain” without asking friends what they needed from the store. That happens here only when there’s a snow storm or other natural disaster.

Buying clothes from a shopping consultant isn’t exactly like building a barn or harvesting hay, but it’s what passes for pitching in around here. It doesn’t banish the anonymity of suburban living, but it tries.

Eastern Light

Eastern Light

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Here on the outer edge of Eastern Standard Time the sun is late to rise. But when it does, it floods the backroom with morning light. That’s what it’s doing right now.

A riot of rays spills in from the east, silhouetting the lamp and globe, which turn into out-size back-lit shadows.

It dawns on me that I can make hand puppets in this light, and I do, a long gangly goose that laughs and quacks his way into the morning.

The light promises a good day, a freshening season. No Black Friday for us. We are after sunshine and ice-skating, the three-mile trip downtown (yes, we can handle that, we suburbanites), and a little more family time.

A Glimpse of Home

A Glimpse of Home

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“Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.”

from Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence by M.F.K. Fisher.  

On my way home from the funeral Saturday, I stopped for a moment to snap this shot. It is a view of downtown Lexington from the parking lot of St. Paul’s Church, where Tom and I were married. I turned my head and there it was, this vision of old Lexington with the bright sun overexposing the steeple and the red brick rectory shining by its side and the late autumn foliage adding a spot of color on the left.

Seeing my town from this unconventional angle I see also the old towns of Europe, their cobbled streets and ancient airs, all the living that went on within their walls, the stones somehow absorbing this life and reflecting it back to us centuries later. 

 Surely when we talk about place we talk about all the living that goes on within the cities and the towns and buildings, and our noble — and ultimately futile — struggle to hold onto what passes too quickly through our hands.
Resting Place

Resting Place

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A death in my extended family has me thinking about final resting places, their importance and value. On Saturday, my aunt was laid to rest next to her husband in Kentucky. She was born in the state, but lived much of her life in Ohio and Michigan. My cousins are scattered from Saginaw to Katonah to Cleveland to Washington, D.C. But now they are doubly bound to this plot of soil on the west side of Lexington.

What helps us decide where to end up? It is a complicated and intensely personal decision, of course, and it brings into high relief questions of place and belonging. Because even if we’re scattered to the four winds or kept in a vase on the mantel, we still have to end up somewhere. It is our final decision, where we stop when we can roam no more.

This is Mozart’s grave in Vienna, though there’s a good chance the composer was interred elsewhere in this cemetery.

Cul-de-Sac

Cul-de-Sac

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One of the features I’ve observed through the years about the suburban landscape is the great number of cul-de-sacs. Everyone wants to live on one, I suppose. So I included them in my poem.

No longer “dead ends.”

Now they are cul-de-sacs.

“Bottom of bag,” a Catalan phrase, I learn, via French to English.

Their modern use: to calm traffic.

But what happens to traffic calmed? It bursts loose on the straightaway.

Meanwhile, the lone woman rides her bike to the circle,

round and round she goes.

She has lost count of the years.

Water and the Bridge

Water and the Bridge

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As I learn more about the land around me, I find myself gawking out car windows, craning my neck as I cross bridges, counting houses after I pass a hidden lane.

Is that where the old road veers off into the woods? Is this where, as late as 1970, cars forged the creek?

I’m testing the waters here, seeing if history can stand in for that bone-deep knowledge of a place that comes from growing up there. My hunch is that it won’t; my hope is that it will.

For doesn’t this, like so many conundrums (conundra?) depend upon whether you listen to head or heart? You can make a list of pros and cons, but in the end your rational self is taking orders from that fast-moving water down below.

Our thoughts are the bridge; our feelings are the water.

I put my money on the water.

A Patch with a View

A Patch with a View

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Yesterday Suzanne and I drove to a pumpkin patch in Delaplane, Virginia. We drove past wineries and groomed estates with high stone walls, then turned left and climbed up a gravel road to a steep-pitched farm. There were pumpkins, gourds, apples, greens and flowers for sale. A moon bounce and corn maze for the kids.

The whole outfit was thrown together; there were no permanent structures on that hilltop. You could easily imagine the way it will look a few weeks from now, windswept and golden, picked out and past peak — but still lovely. It is the view that makes the place, and that’s not going away. Mountain after mountain as far as you can see. And, at least yesterday, still-flowering cosmos softening the foreground.

I wound up with more pictures than pumpkins.

Emancipation

Emancipation

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The Lincoln Cottage sits on the grounds of the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home in a quiet section of northwest D.C. It is one of the highest spots in the area and three miles north of the White House. The summer home of President Abraham Lincoln and his family, it was the “Camp David” of its day. Lincoln spent 13 months, a quarter of his presidency, here.

While his wife and children spent most of their summers at the cottage, Lincoln commuted to the White House by carriage or on horseback almost every day. The ride was dangerous; he survived at least one assassination attempt en route and often refused a military escort. But he craved the quiet that the cottage (and the commute) provided, so in this, as in so many things, he persevered.

Here the president would wrestle with battle strategies, conscription questions and other issues. And, most importantly, here he would draft much of the Emancipation Proclamation. Not with pomp and circumstance but quietly and piecemeal, on scraps of paper that his valet William Slade collected and placed in a large wooden desk.

Was there something in the nature of this house and land that gave Lincoln the perspective and courage to change the course of American history?

Historians cannot answer this question definitively, but to visit the site now is to feel a strength and stillness that wells up from within. It is not hard to imagine that the cottage and grounds stirred Lincoln in ways that places sometimes can. Above all, the home was a retreat, a secondary landscape where Lincoln could ponder problems from a different perspective.

Place and creativity are bound together in ways we are just beginning to understand.