"Grief is the most mature emotion" a wise art professor of mine, himself an artist, once said. He'd have us read poems of love and loss, and impress upon us that, although we were still young, we would get old, and the process of aging was bound up with grief, diminishment, and letting go.
My mother would not have liked him. "Che tristezza!" (what sadness!) might have been her retort. Instead, my mother loved New York City. For its pace, for its diversity and energy, for the seductive balance it struck (on a good day) between grinding "terrestrial" commerce and the soaring "celestial" arts. But I'd say that above all she loved New York for the way it held out the possibility of renewal, of reinventing not just itself but one's self. That was irresistible to her, as to many others. And she was loath to leave that possibility behind when, in mid-1998, in an unknowing concession to my professor's teaching, she and my dad let go New York City and returned to Tuscany to live out the last twenty-some years of their lives.
Yet they did not let go completely. With the proceeds from the sale of a mansion in Forest Hills Gardens they bought Poggiosole, yes, but also, in 2002, a jewel-like one-bedroom apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows on West 66th Street in Manhattan. In the photo above, this "pied a terre" was located on the 23rd floor of the tower jutting up above Lincoln Center, behind the American flag at center-frame.
Lincoln Center is a venue I recall frequenting for some portion of my growing up. Seated next to one or the other of my parents in one of its great halls, I developed a taste for classical repertory, and the occasional ballet and lyric opera. We were middle-class enough that the shows felt special in and of themselves and I think that, for my dad, it was a pleasure and a point of pride to bring us there. I grew to like the music, and especially the dancing, but what equally impressed me was the skyward view, through sleepy eyes, of the strobe-like effect of streetlights and the chop-chop passing steel trusses of the Queensboro Bridge beheld by me from our Chevy Chevelle's rear bench seat as dad drove us home.
So when it came time to bid goodbye to New York, my folks' decision to lay claim to a slice of the 23rd floor of that 66th Street tower was significant. Their original plan was to rent the apartment furnished, in order to be able to return there for spells of a week or three between tenants, revel in the offerings of Lincoln Center and much else besides. But it didn't work out that way. At first they had their hands full with construction work at Poggiosole, then with aging parents and siblings (all of whom pre-deceased my folks), and finally with their own mounting health issues as the years piled on. On the occasion of their last trip to the US in 2014, to attend the wedding of a young member of the "American side" of my dad's family, their West 66th Street home was occupied, and they ended up renting a short stay in a small apartment in an older building nearby. Returning from that trip, I remember my dad remarking that it had been difficult for them to enjoy Manhattan. The city that never stopped renewing itself was galloping headlong ahead as ever, while they had since slowed down. They never again returned.
And as they let go, I stepped in. For what concerned their New York home away from home, I was their delegate, their proxy. My dad (and it was almost entirely my dad) took the decisions, and I would, from around 2015 and to the best of my ability, carry them out. Water leaks, appliance hiccups and tenant grumbles could often be sorted out with a few emails or phone calls, but, failing that, I'd get on a plane. Like my parents, I never slept in our Lincoln Center home but I spent many more hours in it than they did. The renovation we undertook in 2020 was, in retrospect, the last exuberant expression of the aspiration that home represented. When the unit went up for sale last month, it was gleaming.
So I am brought back to my art professor's teaching. It is hard to part with something so central to my parents' trans-Atlantic life journey and to my own growing up, double-hard now that they are gone. This is, in a sense, a final goodbye. Each time I have returned to New York over the past 10 years, usually for something to do with that apartment or its tenants, I would shoot two or three pictures of the streets, the occasional museum exhibit, fire trucks for my youngest kids, or, my old fascination, the subway.
For this post I put a bunch of those pictures together. The resulting collage doesn't begin to convey the sense of belonging, mingled with a sense of estrangement I always got (and still get) from New York City. It manages to hint at the City's enormity though, along with its modernity, its interplay of decay and renewal, its color, its menace, and its beauty.
For me there will also always be a sense of home. Or, at least "once home". I was back in New York just recently, to arrange some final repairs and sign paperwork related to the unit's sale. As I was heading to JFK on my way back to Italy, the airport-bound E train pulled into 71st | Continental Ave, the Queens station at which, from the fall of 1978 through mid-1981, I'd board that same line, Manhattan-bound, for a 45-minute ride to my high school on the lower edge of Stuyvesant Town. The 71-Continental subway stop, springboard to a day of lessons or a tough exam or two, then point of retun for that young E-train rider, resonates in me like few other places. "Hey, whoa" I breathed, as the station's familiar massive green columns rumbled into view last month. The doors opened. The station, mute, indifferent, in that moment nearly deserted, seemed unchanged from what I remembered. My gaze lingered as a conductor's voice squawked something over the intercom. It may as well have been, "Not your stop, son." That son is now a sixty-one-year-old. As the train pulled away, he reached for his phone and snapped a picture.
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