Hip hip hooray, I'm back home. I have rarely felt so pleased to see the grey clouds of London. I have had enough of heat and humidity, planes, trains and automobiles, fast food and crowded places.
My trip to the US was on the whole good. My dad was still my dad and there were glimpses of his humour and personality under all the frailty and dementia. I relaxed a lot after seeing him and very much enjoyed the family wedding (more about this tomorrow) and seeing friends. I HATED the heat and had completely forgotten the tropical, steamy humidity that plays havoc with hair and make-up, not to mention completely destroying any small semblance of patience I may have had. I also forgot the mosquitoes. London does not, as yet, have mosquitoes. It's always been too cold here. Our first evening in New York was a hot one. So, when my friends invited us to have dinner on their lovely garden terrace, we jumped at the chance since it's so very rare to have al fresco dining opportunities here at home. Candles lit, food on the table, the barbecue fired up, we sat down for a relaxing summer dinner. So did the mosquites. They devoured Ralph and me. I had so many bites on my ankles that my feet and ankles proceeded to swell up to elephantine proportions. And itch, and itch and itch more. The fact that the itching and swelling lasted until yesterday when I returned to the UK was an unpleasant reminder to me of the benefits of living in a cool climate.
But, back to my New York stories. I love being in the city. People are completely mad and extrovert and so different to my English compatriots. Ralph and I went on a very sentimental journey into our pasts and visited the building in which we spent the first year of our married lives. This was in a complex of apartments called the Sholem Aleichem houses in the Bronx built in the 1920's by a group of idealistic Yiddishist garment workers and even in 1969, when we lived there, it was still a largely Yiddish speaking environment. The populace has changed but the environment looked even better than remembered. The complex of apartments were built around courtyards and gardens and going back after so many years was just delightful.
We stood there, at the entrance to our block of apartments and remembered the early icy January mornings slipping and sliding in the snow to walk to the bus to get to work. We remembered the day we moved in and the day we moved out, throwing things directly out of the third floor windows into the rubbish! We laughed when we recalled those early days of married life when I thought that being married involved cooking a complex recipe for dinner and preparing a pitcher of cocktails to have our pre-dinner drink when Ralph came home from his job in Manhattan. Unfortunately no one told us that we should stop after one drink and we would finish the whole pitcher of martinis or daiquiris and then collapse into a drunken heap for the rest of the evening. This happened for a few weeks until I realised that maybe we should actually eat dinner and not just sleep for whole evenings! We had some great parties in that apartment and I especially remembered the housewarming party when we decided to dye all the food blue. It surprised us when people hardly ate anything.
All the furniture in that apartment was either donated to us by family or picked up in the street. We would go out on the night before rubbish pick up and choose chairs, tables, and lamps from the discarded furniture in good neighbourhoods. We decorated the walls with packaging and advertising and painted all the window frames yellow so it was always sunny in our house. We even painted the bathroom ceiling yellow but that made the bath water look like someone pee-ed in it. It was only 9 months we spent in that apartment but they were the first nine months of our marriage and they were wonderful.
As we were walking around photographing and reminiscing a woman stuck her head out of a second floow window and started shouting at us. At first I couldn't make out what she was saying , so she shouted louder.
"The gardens and outside may look great, but the apartments are falling apart. Inside they're crap! Nothing has been done to fix them up for years. The management are only in it for the money. When you want something fixed, they aren't the managers, but when they want the rent, they're managers. If I was you, I wouldn't even think of renting here!"
We told her we had lived there 40 years ago and she said "That would be right, nothing has been fixed for the past 40 years. You'd probably easily recognise the inside of the apartment - it's probably exactly the way you left it!"
We laughed at the fact that we were standing in the courtyard with a perfect stranger shouting at us from the windows of her apartment to warn us off renting there. Only in New York!
We then took the subway into Manhattan and had lunch with a very old friend, wandered the streets of the Upper West Side and took the subway back home. The train was crowded and as the crowds thinned out Ralph took out a map to check on our route. Immediately the elderly man next to him struck up a conversation. You know the drill - where are you from? Are you visiting? How long are you staying? etc. And then this man told Ralph his entire life story. Within five minutes Ralph knew that the man had a heart pacemaker, a replacement knee, lived in the Bronx, has spent time in army in Korea and was stationed for a short time in London, didn't like tea with milk, had relatives in Russia, some in Germany named Fraiman, was Jewish, and more.
Ralph had time to squeeze into the one-sided conversation to say that he was married to me (I was sitting across the aisle) and we lived in London. At that point the woman sitting on the other side of Ralph turned to him, looked across at me and demanded to know "where did you meet her?" She then turned towards me and in an equally strident tone wanted to know why we had never met since she once lived in London for seven years, her children went to a Jewish school and she was friendly with the American Jewish ex-pat community in London? How could we not have met? Where did I live? What school did my kids go to? When I mentioned where Sam went to school, she commented, in a tone of slight disapproval, that this was a 'secular' school. She was divorced, she told us, and now lived in New York. Her sister had also married an Englishman and now lived in the US. How come, she demanded of Ralph, he had made me live in the UK? Didn't he want to live in America? She then went on to ask Ralph if he knew any nice Jewish men for her in London!!!
All of this in a space of about seven minutes. Only in New York. This has never happened to me in London and yet, in New York, this happens all the time. I love it and miss it.
Tomorrow I think I'll write more about my USA journey, but in the meantime, it's so good to be home.
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