I haven't had time lately to look for my late father in books, particularly ones about New York City or set in New York City. New biographies about Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, James Beard and Jimmy Carter horn in, as well as the first volume of the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John O. Brennan's memoir about his career in the CIA. I have to get to the Eleanor Roosevelt biography first because there's only one copy in my local library system and two people have it on hold after me, but she is New York, so maybe I'll see him a little bit there.
For now, while I wait for those thousands of pages to clear, YouTube is useful. I look up the New York City walking tours, Midtown Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, 8th Avenue, and I seek him not only in the faces that pass by the camera, but the windows of New York in the skyscrapers, in the shorter buildings. I wonder who's in the office buildings, the hotel rooms, who's behind the windows next to the fire escapes in those very moments. Do they have the same energy my father had for the city? I know it's changed drastically since he was born in the Bronx and then lived nearby enough in Paramus, New Jersey, and also taught in New York City in the '70s, always noting the rats in the schools. Do those people have the same single-minded passion for their work that he had for his career? Do they have the same charismatic welcome that he had for other people?
PBS has those Live from Lincoln Center concerts with such luminaries as Patina Miller, James Naughton (who I will always remember as the Gentleman Caller in Paul Newman's adaptation of The Glass Menagerie with John Malkovich, Joanne Woodward, and Karen Allen), and Megan Hilty, these ones recorded in the Allen Room of Frederick P. Rose Hall at Lincoln Center, the windows of which look out on Central Park and Columbus Circle. I watch the performers here and there, but whenever the camera angle is large enough, I look out those windows at the traffic barreling down the streets, and I wonder how often my father drove those streets. You would never have caught him on public transportation like my mother had done when she grew up in White Plains, New York. She always said to my father that he never knew a true New York winter. He never had to ride the bus. He never had to walk in the snow.
I'm sure many of those drivers are as impatient as my father was, but it's because of his experiences driving in New York that he was able to navigate anywhere else in the world. We always joked that you could drop him in a paper bag, take him out to the middle of nowhere in, say, Kansas or Iowa, and he would be able to find his way around without hesitation. That was his gift. When we were first tourists in Las Vegas in 2007, and had never seen the city before in our lives, he knew where to go. I have that ability, but only locally. I can get you through Ventura, but not via the freeway (which is more a leisurely three-lane highway, and much more manageable than the six lanes of Los Angeles), since I never see it as a driver.
I know that in my search for him, my father would also want me to find what interests me about New York City. I think if the day ever came, I could visit it, but not in winter. I'm not trained for that, and never lived in such a climate, having been born and raised in Florida, spending all of my life in the bottom half of the United States, including Nevada, and now California again. But I love parks, and I've always been curious about Central Park. Ditto Lincoln Center itself, including the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts there, which has a wealth of theater performances on film and tape. For that alone, if ever given the chance, I don't think I'd ever leave that library.
So for me, YouTube is also a window onto Central Park and Lincoln Center. Watching the walking tours of Central Park, I wonder how often my father was there. He was most certainly talkative about the Bronx (he was born there and revered it his entire life), but I never thought to ask him about all those other parts of New York City he knew. He seemed to be so thoroughly of the Bronx, even given the brief period he actually lived there (I think he and his family moved from there to New Jersey when he was 7), that maybe it would have seemed strange to take him away from the Bronx, however briefly, even in questions.
Last Thursday, I started reading John Steinbeck, Writer by Jackson J. Benson, in honor of my old friend at the Ojai Library, the aging, slightly waterlogged copy that I found out was weeded from the collection there. This copy, purchased through AbeBooks, came from the Butte County Library in Chico, a discarded copy. I've always been curious about Steinbeck anyway ever since visiting the Steinbeck house in Salinas in 2006, but as I read the biography, looking forward to reading about the process of writing The Grapes of Wrath, I slowed down. I read about his years at Stanford University, his caretaker job at Lake Tahoe, and it became clear to me: I don't think I can be an out-and-out Californian. I like living in Ventura, I love the weather, which is incredibly convenient, but I don't have that overall appreciation of vast spaces and rugged independence. In the moment, sure, but not something I think about often.
This realization came to me because on page 138, with Steinbeck still in Tahoe, I thought about John Cheever. I've always felt closer to John Cheever. I saw Frank Perry's adaptation of his short story The Swimmer on Turner Classic Movies once when I was a senior in high school in Pembroke Pines, Florida, and I was completely stunned by it, devastated by the ending. When I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, California, I found a volume of Cheever's short stories and finally read The Swimmer, as well as his other short stories and then moved on to The Wapshot Chronicle and Falconer.
I'm a Florida native, Southerner by birth, but not by blood, as I often define it. But I have New York City, and by extension, the east coast, from my parents. It's there forever. It's why I could never become a true Californian, but it's not an everlasting conflict within me. Parts of California have interested me, but never the whole thing at the same time. The north's perception of the south, for example, and vice versa. That interests me. But the overall life? The overall feel? No. I've always felt close to Cheever and his examination of the slow, conflicted, hidden simmer of east coast bedroom communities. Closer, historically, than I've been able to find for myself in California. Its history interests me, and I study parts of it, but to step inside is difficult for me. My history is east coast, even though it's likely I'll never see it extensively again, and I have no desire to visit Florida. We moved around so much that I never really felt I had roots there. So it doesn't matter as much.
Besides the East Coast connection I also feel closer to Cheever because in 2008, I wrote an essay about The Swimmer for an anthology by the Online Film Critics Society (of which I was a member) that ultimately never happened. I reread The Swimmer as partial research for the essay. I may post it here sometime, but I believe that experience is what hooked me on Cheever, and defined more my place in the world, where I am in relation to where I'm living. After discovering that while reading up to that point in the Steinbeck biography (I'll go back to it after I finish reading those new biographies), I put Blake Bailey's biography of Cheever on hold at my local library, as well as the Library of America volume containing all of Cheever's short stories, to rediscover them, being significantly older now, 12 years after writing that essay. I have spent a great deal of my life moreso in living spaces and the routines involved than anything else, so perhaps that's why I also connect to Cheever, that middle-class aspect. And Cheever lived in New York, too, just like my parents. Steinbeck has a place in my reading life, of course, but Cheever has a bigger place. It's in my genes.
Right now, I'm watching a YouTube video of a walking tour of the Upper West Side in Manhattan, "Columbus Circle & Lincoln Center," as the title notes. The first shot looks way up at the skyscrapers at the intersection of 9th Avenue and West 59th Street, and I wonder how often my father saw those buildings, if he was ever in awe of them or if they were just a normal part of his life, not something you really look at when you live in that environment every day. Then the walking tour begins, with another quick pan-up at the buildings, and then back to the sidewalk.This is the one video, the browns and grays of the buildings, and the windows alongside, that makes me wonder what I might have been like if I had been a New Yorker, too, if neither of my parents had moved out of the region. Would I have even cared to notice any of this? I wonder if my personality would have become more jagged, or more expansive, perhaps. The buildings, the windows, still fascinate me, though.
YouTube also has the full 2017 Thanksgiving Day Parade on CBS. Before this year of no usual Thanksgiving Day Parade, the CBS broadcast was always my favorite. And I'll probably watch this one again in the next few weeks because the sole focus of the NBC one was the Broadway performances in front of Macy's and the parade itself in tight shots. Never the atmosphere of New York City, or at least one part. In the CBS broadcast, they're on a platform way up, across from the Hilton Midtown hotel, and there's a greater stretch of buildings behind them. It feels more naturally New York, the crowd less processed than it feels on NBC.
Still the windows and the wonder. Is my father somewhere in the New York City of today? Or is he in the books of the past? I'll keep watching, and I'll keep reading. I know he's with me, but I want that context, too.
