Days of the Locust

As a child, I had a troubled relationship with my mother. She wasn’t physically abusive, but she had a nasty tongue. She called me a “big lummox” and, alternatively, a “little ninny.” Those words forged my identity, and even at 67, with a lifetime of competence behind me, I struggle to shake the shame and self-loathing they invoke. Sticks and stones may break your bones—and words may cripple you forever. That’s not the whole story. Our relationship improved when I grew up and moved 3,000 miles away. Visits back and forth provided pleasurable episodes that helped the old wounds scab over. But her quick trigger and uncanny aim with verbal bullets remained—though I was no longer the target. My mother is dying now—in slow motion—and it has fallen to me to help oversee her care. Now that she’s old and enfeebled—literally and figuratively defanged—I find myself trying to understand her. I’m learning to detach myself from the ugly labels I grew up with. And perhaps that detachment is help...

It's been like the first days of a school year—with clothes that feel starchy and bright, and careful courtesy to and from the teacher.  There are no fingerprints on the walls of our new apartment, and we are fastidious about returning our belongings to their places and sponging up spills and fixing small breakages. We wear bright, somewhat artificial smiles to greet our super and doormen and neighbors. We are nice to the max. It feels a little phony, but we want to start off on the right foot. Or the left foot. Or whatever foot everyone else uses. We want to march in sweet synchrony.  There are moments of euphoria as Other and I remark to each other on the profound silence, which continues to stun us two months after leaving the cacophany of NoHo. I sometimes wonder if anyone else actually lives here, it's so quiet in the wee hours—no 3 a.m. revelers screeching beneath our window, no drunken cell-phone breakups broadcast into our bedroom, no bass beats booming through...

The appeal of Downton Abbey for most Americans is its quaintness—nostalgia for a bygone world. But for a certain class of New Yorkers, Downton Abbey is aspirational. Perhaps we don't long for footmen and butlers and maids and valets. But doormen and supers? Hell, yes. After living for 35 years in a little bohemian self-managed building, Other and I had finally had enough of flushing boilers and fixing water heaters and shoveling sidewalks and picking up litter. A couple months ago, we left our old Bowery neighborhood and moved to the Upper West Side, where rain is just weather and not a gutter crisis. We expected to have buyer's remorse, known hereabouts as the New York surprise—the discovery that whatever due diligence you did was inadequate and your building turns out to be infested with bed bugs or roaches or black mold or totally insane neighbors or ...  In any case, it hasn't happened—so far. We've seen no vermin. And the neighbors seem sane. There's a ...