Finding harmony in the midst of chaos

The Column: 11.17.23

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I flew into New York last week into JFK, which would not be my choice but that’s where the plane landed. LaGuardia has been remade into a marble palace and JFK is an obstacle course to find out if you really really really want to come to New York or if you might rather go to Cleveland. The Statue of Liberty says, “Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and that’s JFK, huddled masses yearning to claim their baggage and find a taxi.

Your best strategy in dismal circumstances is militant cheerfulness. You say “Thank you” and “God bless you” to anyone who holds a door for you or lets you pass, you ask the taxi starter how he’s doing today, you address the cabbie as “My friend” and it really does brighten your day.

I don’t belong in New York, I’m a loner, I have the social skills of a hoot owl, but I accept the amusement that the city offers. I saw a dog on the subway with earbuds on and I asked the guy holding the leash what the dog was listening to and he said, “Those are hearing aids.” But he said it sort of sarcastically. You get a lot of irony in New York. So I asked my audiologist if there is such a thing as veterinary audiology and she said, “I think so because there is a hearing test for animals but I think it’s a branch of neurology.” She didn’t seem to want to delve into it.

As I stood there on the corner of West 74th I saw a woman with a little white dog on an odd leash that had two loops, one around each front leg, a sort of orthopedic leash with which she helped the dog stand upright. I was going to ask but I didn’t know how to phrase the question so I headed for the subway stop at 72nd and Central Park West. John Lennon was shot on that corner in 1980. I still feel anger in his behalf, he being two years older than I, he having been cheated of 43 years of walking around Central Park and noticing things. The bastard who shot him wasn’t just crazy, he was evil.

I don’t want to think about evil. I forced myself to read about the Hamas terrorist attacks on the kibbutzim in Israel, the casual slaughter of defenseless persons, women, children, infants, the brutality, the raping, the capture of civilian hostages, and after a big pro-Hamas rally on the Upper West Side, I read some more, including Bret Stephens’s excellent dispatch in the Times on the 12th.

I’m a romantic, not a realist. I love a photograph of two lovers kissing in the midst of a bustling city. There’s the famous Eisenstaedt photo of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945, and there are others of couples in Paris and London and San Francisco, and each time I see one it speaks the joy of being in love and oblivious to the hullabaloo and the hustle, two humans in the midst of the crowd who hold the world in their arms when they embrace. I kissed Jenny once in the plaza of Lincoln Center and another time in the 42nd Street C-train station and I intend to do it again. I only wish she were taller.

I thought of John Lennon when I got on the train at his station and I wrote him a limerick.

And then I wrote one for my friend Stephanie who writes them for friends on their birthdays:

And then an elongated one, a limerick with an extra bedroom:

I’m considering setting up a table in Central Park: “Custom-made Personal Limerick, $5. 50% discount for the discouraged.” Sit by the Reservoir path and crank out poems for Tom, Dick, Harry, Teresa, Delores, Hannah. I can’t change evil but I can make one person smile. You do what you can.

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