Confessions of a Four-year Old

Yesterday’s musings on neighbours inadvertently threw up an old flame from my puerile fantasy world. Combine that with a bang on the head and suddenly I’m remembering the other influential women from my days of emerging consciousness. A four-year old surely does not have much to go on when it comes to the rational discrimination of beauty, so I offer you these four angels as pure forms, who appealed to me in an unmitigated manner, haunting my early childhood dreams. My wife says it is pretty clear what my ‘type’ was, but I had thought from a relatively young age that I could pretty much find a redeeming beauty in any face. I wonder now if those redeeming features in some way evoke the memory of a small part of these four faces. Looking at them now, together, for the first time in years, I realise that the primal attraction is undimmed. Looking at them in their current form, wearing the years most respectably, I think my four-year old self knew what he was doing. Anyway, with apologies for this bizarre turn (surely a result of a rattled brain), may I present Felicity, Agnetha, Deborah, and Olivia. Please bear in mind that I want to hear nothing whatsoever about Freud. If that’s your cup of tea, fine, but drink it somewhere else.

Then:

And now:

Fighting with Two Chairs

Friends, I am beaten up. Today, as I was bleeding everywhere rather alarmingly, I did have the remarkably sober thought that it was all rather ironic (in the American sense), and probably fitting to actually wear some battle scars from the week.

I walked into a chair. ‘How do you walk into a chair?’ you ask. I do not rightly know, but there it is nonetheless. One thing I can be sure of is that I didn’t see the chair, and its way of announcing its presence was to knock loudly on my skull, with all its wooden might, just adjacent to my right eye. Quite a clout sent me reeling around the kitchen, wondering what the hell, and it wasn’t until I got to a mirror for a butchers that it started spurting, B-movie horror style, all over the place. ‘How do you cut yourself on a chair, even if you manage to walk into one?’ you justifiably ask. Well, I do not know that either, but the half-inch gash in the appointed spot suggests it is possible. There is a pleasant purpling developing all around, and by this time tomorrow yours truly will shine like a black hole.

Yesterday’s fight – well, more of a tussle really – was with a Chair of the academic variety, as I tried once again to find myself some gainful employment (much as I’d rather spend my time chatting with all of you, you’re not sending me too much by way of bread). I came away from that contest unscathed physically, but knocked around a bit all the same. I’m thinking of today’s head-banging as a sort of delayed, but inevitable, reaction. Anyway, fingers crossed that all this rough and tumble ends up with VB’s arm aloft. Nobody ever got where they intended without a knock or two en route, right?

Manfully forwards, ho!

Smoke Signals; or, Love Thy Neighbour

No, really: do you even know who lives next door?

 Image: Neighbourhood Life

I once lived next door to an elderly widow who would probably have loved some company, but most of the time one wouldn’t have known she was there. Her appearance one day at the window during my attempt at a back-yard barbeque was telling: ‘Are you trying to smoke me out?’ she yelled from the top floor of the house. She closed the window and then appeared at the back door. ‘Since my husband died I like to keep the bedroom window open’, she said. I wondered if he was still in there. In any case, it wasn’t an auspicious beginning, and I can’t say a relationship blossomed thereafter.

When I left England and moved to Montreal, my first neighbour there was a pot-smoking loner called Hubert. He really smoked a lot of pot; so much, in fact, that I spent much of the first six months in Canada feeling light-headed while teaching an assemblage of McGill ‘90 Averagers’. I blame Hubert for the smashing of this teapot, as my attempt to remain civilised failed in the drifting haze. I think the breaking of a teapot is a highly significant act, for the teapot is the pivot around which friends and neighbours are meant to gather. To imbibe tea is the modern equivalent of breaking bread. This was altogether a failure in the company stakes.

The German neighbours have been altogether a different kettle. I must say, I’ve become rather fond of our upstairs neighbour here, with his repeated insistence that we should come over and consume alcohol. He’s in his 50s, something of a lone wolf, and a tad deaf. But the act of talking to a neighbour is unlike other conversations. It’s not like talking to a friend, or a family member, or a colleague. After all, what do you have in common, other than your proximity? And to that end, talking to a neighbour reinvigorates the art of conversation, for you escape into chatter about interesting things, sometimes weighty, sometimes trivial, sometimes anecdotal, and find that you have pleasantly escaped your own stressful preoccupations for a while. Our neighbour here helps this along by his conspicuous display of maps and globes, old photographs and books, and a random assortment of antique talking points. It’s a stimulating experience, being inside the character-filled home of another. Think of that the next time you’re tempted to shop at Ikea.

Of course, it’s not all roses. We were invited to this man’s annual party once, along with an assemblage of life-long friends of his who collectively fit well with the randomness of his furniture. The only thing they had in common was a tendency to chain smoke. Being German, they all smoked inside. Since we’re now utterly unaccustomed to such an atmosphere, it was hard to swallow.

Good Neighbors: my first crush is on the right.

One way or another, it’s better to have neighbours whom you know than otherwise. It’s never a good thing to start a relationship with an argument, but unless you introduce yourself, this is likely going to be the case. So, why not send your people next door a smoke signal? What’s the worst that can happen?

Harlem Globe Trotter

Ten years ago I stayed in Harlem for the first time. Actually, it was right on the edge, at Amsterdam and 103^rd, in the worst (only?) youth hostel in New York. That particular experience is one I would have been happy to forget, but it is seared into my mind for a variety of reasons: being ripped off by a ‘taxi driver’ on the way; being aggressively propositioned in the communal bathroom; navigating the shelfless glass-doored refrigerator that served 1,500 people, etc. And at no point when leaving the building did I have any desire to head farther north. The neighbourhood was bad enough where I was, and promised worse.

A lot can change in ten years. I’m certainly no longer a ragged backpacker, for one. Experienced eyes would have looked on that neighbourhood differently even then, but now they do not recognise it as the same place. Doings at Columbia took me back to Harlem, and I hereby recommend it as your destination, the next time you choose to trot the globe.

This time Mrs. VB and I stayed in a proper brownstone house on 118^th and Malcolm X. The post-Giuliani neighbourhood is a charming place, full of relaxed yet busy people. The welcome is the warmest in New York. The community is vibrant, mixed, young, and (to judge by the food on offer) demanding of high standards. Ten years ago, I doubt I’d have been consuming home-made and authentic Italian food in a restaurant street terrace at 120^th Street. I might have been welcomed into the bosom of Sylvia’s soul food restaurant (it’s been there for decades), but I somehow think it unlikely that the waiter would have been able to try out his German on me back then. I also suspect I wouldn’t have wandered home calmly at a saunter at around midnight. Friends, the cosmopolitan dream is alive. In these streets America is doing quite nicely, thank you.

The 100ft climb through Morningside Park to reach Columbia on the Upper West Side no longer represents an ascent to civilisation in the stark manner of yesteryear. Ivy League cosmopolitanism is its own peculiar brand of soul-sapping homogeneity. After lengthy days in the rarefied air-conditioning of the Ivory Tower, it felt good to descend again and return to what I happily thought of, for a few sultry days, as home.

Apparition in Birdland

There’s only one way to improve a martini, and that is to have a commodious throat breathe a saxophone over it. Now, there are saxophone players and there are others for whom the horn is an extension of their souls. Most of these people are dead.

One such dead man is John Coltrane, whose ghost I half expected to see mooching around Birdland. Nevertheless, I wasn’t prepared for a living, breathing, reincarnation of the man, his essence, and his tone. Ravi Coltrane embodies the very posture of his father, forcing one to shake one’s head in disbelief. In a set that navigated between the energetic and the melancholic, Coltrane’s muse was explicitly his mother. His four-piece ensemble played music by her, for her, and to her. If this wasn’t a direct line to the ‘60s, I don’t know what could be.

Too often in great cities with great pasts, historic venues have become merely tourist traps. If I’m honest, I expected Birdland to be just such a hokey hole. I am happily disabused.