A quiet weekend on the Upper West Side

The priest at church Sunday morning said, clear as a bell, “Do not be afraid. Receive the news with joy.” He was not referring to the Sunday Times, I believe, though I hadn’t read it and was feeling pretty good on a summery Sunday in September having been to hear a Schumann piano quintet the night before played by the Callisto Quartet and Philip Edward Fisher that really rocked out, it was what “Great Balls of Fire” could’ve been if Jerry Lee Lewis had been to Juilliard and studied composition.

I didn’t want to go to the concert but my wife said, “Great music is good for the soul,” so I went and she is right. Schumann suffered terribly back in the early 19th with seven kids to support and Brahms to compete with and he went mad and died young, but here is this great work that, played by brilliant young talents, can shake your nerves and rattle your brain in good ways, even if you’re old like me.

Old age is the age of gratitude and I have more to be grateful for than you kids do. Chicken in a package from a cooler rather than flapping its wings as I carry it by the ankles to the chopping block. I’m grateful for the inferior drugs that were passed around at parties in the Sixties in Minneapolis and rather than be a goody two-shoes I sniffed it and smoked it and it was like sniffing powdered sugar and smoking used coffee grounds, all the high-grade stuff went to rich people in New York, and now look at Washington and see what heavy price was paid in cognitive skills. If you and I had had that stuff, we’d still be in recovery talking about our parents and how they failed to affirm our sense of self-worth.

Back then, my sense of self-worth was none of my parents’ concern, it had to do with how well I did my job, and I did it very well and it wasn’t easy. I was a parking lot attendant in a crew of four — two ticketers, a flagman, and a parker — and I was the flagman. It was a gigantic gravel lot, no painted lines, capacity of 300 cars, and my job was simple: the drivers believed in individual liberty and I had to be the heartless dictator to stifle freedom and direct them to the correct parking space, otherwise chaos would ensue, cars jammed in and preventing passage, anarchy, possible violence, and so I, a Christian gentleman, learned to yell at people, including women who were some of the worst offenders.

We stood in church Sunday and prayed for the world, for the sick, for the forgiveness of our sins, and I also gave thanks for the laptop computer and the cellphone. Grateful for the little garbage pail icon that lets me throw whole documents over the cliff and into the sea. I used my cellphone to snap a picture of my wife on her birthday in a French café courtyard in Soho and send it instantly to a dozen pals — imagine doing this in 1966, the Kodak Brownie, the week waiting for the development, the postage, the addressing of envelopes.

And I gave thanks for my friend Father Bill Teska who passed to Glory a couple weeks ago, the Episcopal priest who told me that the beauty of ritual worship is that you can do it even if you don’t feel like it, which is when it’s most important to do it. He said that if you listen for God you will hear Him, that it all begins with faith and then you seek understanding. Bill thought awe and wonderment were the beginning. And eventually I went back to the Episcopal Church and indeed God’s presence is felt.

When my daughter was born, Bill baptized her, a big booming baritone in full regalia, proclaiming the faith as she lay fascinated by his big black beard and held onto his pendant. And now, twenty-seven years later, I’m still grateful for the blessing that she is. To others I may be a conundrum and a bump in the road but to her, God help me, I am an emperor of love and delight. Darling, I’m doing my best.

I am grateful for simplicity, for the principle of “Less is more,” for the idea of deletion, which is much easier now with the laptop computer, an entire key devoted to it.

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