It is 1:00 PM on January 14, 2021 and I am aware of the pressure to write this, I have until 3:00 when my email notifications are auto-sent when I post and I want to write this, I need to write this because I am feeling, as usual, a daily agitation about the unknown. Robert is still hospitalized. He is still testing positive for the Coronavirus.

He makes no attempt to call. Calling him is difficult: his little flip phone likely is laying somewhere without a charge, he may not remember how to use the phone near his bed  One day a nurse called me from that phone and we spoke briefly; he didn’t have much to say so I tried engaging him and all he could offer back was “Alright!” Not the “alright” as a battlecry for YES! But an “alright”  that was whiny, weak, that was giving in. An “alright” that was more like “alright already!” An “alright” that was on the edge of anger, that didn’t want to hear anymore or think anymore.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” he’ll repeat and then add, “now I have to rest.”

I have no specific details other than the “he is stable.” He is not eating much, something which he can not afford. But that seems like a part of the Covid tale, loss of the senses for enjoying food, something he was always thinking about, talking about, longing for. It’s a miserable situation.

Sometimes I forget and want to dial my mother, at a time when she was back in Florida and enjoying her life despite the loss of my father. I just want to talk. She was my age when my father suddenly passed of a stroke in the shower, and she continued to live for another thirty years. She seemed happy. I look at her photo from that time, the one that sits in a small array of photos. Her hair is done, she is well-dressed as always and posing for the camera. The photo was taken by her new-found companion, Milton, a photographer like my father. But he didn’t last long. He too was taken when his heart gave out. And she lived on, meeting other men for companions…one was a judge. She called him “an old man with a cane.” Another one became a troll and a bit weird and was put into a nursing home if I recall. She lived longer than any man she knew and in the end, was alone, manless and probably didn’t know how to define herself.

But let’s move away from her and back to Robert. It is 1974 and I have just moved to Flushing Queens with Steve, to a wonderful co-op apartment on the top, seventeenth floor, with three exposures, a terrace with a magnificent view, two walk-in closets and sound-proof walls. Shortly after the move, Steve was back in the hospital. Not long after, he was gone.
Robert was in a co-op nearby, divorced from my childhood friend and newly-engaged. We had met a couple of times while Steve and I were still living in The Bronx, he and his wife, my friend, visited. It was the early 1970s. I made a mammoth meatloaf. Steve, he later recalled, had a motorcycle engine sitting in our living room.

Robert was driving a cab for Scull’s Angels in an attempt to earn some money to attend Pratt Institute, full time, for his third degree in architecture. Several times he passed by and left a business card with a note in the mailbox.

He liked me.

Getting back to Steve’s final hours, when I realized on that Saturday morning in April that this was the end, I called Robert. He came over with a turkey sandwich and The New York Times. My sick husband was gone. I was in shock. We sat on the floor of my barren apartment and he read the Times while I sang Edith Piaf.

He ended his engagement.

We often went into Manhattan. We went to the theater, to shops, to The Strand, as the go-to book store, down along 8th Street, to that record store on 10th in the Stewart House condo which used to be the site of John Wannamaker’s Department Store, where, when I was six years old, my mother bought me an Indian costume.

Let me continue to weave this story with woof and warp of time and space. We are still in the early years and probably in 1975 we had a mutual proposal after he tripped, in front of The Cooper Union. Ah, the things we remember.

It must have been around 1980. Zabar’s was having a sale on Cuisinarts and I was enjoying cooking with Julia Child. I was making wonderful vegetarian dishes from “Cooking What Comes Naturally,” I was baking bread. I have had that Cuisinart ever since, though it was stashed away, off the counter.

So, one day, while in Manhattan, I vaguely recollect that we were walking along on The Upper East Side, and an argument ensued in the street: two men were fighting over a parking spot. This was at least a decade before any Seinfeld episode you’ve ever seen.

In a flash, Robert jumped into the fray! He left me standing on the sidewalk, bewildered. Little did I know that these diving-in episodes would occur many times in future years: he’d lead education-ins in the co-op lobby about how the board was withholding information on the need for a new water pump, he’d fight with bullies in the supermarket who would smoke in the store, which would later become illegal, he’d write numerous letters to newspapers and corporations in protest of anything and everything, he’d stop and pick up cans and bottles from streets, as we drove along.

He was a rogue. Or maybe he just had OCD.

He had his own agenda. He was a fire sign, a Sagittarius, and I, a Scorpio, the deepest of water signs, was trying to put him out. To no avail.

He was in the middle of the street with the two guys, each insisting they were there first and deserved the spot. A crowd was forming on the sidewalk, across the street. There he was, part of the comedic drama that New York City is known for.

“How many of you think this guy should get the spot!?” He had walked over to one of the parking contestants and the crowd was cheering and clapping and hooting as he pointed to parking man #1.

Then he walked over to the other driver and asked the same thing. Not so much clapping and hooting as he pointed to parking man #2.

He declared: “This guy gets the spot!” Number one was the winner!

And the winner was happy, and the loser had a laugh, and we all did, actually, as we became a part of that New York City moment.

I often wondered how I would cope with this brazen impulsivity which would, many times in our future, get us in strange situations and feed my anxiety. But something in me truly admired that courageous lunacy, that lack of fear about what anyone thought. He was totally unselfconscious. If you had “Black Forest Ham” on the menu, it damn well better be the real thing, lest the restaurant get a complaint, the plate be sent back, and a letter go to some NY department.

I used the Cuisinart for many years though not so often in recent times. Gone were the days of the medieval herb bread, of rising dough and packets of yeast. But, recently I had a yen for one of my vegetarian recipes, I needed comfort food, and I pulled out the yellowed cookbook and dragged the heavy-motored Cuisinart out of the cabinet and began to set up the ingredients on the counter. What used to come to me naturally was now staccato. Un-automatic, non-fluid. For this recipe there was a lot of food processing to do, almost an hour of preparation. About fifteen minutes in, the machine worked, but each piece had a plastic stem that attached to the central spinning part, and they all spontaneously came unglued and cracked, some broke off into the spinach, another could no longer grind and process the nuts or whip the eggs.

My Cuisinart from Zabar’s, purchased in 1980 was, in effect, done.

I stood there looking at another loss. How was I going to go on, to finish? My son’s girlfriend came to the rescue with a borrowed machine and I survived. The old one would never be able to get replacement parts. We tossed it.

I thought: I had this machine since an anniversary in 1980. Forty years. A New York City moment of excitement buying it, bringing it home on the subway, preparing food with it. It was a way to embellish sustenance. To make everyday life a little easier.

Robert, like my Cuisinart, still had a motor that ran and was keeping him going, but one by one, his parts were failing, they cannot be replaced, the memories were leaving, the processing of knowledge was confused, unwinding. I have no idea what is happening to him, but without the synergy of all the pieces working in unison, with the parts ungluing and separating,

I wonder who he is.

 

 

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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