Endless Knots

Health care: the novel

I haven't read it so regard this as merely a pointer to Lionel Shriver's new novel, So Much for That, favorably reviewed in today's New York Times ("When Taking Care Taps the Soul, and the Wallet"). It's difficult to write fiction about policy issues and sustain the deep emotional content that novels are supposed to concern themselves with. From Dr. Abigail Zuger's review, it appears that Shriver's familiar tale -- more than one family member enmeshed in impossibly complex medical problems that suck the life right out of bank accounts -- manages to tackle how awful things can be without causing the reader to slam the book shut.

If anyone's read it, please say what you think. Brave of Shriver to take this on. Fiction may be the only way to really break through. Logic certainly doesn't seem to be working all that well.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 54

Page 54, “The Persuasion”

It was already very sticky, ninety degrees at seven, the elevators weren’t working, my room was on the twelfth floor, and we’d only snagged one of the cotton hampers-on-wheels that the college provided for students vacating the premises. The day after graduation, I had to move out of the dorms and into the apartment, which meant that we had to get up early.

In reality, most of my clothes were now in his closets, as were my most precious books (Pippi Longstocking, The Golden Notebook, and my slender Penguin volume of Mr. Donne) on his shelves, I still had an ungodly number of objects in my dorm on W. 112th and Riverside. How one young person who did not have much money and who claimed to eschew the material world had acquired so many possessions was bewildering.

With its wide steps, Tonin’s building, The Magestic, was my favorite on his street. Granite lions sat to the sides of oak doors so massive that opening them required leaning in with the full weight of my body. The original mailboxes, each with its own combination, lined the wall of the marble foyer and the iron-cage Otis Elevator from 1893 was still in operation.

Tonin had the sunny five-room corner apartment on the fifth floor. His bedroom windows and the kitchen faced east toward the stairs sweeping up to St. John the Divine; the living room, filled with coleus, spider plants, and 14 avocado trees that he had sprouted from their pits over the past year then nourished to bushy five-foot heights while hoping they would pollinate, faced south. The room that had been Janos’s painting studio when he lived there during college was now Tonin’s for design, facing north and overlooking a small courtyard belonging to a building on 112th Street.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 53

Page 53, “The Persuasion”

Janos was standing in the room that would be my study when I arrived, a large sheet of paper spread on the floor, paint samples spread along the windowsills, and a toolbox by his feet. Even if I was not ready, the project was underway. In any case, I had to be reasonable. There was no evident harm in having a room in Tonin’s apartment. It didn’t mean anything. It was just a room. With my stuff in it. Not a binding legal contract.

“If, and I emphasize the if, if I could have what I really wanted, it would be a very big desk, really big, so I could really lay out many pages of writing at once,” I said.

“That’s good and I emphasize good,” he replied. “Shelves for your books?”

“Yes, shelves, lots of books, and you know, Janos, now that I’m focusing on this, I’d like to have my mother’s sewing table and do something with my father’s trumpet.”

When looking to display meaningful objects, engage an artist. By St. Patrick’s Day, I was standing by the double windows in “my” new study, a four-by-six cherry table with a wide drawer in front of me.

To my right was my father’s trumpet hanging from the ceiling on a copper hook, suspended over a marble stand into which was set my mother’s sewing machine.

Along the wall to the right was an oak trundle daybed that could be pulled up-and-out into a double. Babi had upholstered it with purple and orange striped canvas, my favorite colors; scattered across the top were orange and yellow Indian cotton throw pillows.

To the left the original bookcases, now extended to the ceiling, more than large enough for my collection, and the bureau that had been in my bedroom when I was a little girl.

The antique pine blanket chest, which I opened to find the linens from my mother’s apartment, doubled as a footstool in front of the daybed. They had wallpapered the room in pale yellow linen.

It was beautiful.

But nothing permanent.

Cliff has cracked the code

Author and blogger Cliff Garstang has figured it out. If you want to write a best seller, all you have to do is what he prescribes here. Please let me know how it works out for you, reporting back, in say, a decade or two. Well done, Cliff.

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 52

Page 52, “The Persuasion”

Janos suggested that we meet in the apartment on the Monday after New Year’s to discuss the details, which would give me time to think about what such a room might look like, he said. I woke up in the middle of the night before the day of the meeting with my head feeling as if it had been cracked open with a pickaxe. I told Tonin to postpone, slept until nearly noon, missed my first two classes ever, and a session with my adviser.

“Next Tuesday,” Tonin said that night at dinner. “Janos is raring to go.”

“Oh, I can’t next Tuesday.”

“What’s wrong with next Tuesday?”

“It’s my mother’s birthday and I never like to do anything complicated that day.”

“OK, Wednesday.”

“Not Wednesday. You know how crammed Wednesdays are. That’s the day we put out the paper. How about February?"

Tonin stood, put the dishes in the sink, and left the kitchen for his study, closing the door hard enough behind him that the china in the antique cherry hutch rattled. I skipped our afternoon coffee date and had dinner with a friend. He was already asleep when I went to bed. When I got up the next morning, he’d already gone and I found a note on the kitchen table:

MJ—you can pretend that this is not forever but you’re only fooling yourself. Janos coming this afternoon. I love you, silly girl.

Brooklyn's best

Have been collecting notes, via noshes, for great eats in Brooklyn and the outer boroughs, including the one that thinks it's the inner (Mannie), and so a quick round-up:

--Milk Bar, 620 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn. First, coffee lovers, their Flat White, Australian in origin, is just a great cuppa. Then, the Mushroom Toast on multigrain; add a poached egg or two, and you'll come back again and again. As I have. Took some young friends of mine for a walk recently and as they decided to snooze, I settled in for quite a while, drinking said Flat White in the warm sun.

--Bierkraft, 191 Fifth Ave, Brooklyn. This place is so famous that my reviewing it per se makes no sense, but what's new, at least to me, is their serving made-to-order sandwiches on baguettes, none better than the home-baked turkey, that you can actually sit down and eat. Where cash registers once roamed, now there are benches and tables, all very down-home.

--Not in Brooklyn (yes, one does leave eventually) but on the spur of the moment recently, we went to Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown. Oh, boy. Order the soup dumplings. And the scallion pancakes. Enjoy the pandemonium and the other ten people at your table (communal seating).

--And a bit uptown from there and deserving of about 25 posts: Dirt Candy. Another impulsive eating expedition (aka dinner when starving). With one of my very favorite dining partners, we ordered and shared (I'm pulling these straight off the menu): Portobello mousse, truffled toast, pear & fennel compote (even better than it sounds), Crispy tofu with broccoli & broccolini, and orange beurre blanc; and Parsnip gnocchi, creamy root vegetable slaw, carrot crumbs. That I can remember precisely what we ate several weeks later, well, draw your own conclusions. Vegetarian delight and a thrill for the rest of us to realize just how superb eating can be without the customary sacrifice of animal.

Photo from special event in Boston

Margaret Fuller's Persuasion 51

Page 51, “The Persuasion”

It was Christmas dinner (four courses) at Papa and Babi’s apartment on West 86th. I was nervous about which spoon was for soup, which knife for fish, whether everyone could see my lip quivering when I spoke. This was my first holiday with his family (I’d gone to Shelter Island with Aunt Julia and Uncle Irving for Thanksgiving) and I hoped our relationship wouldn’t come up.

Announce may not be the proper verb to describe what Tonin did. “You guys will have to come for dinner,” he said when his grandmother was ladling cream of parsnip soup into my bowl. “We’d like to show you what we’ve done with the place.”

We? What we had done with the place? I bit the inside of my cheek.

“Well, then, Mariana,” Janos said. “I think we need to have a meeting.”

We, now meaning Tonin's father? A meeting? And we weren’t even at the salad course. “I think it’s just wonderful that you and Tonin are living together. We need to give you a proper room of your own. Isn’t that what Virginia Wolfe said women need? I think we should convert the guest room into your study. Just say what you want and we’ll make it like that. Think of it as a down payment on your graduation present.”

Tonin’s father made it sound so simple. A room known as mine in Tonin’s apartment was permanent—and elaborate. Since my mother’s death, I’d been making do with meager surroundings and I liked it. Confined space left less room for sadness to take up residence.

When I moved into the maid’s room off the kitchen in my aunt and uncle’s apartment, I’d compacted my belongings into one trunk, three boxes, and a suitcase. Everything—meaning my childhood and most else associated with my parents—went into storage. A whole room for me, big enough for a desk, books, and some belongings I really wanted to have near me? Disturbing. I reached for the water and knocked over my glass.

From Bear Island to Betelgeuse

Richard Laronde, local originally to Newton, Mass, and now of Walpole and Bear Island, NH (explaining how I know him), is heading out, by which I mean way out, as in outer space: "Newton native books ticket on one of the first commercial space flights."

We're all expecting a full report at the next BICA meeting, Richard.

Try this at home

Three times in the past day I've heard this from employers: people who work from home are more productive. This is not data (though there's plenty out there).

One of the times I heard it was at a face-to-face meeting this morning in Boston. The meeting was informational and we sat around a table looking at each other. No handouts even. Just talking. Useful but we agreed that we would have learned more if it had been virtual. On the phone, looking at the screen, we could have shown one another stuff...and probably accelerated our thinking.

"As large as life and twice as cheerful"

Blarneycrone's post, "As large as life and twice as cheerful," about the NACD Digital Directorship session is great journalism. Factual, captures affect, and, thank you, Liz Barron, is humorous...and the pictures are fantastic. Teaser:

Take two tables, each shaped like a slice of melon and place one of them in Boxborough MA and one in Phoenix AZ. Add the magic of Cisco Telepresence, three 65 inch television screens, and some eerily good audio and suddenly people in both locations appear to be sitting around the same board table. The people in the North East can see the powerpoint slides projected in the South West and the other way around. Everyone is as large as life and twice as cheerful.