Correspondence / 10

I’m following your posts from the trenches. I read somewhere just recently that deciduous trees shed 

their leaves in winter precisely to avoid bearing a burden of limb-fracturing snow. Oh dear. I share your 
grief. I remember when a tropical windstorm broke and toppled the massive old cycad outside my 
bedroom. Other green things, big and small, over time, filled the void, but I miss that grand old lady. 
I’m told Staten Island really got pasted in the hurricane. I lived there for ten years after fleeing 
Manhattan in the late eighties.

Leave it to your youngsters to turn things around. They still have the instinct to find an opportunity, in 
everything, for play. Isn’t that why we’re here? When did we lose that? 

I never understood daylight savings time. I always thought they got it backwards. Who needs daylight 
at 9 pm or nightfall at 4 ? 

Have you seen Mamet’s (screenplay) “The Edge”? He has a knack for dealing with primal stuff, 
especially among/between men, in a fresh way but with big classical themes and gestures. 

Your blog makes me miss New York. Your take on it seems so much like mine. Central Park has a 
story-book quality at times, in places. Your shots of it abandoned to snowy serenity brings that out. 

I remember when I stood before a Warhol for the first time at MOMA, the gold Marilyn and the big 
Elvis, and being shocked by their physical beauty. I’d already “got” the pop aesthetic, having pored 
over reproductions in high school. But the canvases themselves were a revelation. The Metropolitan has 
one of my all-time favorite big Monets.

It’s cultural resources like that, and so much more, for which my soul sometimes aches. But the 
creaturely appeal of a life in t-shirt and shorts (plus a couple of critical entrenchments) have trumped the 
well-known drawbacks of life in Florida. Or better said life not in New York. Though I sometimes 
think of Florida (the east coast, anyway, and the Keys) as Gotham’s tropical outpost. Parts of the gulf 
coast still have an otherworldly, end-of-the-line, film noirish character that I love, but only in small 
pockets anymore.

Be strong. Stay warm.