Dr. Metablog

A New Orleans Conversation

For our annual winter stay in New Orleans, we rented a place in the old Bywater district. It's a feature of the neighborhood that one house is a perfect example of classic vernacular architecture while the next one over is a ramshackle mess, smelling of mold and nearly swallowed by yellow cat's paw creeper. And then one over after that is a vacant lot, the home having been demolished years ago.

Almost all Bywater houses touch or impinge on the sidewalk, European-style, and many of their owners decorate the public way with pots of common annuals, especially those lovely rocket pink snapdragons. Others set out repurposed bathtubs and various other containers filled with flowering perennial plants that I can't identify. It's a mighty colorful area -- when it isn't derelict. 

Somewhere on Royal Street (or was it Decatur?) between Desire and Independence, we admired the sidewalk garden of a renewed double-shotgun (a common kind of home) and fell into neighborly chat with the bright-eyed old lady sitting on its porch (or stoop, or veranda, or patio). We offered, "good day for taking some sun," and she, perhaps lonely, launched into a monologue: "my friend takes care of me. He's young. I broke my hip last year, so no more stairs." Etc. And then she asked, quite out of the blue, "how old do you think I am?" Clearly, she was proud to boast of her many years.

Now, I've been around enough blocks to know that it's never a good idea to estimate someone's age. It's a difficult art -- you must guess about ten percent below what you think is accurate, because if you guess older you've insulted the inquirer and if too much younger you're guilty of insincere flattery. So I hesitated, kept quiet. At last, to break the silence, I replied "well, ma'am, how old are you?" I thought I had given a safe response because I could see that she wanted me to be curious. "I'm 84, can you believe it?" 

I was more surprised than she had imagined, because if I had ventured a guess, I would have said 92. Or at the lowest, way up in the 80s, because, well, the woman looked ancient and frail. She reminded me my two grandmothers, who died at 87 and 89 and who, in their last years, rarely if ever left their homes but if they did venture out, did nothing more adventurous than to sit on a bench for a few warm minutes. 

But I'm 85, a year older than my new Bywater acquaintance. She's inactive, winding down her life, resting in a soft chair, and I'm not only upright and walking, but happily exploring a distant city. For a moment I felt a bit of superiority, of triumph. I certainly did not say to my elderly friend, "yeah, you're 84 but I'm 85, look at me." I'm not that crude. But I confess that those or similar words passed through my brain. Not a sentiment that I admire in myself and one I quickly banished. It was unhandsome, ungenerous even if it came and went in a millisecond.

I know that I'm fortunate to be moderately vigorous, still strolling the avenues and enjoying good health. Yet I am very aware I that my well being is not an achievement about which I can be vain or proud. It's simply the luck of the draw, luck of the genes. In addition, it's a fact that I have been fortunate enough to have had access to a lifetime of superior medical care. Without that surgery in 2010, and the later one a decade ago, I would not have been touring the Bywater. I'd have been dead or at best, wheelchair-bound and in pain, gorging on advils and aspirins and narcotics. A moment's reflection served as a good antidote to any feeling of superiority that I might harbor. 

Still musing, I began to wonder about my Royal Street friend. Who is she, aside from an ancient person savoring the sun?  What memories does she hold? Who knows, perhaps she lived a wild and varied life. Was she a traveller, an adventurer?  Enjoying complicated and deep relationships with a series of devotees?  Perhaps she was a talented musician -- a soloist in the church choir -- or an artist?  I allowed myself to fantasize what she was like in her glamorous thirties -- crossing the equator on a cruise with her first husband, the one with the estate in Jamaica. And the children: one a famous surgeon, the other, the unlucky one who was a hero in Iraq but who took years to regain his footing. Or was she, perhaps, a scholar?

Everybody has a story; what is hers?  

The Piacenza Liver

It's humiliating for me to confess that until a few weeks ago I had never heard of the Piacenza Liver, which is a life-size bronze Etruscan replica of the liver of a sheep, and unquestionably European civilization's most heralded metal liver. How could I not have known? 

The PL was unearthed in 1877 and dates from the first century BCE. Here's a picture of this most important artifact:

Because my knowledge of sheep livers is so appallingly slim, and because most readers of this blague are not doubt similarly ignorant, let me quote an expert description of the object: "In the Etruscan model, the liver is reversed, with the convex part of the gallbladder pointing down. On the right side of the gallbladder, we find a pyramid-shaped structure that was referred to as the processus pyramidalis corresponding with the caudate lobe in humans. On the other side of the gallbladder, we see a protrusion that was called the processus papillaris corresponding with the paracaval part of the caudate lobe." In other words, it's one heck of an accurate liver model. Yet It is not its fidelity to the shape and form of a sheep liver that makes the PL so crucial: it's the markings and inscriptions on its face. As you can see, the surface of the PL is divided into segments, on each one of which is inscribed a word or two in the long-extinct Etruscan language.

 

This find is obviously not one of your run-of-the-mill uninformative liver sculptures. It's brimming with meaning. Let us recall that Etruria was an advanced and prosperous civilization that dominated northwestern Italy from about 800 BCE to 500 BCE until it  gradually fell under the sway of the ambitious militaristic Romans. In the ancient world, Etruscans were famous not only for their arts and commerce, but also for their skill in consulting the gods through the process of haruscopy -- divination by examining the liver of a sacrificed sheep. The Etruscans passed along this accomplishment to the Romans who rarely made important decisions without the advice of the gods, which they acquired through the medium of a professionally certified haruspex. Inasmuch as the Romans, employing haruscopy, ruled the world for a thousand years, the power of the sheep liver-and-haruspex team cannot but be acknowledged. 

 

I have no idea, nor do scholars of the Etruscans, know when or why haruscopy originated. Etruscan civilization is replete with mysteries and moreover the Etruscan language is not fully understood. It's an "isolate" -- like Basque --an island in a sea of Indo-European languages to which it bears no relation. Etruscans arrived in Italy a long time ago -- long before they possessed a written language. When? From where did they come? How did it happen that they became proficient in haruscopy?  No one knows and there are not even any decent theories -- it's all lost in the dark backward and abysm of time.

 

Readers of a skeptical bent will wonder, what special powers are incorporated in the liver of a sheep?  Why not the pancreas or the spleen? Some might even ask, why a sheep?  Why not, for example, goats?  Goats are far more intelligent than sheep, and it stands to reason that a goat liver would house more prophetic oomph than the liver of a mouflon or an urial. For that matter, why is haruscopy to be preferred to less messy systems of augury such as ornithomancy, which utilizes the flights of birds, or ceraunoscopy, which works by the study of lightning and thunder. No bloody sacrificing required in either case. Livers, in my opinion, though I've never come face to face with a sheep's, are kind of gross and not for the squeamish. But as William Cowper told us many years ago, "God moves in a mysterious way,/ His wonders to perform" and although Cowper was not specifically referring to the multiple gods of the polytheistic Etruscans, his words certainly apply. So divination by liver it was and has remained so. Whether or not the Romans would have conquered the world without the Etruscan facility with sheep livers is impossible to say.   

 

A closer look at the PL reveals that each demarcated section is inscribed with a series of Etruscan letters. Inasmuch as Etruscan is an extinct language that has been only deciphered in part, the words are not fully understood.  Although Etruscan is almost impossible to translate, it's easy to transliterate, because the script is written in a version of the alphabet devised by some Phoenician genius and then passed along to the Euboean Greeks and then on to the Etruscans and to the Romans and eventually to us. 

 

Here's the most recent transcription of a part of the outside ring of words on the PL.

 

1.   tin cil en

2.   tin thvf

3.   tines neθ

4.   uni (thought to be Etruscan equivalent of Juno i.e. Iuno) 

5.   tec

6.   lvsl

7.   neθ (thought to be Neptune)

8.   caθ

9.   fufluns (Bacchus?)

10. selva (Silvanus?)

11. leθns

12. tluscv

 

Kind of impenetrable, is it not?  Almost entirely opaque with only a few good guesses. But, alas, that's the sorry state of Piacenza Liver knowledge. Scholars are agreed that the markings are the names of the various gods -- each associated with a section of the live. It follows that the PL is a teaching instrument, a show-and-tell. It's not difficult to picture a veteran learned haruspex instructing his or her aspiring students to study the PL closely. Any peculiarity or disorder or irregularity in the liver would reveal much to a gifted haruspex.  

It's shocking to me that the tourist-oriented website of the city of Piacenza advertises its Duomo, a 12th century Romanesque church, its Passerini-Landi Library, and the Palazzo Farnese, a 16th century great house, but offers not the slightest mention of its foremost liver (which is housed in the palazzo). An inexplicable omission.

 

Kitsch? or the Epitome of Tacky?

We visited the grandiose Americana at Brand Mall in Glendale, California. It's gigantic, splendid, and luxurious.

I was, I gotta say, utterly transfixed by the artificial lake and its wondrous statue. Words cannot do it justice; here's a picture:

The statue is titled, "The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves." It is 18 feet tall, weighs 2500 pounds and is covered with 23 carat gold, which, I'm going to guess, made it expensive to construct and to install.  It rises from the artificial lake and soars loincloth-clad above the neighboring Cheesecake Factory.  It's shamelessly, courageously vulgar. 

It is, in my opinion, the epitome of kitsch: crass, tasteless, crude, gaudy, flashy, pretentious, showy. Banal. I think the contemporary expression is "over the top."  No Stendhal syndrome for me.

I must say that it doesn't engage the intellect or require much in the way of interpretation. It might even be called fake art expressing a fake emotion. Nevertheless, it's lovable in a kind of melodramatic way. I'm glad to have encountered it, even though it doesn't speak well for American or Californian sensibilities. Perhaps it embodies tasteless nouveau-riche ambition. Bottom line: it's astounding. 

Automobiles in My Life

This will be a very short essay, because automobiles have never been a big part of my life. Unlike many of my friends, I've never been one to have a romantic relationship with a vehicle. 

My parents did not own an automobile and neither of them ever learned to drive. I was a most provincial city boy, happy with my bicycle and my subway token and wanting no more. I did not learn to drive a car until after I was married and left Brooklyn behind.  Nevertheless, over the course of a lifetime I've owned a number of cars. The first one was identical to the Nash Rambler depicted in this stock photo: 

The Nash was the car I drove to California and back in the summer of 1963 (the first time I was west of New York). I've since owned an Oldsmobile '88, a Renault Dauphine (a dog), an underpowered Dodge station wagon, an uncomfortable but sturdy Corolla, a Saab, a Camry, and a Volvo that lasted for twenty-one years and which I only surrendered  because it was hard on my aching back. I've driven perhaps a hundred other automobiles and an occasional truck, mostly rented, but I've never felt anything like affection for a single one of them-- they take you from one place to another and I'm grateful for the mobility. I'm a cautious driver, but I've made some bad mistakes behind the wheel and I am lucky to have gone through life without being mangled or killed, so far.

I confess that at various times in my life I've experienced the glamor of the open road. I'm a happy fellow when I'm driving a two-lane at dawn or twilight in southern Missouri or rural South Dakota. I have a soft spot for Iowa's Jesse James Cafe and for the Crete Diner in Oneonta, New York. A stop at Grandma's Cafe in some faded downtown is to me a peak experience, however weak the coffee or gluey the cherry pie. I treasure those glorious small-town attractions: among many others, the corn cob palace, Carhenge, the Donna Reed Museum in Denison, Iowa, the Jell-o Museum, the Purple Martin Tower in Griggsville, Illinois, the world's largest ball of twine in Cawker, City, Kansas. 

I don't drive long distances any more. In fact, in the last twenty years I've probably spent more time on the John Deere "Lawn Tractor" than in any other vehicle. Maximum of five miles per hour, my kind of speed. It may not be glamorous but it gets the job done. I've "buried" the machine a couple of times, but it's still in one piece and still working. 

 

Another Astonishing Feat of Memory

I've arrived at the age in which even a momentary lapse of memory is worrisome. Have I at last begun the ineluctable descent into senility? 

But then there's the contrary. When I happen to dredge up some bit of buried knowledge, I experience a rush of triumph. I feel it as evidence that I've put off the inevitable for another couple of weeks -- perhaps even months. And I preen and strut shamelessly. I become unbearable.

At the Phillips, yesterday, we came upon a painting by Giuseppe De Nittis called "Spring" (there's a pretty poor reproduction of it above). I glanced at the picture, and in a flash, without hesitation, announced, "that's a trullo in the left distance."  And I was correct -- my assertion confirmed by the scholarly description on the accompanying wall plaque.

What is a trullo?  It's a building, obviously, a kind of drystone architecture, common in Apulia, usually whitewashed and with a conical roof, often constructed as a temporary shelter for shepherds and other agricultural workers and occasionally for long term occupancy. 

But how does a Flatbush yoot recognize and immediately name a trullo at first glance?  I could be coy and say something like, "Oh, who doesn't know about trulli?" and leave my friends baffled and dazzled by my prodigious memory. 

But of course that would not be the full story.

Some seven or eight years ago, as turisti, we visited an Italian village called Alberobello in Apulia in southern Italy. Here's a picture:

It is, obviously, all trulli -- architecture that is striking and memorable. So it's not mysterious that I would instantaneously recall the building and the name. Not mysterious, but still rather impressive, I think. And temporarily reassuring.

Contradictory Assertions

We stayed at an inn in Lyme, New Hampshire called "Breakfast on the Connecticut." Good location, decent accommodations -- but they don't serve breakfast. Which reminded me of the famous sign in front of the Fairlee Diner on Route 5 in Fairlee, Vermont: "Open Seven Days a Week. Closed Tuesday."

Max Oeschger (1938-2021)

Max had a long love affair with New Orleans, and he loved to initiate his friends into the city's splendors and secrets. We were beneficiaries of his generosity. It was because of "mad Max" that we enjoyed a series of winter visits to the crescent city. He was a splendid enthusiastic guide as well as a great character, with a touch of Falstaff about him: charm, flaws, girth.

For me, it was a late-onset friendship, but Lynn had known Max from the 60s, from her Baltimore days, when Max was a doctoral student in biology at Hopkins. The two of them reconnected five years ago when Max invited Lynn (and me) to stay for a month in an apartment in his rental house in the Garden District. How could we decline such an offer? His house, alas, turned out to be virtually uninhabitable, with holes in the walls and floors that let in the light, the wind and rain, and the critters. There was a pungent smell of decay and a tilted bathroom that seemed about to plunge deep into the earth. Lynn was not fazed: "I lived in Africa."  Max was only mildly apologetic. We made do.

In subsequent trips to New Orleans we took the precaution of renting a BNB.

But we often visited Max at his place in an apartment house on St. Charles. Max owned two adjacent apartments. He connected them by busting through the wallboard with a sledge hammer. Two kitchens, therefore, both, shall we say, far from immaculate.

A serious and knowledgeable cinephile, Max sponsored a monthly film series in his home. His screen had to be angled sharply to find a place amidst the clutter, distributed among which was an exquisite collection of contemporary American pottery. (Max was a widower; his sometime ladyfriend was a very accomplished potter). 

Max squired us about town, introducing us to both famous and out-of-the-way restaurants. He was quite a sight, squeezing his 5' 4" and 300 pound frame into a small sports car. He loved Adolfo's, right across the street from Snug, because the food was excellent and the portions were enormous.

As much as he loved his dinner, he also loved the south Louisiana vegetation; a walk with Max was a learned lecture on the local plant life.

Would we have discovered either Angelo Brocato's or the Creole Creamery without his guidance? 

I don't know what eventually killed him last August.  It could have been any one of his many ailments; he was not healthy and was often in pain. We'll miss him.

Max and I shared a birthday; he was exactly one year older than I. So his death is another memento mori. As if I needed another reminder.

Our Visit to Beardstown, Illinois

We visited Beardstown, in southwestern Illinois, because it was the birthplace, in 1845, of one of Lynn's maternal great-grandmothers, Mary St. John DeHaven. Even though it's Lincoln country, we had no idea what to expect, the AAA entry being so scant, but we soon discovered that Beardstown is a place that had its moment of glory sometime in the nineteenth century, but which has allowed history to pass it by. While it's not entirely derelict, it's not even slightly prosperous -- nor has it achieved quaintness. The industry of note nowadays is the JBS meat-packing plant out on the Arenzville Road; most of its employees come from south of the border, which is why the only indication that Beardstown might someday be rejuvenated is the dozen or so new downtown taquerias and iglesias.

Our first stop in Beardstown was a decaying, rather pathetic 200-foot long peeling boardwalk along the sandy Illinois River, a waterway which in the years before the Civil War had been a thriving commercial thoroughfare. There we watched a solitary tug struggle to free a barge that had somehow run itself aground. Perhaps the boardwalk had once welcomed visitors and tourists, but during our stay the only spectator beside ourselves was a very frayed out-of-work fellow who arrived on a beaten-up bicycle, and who seemed entirely out of his depth when we asked if there was a place in Beardstown to purchase a cup of coffee. To me, he seemed addled; I suspected meth or opioids.

After gazing at the sluggish river for half an hour (remembering Abraham Lincoln's enthusiasm for river transport), we toured the few blocks of the old downtown, in which fewer storefronts were occupied than were vacant. We looked in at an antique store -- actually less "antique" than "junque" (unless a flashy bejewelled Elvis Presley doll was a revered artifact of a prior civilization). Lynn purchased an owl-decorated piece of blue porcelain for $5.00. We inquired of the proprietor, Mrs. White, if there were a coffee shop in Beardstown. Patricia White, we soon learned, was a recently retired public school music teacher and a lively lady knowledgeable about all things Beardstownian. I asked her about the intriguing storefront adjacent to hers, which proclaimed itself to be a Grand Opera House. I was skeptical that any sort of grandeur could be found in such dreary town, but I was wrong. Mrs. White generously offered us a tour of the old theater. She warned us that it was in deep disrepair but she said that she and others, led by the local chiropractor, were working diligently towards its restoration. So up a flight of dark stairs we went, and there, lo and behold, was revealed to us the picturesque ruins of what had once been a remarkable structure. Here's a photograph of the remains of its ornate frescoed ceiling and 20-foot-high windows:

The theatre had a well-proportioned stage and had once (before the balcony was pulled down) been able to seat several hundred people. In the littered backstage were the remnants of nineteenth-century traveling shows, including a large painted backdrop of Venetian gondolas, left behind by a company from St. Louis. But the building, though its bones were good, was a wreck: leaks in the roof had caused the ceiling to deteriorate. The auditorium itself had served as a storage area for the overflow merchandise of decades of store owners. It would take a dozen roll-offs and weeks of work just to remove the trash and find the floor. Nevertheless, the Grand Opera House offered us an insight into what Beardstown had been when it was a thriving community. I was so impressed by the theater that I decided to donate my bit to its reconstruction. I had determined on $100 until I noticed that Mrs. White had donned a red white and blue Trump 2020 face mask. And so arose a moral dilemma: I want to support the arts, and I would love to help return the Grand Opera House to its former glory. Opera and music should be beyond politics -- but yet I was deeply repelled by Mrs. White's Trumpism. So I split the difference and donated $60 to the cause. A sensible compromise to a vexing problem?? I don't know. But it's what I did. I wanted to ask Mrs. White what Donald Trump's ignorance, bigotry, authoritarian predilections and corrupt, vacant life had to offer to a cheerful retired teacher in a decaying midwestern town, but I saw no reason to provoke a controversy.  

Afterward, we found some lunch up the street at Sally's Bistro. The bistro did not live up to "bistro" expectations, and could more honestly be called Sally's Diner, but it did make a good BLT and almost-decent coffee. We did not try the "alligator bits" for which it is famous, even though Sally assured us that the bits were much better than the usual alligator tail. (Beardstown has an alligator farm but we didn't tour it.)

Mrs. White had also told us about the "old cemetery" so on a lark we went off to investigate. We wandered about, not expecting much, until we stumbled upon a gravestone which revealed that the late Henry Foster married the late Mary McKeever DeHaven. Lynn doesn't know precisely who these people are, but there are so many of her family names on the marker -- that of her grandfather, George Foster Massey, her uncle, McKeever Massey, her second cousin, Katherine DeHaven Milligan -- that they must  be long-departed members of her extended ancestry. Certainly cousins of some degree.

We googled Henry T. (for True) Foster and found that he was a pillar of the frontier community of Beardstown. He had immigrated from Maine; Mary from Philadelphia. We were gratified by this unexpected find. 

On the return trip from Beardstown to Jacksonville, we stopped at Griggsville, which, we were astonished to discover, is the "purple martin capitol of the nation" and the location of the world's largest purple martin skyscraper. Skeptical?  Here's the proof:

So altogether a most rewarding day.

"Foody" Talk on the Airplane

Stewardess:  "Chicken or pasta?"

Dr. M.:  "Which do you recommend, Madam?"

Stewardess:  "It's airline food.  They both taste exactly the same."

Dr. M.:  "I'll try the chicken."

Shaya, Venezia

Many a restaurant in New Orleans; and many visited by us during our latest stay.

Two divergent experiences.  Shaya, and Venezia.

Shaya:

Slick, elegant, ultra-modern, carefully designed. Waitpersons stylishly costumed and coiffed. Well-trained. Reservations mandatory. Customers:  jacketed and tied, or on high heels. Price: whole wallet.

The place to go if you're looking for wood roasted Brussels sprouts with black harissa, tahini and sumac pickled onions. Or ikra made with paddlefish caviar and shallots. Or if you want your crispy halloumi with strawberries, mint and pistachio. Perhaps shakshoula made of tomato, Jerusalem artichokes, poached egg, chilies and chermoula. The roasted chicken is cooked with shawarma spices, heirloom carrots, and chickpea mujadara.  Etc. Very enjoyable experience.

Then there's Venezia. Not pronounced ven-ets-ia after the Italian style, but ven-ezh-a by local custom. Red-and-white checked tablecloths. Families, large and extended. Waitresses as wide as tall who call you "honey" or "dearie."  Sausages, peppers, spaghetti with tomato sauce, shellfish. Excellent pizza. Sorry, no picture available on website.  No website, actually. And, added bonus, Venezia is just down the street from famous historic Angelo Brocato (ice cream and pastries).

 

Guess at which restaurant I felt more at home.

 

New Orleans is a high contrast city where the Whole Foods sits directly adjacent to the Dollar General. Honest.

United Airlines to Charge to Use Toilet

United Airlines has announced that starting March 1, passengers will be charged for the use of on-board toilet facilities. "Charges will be nominal," according to United spokesperson Alma Santistevan, "just five dollars for the first five minutes and two dollars for every subsequent minute, but passengers must remember to bring their credit cards with them to the facility."

Toilets are now being equipped with card-operated locks but passengers may still use the facilities for free until the end of the month.

Last year, United carried 95,611,500 passengers. "Even if each passenger uses the facilities just once a trip, we are looking at half a billion dollars of additional revenue with very little capital expense," explained Santistevan. "Stockholders will be very very pleased."

United is considering additional charges for toilet paper and for paper hand towels. Barf bags will also require a small fee.

Other airlines are expected to follow suit.

United CEO Scott Brandon was asked if he anticipated passenger resistance. "There will be some grumbling at first," he replied, "but passengers will get used to it. After all, they've accepted smaller seats, charges for water, rude service, unpredictable bumping, huge fees for cancellations and plane changes, luggage surcharges, pets stuffed into overhead bins and suffocated, as well as the occasional person dragged from his seat screaming. Besides, what choice do they have? They've got to piss."

At the Getty Museum

Dr. M.  "How long have you been a guard here?"

Guard:  "Seventeen years. You can't stand still. You have to change your position, move around." 

Dr. M.  "Has anything ever happened. Someone try to steal a painting?

Guard.  "No nothing. Nothing has ever happened."

Dr. M.  "No one descending on ropes from the ceiling, trying to snatch a sculpture."

Guard.  "Nothing has ever happened. Wait, I forgot. Something did happen. Two or three years ago, there was a woman, she had a can of soda in her bag. She leaned over to look at one of the bronze sculptures, and the soda fell out of her bag. It broke and sprayed some soda on the statue. They called a special crew in to clean the sculpture. We closed down the entire wing."

Dr. M.  "Must have been exciting."

Guard.  "No, not really."

Los Angeles Uber Driver

"I worked for Ethiopian Airlines in Ethiopia. I have a degree in business. One time my wife came to America and she says she wants to stay here. I had so much paperwork and investigation but now I am a legal immigrant. America is the land of opportunity. I believe that one hundred per cent. I bought a house, it is my house. In Ethiopia, I would have to bribe many big shots and one day they could take the house anyway if someone wanted it. Here, no trouble. I had to leave Ethiopia because I was opposed to the government. We had an election and 100% of the people voted for the government, hah! We do not like Obama so much because he visited Ethiopia and said it was a democracy. Our government is fighting the terrorists in the Sudan so he pretends not to know the facts. I have two children, they speak English but also Amharic. My wife is a nurse. It is good here. I am an accountant at LAX but I drive for Uber on weekends and sometimes at nights, extra money. Los Angeles is very expensive to live."

More New Orleans Dialogue

At a restaurant at the corner of Jena and Freret, the over-tattooed waitress, acknowledging our appreciation of the greens, fennel and kumquat salad, said, memorably, "People do not understand the beauty of the kumquat."  An excellent instance of found poetry. And all the more brilliant in context, because I myself once asserted that "kumquat" is the most obscene-sounding word in the English language. 

New Orleans Streetcar 0verheard Conversation.

Cheerful, lively 70ish woman:  "I was alone for thirty years. I didn't even have a date. He (man in a Mardi Gras green bowler hat) grew up in a French-speaking family in Rhode Island,  We shacked up for a couple of years. Then he wanted to get married. At our age it's all about finances, so I said, why not?  He's funny. He's very good to me. He likes to do things. We live six months of the year in Arizona and six months in Alaska, fifty miles south of Fairbanks. There's good fishing. We're just here for a couple of days. We're going on a cruise in the Caribbean. Now we're on our way to find a restaurant that has the best hamburger in the entire south, he says."

What is a Tax-Cart?

What indeed?  In Trollope's Barchester Towers, when Mrs Quiverful discovers that her husband, rector of Puddingdale, is not to become warden of Hiram's Hospital, she sets out to Barchester to confront the bishop. Not a walker, and not the owner of a horse or carriage of her own, she "begged that Farmer Subsoil would take her thither in his tax-cart."  A tax-cart, as far as the dictionary is concerned, is a "small spring-cart on which a tax is paid." So it is properly a "taxed-cart."  A "spring-cart" is a "springed-cart" -- i.e a cart with springs. But were taxes paid on all vehicles? If so, why should this one kind of vehicle be called a "tax-cart?" But if not, why should this particular kind of vehicle be singled out of taxation. Trollope does not illuminate. 

And so to the other nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles (barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, concord wagon, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, dennet, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, fourgon, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, herdic, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, patache, phaeton, pill-box, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, sociable, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, whitechapel, and wurt) now add "tax-cart."

More Absolutely Real Captured-in-the-Wild Dialog

Dr. M. (at the spacious Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, to a guard);  "Can you tell me how to get to the new American Wing."

Guard:  "You go straight ahead, through the main courtyard, through two more doors, when you hit Egypt, you take a left."

What Have We Come To?

Just back from the post office, where I mailed the granddaughter her gift, a zester. What is a zester, you ask?  It's a kitchen device designed to remove the "zest," that is, the outermost skin of a citrus fruit.  The granddaughter's zester is an inch and a half wide and thirteen inches long, including its five inch handle. Essentially, it's a hand-held grater, very useful if you're a cooking enthusiast. And why, you ask, would I venture out in 15F, snowy weather to mail the zester to California, when the grand-daughter could have put it in her backpack when she returned home? Because, I was creditably advised, the zester would certainly be confiscated by airport security.  

What have we come to, when, rightly or wrongly, we seriously entertain the idea that an eleven-year-old child could hijack an airplane armed only with a zester?  What would she do, abrade the pilot to death? 

Post-Friendly Skies

It had been a while since I last flew Frontier --the airline with the cute furry anthropomorphic talking mammals on their tails. There have been some changes -- all of them for the worse. There's now an extra charge for each piece of luggage. Those free meals are a thing of the remote past. So are the days when you would get the entire can of ginger ale or tomato juice. It's now a splash of juice in a cup of ice. No free TV -- you swipe your card, they swipe your cash. The seats are smaller, too. More rows,less leg room. Wasn't there a time when air travel was glamorous? Now it's just a big Greyhound in the sky, a warehouse on wings. 

Not only was my seat compressed, but the back didn't recline.  Somehow I had signed up for a seat that bordered on the emergency exit row. In earlier planes, such seats used to recline, but I'm guessing that Frontier has gained a few inches by rendering the backs immobile -- at the cost of my comfort (but not at reduced cost).

Adding to the insult is an unapologetic sign on the back of the seat in front of me inscribed with the words NO RECLINE THIS SEAT. I wonder what language the author of this sign think he is using. Not English, that's for sure. "No recline this seat" does not even come close to parsing. What would it have cost Frontier to affix a sign that read "the seats in this row do not recline." Where do they outsource their signs -- to Mars? No recline this seat!!  Come on, frontiersmen; you can do better than that. If you have no respect for me, at least have a little respect for the language. The talking animals speak better English.   

To the chief of sign-makers at Frontier I say, "No hire this job."

There was another sign for me to stare out while I sat there, miserably cramped, watching the clock. "LIFE VEST UNDER YOUR SEAT."  Is Frontier banging the frugality drum a little too hard? The sentence might have read, "Life vest IS under your seat."  How much could a trifling copulative verb cost?  If Frontier wanted to be truly prodigal, it could even have raised the cash to provide an indefinite article: "A life vest is under your seat." Wow. A complete sentence!. What a concept! 

A Melancholy Errand

Before Grandma died, she specified cremation and asked that her ashes be divided between the graves of her husband Dan and her daughter Phyllis. Now the time has come to fulfill the first half of the assignment. We'll fly to NYC later this month. We'll make a pilgrimage to the Baron Hirsch cemetery on Staten Island, scatter a portion of the ashes, leave behind a ceremonial stone or two, and think thoughts as positive as the occasion will allow. 

However, in the light of the Detroit plane incident, I'm concerned about carrying a box of white powder on board. Am I paranoid? is it completely nuts to imagine that some vigilant but misguided TSA employee will take a gander at the ashes and think "anthrax" or "explosives." Take me into that little room where they peruse your "body cavities." And then on to Gitmo.

Apparently, I'm not the only person with this worry.

"Passengers are allowed to carry a crematory container as part of their carry-on luggage, but the container must pass through the X-ray machine. If the container is made of a material that generates an opaque image and prevents the security screener from clearly being able to see what is inside, then the container cannot be allowed through the security checkpoint." Is our container sufficiently transparent? How would one know?

Instead of carrying the ashes aboard, why don't we just check them through?

"Some airlines do not allow cremated remains as checked baggage so please check with your air carrier before attempting to transport a crematory container in checked baggage." Why would United Airlines care whether I put ashes in my bags?  It's obvious -- they lose the luggage and then we sue them for zillions.  How about if I promise not to sue?

I'm going to guess that it's not a good idea to sew the "cremains" -- hideous neologism -- into my underwear. 

OK, here's the plan.  We take a symbolic portion the ashes, secure it in a transparent ziploc baggie, and insert a visible all-caps large-font note: "These are Grandma's ashes. They are not dangerous. Feel free to examine or to sample."

Incidentally, I can offer no confirmation to the rumor that the Department of Transportation plans to ban all underwear. Or that it will insist that underwear be worn on the outside. These are vicious canards. 

Les Tits

We drove from DC to Bradford, Vermont. Not desrious of hazarding the I-95 corridor, we veered far to the west, almost to Scranton.  It was a mostly pleasant ride. Travelers, remember the Taconic State Parkway --  it's underused, neatly landscaped, truck-free. 

Along the way, we encountered a road sign which said, Lititz, Pennsylvania. 

Lititz. I know that name. How? Have I been there?  No. Did I have a friend from Lititz?  I searched my mind.  Nope. Some famous person come from Lititz?  No.

It bothered me. Something in my mind connected with Lititz but I couldn't recall it. 

Is it LIT-its?  Luh-TITS?

We at last we arrived here in Bradford, Lititz still puzzling me.  What kind of word is Lititz? Time to fire up the wikipedia.  OK, here it is. "Lititz was founded my members of the Moravian Church in 1756, and was named after a castle in Bohemia named Litice....  For a century, only Moravians were permitted to live in Lititz, and until the middle 1800s only members of the congregation could own houses  The lease system was abolished in 1855." Nice little exclusivist Pennsylvania Dutch town, but still the question lingers  -- how do I know it?

"Lititz is also home to Linden Hall School, the oldest all-girls boarding school in the United States, founded by the Moravians in 1746."  That's an interesting piece of news. 

Do I know someone who attended Linden Hall?  No, I don't think so.

I went to sleep, puzzled. Why is Lititz, PA so familiar to me? 

Next day, we started spring-cleaning the house and ran into distinct signs of recent mouse habitations.  I got out some mousetraps, the kind with the spring that I've been baiting with peanut butter at various catless times these last 50 years.  They're Victor mousetraps.  Aha. Printed on each one, in small letters:  "Woodstream Corporation, Lititz, Pennsylvania." 

Mystery solved.  Next time through, perhaps we'll stop at Lititz, check out the church, the school, and the Moravian mouse-trap factory. 

 

Overheard Conversation

A long weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico -- a handsome small city. I don't know of another place in the nation in which the principal economic engine is the making and selling of arts and crafts.  I myself am in the familiar situation: anything I can afford, I don't want, and anything I want, I can't afford. Besides, we're in de-accessioning mode -- a condition which doesn't prevent us from appreciating the astonishingly high level of artistic achievement on display here. Fortunately, there's no cost to hiking in the nearby mountains -- we went to Bandelier National Monument to gasp at the spectacular rock formations and marvel at the Anasazi cliff dwellings. A most enjoyable and worthwhile expedition. The guidebook says that Santa Fe is the product of the melding of three cultures: Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo. I guess, by default, I must be an "Anglo." It's odd to be an Anglo, but not as disorienting as my experience in Salt Lake City, where, as a non-Mormon, I was considered to be a "gentile." 

At breakfast in the hotel, a man at the table next to me told the following story to his friends (I was alone at the moment, pretending to inspect the complimentary USA Today).  "A Hindu, a Jew, and a Republican are driving in a storm. The car breaks down, they walk to an isolated farmhouse and ask the owner if they can stay the night. 'Sure,' he says, 'but I have only two beds. One of you will have to sleep in the barn.' "'No problem,' says the Hindu, 'I don't mind sleeping in the barn.'  But after a half hour, there's knock on the door, and the Hindu says, 'There's a cow in the barn. Cows are sacred. I can't sleep with a cow.' So the Jew says, "Don't worry. I'll sleep in the barn." But after a half hour, there's a knock on the door, and the Jew says, 'There's a pig in the barn. I can't sleep with a pig.' So the Republican says, 'Don't worry, I'll go sleep in the barn.' But after a half hour, there's a knock on the door. It's the cow and the pig."

Actual dialog, captured in the wild.   

Road to Hannibal

Stepping westward, we left St. Louis behind and detoured northward to enjoy scenic Route 79 to Hannibal. Well worth it --lovely, well-cultivated bottom land and wonderful vistas from the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi.  We toured Louisiana, an old river town where a handful of century-old mercantile buildings are hanging on precariously, waiting to be redeployed for modern uses.  I recommend if, especially for those who are not fazed by a seventy-five mile add-on to a twenty-four hundred mile jaunt.   

While I'm dispensing advice, let me also commend Route 50 between and Bridgeport and Parkersburg in West Virginia -- another less-well-traveled and very beautiful highway.   

Louisiana, Missouri (unknown to me until today) now enters that small but distinguished category of cities that are named according to an unusual template.  Others include Washington, Vermont (and many other states), Delaware, Ohio  and Delaware, Wyoming and Indiana, Pennsylvania. Related but Impure:  Kansas City, Missouri; Michigan City, Indiana. 

What I Learned in Frackville

TV-free for more than three months, we stayed last night at a motel in Frackville, Pennsylvania and couldn't resist taking a gander at the tube.  I was shocked to see how artificial and contrived it all seemed.  The actors were not real people, nor were they actors pretending to be real people.  They were actors trying but failing to act like real people.  They were, at least to me last night, no more convincingl than those archaic Egyptian sculptures.

Try this experiment.  Switch on the TV and then surf from channel to channel.  I guarantee that you'll be able to tell within ten seconds whether the person you see on the screen is acting in a "daytime drama," a TV series, a documentary, or a movie.  The style of performance in each of these genres is so heavily conventionalized that the cues become immediately obvious to the TV-literate.  (By the word "convention." I mean "an agreed-upon departure from reality").  Good actors have assimilated these conventions.  When they appear on screen, they gesture and smile and speak in agreed-upon but unnatural ways.

My new perspective was an artifact of the three-month hiatus.  Temporarily unfamiliar with the style, all I could see were the conventions at work.  Of course actors are always faking, but I had stopped seeing it.  In Frackville, it all became transparent, offensively transparent.  And because it was so transparent, it wasn't worth my time, especially when a little clicking brought me to baseball.

I wonder how long my resistance will continue.  Not very many days, I imagine.  I'll forget.

Stepping Eastward

It's just about 2000 miles from our residence in Colorado to our summer quarters in Vermont.  Early this week I made my 33rd drive from the one to the other.  We were lucky -- we sidestepped both floods and tornadoes, though fields were flooded throughout Iowa and there was impressive and nasty twister damage in Aurora, Nebraska.  There were the remnants of dwellings and big hunks of metal roofing lying on the side of the road.  Nevertheless, it was one of our easier trips:  four solid ten- to twelve-hour days of driving.  As usual, I was impatient for the first hour  -- It takes a while to get into the swing.  But after a while I went into a "zone"  -- otherworldly, attentive, resigned, content.  It's another state of being.

It was only at the end of the trip, along narrow and undulating Route 4 from Rutland to Woodstock, when for twenty miles I trailed the Executive Director of the Slow Drivers of America, that I lost my equanimity.  I was just about to metamorphose into the Incredible Hulk, vault from my vehicle and toss the guy and his Plymouth into the Ottaquechee River, when I found an opening to drop into third, floor it, and zoom by him.  Ah, what satisfaction!

It's an amazing trip -- an ever-changing and fascinating landscape.  Some people claim that the mid West, with its astonishingly large cornfields, is boring, but those who think so are just not paying attention.  It's a long book, to be sure, but every page is different.  Despite the pleasure of it all, I'm relieved to get out of the vehicle, stretch the old legs, and get going on the gardens.   With nothing on the driving horizon except an occasional trip to town for supplies. 

News from Nebraska

Today we covered 200 miles or so of Route 34 of western Nebraska, the reddest part of one of our reddest states.  We started in the high steppes and finished in fertile (when irrigated) farmland.  Here are some of the roadside highlights.  Nine reassuringly green John Deere dealerships, evenly spaced along the route.  A number of llama farms, producing either wool or llamchops, I don't know which.  Outside Benkelman, a large roadside sign:  "Birthplace of Ward Bond."  Entering Funk, Nebraska (pop. 204), a sign, "Welcome to Funk."  The curious slogan of the small community of Minden:  "The Christmas City"  (for which act of arrogance Minden should be rechristened "The Chutzpah City").  Just west of McCook, a giant billboard:  "In God we trust, not Hillary."  A challenge to logic, I think.  Or perhaps, a challenge to divine exactly what the billboardist was thinking.  Are we supposed to imagine that Hillary Clinton is conceived of in McCook as the anti-Christ?  And finally, just east of Hastings, for some years the residence of Willa Cather, the largest of billboards, viewable for miles:  "Don't Beat Your Kids -- God."   An admirable sentiment to be sure, and one to which we can all subscribe.  Alas, the words that God put on the record are these:  "He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes (Proverbs 13:24) and also "Withhold not correction from a child:  for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die.  Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell" (Proverbs 23: 13-14).  The amateur theologican who composed the words on the billboard offers a paraphrase of God's words which is, how shall I say this kindly, somewhat loose.  Revisionist even.   

Williamsburg Bridge/ Naked City

On two occasions this year the Williamsburg Bridge (from Manhattan to Brooklyn) has made a guest appearance in the plot of my life.

In January, as faithful readers know, we set up shop in Manhattan. One day we strolled over the bridge from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The bridge is a splendid monument of nineteenth-century technology and the view from above is spacious and commanding. It's a restless, busy path from one side to another; all around you, automobiles, subway trains, bicyclists, runners, baby carriages -- the works. NYC in a Victorian nutshell. 

Then, a few days ago, came the news of the death of Jules Dassin. Dassin is famous for Never on Sunday and Topkapi, but as movie-lovers know, he was a polished director of films noirs during the 1940s -- before Nixon, McCarthy, and the blacklisting boys drove him into exile. We decided to embark on a Jules Dassin festival and tribute right here on our very own giant TV. Our first choice was Naked City (1949), a highly un-subversive policier, markedly patriotic but disturbing because all the bad guys are vaguely "ethnic." The climactic scenes of Naked City were shot in the Lower East Side (just where the Williamsburg Bridge hits Delancey). The murderer/wrestler/harmonicat Willie Garzah attempts to flee. A voice shouts, "he's on Norfolk near Rivington." Right where we had just a few months ago wandered! It's right off the bridge! And then Garzah panics and tries to escape by running across the Williamsburg into Brooklyn. Police in pursuit, squad cars, pistols, shouting, shots. Garzah climbs the girders--the very same girders, which, just a few months before, I had decided to honor my acrophobia by not climbing. And then he's wounded, and, as always in the movies, falls theatrically to his death.

It's peculiar, isn't it, when a store or a street-corner that you know in real life appears in the movies. Does it mean that film tells the truth, is real, or does the celluloid appearance provide us with some evidence that our own life is genuine? Why should the movies sometimes seem more substantial than the reports of our own five senses? How can art validate life? And at the same time, don't we feel a little cheated--in the sense that our privacy--our uniqueness--has been violated and the things and stuff that are personal to us have been delivered over to an unappreciative anonymous world? It's odd and disorienting when a familiar non-fiction bridge plays a supporting role in a fictional film.   

Naked City is a good, solid, intriguing piece of work, well-paced and well-written. I'm not entirely happy with the way it treats women or the working-classes, but then, many such films are far more culpable. I liked best the authentic, unstaged street shots of Manhattan as it was sixty years ago. Delancey Street was nostalgic and poetic (although the shop signs, then lettered in Hebrew, are now mostly Chinese).

The Williamsburg Bridge, solid and substantial, has weathered the years extremely well. It's well positioned to star in many another film.         

A Corner in Alameda

Over there on the west side of Alameda, at the intersection of 9th and Santa Clara, plunked down right in the midst of an otherwise residential neighborhood, is a most intriguing commercial island. Once upon a time, I'm sure, it would have consisted of (let me guess) a hardware store, a mom-and-pop grocery, a haberdashery or a shoe store, and a gas station. Now it's a fully  contemporary American mish-mash.

The gas station has been converted into the Islamic Center of Alameda. Where there would once have been a sign advertising Esso, there's now the harder-to-parse motto "there is no God but Allah, the self-sustaining, eternal." Directly across the street from the mosquette is a second store-front worship-opportunity, the Love Fellowship Church of God in Christ. Here pride of place goes not to Allah but to "Pastor Elder Samuel Butler," or "Pastor Elder Samuel Bulter," depending on which hand-painted sign you put your faith. Kitty-corner to Love Fellowship is Dance 10, no longer a shoe store, but now a venue where budding toe-tappers are instructed in "Hop. Lyrical. Modern. Musical. Theater. Jazz. Tap. Ballet. Acrobatics. Hip-hop."  On the fourth corner, there's a "convenience" store, where outsized neon signs advertise "Budweiser" and "Tecate."

It's a comprehensive assemblage: feed your soul (for them as believe they have one), feed your feet, feed your gullet.         

Upper West Side Then and Now

From 1965 to 1969 we lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now we've returned for a month-long visit. In days of yore, we were the busy young parents pushing our baby carriage down Broadway. Now forty years more 'mature, we step aside as nannies maneuver the twins (without question there are both more nannies and more twins) around and past us.

And the eternal West Side -- has it also matured? Certainly it's a more prosperous neighborhood and a more crowded one. With scores of giant high-rise apartment houses added in the intervening years, it's become even more densely populated. Paradoxically, it's also safer. In the 1960s, received wisdom stated that to wander onto 85th Street or onto Columbus Avenue after dark was to risk death or at least a good mugging. Now the area is peaceful morning, noon and night, and newly-fashionable Columbus Avenue houses dozens of trendy ethnic restaurants. Forty years ago, it was foolish to venture across Central Park to the aristocratic East Side, where, it was rumored, there lived people who were fair-skinned and blond. Some areas of the Park, like The Ramble, were famously dangerous and were visited only by those who were itching for action. Now, single women jog without the least concern. We took advantage of the new freedom by taking frequent jaunts to the row of fabulous museums along Fifth Avenue. (In the 1960s, museums were difficult for West Siders to access but admission was free; today, they're easy to reach but the ticket prices are staggering.) In the good old days, West Side street-corners were gathering points for enterprising drug-dealers. On this visit, I didn't spot a single dealer or a single transaction. Moreover, the neighborhood used to be thick with policemen on patrol; this time, police are scarce and apparently unnecessary. Why the improvement in public safety? In a word, money. Only the rich can now afford to live on the Upper West Side, and rich people don't need to knock you down and empty your wallet. They have other fish to fry. 

There's a new feature of transportation: droves of briefcase-bearing suit-wearers are shuttled Wallstreetway in luxurious "private cars." Meanwhile, the subway is as efficient and as filthy as ever, but nowadays we pay not with tokens but with "metro cards." The New York Times, then 10 cents, is now $1.25; it has fewer columns, a larger font, and poorer writing. More changes: in yesteryear, a man shouting in public was very likely a paranoid schizophrenic; now a noisy talker has a gimmick in his ear and a cell phone and he's doing nothing more lunatic than snapping up undercapitalized mortgages. 

Dogs, here as elsewhere, are horribly indulged. One day we peeked into a "pet exercise" gymnasium and later were amused by a well-appointed van labeled "Pet Limousine." Although there are many more curs, there are fewer piles of canine poopery on the sidewalks; most dog-walkers make use of plastic bags. Thank you, dog-walkers.

Affordable supermarkets have disappeared and there are only specialty food shops where the prices are beyond astronomical. But where do the waitresses, cooks, cleaning ladies, nannies, cashiers, shop girls, bank tellers, kioskers, subway maintenance men, bus drivers, janitors, and policemen shop?  Where, in fact, do they live? Not in the neighborhood; not since the entire West Side went condo.

It's still a polyglot world, but there's much less Spanish and a lot more Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

More novelties: there's a Duane Reade (sometimes two) on every street and there's a second crowded Starbucks visible from the Starbucks where you sit poring over your wireless laptop and nursing your gigantico skinny dry vanilla latte. In the 1960s, there were seven movie theaters within walking distance -- including the New Yorker and the Thalia, the mother churches of cinema worship. Now, there are none -- nor even a single dvd rental store. It's all Netflix and downloads.

There's been a phenomenal growth of personal services: not just the barbershops and hairdressers of old, but also whole galaxies of nail care shops. Who could have imagined that in the new millennium, fingernails would become the cornerstone of the economy? An economy of which I'm not a part; my nail care consists of occasionally biting off a sliver of stray keratin and taking a cosmetic nibble or two at the paronychium. I don't believe I've spent a nickel, lifetime, on my nails, nor do I intend to do so. Nope, no manicures, nor pedicures, nor medicures (what the heck is a medicure?) nor massages nor aromatherapy for me. Nor will I have my ears candled (a process that one medical website calls 'useless and dangerous") or my eyebrows threaded or any part of my body, public or private, waxed. It appears that every facial feature and every organ has an entire industry dedicated to its hygiene and its remediation. Is the upper West Side experiencing an outbreak of good health? Or a triumph of narcissism?

One final observation: since we lived here, many expensively-architected fancy-shmancy private schools have appeared. Meanwhile, public schools have been allowed to slide further into poverty. Ugly, concrete block buildings surrounded by chainlink fence and razor wire -- not temples of learning, but prisons.The gap between rich and poor, evident then, has become a chasm. Manhattan is safer and more livable than it was (at least for the prosperous), but it will not be truly healed until its citizenry moves beyond "private wealth and public squalor."

The "Chinese Bus"

As is our custom, we journeyed from New York to Washington (and back) on the so-called "Chinese bus." It's a bargain: round-trip between Chinatown here and Chinatown there for just $35. It's a non-standard, non-greyhoundish, no frills experience. It's also shoestring capitalism in the raw. When a potential passenger arrives at the East Broadway departure site, he/she will be accosted by young female representatives of several different companies, each touting her own organization. The ladies are aggressive but hard to decipher inasmuch as they shout in Chinese and possess only the most rudimentary English. A traveler must be careful to board the right bus at the right hour (the first time I used this service, I was almost shanghaied to Boston). The buses are not well marked and misrepresentation is rife. Leaving New York last time, we talked with a number of travelers who were frustrated and angry. Some had been told that the bus would set out for Washington at noon, some at 12:30, some at 12:45 -- whatever time would sell the ticket and get the luggage on board and the passenger into a seat. Because there's no terminal and the streets are so crowded, the bus had to run a loop around lower Manhattan. Each time it set out, there was optimism, but then fifteen minutes later it would return to square one to board more passengers. We circulated three or four times. At 1:30, which was in fact the scheduled departure time, we were on the road, but with quite a number of unhappy passengers in tow. 

A few years ago, almost all the passengers were Asian. Nowadays, the news is out and it's all complexions from ebony to ivory. Still, the dominant language and the dominant food odors are Chinese.

Sometimes the driver bypasses a scheduled stop. Sometimes it's necessary for one passenger to discipline a fellow passenger for surreptitious smoking. Amenities are minimal. The waiting rooms are small, dank, and squalid. On the bus, the john is unspeakably foul. BYOTP.

But it's inexpensive, it's fun, and it gets you there.