Today I am flying to New York City, spending a week there, and traveling on by train to Boston, stopping on the way for a few hours to attend a memorial service of a very old, dear friend who was a professor at one of the universities in the Northeast Corridor. Because I am so unsteady and have an apartment full of clothes in the city I tend to travel only with a capacious canvas briefcase into which I can add a couple shirts, underwear and socks for the few days trip north of Manhattan. Because of the memorial service and its university setting I feel compelled to wear a suit, and since I am in Florida it will be very lightweight. The weather prediction is for something in the high sixties low seventies; that is polar to my new sensibilities. Should I take my outdoor jacket and make do with it as the alternative to the suit jacket? My daughter who sent me weather tips from up north sternly rebuked me for even caring about the outerwear/suit jacket issue. No one cares, no one, she insisted. All those years at Ivy League faculty gatherings particularly among humanists who as we know tend to be well born and slightly pretentious from birth have left me denatured; I cannot resist worrying about what I am wearing for an hour visit at a memorial service. 86 years old. Pathetic. Today I have been reading an oral history of Bella Abzug, published perhaps a decade ago by Farrar, Straus. I remember her as being so ugly, pushy--no, I don't mean that as a code for Jewish; she was that as well and insistent about it--and opinionated. This book is an inspiration. She was everything that makes me love New York. She was ambitious, hard working, she cared about social justice, the poor and oppressed needing help were her special concern along with the displaced Jews of Europe. She was so vehement, always on task, energetic, and probably somewhat humorless in the sense that irony was not her frame of reference. After reading one hundred pages of this I feel energized, liberated, a friend to humankind, ready to go forth, do battle, wear whatever to the memorial; my old friend's family will not care, old acquaintances will have other things on their mind. I am not going to this service to ingratiate myself so as to get tenure. At my age I am anonymous. The world must belong to the likes of Bella Abzug. I salute her memory.
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For the next ten or so days I will probably not work with the blog since I am always at a loss when it comes to transmitting from my IPad and from our New York apartment which has no Wifi although I have something else called LTE, I believe. That seems to allow email. Oh, well, a break is always good.
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