Being bad in Harlem

With Dr. Motes off in Indonesia and all our orchids living outside and waiting to be swept away, I became totally obsessed with Hurricane Erika, even down to buying candles for her and after all that she couldn't even be bothered to show up. So it's back to my other tale of black and white New York.

About fifteen years ago I went up to Columbia for a conference. The organizers provided a list of places to stay. Right in the middle was "Harlem Y." Not only the cheapest but the coolest! And if Columbia University put it on a list it had to be OK. OK?  Still, I would wear sturdy shoes and always Walk Purposefully as we older folk are told in our Survival Manuals.

At the end of the first conference day I took the subway to Lexington Ave. As far as the eye could see, only black people! African Americans. AA's. While I was the little old white lady, the OWL, in her tennis shoes Walking Purposefully through them, mostly children, coming home from school. In the Y elevator, an AA, ("I'm David") taking his bike up, said he liked my necklace. (Another great find from the Florida City swap meet.) A sweet Puerto Rican girl on our floor welcomed me, explaining where everything was, the iron and the microwave and the plates.
"So you live here." No that wasn't allowed, she said. After a certain number of days she would have to move on.
When I heard about the microwave I was home. It had been a long day. Down again, David again without his bike. Out into Lexington Avenue, popcorn was easy to get. And right opposite on the corner, a liquor store. Bars on the windows. I stood in line, Friday evening, between an elderly gentleman buying a small square bottle of something and a young man very generously ignoring me completely. I was the one keeping my head down. I was the shifty one about to break the law. The Harlem Y greets you graciously but under the big sign NO ALCOHOL ALLOWED. Chardonnay, even with a British accent, would count.

They had Chardonnay! The Friday night queue in the liquor store was getting longer. Not the moment to hesitate between an Australian bottle or a Californian. Especially as I had to ask, "Um, could you open it, please?" And don't call the Y! I recrossed Lexington Ave dutifully at the light with my brown grocery bag.Popped my corn and poured my wine and settled down with the New York Times. There was the Friday night sound of the girls getting together on our girls only floor, and the only complaint to management would have been about the institutional clang of metal doors along the bare corridor.

The next time I was at the Florida city swap meet, I told the elegant woman I always bought my silk  scarves and necklaces from, all about my adventure. For that wholeweekend, up in Harlem I  never  saw another white person and yet no one even looked at me!
And this elegant AA woman looked down at me, she was tall too, and that patient look said, "You people..." What she did say was: "That's the big city. They're just New Yorkers."

The white problem

"America doesn't have a black problem it has a white problem." That was a line in the seventies. That was the time I first went to New York, to the States, the early seventies. I stayed with a friend who lived on the edge of  Spanish Harlem, just down from Columbia. "You'll be OK till eleven, that's when the junkies get up." She was a cool character, but she still had four locks on the door.

 I was back from five years in Kosovo, and still all for Brotherhood and Unity as the Yugoslav Communist Party put it. That meant that as I wandered round New York I made a point of asking directions only from black citizens. In the subway, on the crosswalk. Most seemed surprised, probably from my Downton Abbey BBC accent. Two I still remember: a young man from South Carolina, in a bright purple shirt and cowboy hat. We walked along for about three blocks, just talking, having fun and then I had to do the white liberal thing, bring up some pious statement about black and white and he looked down at me, and just faded away, into the crowd. The other was a teenager, playing basket ball. I'd landed up in some back street, and called over to the group. One boy came across, looking at me through the wire. His directions were: "Keep on walking, keep on till you see people who look like you."

Secret of a Happy Marriage

Forget the petty squabbles, the silly little differences that arise, above all, forget the anniversaries. Let us rephrase that: both of you forget the anniversaries. Otherwise it doesn't work. I well remember the time when my sister in law caught sight of my forgetful brother coming through his own innocent front door. That day he had forgotten some vital prime number, the engagement, a christening? God forbid, the date of the actual wedding. She directed a look at him that could have scorched paint off a tank.
Luckily Dr. Motes and I, among many other things, always forget our wedding anniversary. And this year it was quite a big one, the 40th. I'm not sure what category that makes it, not up there with the precious metals, but certainly well beyond paper, plastic or plywood. And this time we totally forgot, even when a card arrived, joking about what a good thing we'd hitched up...for a long moment we were saying, Whaaaat the....?

So we both gave a merry laugh and went our separate ways. Of course, some things don't really have a date on them. Like the evening when we first saw "Midnight Cowboy" on Belgrade television. It was in the middle of a cold Balkan winter, and we'd just met each othe, teaching in Kosovo. And Dr. Motes said, yes, it 's Miami and like the song says, that's where the sun keeps shining through the falling rain...and that's where we'll be going...
 And he's totally forgotten he ever saw that movie with me on a cold Balkan night, totally. And he's lucky that I've totally forgotten about it. Totally.
This one's for Cathy!