42. On A Rooftop In Brooklyn
By: Timothy Warfield
Tags: Birthday, Aging, Racism, Fatherhood, Memoir

The Year Of Paying Attention

photo by Alex Simpson/Unsplash

How long since my horrible fight, instead of a nice lunch, with daughter Lizzie? I studied my datebook — it’s been three silent months of pressing my thumb into that bruise. I haven’t seen her since, but I will tonight, to celebrate her sister Ellen’s 30th birthday. I imagine Lizzie feels awkward like I do, waiting to see me. I know any further preparation is a bad idea. Show up at the restaurant with a positive attitude and a functioning credit card, and be present for a nice meal with my my children and their mother. Not complicated.

Sarah told me I seemed unbothered lately, unlike herself, she said, waking up agitated about her art practice and the social justice program she runs and her own family relations. Maybe it’s because I’m not working anymore, I said. Fewer people to bother me. I’m looking for patterns to make sense of my life, but I can’t get up high enough for a proper perspective. When I imagine this November in New Orleans, it feels more like a chore than an adventure. I have to bring my unfaithful Subaru back to my Queens mechanic this morning, to see whether the goddam catalytic converter can be replaced under warranty. My life seems more like that cursed car than the single-mast sailboat I can see through my window, gliding up the East River.

It’s a beautiful day, a little blustery, chilly enough to herald autumn. The hurricanes ruining the lives of Texans and Puerto Ricans today are leaving me alone. The Republicans in Washington are spiking the insecurity of immigrants, but I’m a pale faced native son. I listened to Ben Carson, the ridiculous head of Housing and Urban Development on the radio yesterday, and was reminded that ineptitude, malfeasance and a willful disruption and dismantling of government service to those in need is the order of the day. There’s a new Calvin Trillin article in the New Yorker, so it’s not all bad.

***

I visit my auto mechanic so frequently that I might as well as be driving an ancient and volatile MGB-GT. After I handed Laz the keys I wandered into a Queens coffee shop. It felt like Santa Monica, lots of trim young people lolling in the sun streaming through the windows with laptops and no sense of urgency. I ate a donut and read a magazine profile of a quirky TV show runner. I felt content. I can do this, I thought. I can drop the car at the mechanic’s, find a bakery, and stroll home to Roosevelt Island. I can stop in at the Noguchi Museum and read about the artist’s decision to voluntarily join imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent in a scorching detention camp in the Arizona desert, after FDR signed Executive Order 9066.

Walking through the museum, I remembered the modest Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, which Sarah and I visited during our trip to Seattle a few months ago, erected to commemorate the American citizens of Bainbridge who were locked up for their Japanese ancestry. I could have easily strolled from the Noguchi Museum to Four Freedoms Park, on Roosevelt Island’s southern tip, to see inscribed there FDR’s stirring words about freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and from fear, “anywhere in the world,” a speech he gave about a year before signing his executive order to imprison innocent American citizens, but it was a mile more than I felt like walking.

***

Like the PJ Harvey song goes, I was on a rooftop in Brooklyn last night, for yet another 40th birthday party, talking to one of the birthday boy’s artist friends. I asked how he became an artist. He said as a college freshman he was surprised to learn that making art was something one could choose as “work,” after a professor invited him to his downtown studio. “Later, he asked me if I was going to be a painter, and I say, ‘Yup.’ So that was that.” After earning his undergraduate degree, this guy flew with slides of his paintings to visit five schools in England, which he picked out of a thick directory in the school library. “There was no internet. I was very interested in the London School painters, and it didn’t occur to me that they weren’t painting anymore. They were art history by then.

“The airline lost my bag, so I had the clothes I was wearing, and I went to the last of the five schools wearing the clothes I’d had on for five days. I probably stank, and I introduced myself to a guy doing administrative work who looked at my slides. I told him how I worked, and I think I fulfilled his idea of the wild cowboy artist from America, and he said, ‘I think we can work something out.’ It was more formal than that, but that’s pretty much how it happened.”

As the sun set and the rooftop temperature dropped, our host lugged up pasta and salads and coats for everybody who was underdressed, and I sat opposite the wild cowboy artist’s wife, who works for the New York Times Book Review. I didn’t know this until after I’d popped off about once working for TV networks, which were going through hard, possibly terminal, changes, like all the big media industries, newspapers for example.

The Book Review editor talked about the painful changes she was experiencing at the Times, and about the struggle to maintain the Book Review while everything was being challenged and squeezed at the paper. Everybody on the roof but me was 40ish. Some had moved to New Jersey — kids. One was starting a new job. The birthday boy was going to Hawaii to do art stuff, and his painter friend had an opening in a few days in Los Angeles. When it got cold and dark enough to leave the roof, we trooped down to the apartment, and I stood in the kitchen with a grad school colleague of Sarah’s, a photographer who lives and takes pictures in Queens. I looked at his website on my cellphone. His photographs were wonderful. We sang Happy Birthday and ate delicious cake from a Brooklyn baker, said goodnight, and walked to the subway.

In my twenties I was figuring out what I could do that would be interesting and pay the bills. In my thirties I was in New York, getting married and having kids. In my forties I was newly sober, trying to be a good parent and a successful working stiff. In my fifties, I’d succeeded, and wasn’t very happy, and I got divorced, got cancer, and got canned. In my sixties I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I know this is all just a story I tell myself.

Next week: Keep It Short!

The Year Of Paying Attention begins here.