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janiklandre-blog · 8 years ago

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Saturday, March 18, 2017

9:35 a.m. cloudy, 34 or 35 - lonely computer room - though I am glad the loud Chinese are not here - I now only see Chinese - they are not lonely - once upon a time a woman by the name of Miriam Friedlander was the council woman for this area - rumors had it she had been a communist once upon a time - it was held against her that she kept an apartment on East 6th street - across the street from where I lived, that she had stopped using and lived on the upper East Side - many communists in their later yeasrs do like luxury and achieve luxury - still - I believe it is thanks to her that I have this here housing, at first = opened 1983 - filled with her buddies - a generation older than I - one of the 100 year old women on my floor did come here then and tells me the house was overrun by rats - well, it's in much better shape now. When I arrived in 2000 there still was Jane, a Friedlander left over? - who did have the power of assigning apartments - but - she was as they say, "on the take". I knew that and greatly regret among the many things they did not teach at Columbia was how to bribe - an art - I never learned. I told her the day I moved in I wanted a quiet apartment to the back - and had I only known how to grease her palm - she was relieved and the power taken from the manager to assign apartments - given to Donald Manning - who answered my earlier requests by "you are not eligible" - my last request he didn't even bother to answer.

I still know that Friedlander was replaced by Pagan whom everyone - or almost everyone - hated - after 20000 and the fire I stopped voting (now I reregistered)) - since then we had many managers here, can't even keep up with their names anymore, like the present one because she is casual - there now is a Chinese assitant - and, we have a Chinese council woman - and since, so I am told there are no old age faxcilities in China town -- they have taken over this house here. I've learned about the difference of Mandarin and Cantonese - Mandarin were the higher classes - Cantonese the lower I believe from Southern China - alas, they are very loud.

It is pitiful how little I know about China and Chinese history - alas cannot learn from my house mates, who talk to me in Chinese that I am much too old to learn. On the roof in the summer they form a large, loud circle and once there was a younger one - their children and grandchildren do visit them and come in fancy cars - I asked one of them: What are they talking about - without a moment's hesitation he said: Food.

I smile at them, they smile back, on warm mornings at 7 a.m. one of them teaches beautiful Tai Chi - it is wonderful exercise and they all will live to 100 or more - they also cook for each other and eat healthy food, in company - alas I did not have quite the patience for Tai Chi, also cannot do the moves - like standing on one leg, holding the other - besides I liked my Mocha routine - so while they exercise I sit in a cafffee and drink coffeee - of course they will outlive me - and as my friends say - God bless them.

Still, Miriam Friedlander had meant this house for people getting old in this here neighborhood - now harrassed to death by Trump's son in law among others - I already observed in the late 60's when I had the $92 floor through on the corner of 90th Street and 3rd Avenue (Christine Fiedler had scored two apartments - the landlord was emptying the house but correctly assumed we were young enough not to stay long) - then houses there were being emptied wholesale - many of the old were Irish, they had built the city - and many actually died when uprooted at an old age. This is New York.

I am not the only chronicler - and while other than eating in Chinese restaurants, using Chinese laundries - but wait: when I began substitute teaching at Stuyvesant high school, a public elite school that Robert Goldscheider attended once upon a time - graduating in 1945 - and witnessing countless tenements taken down to cxreat Stuuyvesant town and the development next to it - also massive evictions - anyway, thanks to a woman I tutored in German, Patricia, I had at long last gotten a TPD - temporary per diem licence, from the Board of education - she alerted me to the fact that things change - I had tried earlier to no avail - anyway, this licence enabled me to substitute teach - also at that time a person at the schjool could call the substitute - I lived 10 blocks from the scjhool, got paid $100 a day for a few hours - alwaysa assigned to advanced placement science classes, the law required a licenced body in the classroom - and there already I met up with Chiinese - bright, eager kids, they studied and studied, totally ignored me - this sad old body in a corner. None of them ever tal;ked to me.

Then if course there were those times when the radicals idealized Mao Tse Tung - from the few Chinese who ever talked to me - usually in very poor English - I've heard only stories of sorrow about Mao Tse Tung. Also since I do little but read - I haver read some about China

And about my Chinese here I do find out tidbits when a younger one comes around - in good English - their parents owned a house, sold it, gave all their money in safe keeping to the bright young people, their social security is mostly minimal - just as mine srtarted at $400 in 1994 - only based on my board of Education earnings - all my other jobs had been for non-profits not paying into social security, I never paid any attention - and so these Chines come here with "only income" - a low social security check -pay next to no rent and take advantasge of every last benefit there is - also I have watched them at any distribution of anything free - they take everything and then try to sell it. They are smart. Our social worker here has a Chinese and Puerto Rican parent - is fluid in three languages - the Chonese love herr - and she organizes "yard sales" - utterly amazing at what these "poor" people have to sell - all I can do is marvel at it all - yet, alas I do feel a bit lonely surrounded by people who are friendly, but talk to me in a language in which I do not understand one single word.

I've avoided traveling to countries where I did not understand the language - in Spain I understood little, but still, picking up a newspaper I could make out some - in Scandinavia I also understood very little - but a word here and there - and mostly I've stuck to .Germany, Austria, Czech Republic - on my trips to Europe - every five years in the 90's, 2000's - when I'd get a cheap flight, could get cheap coupons for the railroad that allowed me unlimited travel in a 24 hour period - and I only stayed with friends, Aachen, Bonn, Heidelberg, Zurich, Munich, Vienna, Ostrava, Prague, Nuernberg, sometimes Essen, sometimes Lausanne - it was a wonderful round trip, a bit exhausting, in most places I stayed only a few nights and after a while was not quite sure where I was waking up - and also - hard to remember all the names of children and grandchildren of my friends - I would make long notes in my address book - my last trip to Europe only a week with my grandson in 2012 to Berlin and Prague - and now I've grown too old and most of my friends have grown too old - and often I do think - I have an American passport valid until 2023, two credit cards, with I think an 18.000 dollar credit line - never used - never owed credit cards one cent - a driver's licence to be renewed in June - in theory I could hop into a taxi, say Kennedy airport and get on the next flight of my choice - and I do see young people doing just that - but I am too old.

I am sitting alone with the 14 computers - lamenting - dreaming still of that house and my community in that house - that will not include Chinese - not because I don't like Chinese - they now also have their boxes on the roof where they grow vegetables ansd insist on giving me some, and I doi like their smile - but while we do like in cities with diversity - while I have enjoyed friendships with people of very different backgrounds, and still do - there is this affinity - that Goethe talks of in his novel by the translated title: Elective affinities - Wahlverwandtschaften in German - relatives by choice - and where he postulates that humans are like chemical molecules that attract each other - and we speak of affinity groups - the Chinese stick together, they are an affinity group.

Goethe's novel speaks of how we like to live with people to whom we have affinity, sociologists study it (often I wish I had stasyed with sociology - I had a lot more affinity to it than the obscure German literature) - sociologists, and Goethe did too (German literature) - study relationships - as do psychologists - I've read a lot of psychology - and yes, a friend just called - it's so long that I have not cooked a dinner - because shared food tastes also create affinity.

Also, the computer is strongly suggesting I would do so much better writing this in word - if only I could overcome my inner resistance to learning things that so many call so simple - I am so grateful to Molly for posting this here - and when I wrote my 1000 page unedited memoir Ken had set up a computer for me where I wrote in word - I do feel like an old nincompoop - well it's past 11 - I know I've written a hodge podge and probably make little sense - something just poopped up that said end process - so to yesterday - interesting session with Molly - reading, not enough moving - the Chinese never sit, always exeercise - few calls, some texting, eating too much sweet stuff to console myself - this morning back to the bean, talking to Dinah - and now - send - why this inner resistance to reading what I wrote and make corrections - thank you, thank you, thank you to the probably few of you - any? - who read this far adios Marianne

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