We are opening, bit by bit. And yet we keep going. Our little community wants to keep talking. So this week we met, and a lot of the conversation touched back to reminiscence of this past year or so. We started by discussing our pandemic cooking skills that we developed over the pas year and change. One of us enjoyed that “Post Traumatic Personal Growth” that’s now being written about as a result of the lockdown and lost a lot of weight. She shared her favorite diet trick, that putting tomato sauce and spices on everything low calorie made it more edible.
We returned to discussing the artist talk we had the week before, about L.S. Lowry. A friend hailing from England explained the dark towers painted by Lowry were not meant only to be an emotional touchstone but were actually realistic because back then all the coal burning in England turned the white stone walls sooty black. Now, she explained, there’s a movement to clean all that up. We discussed how different artists were popular in the US and the UK and about the reasons why that might be, maybe many of them political. Someone brought up that was true even among US artists, and how the artist Andrew Wyeth is known to be more popular among the more politically conservative, for example.
We talked about weird things people want to do, like one explained he had his favorite pet rabbit stuffed after it passed, which I found a tad disturbing personally. Unsurprisingly, the taxidermist who did the job was a bit of a strange man, he reported, a hermit who lived near the cemetery, had long white hair, long nails and five large rottweiler dogs. As he explained, this man turned the cute fuzzy bunny into a “feral beast.” He then found the, uh, object, and shared it with us from his Zoom box.
We then talked about Zoom college reunions, Zoom talent shows, Zoom friend groups. We commented how we connected with people this last year we wouldn’t have seen but for Zoom, one saw an old college roommate from 1993. We talked about Princeton in particular of which one of our regulars in an alum, and how the school is very active with its reunion efforts and also how it expects to grow the campus and student body, which is somewhat impressive that this is happening over the COVID year. We talked about the evolution of school populations and how there was once a Jewish quota at many universities, and that there was once a Jewish quota even to employ doctors at hospitals. Someone explained that this is why the Mt. Sinai hospital in New York was created so that Jewish doctors could have a place where they would have admitting privileges. This of course led to discussing the limiting admittance of country clubs in the past and how Jewish people went on to open their own country clubs. We then touched on the disturbing uptick in anti Semitic crimes across the City and across the country, and that Jewish people are currently the victims of the highest number of hate crimes, and why this is not publicized, nor does it trigger the ire other hate crimes do.
We then talked about interracial, intercultural and inter-religion dating, and about dating apps. We wondered how dating would look as we moved into opening, whether it would be an intense free for all or more a search for connection. We talked about the fun things available to do now that we’re opening and we’re on the cusp of summer. I saw the Guggenheim exhibit the day before, but it was a bit too apocalyptic for my taste, it was a dark exhibit about racism with very little art, mainly a giant screen that hung from the roof down through twisting floors of the museum. Someone went to see the new Floating Island park that was just opened off the west side of Manhattan into the Hudson. Another mentioned a favorite bar in Riverside Park, Pier i, which has opened again and offers awesome sunsets. We talked about the next weekend and Memorial Day and whether anyone had plans. We talked about how time feels like it has flown. We reminisced about the last year and its challenges. Then we looked forward to all the great things opening and how showing our vaccine card and maybe the NY Exelsior Pass would be required. We talked about rejoining our gyms rather than working out at home, and whether we’d try to continue both, our own hybrids like the hybrids of the reopening businesses and their office plans. We talked about all the things we gave up over the year and whether we missed them and whether we’d reintroduce them into our lives now that we can, like that daily latte on the way to work.
