So my parents used to say, sing-song fashion, when we'd arrive back from a trip to the playground or the museum.
It's a chilly Friday afternoon on the Upper West Side, my childhood home. I haven't been back for a while, and every time I am I'm amazed at how little things have changed. A different set of paperbacks up for informal exchange on the table in the lobby of 838 West End, maybe. New scaffolding up across the street. A new resident on the 6th floor, or an old one who's died. Same old neighborhood. Same old synagogue next door, same Sal and Carmine's slice (best pizza in the world) around the corner on Broadway. Same old Ilya, the Russian doorman who seemed elderly when I was fourteen but who now impresses me with his keen-eyed vitality. I shouldn't be surprised, as this is the same ageless Russian who ran marathons up into his sixties. Ahh, Ilya, they don't make them like they used to. I remember in the winter it was (and surely still is) his habit to move his desk set-up inside the lobby's inner doors where he's safely out of range of the chill. When building residents would come in, Ilya would bark at them in his rough English to please shut the outer door. "Shut door, shut door! Please!" "He's the doorman," a friend once marveled. "Amazing."
At some point during my college years, Ilya and I became aware of one another's interest in chess (maybe I saw him looking at the chess section of the paper, or maybe, fiending for a game, I figured he was Russian so there's a good chance). I'd grown up with a healthy hunger for the game, after many frustrating afternoons of my dad mercilessly thrashing me even when starting down a rook (or maybe he went a little easy, but I don't remember him ever letting me win). He'd show me positions out of the world championship Fischer-Spassky match and tell me a little of the lore of the great game. Anyway, fast-forwarding back to the less distant past, this all resulted eventually in a few games with Ilya at the big table in the lobby on my father's beautiful old Czech or Hungarian board. Ilya would sit so that he could vaguely face the entrance, but in our 10 and 15 minute blitz games I doubt he had time to do much of his trademark doorkeeping. I'd put up a fight, but he beat me most of the time--a little less often as I got used to his steely confidence and Russian interjections.
This time as I re-enter the building and spy old Ilya with his winter coat and bright, ice-blue eyes, we give each other a warm handshake. After the usual enquiries as to the location of my chess clock (for the record: location unknown, but possibly somewhere in Vermont) Ilya makes a further foray into English-language conversation. This surprises me, because over the last years he's seemed to slip more and more into Russian, as if our warm regard and shared interest in chess obliterated the language barrier. But this time, just when I've started to think he's given up on English altogether, he opens his conversational gambit in my mother tongue: "Not married," he asks? (Or maybe it was "where is wife?") Sensing his disappointment in my continued a-nuptial state, I try to meet him halfway: "too old," I reply? Two or three syllables is pretty safe and less likely to engender spurts of rapid-fire Russian. Ilya's eye twinkles as he delivers the line I've unwittingly set him up for. "Too young!" he says warmly, wistfully. We all laugh, me and him and my mother who's there with us in the lobby.
Ahh, youth. I'm twenty-seven, an age that feels just old enough to be no longer really young. How many people have families, mortgages, bald spots, ulcers at my age? Any ten year old could tell you I'm a grown-up. But, on the cusp of the full maturity that our society seems to grant only to those over thirty, I'm also old enough to see myself as very young in relation to the average grown-up. And yet again, old enough to know how it accelerates as it goes, how if I make it to Ilya's age (70? 80?) I'll look back and autumn 2011 will seem accessible, just a string of days and nights back along the line like so many dashes in the rearview mirror.
I told my mother recently that even ancient history doesn't feel that remote to me anymore. It used to take a herculean effort of the imagination to picture the nineteen fifties as a real time, when real people made real decisions. Those haircuts! Those cars! Those exclamations! They can't be serious! But I lived through the nineties, I've seen photos of myself in middle school, and I am forced to admit none of us is entirely above the fickle winds of fashion. Once I was able to entertain the fifties as genuine, the ages fell like a row of dominoes. No TV and airplanes, check. No cars, no telephone, OK. I mean, I've been to places where the cell phone is the only one of the four to be a major fact of life, and from there I figure it's only a hop skip and a jump to ancient Mesopotamia. Hunter-gatherers sheltering in a cave ten thousand years ago were probably telling variations of the same dirty jokes that I heard in a Portland bar last week (even their "paleo" diet is back in style). Hell, the cutting edge Chinese herbal formulas I'm learning in school date back almost 2,000 years. People don't change all that much, though their attention spans get shorter. I admit, this did make me feel old: our twenty year old neighbor stopped by on Halloween while my roommate and I were watching Rosemary's Baby and got up complaining that everyone in the movie was old and nothing was happening. Only the son of Beelzebub, girl! Sans special effects, it was a tough sell.
Yeah, time is an awful weird animal. The same friends I once played Super Mario and rode skateboards with are now lawyers and med students and ninth grade teachers. The father I grew up with as a punning, pipe-smoking, intense but playful presence is being autopsied, his brain for research on fronto-temporal dementia. Few traces of his last five years remain in the apartment; as I remarked to someone in the week or so after his sudden death, it's as if (what I imagine to be) the normal death process took place in reverse. While we were losing him, imperceptibly and gradually but inexorably, we de-accessioned many of his belongings: scores to the Columbia music library; boxes of CD's to friends, clothes to the salvation army. He traveled lightly on earth, didn't leave a whole lot behind. Not a lot of material stuff, that is.
Before the post-mortem gathering I've flown back to the City for, I find myself tromping the familiar avenue blocks down to his favorite neighborhood wine and liquor shop, perusing the aisles and picking up the wines he was partial to (Rhone and Southern Italian reds, Alsatian whites). I've inherited or at any rate acquired much of his expensive taste but less of his frugal nature, and this seems like an occasion to splurge a little. It feels like a while since I've walked this stretch of Broadway, perused the wine racks at Gotham, passed the 96th street taco cart with its meaty aromas and the scarf and pashmina vendors gearing up for the holiday season. Overheard the patented NYC hustle and bustle in three or five languages in as many blocks. On the way home, sun glaring against the two newish skyscrapers here on Broadway, I take a moment of vicarious pleasure in the street chess two South American booksellers are engaged in, and I think once again of Ilya, whom I'll disappoint again this visit by not making time to stop in the lobby for a game. Next time, I tell myself, I'll dig out that clock, I'll bring down some tea (which Ilya will refuse) from the apartment and we'll make an afternoon of it. My dad, I think, would approve.
