Last week, while I was constantly fingering the car keys, itching to run down to Oregon to collect the two editions of 40 Ways of Looking at Manhattan, I distracted myself by making a little pretend playlist for the publication party. You can’t really play a lot of loud music in the background of an online meeting the way you can in real life. It turns to audio-mush.
So I browsed Tim’s lists of standards he’d learned for big band gigs in New Jersey, like “Take the A Train” and “On Broadway.” I added a few new tunes I’d picked up in the weeks and weeks of coronavirus lockdown. I trawled my mental mix-tapes to see what truly iconic New York music I would play if this were an actual party on the patio.
There’s some great stuff out there without messing with Frank Sinatra, believe me. (Never work for a Sinatraholic. You’ll find yourself wishing you never heard the man’s name after you’ve been sat down to listen to the umpteenth variation of “New York, New York.”) I added “I’ll Take Manhattan,” since it was a great “father-daughter” dance for a dear friend. And Alicia Keys’ “New York:”
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do now you’re in New York!
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you
Manhattan: The heart of the story
But somehow, the reason for being in the Covid-19 lockdown world kept intruding on my up-tempo choices. My heart aches for what my beloved city went through in the vicious, horrifying, early months of the pandemic… Anyone paying attention knew what was coming to America, at least you did if you read the stories out of Italy. I thought Seattle would be the epicenter, because we had so many nursing home cases, so early.
And then we began to read and hear the dreadful stories out of New York. All those nurses and doctors telling how they were worn to a raveling as they tried to stem the flood of lonely, isolated, dying patients. To Tim and to me, such people were our guardian angels during the long years of his illness. My heart ached to recall what they did for us, how these nurses and doctors believed they were falling short.
I know New Yorkers are as resilient as any tribe on earth, tough as old boots. We hide heartbreak until we have time to take a quiet walk along the Hudson or go for a solitary run in Central Park. We tamp down fear until we can sit among friends at the neighborhood bar or lose ourselves in art, music, even reading the New York Times on the subway heading home. For some reason, when I think of those healthcare angels, alone, struggling, determined to overcome, I hear Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.”
The original, on the album Turnstiles, was a huge hit in the years I was crossing the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge heading for the Hutchinson River Parkway. I must have heard it hundreds of times between 1976 and 1978. But these days, the version I hear in my mind’s ear is his performance at the Concert for New York.
40 Ways of Looking at Manhattan is a tribute to Timothy’s creativity and talent. It is dedicated to my mother, “whose heart never really left Inwood.” But it’s also a gift of some sort to our — his, hers, mine — our collective New York, a helluva town.