Thirty seven years ago, four of us bought a house in upstate New York. For thirty
seven years, I’ve tried to write about this life. Not the gorgeous trees, the birds, the
chanterelles that magically appear, but the people everywhere. It’s the people here
I love.
We looked for a year with a woman named Lotte who met her husband in Berlin at an
army canteen. She was young. He knew how to dance.
She called every Monday morning with spectacular florid adjectives and adverbs
about the houses we would visit. Her descriptions had little to do with what we saw,
but I loved them anyway, and kept a notebook full of all her Spectaculars and Villas.
We wanted a house that led to good dreams, that invoked and evoked, that had its own
resonance. I remember many of the houses we saw, especially a funky fascinating
abandoned motel lodged alongside a craggy swimmable creek with rocks to jump
from and crazy trees. I imagined my friend Rudy, a neon artist, making a flashing sign
saying We Are Always Open for You. Although I thought having a motel could be a
fascinating venture, no one including Lotte liked the motel much. After a year of
looking in Orange, Sullivan, Ulster, and Columbia counties, we asked Lotte to take us
to Greene. She said No at first.
Greene is wild she said, which made me want it more.
By wild she meant that there were no cheese stores, no people who qualified, in her
eyes, as good neighbors. The wild part me want Greene even more.
Our first time in Greene County I rode in Lotte’s car up County Route 20 and saw a
house on the right. I want a house like that I said.
No you don’t. Lotte was adamant. It’s been on the market for two years. It’s a White
Elephant on a road that’s more or less a thruway. It’s got barns and a chicken
coop. What are you going to do with the buildings? They’ll be one big headache, she
said. A money pit.
Long story short, we bought the house. A stop on the Underground Railroad, it’s full
of good karma and magic. Particularly for people who live in small rent stabilized
apartments. The challenge was how to build a life here.
How to be part of the community.
We’ve been lucky enough to spend 37 summers
People here are enormously different from one another, living side by side.
(In my other life, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I am in a silo. Where,
although life has changed somewhat in the many years we’ve been there, I talk to
many people who more or less agree. When a Republican, from England, moved into
my building, people who’d barely spoken for years discussed him in the elevator. He
moved to the Upper East Side.)
Thirty seven years ago, Eileen, the local farmer’s wife, agreed to co-host a monthly
potluck with me in our fields. Many people from her farmstand came. We were as
different from one another as possible, united by our love for this beautiful place.
When Trump was elected, some of us worked hard to continue our alliances. Our area
is full of good people although we are deeply divided about what we believe. We
continue talking. And people continue to amaze.
I’m a part of a poetry project, initiated by CityLore, a wonderful longtime program in
New York. CityLore began a program, Across the Great Divide, generating poems
from people of all political persuasions. People from Greene County have written
poems. And sometimes, I write their poems for them.
A few days ago, I asked our new plumber, a man named Gary with bright blue eyes,
born in Queens, a certain kind of old likable gentleman, a smoker, a skier, if he would
write a poem. Gary is his sixties. He lives nearby in a town called Round Top where
his house abuts a 600 acre land trust. Gary said I could write his poem for him.
Gary the Plumber
I called Eleven Plumbers
no one returned my call
even Doug Levine the Jewish plumber
although i said my name very loudly
Esther Cohen
Finally Gary a friend of Tony
hardware store owner
and poet of Cairo called and said:
I’m coming over in an hour.
When he was here Gary said
many things
(including the memorable line
I can fix your shower) .
One of my favorites:
he and his identical twin brother Larry
went to high school together in Queens.
His brother took all of Gary’s English tests.
Gary took all of Larry’s science tests.
No one ever guessed.
Ah i see you have read never thought of it that way, did you?
Loved 'Gary's' poem!!!!