A time set is the number of moments that are tied together because of a place or an occasion. We all deliberately refer to time sets when we celebrate birthdays and Thanksgiving. We for a moment remember when a child was born or what it was like at the first Thanksgiving, or at least the way we are taught about what had happened then. Every June Sixth, I remember D-Day and also recall the decreased attention it has garnered over the years. The contemplation of a time set does wonderful things for our imaginations.
I have at least four elements in my time set about West End Avenue. They are personal rather than shared with a community, as would be the case with a holiday. And they stand out as significant moments in a continuous memory of the neighborhood, which I lived in for forty five years. I now live in Brooklyn but I check back with my friends who still live there to see what buildings are in construction and what new enterprises are going on in storefronts which lost their previous tenants, and so what I am celebrating in these inquiries is the moment when I left the neighborhood in that there is the time before and the time after that pivotal moment and so I can say, when I visit it, that the neighborhood has changed, just as, when I lived there, i would comment on how much the neighborhood had changed since the first time I visited it, when in high school, and there were two theatres on 97th Street and Broadway, and the Seneca Cafeteria on the southwest side of 96th Street and Broadway.
That time element is personal in that its significance is not in changes in neighborhood commerce but in how my own life evolved over time, moments of memory tied into events in my life: the first girl who this central Bronx kid dated who lived on West End Avenue, which I thought of as a very swanky place. A more purely personal element is my memory of the time when I was walking my dog shortly after my wife died and a year before I moved away. I passed by a young couple sitting on a brownstone stoop come rain or shine, clearly in love from the openness of their faces and how close they sat together, the two of them smoking together, perhaps because they had no need for words. I couldn’t decide then or now whether I should go up to them and admonish them against cigarette smoking because lung cancer caused by fifty years of smoking had taken my wife from me, deciding at the time not to because they did not need a reminder from the ancient mariner that cigarette smoking was bad for the health. This was two blocks from where I lived and so it is a West End Avenue memory. I also remember, from when I first lived there in the early Seventies, a blackout and going down to purchase candles and noticing a number of policemen on street corners, perhaps to protect our affluent white neighborhood from the roving hordes of black people from Harlem who were expected to descend on our neighborhood during the darkness, but never did. That was a historical moment in that it was fraught with social significance and things could have gone one way or another.
Another moment was significant because it called attention to this very spectacle of moments from different times living simultaneously with one another. A film was being shot on West End Avenue. Film-making was always happening on West End Avenue. “Law and Order” filmed a lot of its exteriors there and hired West End Avenue apartments from their tenants to shoot interiors of the slightly redecorated apartments. That particular time a costume drama was being filmed, in that the movie was set in the Fifties, and the Fifties were by then considered historical. The cars were vintage as was the dress of the extras who paraded past, over and over again, upon the instruction of whomever it is that delivers the go ahead from the director. A lot of work went into putting on this scene, even if most of the buildings shown in the backgrounds had been constructed by that time and so didn’t have to be altered, which would have been a very expensive proposition. All the director had done was add some trees whose wood stands wouldn’t show in the footage. I guess you don’t have to be kind to trees when shooting a movie.
What struck me, of course, was that the faces of the actors and actresses as well as their costumes were far less interesting than the people strolling up and down the Avenue who weren’t in any costumes other than their own. The long bearded Hasids; the non-bearded Modern Orthodox talking to their children; the joggers in Gortex; the older people, like me, out for a morning constitutional, who can be distinguished by the determined look on their faces from the people just walking from one place to another; young professionals pausing over their at the time ubiquitous Blackberrys; the nannies with their charges, some of whom seem to me rather old to be chauffeured around in strollers, and so on, many a story to tell, some more distinctive than others, but satisfying even if they are replays of stereotypes rather than of individuality.
So this was another case of back to the future. Reversing times is easy. The present world looks strange if it is put in the light of the Fifties. The SUV’s and other vehicles look amazingly modernistic when they are compared to the stylish modernism of fish tails and portholes that decorated the cars from the Fifties that had been imported to line the current West End Avenue. Life on the present day Avenue tells what history has transpired since the Fifties: health consciousness (the jogging); the recovery of the Jewish Orthodox population from the Holocaust (in number and in being so American that English rather than Yiddish is the vernacular they use when talking to children); the persistence of the neighborhood in its buildings and its doormen and its swept streets. The neighborhood was not swept away by some Cold War apocalypse or by the urban crime of the Seventies. What a story to be told to those people from the Fifties, except, of course, that they know it all because the actors are from this time not that time.
The afternoon of the filming I went to a birthday party for one of my three year old grandsons and so engaged in the very usual experience of a time set invoked by a birthday. There, the déjà vu over again was also a quadruple time set just like the quadruple one I have of West End Avenue. The party was at a gym in Brooklyn. Parents brought their children and stayed to attend to them while a few trainers led the fifteen children or so through some gymnastics and after an hour or so of that took them to another room to serve pizza and cake. I remarked to my wife that it seemed a wonderful idea that had not been available, so far as I know, when we were having little parties and I would take the assorted children out to Riverside Park for whatever physical games I could think of while Jane prepared some party cake and stuff back home. This way, there was less fuss and muss, though parents could get a sense the kids were having a good time, indeed as much excitement as children that age can stand at one time. Everything was well calibrated: not too much; not too little.
So that is the reference back to when I was daddy rather than granddad. This time, I had no responsibilities other than to admire the children, who all seemed so alert and focused. People even offered to get me coffee, which I accepted, even though I am still spry enough to get myself my own coffee. O.K., I guess it is a sign of respect, though I still hope to be respected for something other than being old. What a grim prospect, made not so bad by the fact that you are entitled to have your infirmities honored when they come along, just not yet.
I thought, though, back to the little kiddie birthday parties I went to when I was little. I was expected to recite a nursery rhyme as well as behave myself. I remember thinking at one of those times, so help me, that it was a bit demeaning to have to sing for one’s party cake, but that that was the way it was. I also remember, so help me, the young matrons were smooth skinned and comely in the bare midriff look that was the rage in the mid Forties. Freud tells us nothing we don’t know and which we only deny. I knew enough to say nothing about such things though I was outspokenly and obnoxiously precocious about other matters.
So there were three generations of birthdays simultaneously present at my grandson’s birthday: his, his father’s and his grandfather’s. By a modestly loosened definition of a time set, there were four generations there. My father told me, when I was a little boy and passing by a nicely manicured, rolling lawn not far from the ramshackle house in which he grew up, that his second grade teacher had lived there and he remembered racing down the carefully mown lawn to join a birthday party for a schoolmate. It was important to him, one of those memories that stick. I wonder over the years what kind of person that little boy might have become other than the burdened one who was the only one I ever knew.
The times in a time set overlap, highlight one another, each allowing a deeper appreciation of the others. My grand daughter when she was aged six already chided her mother in the same way as her mother chastised my wife, her mother, who, like every person, is always caught in the middle, having been chided by her mother as her mother was chided by her own mother, known to me as Grandma, who, in her old age, also chided me. This generalization is sentimental because it is banal, the sort of thing whereby families describe the richness and the continuities of their lives.
Time sets are one of the gifts available to (inherited by) human beings. Other times are always present, always available, as simultaneities. The use of this resource of the human imagination, which I take to be general, even though we don’t talk all that much about it, even when it doesn’t have to do with sexuality (I wonder why? Because it is so intimate, so much a part of our distinctive emotional beings?) is a great gift. It raises us out of time as God is supposed to be outside of time, knowing what will happen even as events are free to take place as they may in the times when they occur. Indeed, it strikes me that the idea of God as understanding time in this way is an invention by theologians that simply corresponded to their own understanding of the subtleties of time and was attributed to God so as to praise and to be comforted by this feature of the human condition. Which is a way of saying that there are no experiences available to the religious that are not available to the atheist, except that definitional matter whereby the religious have the experience of knowing for sure that what they experience is something that is unknown to atheists.