The bar also allowed a confessional turn of mind, where strangers over a night of a few drinks developed a sense of intimacy that in other circumstances might result in an SDS test a few days later. This was never an issue. Said strangers would talk, laugh, ponder and then part into the waning Saturday night good humored and ready to face what the week would bring. In one of these confessional turns, a mirror of memory, I encountered Janis, a woman in her mid-thirties, petite in stature, nursing a California chardonnay. She then asked me to please pass the “assorted nuts.” Such detail, I liked her already. An hour and a half later, I found out that Janis lived just around the block from Da Filippo on 70th Street. She had a one-year old daughter, Melanie, who she thought was average but average was okay; a husband Irving, who was a nerd, a CPA, but she loved him, in that order. Periodically, she would tell Irving that she needed to get away, not telling him where. He trusted her. She’d come to Da Filippo to just sit by the bar and drink a glass of wine or two, to slip away from her life, which
she did love. Janis stressed that it wasn’t an escape as much as “work release.” I believed her. Having seen my own marriage falter, I was an expert at recognizing the signs. She wasn’t exhibiting any of those. All that being said, I left for the night and said my good-bye to Janis. What’s that you ask? Was my hunch correct about Janis and Irving or with divorce does it take one to know one? Was Melanie average? I couldn’t say. Our schedules never again overlapped, though I did meet many others, seldom the same person twice, which is okay. Da Filippo was like life that way. People slip in and out, gone, no tidy endings, no symmetry, unlike art. And now Da Filippo is gone, the past tense to which I referred earlier. Actually, it has been gone for going on two years, a casualty of the Second Avenue subway. Why this eulogy long after its passing? In his Foreword to “Here Is New York,” written years after the essay, E.B. White wrote: “The longer true of the city, owing to the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum.” But White pointed out, better than I, that “the essential fever of New York has not
changed.” Landscapes change. People, for good or ill, remain the same. olds not yet here, those who will see the Second Avenue subway as much a given as I did Manhattan without elevated lines and good riddance to them and those who chronicle them, those who live in past. Let me tell you as one who has traveled your path. They existed, though I never saw them, and they carried people going to and from their jobs intersecting with other people going to and from their jobs, and sometimes these people who otherwise might not have traded stories about the ebbs spoke casually then honestly and then said their good night never to meet again but always residing in memory. They did this at places in Manhattan too numerous to know that are no longer there. think about when you’re on the Second Avenue subway reading “Here Is New York” on what will surely replace the iPad or whatever your technology du jour, if you think the iPad reference dated, give it some
Resident