In the years since I started setting up my own households, I have always wanted a dining room.  Living in Manhattan, the way we lived in Manhattan, made that an impossibility.  What I did have for most of my years in the city were fireplaces, which I actually wanted and enjoyed more than I would have a dining room because they were exotic and luxurious.  I learned early in entertaining as long as the food was good, the people fun, the alcohol abundant that people will stand, sit on the floor or even dance while eating.  It could be uncomfortable to find hors d’oeuvres plates in your bedroom, but ca va.

We had a massive eat-in kitchen in the City when we were having all our babies, which is rarer than a dining room.  We bought an inexpensive moderately taste-free table and chair set. Our first suburban rental house, did have a dining room, that was mostly open to the living room.  It held our cheap kitchenette table and chairs, which did accommodate six in the most elemental way: side tables, trips to the kitchen for anything other than what each person was served.  It was mostly the five of us so it was fine, but it really wasn’t a dining room.

When we bought our house there were only two non negotiables:  fireplace and two bathrooms.  It came with many other benefits: river views hid behind neglected evergreens; sour cherry, ornamental cherry, magnolia and magnificent oak trees; lilac and rhododendron bushes of many characters.  No dining room.  Built the same year I was born, our mid-century ranch had a dining area, with two steps down to a large, beautifully lit living room.

After scraping floors, removing unwanted flora, painting; we were able to move on to furniture.  After having used the moldy furniture that had been left in the basement by the sellers — an entire other entry — my mum paid for a sofa and chair, and as things do, the house filled up.  I started adding colors to the linen white walls,

The same kitchenette set sat in the dining area.  It fit well, the normal oblong dining table I had wanted would not.   I began to pine for a round dining room table.  We could go to 52″ no more without sacrificing one of the children to an occasional  backward plunge into the living room.  Yes, round was the way to go.  But there were so many other ways the money had to go: new heating and cooling system, new range, renovate the basement.  As with most things, if this had been that important to me, it would have happened.  My original kitchen was functional until it came to the cabinets, which required spelunking skills to find the rarely used pan.

However, that kitchenette set started to undo me with its damned longevity.  If the cheesy piece of pressed wood would fall apart, then, well yes!  Things would happen.  No, it just got grimy and I would take it out onto the porch to do my best to make it look respectable to anyone who hadn’t lived with it for decades.  But I hated it: its style; that I saw its twin in every furniture catalogue that I allowed myself to pursue; that its top could not really be sanded, but scrubbed mercilessly with baking soda.  Even as I nearly always topped with a table cloth, there were those awful chairs, which were falling apart along with my patience.

Several other things happened that made that ugly set of furniture completely insignificant.  When we sold the house, and I found my beautiful rental. I finally abandon it.  My apartment again had an eat-in-kitchen, surely no oddity in Westchester, and I brought with me a booth from a diner that had closed years ago in Irvington.  It had sat downstairs in the family room since we got it and it is adorable.  What it is not is comfortable.  But I was happy to have three bedrooms so my younger two could each have their space when not in school.

After M moved to the city I was left without a bed in her bedroom, or much else aside from the things you think you want to keep when you’ve just graduated (read text books.) Shortly afterwards a dear friend was clearing out his house, including a dining room set.  A real one with leaves and six substantial chairs!  He graciously gave it to me, along with massive sofa to M whose furniture until then consisted of her massive bed.  Into the former bedroom went the living room furniture, providing me with the smallest, but completely lovely, living room in Westchester.  The larger living room is now outfitted with the china cabinet, which was always there,  a trestle table that holds many plants and my new beautiful table and chairs.  A couple of weeks ago to mark the death of the last of my dad’s siblings I moved his mother’s buffet table from the storage room and into the Dining Room!

I like to think it isn’t odd that I get such pleasure from this, having wanted it for so long.  After all, I live alone and eat alone much of the time.  But I set the table for myself (and my kids or anyone else who is here with me) and eat the dinner that I nearly always prepare and  I look at the river, look at my kids’ art and the plants, or read.  I love that Grandma’s buffet, which spent my entire life in one of two basements, shares my space with me.  In the chair that I have chosen as my own it sits behind me and I feel as if she literally has my back.

At recent social event I retold the story of how I had been evicted from my first apartment, all of my belongings being taken by the NYC Marshal to a spot under the Brooklyn Bridge that is now probably a hot dining spot.  My daughter M heard this tale for the first time.

“How did this happen?” she asked.  I told her that I didn’t pay my rent.  I lived in the Diamond District on 47th between Fifth & Sixth (which now has some of the most kitschy branding in the very tasteful post-Bloomberg midtown).  It was a  supremely odd place to live, there being few if any other dwellings in the neighborhood.  This was 1974 NYC, one block from the Times Square of the “Taxi Driver” era.  My building housed several retail jewelers on the first floor.  My apartment shared the second floor with the largest garnet distributor in the country, solemn men in Orthodox garb for whom I did not exist.  There were  three other tenants of dubious nature, one with whom I somehow had some vague connection that escapes me now.

The owning syndicate had a management agent and my $125/mo rent did not substantially add to their bottom line.  Thus, my disregard for rent payments was not a big focus.  Occasionally, I would get a call at work (I had no phone in the apartment, which people found shocking) from Mr. Farrell asking me to please get my payments up to date.  And I would.  Sort of.  And then I wouldn’t, and like an assignment that is past due that causes you to cut classes, thus compounding the damage, I would continue to dig myself further into arrears.  I would picture Mr. Farrell, maybe 10 years older than I, sitting at his beat up desk, trying to get this errant young Irish girl to get things right for months on end.  I felt bad about letting him down.

I saw where this was heading and found a new apartment, armed with unpaid rent for damage deposit and first and last month’s rent.  I came home one night after cocktails with friends at the St. Regis, a favorite after office spot, and saw that the locks on the door had been changed and a notice posted on how I could retrieve my personal property.  I didn’t cry.  I didn’t call my parents.  I refused to ask anyone for money because I was simultaneously unashamed and fully aware that I had caused this calamity and so I had to deal with it.

I did have the new apartment, but absolutely nothing else.  I was forced to recruit the driver who reported to me for routing printing deliveries to meet me at the Bridge so I could pick my things up and take them to my new place.  He was befuddled, as were the men who were the caretakers of the belongings of the beleaguered as we met in the shadow of Roeblings’ masterpiece.  “How did this happen [to a nice girl like you]?”  “I didn’t pay my rent.”  No bad landlord (ok I had no mailbox, the heat was iffy, and the hallways were never cleaned), bad tenant.  I somehow liked to think that because I stood up and took my punishment, dragged no one else into this except my friend who had to house me over the weekend, that this was acceptable.

I moved my stuff to my new apartment, met my future husband and got evicted again.

All of my life, with exception of time out for college and other misbehavior, I have lived within walking distance of a river.  As a child my dad would quote a friend, Fate Marable, who was the son of the eponymous jazz pianist, that there were two types of people:  river people and everyone else.  I can’t imagine what exactly that meant to the senior Marable since he led bands including one with young Louis Armstrong on riverboats throughout most of his career, an experience certainly more colorful and fraught than my own.  He died when he was in his mid 50’s.

I would guess that most Pittsburghers are river people, whatever that definition is.  We grew up at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers.  This will sound familiar to sports fans, since it is repeated at every televised sports event that takes place there, sports championships having replaced steel as the major product of the city.  The phrase will usually be accompanied by a beauty shot of downtown Pittsburgh and its Northside stadia taken from the neighborhood where I grew up, Mt. Washington.

The outstanding nature of that view was slowly being realized beyond our neighborhood just about when I was starting grade school.  First there was the Grandview Theater, a classic neighborhood theater with a quarter admission and odd white swirling decorations against a red backdrop closed and reopened as LeMont, a fancy dining establishment. This transformation was roundly suspect in the area, with stories of rats through the aisles of the movies house not lending itself to French Service, no matter what the renovation.  It was so fancy that when Premier Khruschev visited Pittsburgh and we proudly lit up all our buildings so he could enjoy the both the beauty and the steel production value of our city, he pronounced it a waste of electricity.   At eight, this was first time I heard anything that might indicate that power of any kind could be a finite resource.

Surrounding  LeMont was the neighborhood shopping district known as ‘upfront” which held the Incline and a dive bar called appropriately The Hut (both still standing), my grandfather and uncles’ drug store, a state liquor store, a cobbler, a couple of hair dressers, two gas stations, a less dive-y bar, an ancient pine floored A & P, the dry cleaner, a couple of butchers a pizza shop and smaller markets (all of which, along with others I cannot remember, long gone). My favorite among these was the bookie joint that had an ancient jar of mayonnaise languishing on a shelf in the window, its only formal nod to any other type of commerce. Each of these locations deserves at lease a paragraph if not an entire encyclopedia on their history.  But I’m talking rivers now.

On the river-facing side of Grandview Avenue aside from the shopping district was housing, not particularly grand housing, but every single resident there and elsewhere in the neighborhood, knew and appreciated the glory of the view they had.  My grandmother lived with my aunt and uncle and her family, with a backyard that lurched perilously downward as it faced the Three Rivers.  A few doors away my school’s convent was there next to the “new” high school, which also had unequaled views, most of them were reserved for the Blessed Virgin Mary statue and excluded the students except for May crowning.

As a young child there was an open field on Grandview between our house and upfront.  Field is rather too grand a noun, it was a lot, a large one by our standards. Through it you could gain easy access to “over the hill” which were forbidden precincts to all Mountie kids from the time the area was built.  There were all sorts of perils: uncovered caves where coal had been mined, steep cliffs, annoying boys and another type of travelling people, hobos who would ride the rails at the bottom of the hill next to the river. My mother never mentioned the last , but did warn about some “people.”  My mother to her enormous credit was the first politically correct person I knew.

But in the field itself were our look out rocks.  They weren’t the stuff of children pretending to be settlers or natives looking out over the amazing fact of three rivers converging.  By our, I mean my family’s.  There were three main ones right next to each other at the far end of the lot.  They extending beyond the relatively flat field and thrust out over the hillside.  My favorite was the long, pointed one.  It rose higher than the other two and jutted out further.  It was also the flattest.  It would be there that we would bring sandwiches and go watch the action along the river. There was plenty of space to run around and just nearly defy remonstrances to not go any further than a certain sumac tree (weed that it is, one of the few I could identify as a youngster).  There were very few times and places that we were elsewhere together as a family.  Our common outdoor experiences were barbeques in the back yard which required endless trips upstairs for condiments, drinks, plates, etc; and the evenings outside as everyone’s parents listened to Bob Prince call the Pirates games on the front porches and we played street games with the dozens of boomers living there.

The picnics on the lookout rocks were relaxed and sweet.  We learned the meanings of the signals from Gulf Building with the weather forecasting beacons atop it, Point Park with its ancient Block House was easily identifiable.  The endless bridges: our favorites being the 6th, 7th and 9th Street Bridges, all the same design, but somehow slighting poor 8th street.Tiny tug boats would ply the river piloting more than a dozen barges filled with coal and coke for the steel plants that lined the shore from downtown Pittsburgh miles up the Mon Valley. I see us there with Daddy talking about this and other lore, much of it apocryphal,  Mummy relaxed and laughing.  Each of us loved it there, it giving us space and a sense of  wide open communal enjoyment that was a rare commodity in our often cramped lives.

So yes, take me to the river, because this is one of the places the river takes me.

We lived on the low side of a hilly street in a neighborhood where that was one of the only two choices.  The high side usually came accompanied with any alley from which you could access your house, and your back yard was above your house.  Our house was closely nestled between its immediate neighbors.  The Foleys to the one side had their path to the back yard on the same side as we did, so there were  probably about eight feet between us.  The only thing that separated our house from O’Donnell’s on the other side was their narrow walkway, which dropped down about six feet below our front porch.  This provided a great location for leaning across the path while threatening those who went beneath. It was like London Bridge meets The Billy Goats Gruff.  It was quite satisfying when I was first able to lean over and reach; satisfying and an enormous relief that I didn’t plunge down those six feet onto the concrete below.

The largest part of our house was the basement. Under the porch was the coal cellar that held remnants of its original purpose with hunks of smudgy coal.  It was small and dank, fitting its name, and held very little because of its inhospitable aspect.  Mum would store some sort of preserved  holly wreath in there, but I remember it as the only empty room in our little house.  To get to the coal cellar, you had to step up from the dirt cellar.  The dirt cellar was a more useful spot, there was an actual light switch rather than a pull chain.  When turned on it revealed the stone foundation walls a couple of beat-up cupboards and the Christmas decorations.  It acted as an inconvenient pantry and held the fuse box.  It was called the dirt cellar because the floor was dirt.

Then there was the furnace room, whose purpose is obvious as well.  What you would not guess at is the enormity of the mechanism it housed.  A galvanized steel behemoth that had once used the aforementioned coal, it had been retrofitted to use natural gas.  It still had the heavy door where the coal once had been shoveled inside of which, where now there was a ring of small blue flames.  From this base extended exactly three broad pipe extensions that lead to the registers: one each in the living and dining rooms and one in the hall way upstairs between the bedrooms.  There was little to do in this room beyond walk around the furnace to get to the laundry room, again self-descriptive, with the added oddity of a beautiful green porcelain oven and the mangle with which I had a love/hate relationship.  The big problem with the laundry room was that the pipes were susceptible to freezing despite its massive neighbor in the next room.

Just like the early sky scrapers in New York, our house got smaller as you went up.  You entered the house from the front porch into the living room.  Between it and the dinning room was a stairway and a 4 x 4 area where the phone was kept on a succession of ugly wire holders with spaces for the phone books below.  The dining room I always thought was large. In addition to an upright piano, it held a table for the six of us, a gorgeous old buffet that had belonged to Grandma Madden, a window box and our refrigerator.  The refrigerator was in the dining room because the kitchen was too small to fit it.  It was too small to hold much more than sink,  the Magic Chef stove and a small porcelain  table.  It was absolutely stretched to its limits after dinner when it would also have to accommodate a few bicker sisters complaining to each other about the inadequacy of the clearing, rinsing or washing of the dishes.

Also off the dining room was the bathroom, both of these rooms having been added when plumbing arrived.  As such neither of them had heat, which was more of a problem in the bathroom.  It was solved by one of my favorite objects in our house: a small iron gas stove; it, too, called a register.  It was about two feet high and a foot in either other direction.  Even then it was old-fashioned.  It was open on the front with an angled interior wall that was ridged like a washboard.  Where it met the back of the stove were about  a dozen tiny jets that you lit with a match.  The bathroom was a special spot, being the only one in the house where we had the right to close the door and be left alone.  Having six people in competition for that spot could present problems among us, but there was nothing more wonderful than drawing a bath (there was no shower)  on a winter’s night, lighting the stove and entering into that  damp room  It would be perfumed by the hard milled soap my mother always ordered from the department stores and lit by the little flames from the stove.  If you could manage to successfully have your bath without interruption or demands to “hurry up”, it was blissful.  Actually it was anyway.  Space and solitude being in short supply.

Up the narrow stairway were the two bedrooms.  The front bedroom over the living room was our parents’ room, even occasionally occupied by both of them.  In the back the four of us girls lived, mostly in bunk beds, sometimes in just twin beds in between the clothes that didn’t make it to the  closet.  In the ceiling of the closet was a push through hatch that led to the “attic”.  My mother put the absolute fear of God (which at the time was substantial) into me about going into the attic because there were no floors and we would fall through the ceiling above the stairs.  I was not particularly timid, but the visions that this conjured of feet flailing out of the ceiling combined with the difficulty of gaining entry into this unknown and dusty spot convinced me.  It is another thing that has stuck with me from my childhood.  As an adult, I lived in our house for nearly 20 years and I never went into the attic.  But as a realtor for the same amount of time, I had no problem forging gamely ahead into basements.

M and I got our Christmas tree in the snow today.  I love doing that chore in seasonally appropriate weather. Cutting the tree down is the ideal, of course, but if you’re going to a lot, it is best to do it in the snow. My kids’ father and I had many great Christmas tree stories: the $125 tree and the balky cabby, it should have been we who balked at spending that decades ago; the tree decorating party when one couple spent the night necking on the sofa and everyone was so eager to avoid them that the part of the tree near them was bare of ornamentation.  The best was when our friend Doug  found a titan of of the forest on an Upper East Side sidewalk.  We arrived to our brownstone apartment with a mammoth, perfect tree in the hallway.  It must have been from a record label party because it had an ornament made from the cover of a Bruce Springsteen album, thus the tree became our Bruce spruce.  I still have that decoration with the young Springsteen smiling as he hangs from a silver ribbon.

After having kids, we started going to a place in Connecticut to cut our tree, until they closed.  Still we went to Connecticut and got off at the same exit.  We decided to take a left where we had previously taken a right.  This was, actually, something we had seen a family we knew do a few years before as we traveled north in tandem on the Taconic Parkway.  We then were holding our collective breath that they would not be heading to OUR farm and indeed they weren’t.  Now we were the potential interlopers.

We followed signs that promised “cut your own” and drove over a pitched and muddy drive through “the largest collection of fire trucks” in the world? in disrepair?  It was bizarre and completely compelling.  “Look, there’s one from NYC,” “There’s one from Rye”, and on.  Interspersed with these hulks covered in snow were the occasional El Camino with a decade’s worth of weeds in its hold or a Rolls Royce with no back wheels sitting atilt with the grille missing its Flying Lady.Our previous farm offered wagons to get your tree back to the base camp.  This one did not.

So it was there that I returned with my two younger children when their dad got irate at some poorly received behavior and  he refused to go on this annual journey.  After our usual prodding and pleading in attempts to change his mind, we nodded to each other and off we went.  When we arrived at the vehicle graveyard things did seem different.  Yes, there was more snow, but no one seemed to be around.  We stopped at the hut that stood before the tree farm & was told that there were no wagons and “ya don’t want to go out too far because ya’ll just have to lug it back.”  Yes, I stoutly responded, I understand; no we don’t need a band saw, we brought our own.  AND our own twine AND our own clippers.

We drove to the furthest spot to park.  It wasn’t snowing but they had a good 6″ on the ground.  We walked, and opined on various candidates and chose one.  Then the challenges began.  Ok,  “who wants first cut?”  No one really cared.  We took turns trying to get a purchase on the tree with the saw, and it was not easy.  Finally when we made a decent cut, I stood and pushed the tree to one side as M put the final effort in and  the tree came down.  We all congratulated each other on our good choice and excellent work.

I  looked out at how far away we were, not from our car, which was  a significant distance, from the hut where we would pay.  I then, to my everlasting shame, started to heave my breath deeply and whine.  “Oh, we’ll never get this damned thing all the way over there.  What the hell was I thinking? Why did I…” Somewhere in the middle of this rant, M and A asked me where we had to go and they, 14 & 11, each picked up one end of the tree and set off towards the hut.  I stood at the top of the hill in this strange landscape populated by trees and their remnant stumps with moldering hulks of steel in the background and watched my two indomitable youngsters take off over hill and valley.  I could hear them laugh between themselves and as the sun lengthened their shadows I watched as our tree wobbled its way up and down erratically heading its way to the hut.  I was so grateful to them for the humor of what I witnessed as well as for their tenacity in the face of their mothers’ incapacity!

Then we got to the hut.  As I said, I had the materials to put the tree on the roof.  We baled the thing ourselves; but when I said I need help tying it to the roof, the guy said, “we don’t do that.”  I was stupefied.  We had done everything: cut, carried, baled and put the tree on top of the car and I was being upended by my inability to tie a knot..  It would be a long highway drive back to our Westchester suburb .  I needed a secure set of knots.

The man reluctantly returned to us after a 30 minute wait.  I didn’t tip him as much as I would have 20 minutes before.  What I did was vow that I would never be vulnerable [to any man] because of an inability to tie a knot again.  A week later I saw a gift box in a store,  that had various lengths of rope and a book titled, “How to Tie a Knot”.  It is one of the few books that made the cut in my move last year.  .

I have been separated from the man I married in 1980 for over two years. We’ve sold the house. I’m living in a third-floor walk up in the suburbs,and have a full time job.  I have one child I am still putting through college, another temporarily living in said apartment. The oldest is living in San Francisco and getting married in Marin County next September.
What am I thinking about? What to call the man I’m married to, both now and when we are finally divorced.
I have always loathed the nomenclature “my ex-“. Decades ago it seemed to me like a failed attempt at sophistication in addition to being linguistically dubious. I remember having the difference between ex- and former- explained to me when modifying elected offices: ex- if having lost an election, former if being retired from office. I’m not even sure that’s the case but it has affected my thinking. Ex seems fraught, like something being spit out of your mouth. You have X’d this person out of your life like days on a prison calendar.Granted former doesn’t the same insouciant single syllable snap as ex, but it does seem to be a bit more respectful.
Then we got into the time when you didn’t have to have been married to have an “ex”. So now the phrase has no meaning whatsoever. I was with a friend recently who is separated from his wife, and recently broken up with a girlfriend. The phone kept ringing and he said, “it’s my ex.” It meant nothing, which was fine if he didn’t want me to know which of his at least two exes whom I knew about that he was referencing. Why say anything?
So what do I call the father of my children? For people who have known me before the last two years, I can use his name.  For the kids, he can be “your father.”  I said “Daddy” once a few months ago and my two younger kids sort of glared and me and started laughing.  Old habits die hard.