Arlo Guthrie with my friend Arnie, after a performance at Castle Clinton in Battery Park.

New York really is a summer festival.Arlo Guthrie is doing a show in the Nelson A. Rockefeller Park today. The Mammals will be opening. I hope the weather holds. If you’re in the neighborhood, you’d enjoy it. I’m feeling kind of bittersweet about the whole thing. When the picture above was taken, we, none of us, were exactly young or carefeee either, but it seems like it in retrospect.

The Towers hadn’t fallen. George Bush was not the president and we didn’t know he ever would be. We were not at war in Iraq and hadn’t seriously considered that we would be, at least not like this.

Arlo’s wife hadn’t been diagnosed with breast cancer and neither had my friend Judy. (Both are fine, now and past that crucial five year point.) My husband had not yet been diagnosed with diabetes and he had both kidneys. We were both at our old jobs.

I took a few hours off from work and went to the show, meeting up with old friends and new ones. Arnie was a new friend then. We’d met him on Arlo’s website. He’s a fellow Long Islander, and works in the city. He was pretty surprised to be greeted by Sherry with VIP tickets - no standing in line - and a group of new friends he hasn’t been able to lose, no matter how hard he tries. He’s no longer suprised by anything that group comes up with. It was a beautiful evening in the city.

Today, I’m heading north as Arlo’s bus heads south. I’m going up to New Haven to try to find out what I’m supposed to do about This Thing and there’s no time to take off for shows or other frivolities. I never would have thought that I’d be looking back at a time only a few years ago as though it was my youth, but everything is relative.

Expect a few more of these pity-party retrospectives as the summer goes on.

I said in a recent post that I lack a sense of place. That’s partly because places don’t stay the same anymore than people do. It’s obvious in the suburbs. The suburbs of Long Island grew up largely unattended. They’ve shifted and changed again and again without any apparent planning. Mileage has varied as far as quality of life goes. I created an entire website about the town I grew up in, not out of a great sense of attachment to it, but really just because it was changed beyond recognition in the few decades since I lived there. I just wanted a record of what was there during the years we were growing up.

My computer desktop is a photo of the Empire State Building and surrounds that my husband took a few years ago. No matter how willing I was to leave it, the concrete buildings and long shadows of New York formed the landscape of my childhood. They’ll always mean home. A city like New York doesn’t give in to change the way the less substantial suburbs do. The surface seems to remain the same, despite the constant reconstruction. Underneath, it’s changing, too. I knew that my old neighborhood was very different from the way I experienced it when I heard Regis Philbin mention a restaurant he’d been to on 89th and Amsterdam, or maybe Columbus. Even that was a long time ago…back when his show wasn’t syndicated nationally and the first few minutes were devoted to NYC news. Whether it was Amsterdam or Columbus, when I went to school there you wouldn’t find a trendy restaurant. You’d have found places that would cash your check, no questions asked.

I did some searching on the web and found that my elementary school, PS 166 has been designated a landmark and has more names than it did when I went there. In the era when I lived there, the city was careless with its old treasures. I remember accompanying my mother to various office buildings when she was out doing grown-up errands. It was a common thing for them to have their wide marble staircases with brass railings intact. The elevator doors were often brass, too. The buildings themselves would have been broken up into small offices with nothing but economy in mind. The walls would be painted some institutional shade of green or tan. It was a visual incongruity, but so common as to be accepted without much thought. Now, it seems that at least some of those buildings are being restored to their former grandeur and protected with landmark status.

I even found an apartment for sale in my old building. Like the rest of the neighborhood, it’s fallen on good times. The apartment for sale is one of the ones on the east side of the building. Only eight huge rooms. Ours was a little bigger. My parents were paying $165 a month for it when we moved out. The one for sale is a bargain at under two million. The outside of the building looks pretty much the same now as then. Even the green awning is the same. It’s clear that it’s not the same place, though. At one point my father did try to talk the other residents of the building into buying the landlord out and going co-op. There wasn’t enough interest and it didn’t happen at the time, or for a good many years after, as far as I know.

I’m sure things turned out for the best and we’re better off where we are. Don’t mind me. I’ll just sit here and sob quietly at the keyboard for a while.

Ronni Bennett’s impending change of venue continues to inspire memories. In her most recent post, The Ten Percent Solution, she discusses an unexpected choice that’s been extended to her. She’s got a chance to stay in the city but one of the factors she has to weigh is that the apartment offered is a fourth story walk-up. Part of getting older is considering the possibility that what you can do today might not be so easy, or even possible, tomorrow.

The bulk of my years as a city child were spent living in one of those cavernous upper west side apartments. The leases on them went for something like twenty-five years at a time and could be passed on to family members. And the apartments were rent controlled. Before that, we lived in a much smaller place on West End Avenue and 72nd. It was a one bedroom and by the time I could form memories my maternal grandmother and I shared the bedroom while my parents slept on a sofa bed in the living room. My grandfather had died in my first year or so of my life and it’s never been clear to me how the family lost possession of the home in Connecticutt that he and my grandmother raised their family in, but lose it they did and my grandmother opted to move in with us.

Meanwhile, on West 87th, my paternal grandmother had died and my grandfather was in a nursing home. The ten room apartment that was that family’s home was now occupied by my aunt and uncle, who were not planning to have children, and my father’s uncle, a confirmed bachelor who would today probably be diagnosed with a mild case of Asberger’s Syndrome.

A decision was made to switch apartments. My aunt and uncle and their cat moved into our one bedroom and my grandmother, my parents and I moved north to the bigger place. My father’s uncle came with the big apartment and was part of our household from then on.

The 87th street building was ten stories and a penthouse. When built, each floor had just two huge apartments on it. It had changed ownership after WWII and the one abiding goal of the landlord was to rid the building of rent controlled units. When one of the original apartments was vacated it was broken up into several small ones and those, being entirely new apartments, were not subject to rent control restrictions. In addition to a desire to drive out the older tenants, the new landlord didn’t provide the services and maintenance that they’d been used to in the past. As far as my father was concerned, he was in a perennial state of war with the landlord or “that son of a bitch” as my father most usually called him.

When we arrived home from somewhere one evening, we found both elevators - the front one and the service elevator - out of order. We lived on the sixth floor and this wouldn’t have more than a big inconvenience, but my grandmother, who had serious rheumatoid arthritis, was with us and for her, walking up one flight of stairs would be problematic. Six was impossible. We were invited to encamp in a first floor apartment and that’s where we stayed until the landlord arrived. I think we were lying in wait. I was a kid. No one explained the finer points to me. All I remember was that when the landlord did arrive my father let loose a string of expletives I hadn’t ever heard from him before. The sight of him chasing the landlord up the street with my father yelling, “Come back here, you son of a bitch!”, both of them properly attired in business suits, overcoats and fedoras, was worth the wait to me.

Eventually, some way of carrying my grandmother upstairs was devised and of course, she had to stay there until the repairs were complete. This incident was one tiny item in an increasingly long list of things that motivated my parents to make the move to a house in suburbia. One reason that they chose the house that they eventually did was that it had a first floor bedroom for my grandmother. Floorplan is destiny? Maybe sometimes.