Ordinary Least Square

One Year Later...

One year later, we're back at Lake Naomi for winter break. Some strange things have happened in the world at large, but this place has been a constant.

When I first wrote last New Year's, I really had no idea what winter had in store for us here. The two weeks leading up to the new year were unseasonably warm, so even though we walked onto the ice once or twice early on before it softened, and even though there was a smattering of snow that quickly disappeared, the real show took place on long weekends in January and February, after the northeast went into a deep freeze that felt to me like the coldest winter since my childhood. The lake froze twenty inches thick, according to the ice fishermen. "You could drive a truck across here," one said. The kids just loved the concept of being able to walk freely over the surface, after learning over the summers how hard it was to row or swim across.

We got some sleds and at first pulled them over the ice, but though they liked it, it was too hard for the adults. Then we discovered the tube run over by the clubhouse. Not much a run, not compared to snow tubing at ski resorts, but the club had lined it with bales of hay, strategically placed a couple of bumps in the middle of it, and the frozen lake allowed additional slide at the end of the run. Stella was a hoot, age three, bundled up in parka and polka dot hat with pom poms matting down her endless ringlets, her scarf gift-wrapping the whole ensemble, brazenly skimming down the slope, over the bumps, onto the ice, while kids twice her age quaked in their boots.

I got some excellent skating in when I could, no small task with snow covering the lake. One day, after the first snowfall, the wind blew most of the powder off the ice, leaving swirls that forced me to snake my way around them and through them. With a stick and a puck, it proved to be the best stickhandling practice I could imagine, by necessity watching out for snow patches rather than looking at the puck, and having to weave back and forth through them at the same time. Another time, after a larger snowfall, I shoveled out a small rink -- too small as it turned out, and retrieving the puck when I shot it out onto the snow was a pain, but again it proved to be great practice, having to control the puck in such a tight space while making tight turns.

Indoors was cozy with the fires I built. Sitting on the weird circular orange chair, vintage 1960s, by the picture window in the dining room was a great way to spend time -- looking through the bare trees out toward the lake, reading, curling up with Stella, watching the birds frequent the feeder that hung four inches from the other side of the pane (chickadees, junkos, cardinals, jays, finches, tufted titmouses, even a woodpecker).

For Ellen, this place is more about interiors than the outdoors, the deck being her favorite perch for observing the outside world. That and the car -- unlike New York, one has to drive everywhere, even to pick up a bottle of milk or a fat free French vanilla cappuccino at Wawa. And with movie theaters thirty to forty-five minutes away, video rentals must suffice. But we've found the perfect outlet for that -- we obsessively rent each season of 24 and Alias as they are released, watching as many consecutive episodes as we can from the edge of our seats, where they force us to sit with their relentless suspense.

This winter break has been more of the same, the deep freeze kicking in earlier than last year. The lake was frozen when we got here, the mercury having topped out at 12 that day and dropped well below zero that night. It softened up dramatically when the atmosphere warmed up and wrung an inch and a half of rain on us. But then it went right back down below freezing and has stayed there, so within days we were back out onto the ice (six inches, said the ice fishermen). Full moon at night out on the lake -- awesome!

Snow has dogged my skating, though. I tested the ice 36 hours after the rains -- it was black and glassy, but still too thin. At 48 hours, after dark, we were able to go out on it safely, and I knew it would be great skating the next morning. But two inches fell overnight. I still had a good time out there with the kids, but I couldn't skate. Then a brisk wind kicked in and like last year blew much of the snow away, leaving black ice feathered by white patches, perfect for stickhandling alone.

I had the kids out that morning, then they went off to the movies with Mom. Before skating, I chopped some wood and took it in, so that it would have time to reach room temperature before I fired it up. By the time I was done, it had started to snow again! Not much fell, but it was enough to lay a white sheen over the open areas of the ice. I managed to get an hour of skating and stickhandling in all the same, but it was tough pushing that thin layer of snow around with a stick and a puck, then the snow was too thick to continue.

One finds it hard to imagine summer during the middle of this kind of cold snap. Though I manage to spend a ton of time outdoors in the winter -- on the lake, chopping wood, taking out the dog we're taking care of for three weeks -- summertime is such a care-free time for going in and out, whether for boating or swimming, or just hanging out on the deck grilling or reading.

Last summer was a big summer for boating. First I got a pair of kayaks, a solo and a tandem (with a jump seat for young children). I figured I'd have to take Sophie out in the tandem (with Stella in the jump seat) while someone else used the solo. But Sophie decided during her first ride to instantly master the kayak. The pleasure of seeing a kid -- once afraid to try anything new or anything at all that required physical activity -- take so quickly to a new activity requiring physical acumen and stamina was enormous.

The day she mastered the kayak, I took her out at dusk, me alone in the tandem, her in the solo. I had discovered that sunset was the best time -- the water was still as glass, mirroring the trees and rhododendrons that line the shore, the sunsets were gorgeous, and the wildlife emerged. I discovered a beaver and tracked it across the lake to its feeding spot, so when I took Sophie out that evening we went right there and spotted it again. The dang critter took down three beautiful young birches that were growing at the end of one of our points, but still it was fun tracking it across the lake and around the islands.

Then I got me a sailboat -- a Hobie Bravo, the smallest catamaran they make, its double hull moulded out of a single piece of whatever synthetic material they use. I only tipped it over twice, and the second time wasn't even my fault (not totally). I can't say that I exactly mastered it, but I went out every chance I could and got the hang of it. The boats were a great way to entertain the parade of visitors we had. Sophie loved to show off her solo kayaking skills when her friends came up -- they had to ride with me while she paddled on her own. I was able to show off the sail boat -- and then had to hide my embarrassment when the wind died down and I couldn't figure out how to get it back in!

I made the mistake of trying to take up golf at the same time -- two new obsessive activities on top of all the old ones (I still went back to New York once or twice a week to play hockey all summer!). While the boat was always accessible, depending on wind conditions (not too much, not too little), golf was a problem -- as a beginner, I didn't want to just go out on the course, get thrown into a random foursome, and then force them to deal with me when they had innocently thought they would have themselves a nice golf outing. So I went to the driving range all summer to try to harness my slap shot into a golf shot, and was able to do it fairly well.

The time finally came when my sister and brother-in-law, golfers both, came to visit. I arranged a tee time at a time I knew there would be no fourth, and shot my first round of nine holes. Well, with all that practice I was able to drive the ball a fair distance, but what I hadn't taken into account was how many finesse shots would be required -- I swung through many shots and shot over the green by a mile. On the other hand, sand traps were a piece of cake, having to hit the sand two inches behind the ball -- exactly what you do when taking a slap shot in hockey.

I thought I was embarrassing myself out there, but they reminded me how badly they felt about the way they played, which for them was not the first time. One area I did not embarrass myself in was grilling. My salmon was already legendary, if I do say so myself (and I don't like salmon, so I don't even eat it myself!), and the prior summer I had (with the help of a book) finally perfected tuna and baked potatoes. This summer, I expanded my repertoire by learning at long last how to properly grill shrimp, grill veggies, and grill corn, plus I found a simple recipe for an awesome marmalade-mustard marinade that everyone went ga-ga over and which made soft white fish work on the grill for the first time (coincidentally, I first tried it on orange roughy).

Meanwhile, through all this, Stella, in the months leading up to her fourth birthday, continued her assault on the 2020 Olympic swim team, unbeknownst to her as of yet. She had already caused a stir at the Y all winter and spring by breaking the mold they adhere to in matching age and skill level. Now she was vexing the lifeguards at the Lake Naomi and Timber Trails pools by swimming up a storm for someone so small (she can swim all the way across the pool at the deep end, can jump off the diving board and swim in, and can sort of dive).

The in-between seasons proved to be an unexpected contrast. Spring, the season we all love so much in the city, is just mud season up here. It's still too cold to be outdoors all the time, outdoors is too wet and muddy anyway, and without the outdoors there isn't enough to do to keep the kids busy. Spring break, we found out, is the ideal time to go somewhere else on vacation.

Fall on the other hand, despite the shorter days and brisker weather, is a joy. The colors are amazing, being in an area that is really still a vast deciduous forest, despite all the development that has taken place. And it's dry, so as long as you keep yourself busy you can stay outside. My wife couldn't understand why I spent hours and hours one afternoon picking up dead wood in the back yard, loading it up in a wheelbarrow, and wheeling it into the garage. Sure, I needed kindling for the fire for the winter (I got caught short last winter), but mostly it was a way to keep busy and keep warm while staying outside on a gorgeous but just a bit too cool of a day. I've maitained that tactic even in the coldest of winter days by chopping wood.

Autumn also brought our second (now annual) Thanksgiving weekend, with the same group of twenty-four (twelve adults and their twelve kids -- it was actually twenty-five this year, one kid having brought a friend). Some people stay with us, some stay at a nearby hotel that has a pool, and between the two locales we party up a storm all weekend long. Among a group of friends that have often been contentious, the house and lake, whether it be over Thanksgiving or during the summer when many of the same people visit, have brought people closer together with their magical karma.

This year's winter break is almost over. As I write, we have one full day left. A visiting family has just left after a morning of horseback riding and an afternoon tubing at Camelback (there was not enough snow here at the clubhouse -- a shame, because tubing at Camelback was a rip-off and not worth the trouble). We will be going back to the city for New Year's this year, for a small party on the eve and a larger one the day after, rather than staying here.

Winter break at Lake Naomi has provided pleasant book-ends to an otherwise frustrating year -- an unconscionable election year in which homophobia won out over a devastating war, unabated terrorist threats, economic malaise, and possibly nascent fascism, andf in a small microcosmic way in the sport that I love, ice hockey, where greedy billionaire and near-billionaire owners have shut down the National Hockey League in a blatant money grab while making fans believe the players were stealing bread out of their starving babies' mouths.

Hopefully next year the time spent here will be more than a silver lining while waiting for the other shoe to drop, though at the moment there is no justification for that hope. Oh well -- if we correct the drainage problems in the basement, then along with the new furnace and new water filtration system we put in and the new dock going in next spring, at least our house will be in good working order, even if others aren't.

New Year's Eve - New House

I never owned a house before. I never even really lived in a house before other than summer rentals the past few years. I grew up in apartments, and as a longtime New Yorker have had little choice but to live in various Manhattan apartments, starting out in a hole in the wall (a literal rather than proverbial one) and working my way up to a spacious (but never spacious enough) loft.

We may have lived in a small house in a rundown suburb of Tel-Aviv when I was a baby, but if so, it was only a small apartment in a small house -- my parents couldn't have afforded anything more. I have a flash memory of a small kitchen and of a dusty courtyard shared by other families, where I'd run out and meet my father as he came home from work. When he left for America, my mother and I moved into a small high-rise apartment building with my grandparents (another flash memory -- a small plane flying in low over the top of the highrise).

Six months later, we joined my father in a three-room apartment in West New York, New Jersey, but moved a few blocks over to a four-room flat on 51st Street in Weehawken after my brother was born -- we needed the extra room, me and my baby brother David sharing the one bedroom, my parents setting up their sleeping space in what should have been a dining room.

51st Street was right on the border of Weehawken and West New York -- on our side, a row of identical five story apartment buildings; the West New York side, a row of two families houses. It was a busy street, but that didn't stop us kids from playing stoopball or stickball or punchball out in the street ("Car, car, C-A-R, wash you face in a jelly jar!"). Kids were always out roaming about with little or no parental supervision in those days (it's tempting to say that it was a safer, more innocent time, but tell that to my mother, who had to call the police to go find my four year old brother when he wandered off one day, eventually turning up in a park in the next town over).

We lived on the fourth floor, in the back, facing the backyards of the two family houses on 50th Street. One day, me and my friends were antagonizing the people in the house directly behind our building. The old lady tried to shoo us by throwing rocks at us. A rock hit David (who, tagging along, was milling around in the background amusing himself) in the head, drawing blood and sending him to the doctor. The lady, Mrs. Peterson, felt so bad she lavished us with gifts for the next few years -- I never got new toys or games until Mrs. Peterson gave them to us.

Down the end of the block was Boulevard East, and across the boulevard was an old stone wall, maybe four feet high, that separated the sidewalk from cliffs. Below the cliffs was the Hudson River, and across the river, New York City. Our 51st Street was directly across from 51st Street in Manhattan. I say "was" -- everything is still there, but we moved away nearly forty years ago.

We used to go down to the corner of Boulevard East one Sunday a month and catch the 166 bus, crawling the rest of the way down the boulevard to the Lincoln Tunnel and through to Port Authority. Then we'd walk around midtown, shop, get hot dogs on the street, and catch the bus home. One evening, sitting in my living room listening to Cousin Brucie on 77 WABC radio, the music turned to static. Couldn't be the battery. I looked out the window toward the city skyline, but it was gone -- the first blackout, the one Doris Day starred in when they made the movie about it.

My aunt and uncle and cousins lived on the block. My longtime best friend Jack Rak lived on the block. The girl I was supposed to marry, Ziva Blankrot, lived in the apartment directly below ours. Every summer, we all relocated to Blue Paradise Bungalow Colony in Ferndale, New York -- what we called the Catskills, the Borscht Belt, not the actual Catskill Mountains. Even there, we didn't have a house of our own, a stand-alone bungalow -- we stayed in a room in the Main House, an eight by twelve cell with a bunkbed for me and my brother, a crib and later a cot for my sister Helena, a rickety double bed for my parents.

Everyone from 51st Street stayed in the Main House, sharing a communal kitchen and dining room, communal bathrooms and showers, the long front porch. We roamed free at Blue Paradise too, invading neighboring colonies (Milly's and Albert's), sneaking into Grossinger's, hanging out at Howard Johnson's, Fun Fare, or Liberty Lanes. Or just going into the woods to shoot off firecrackers and do all the things kids do in the woods when there are no parents around. We loved it so much, we even have a photo album online where we post pictures of Blue Paradise.

When I was in seventh grade, we moved two towns over to North Bergen, the last of my parents' crowd to make the move there (Weehawken had become heavily hispanic, so the enclave of holocaust survivors relocated to the more Jewish city of North Bergen). It was a major move up for us, even though my father still worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and half that on Sunday in an embroidery factory (North Bergen at one time called itself the embroidery capital of the world). It was a five room apartment, with two bedrooms (me and the TV went in one small room, David and Helena went into the master bedroom, and my parents again decamped in the dining room). The building even had a rec room for kids -- until we trashed it one night and they locked it up.

But we only lasted a year and a half there -- my father got a decent job, leaving the sweatshop to be the superintendant of Hawthorne Gardens, a brand spanking new 182-unit garden apartment complex in the small working class town of Hawthorne, just outside Paterson, New Jersey. It was a great move for him, but all my friends were back in Husdon County, and I had to go to a high school where I didn't know anyone, was the only Jewish kid in a school body of a thousand, and was forbidden from making friends with anyone.

We didn't even get a bigger apartment, though it was newer. In fact, we started out in a four-room apartment while our five-room apartment was still under construction. This time me and my brother were in the dining room on a trundle bed, except that unlike my parents' full bedroom set-up in previous flats, we had to share the dining room with an actual dining room set. My sister had a cot in the bedroom with my parents. When we moved into the two-bedroom, she ended up in the dining room (with the table, chairs, chandelier, and breakfront) while me and David shared one bedroom and our parents took the other.

That was my home through four years of high school and four years of commuting to NYU. My first year of grad school, I moved out, into my own place in the city, into the decrepit East Village in the punk rock years (though I was a hippie manque, so I missed out on punk just as I had missed out on the 60s). That was my hole in the wall. I couldn't even call it a studio -- in one of those old carriage houses that are hidden in the middle of blocks behind streetfront tenements, I had a ten by twenty room (if that), one of only two that fit on each floor.

To the right of the door, there was room for a shower, a fridge, a small stove, and a sink. To the left, room for loft bed and a toilet. The only thing that fit on the seriously sagging open floor space between those built-ins was a convertible love seat and a portable black and white TV set. Roaches ruled that cozy little roost. Over the bed, where a side window should have been, was a large square hole -- there wasn't even a window frame, though the hole was clearly built to hold one. I taped a sheet of plastic over the hole in the winter, fit a fan into it in the summer.

Behind the shower was another hole, same size, filled with yellowing balled up newspapers, a hole I shared with my neighbor. By one unexplainable coincidence, I met my neighbor three days before I moved in, before I knew he would be my neighbor, when we went hiking together in the Ramapo Reservation in Mahwah, New Jersey, with a mutual friend. All my efforts to control our joint roach population went for naught because he was not bothered in the least by them, and they migrated easily through our shared hole in the wall.

I moved out a year and a half later when I went on a four-month Eurail trip with that same mutual friend. After I came back, after a half year of culture shock and depression and living back home with my parents, I had a serendipitous streak of good fortune. All in short order, I got a great job at AT&T even though I went to the interview wearing sandals and a T-shirt and a fright wig of curly hair (my real hair, not an actual wig), I fell in love, and I found a really cool East Village apartment (found the listing in the same issue of the Village Voice that had my contest-winning 250-word science fiction story, which I didn't even realize until I had found the listing, seen the apartment, signed a lease for it, and went back to work, that's how crazed apartment hunting was in those days).

I loved that place. Stayed there for eleven years, still to this day the longest I ever lived continuously in one home. It wasn't much -- a small bedroom, a small living room, a small kitchen, and a small bathroom -- but hey, it had a separate bedroom! It was a quiet apartment on a quiet tree-lined block in the heyday of the East Village. It was hip, it was comfortable, it was me. I worked out of there once I started my own business, and I lived the heck out of that place (the super hated me).

I even kept it after I moved out, after I met my wife to be and moved in with her in her classy art deco one-bedroom in Chelsea -- same configuration as my East Village digs, but larger living room and bedroom -- much larger. Every morning, I'd walk the mile and a half from Chelsea to the East Village, reading a book along the way, and use my old apartment as my office (there was no room to do that in my new place with my new partner). But I had to give it up eventually to get a real office.

We didn't last long in Chelsea -- me and my wife, we lasted, we still do, but we had a baby, needed more room, and thanks to a boom in business could afford more room, a loft in SoHo that we gutted and rebuilt and still live in nearly nine years later. It's an address to kill for, for eurotrash anyway -- maybe they don't mind the Holland Tunnel traffic and weekend tourist invasion as much as I do. All that extra room we never thought the likes of us would ever be able to afford, not in Manhattan, has been gobbled up two children (they even kicked us out of our master bedroom when they needed the extra room for their stuff -- they don't need a Mrs. Peterson to be their deus ex machina benefactor).

Now we own two houses. The usable one is one of our recent summer rentals, the best one, that we bought last summer and recently moved into, a 40s era lakeside cottage expanded into a full-size house in the late 60s. The other one is a Village brownstone, forever under construction or stalled in urban red tape and other legal and business quagmires. The latest move-in estimate is next summer, coinciding with our first summer as owners of the Lake Naomi house.

Lake Naomi, New Year's Eve, 2004. That's what brings me here. A personal watershed so subtle that maybe I'll be able to figure it out for myself while writing about it. Maybe.There are a lot of factors to weigh -- the city vs. the country, the World Trade Center, children, culture, ice hockey. Friends, family, school. Computers, cable TV, and the internet. All viewed through a different prism by my wife and my daughters.

We actively sought out a quiet New Year's Eve, were glad we weren't invited to any big parties. Not that we didn't want to be with any of our friends -- we went back for a couple of nice Christmas parties a week earlier. But we wanted to spend winter break at Lake Naomi -- we had twenty-four people, twelve adults and twelve children, for Thanksgiving, just after we moved in, and wanted to spend a chunk of time there ourselves, our first time there in wintertime.

There was a nice snow cover when we first got there (since melted), and the lake was frozen over enough to walk on (since softened). A family of eight deer wandered through our backyard one day, a pair of wild turkeys another. I got a nice stack of wood, enjoyed the effort of splitting it, enjoyed even more the fire I built every evening in the living room fireplace.

On New Year's Eve, there was one moment when we were all sitting around the living room, me and Sophie on one couch, Ellen and Stella on the other, and even though the TV was on, we felt like a real family to me. We have always been a real family, I'm sure of that, but maybe it took being in a real house for this lifelong apartment dweller to feel that we were like a real family for the first time ever. I've never been a fan of that image of family, or at least of the concept that it is the ideal image, but for that one moment, it felt great.

A little while later, Stella found a flashlight and wanted to go outside to test it out in the dark. It was cold, so it hadn't occurred to me to go out, especially with the kids, but once we went out, I discovered something remarkable. I went back inside, forced the others to come out too. We walked down the wooded path to the lakefront under the light of a half-moon and watched it shimmer over the frozen surface of the lake. The stars were out in full force -- always a remarkable sight for New Yorkers. The clubhouse across the lake was all lit up for a party. Many other houses, both on the lake and off it, had their holiday lights blazing in their full glory. Another moment.

At midnight, we watched the ball drop in Times Square. We watched the celebration for a few minutes. And after a few minutes, my heart sank. Though nothing of the sort happened, I turned to my wife and said that as I was watching I kept expecting something to happen. Something bad.

I don't want to leave New York -- I love it here, have lived here full-time for the past twenty-five years after growing up in its immediate suburbs. I don't even know what life would be like elsewhere, not on a long-term full-time basis. I know my wife doesn't want to leave. Lake Naomi is gorgeous and the immediate community classy, but the area is second-rate, devoid of culture, missing so much of what we're used to having here in the city, even the kids.

But those feelings, those New Year's Eve feelings -- the family, the moon and stars on the lake, the dread of watching Times Square. I don't know.