Blue Morning

If Facebook has any redeeming qualities at all, it might be that during the pandemic the social media platform has served as a refuge of sorts—an escape from the solitude of quarantine. It has provided as close to social contact as is possible during a time deemed prudent by the medical professionals. There are also recipes and cute videos of puppies and kittens. And currently, Trump is banned from it.

What’s not to like?

It’s also been a way for many of us to rekindle old friendships from times long thought past.

A high school friend, with whom I’ve had intermittent contact over the past fifty years, has proven himself to be a prolific contributor of Facebook posts. He, like most musicians, has seen a dramatic shift in his career—the international touring, live dates and recording sessions having been replaced with some rather ingenious uses of technology to get his music to people whose “savage breasts are calmed” by music’s universal charms.

He also recently had heart surgery. Then the frequent posts trickled down to be noticeably few. I inquired to his well-being and received the following note:

I’m good. Losing too many friends these days to illness…aches and pains are one thing, but the endless news of one person after another dying…I missed that chapter in the “how to get old” book. Sorry, you caught me on a blue morning.

Most of us can easily identify with the idea of a blue morning and all that it encompasses. It’s rare to wake up not uneasy.

The COVID-19 crisis has reordered all of our lives. Our apple carts have been upended, the bruised fruit rolling downhill. The natural progression is now spiked with incidents of unprecedented disturbance; the hearty and hale among us suddenly stricken and then gone, passing alone without cherished loved ones at bedside.

I suppose that even the most disordered life has some degree of order, just as the most ordered life allows for spontaneity.

While we may wish to restore whatever order has been altered by circumstance, we may not even recognize—whenever—or whatever will be our return to normalcy. This week’s unemployment figures were hardly rosy, and there is a growing acknowledgement that many are not eager to rejoin the work force until all the unemployment benefits have been exhausted.

On many fronts, things are not getting better.

Like employers re-evaluating their business directions (commercial real estate values have plummeted, negatively impacting urban taxes revenues), there are workers who have used the past months to more closely examine their own lives and have rediscovered the intrinsic value of family, friendships and place. As they should, those values might be found to exceed those represented by the rungs on the corporate ladder.

My old friend Ira and I were kindred souls for whom the corporate ladder held little appeal. We were (are) the last of the post-Watergate reporters, each of us hoping for an investigative assignment that would unseat a government or expose widespread corruption.

We were desk mates, sitting across from each other at gun-metal steel desks in a noisy room still redolent of cigarette smoke and cynicism. He rarely joined a group of us who gathered nightly at the American Legion bar next to the newspaper, where we regularly slugged back too much Scotch or vodka to whitewash the day’s news that the public would read in the morning.

Ira took leave to devote his efforts to writing—brilliantly, I should add—about religion and matters of spirituality and the soul. I took leave to write about two-headed turtles and women doing men’s jobs before securing my position as a jazz critic—one of the least in-demand jobs in history.

Forty or so years later, we connected on Facebook. We’re closer now than we ever were sitting across from each other eating our tuna fish sandwiches at lunch.

We’ve come to know about how close our paths crossed (he’s got a few years on me) on our youthful adventures on the Lower East Side of New York. We lived mere blocks away at different times, visiting similar haunts—McSorley’s at Bowery and 7th, most notably.

What I didn’t know about my friend is that he had son from a marriage that I hadn’t even known of, or had maybe just forgotten.

Brady, his son from a marriage gone afoul, was fifty-four when he passed after a three-year battle with cancer. Losing a child is as cruel an act as any can imagine. It upsets the order that life is supposed to obey. My children are charged with placing me in the ground, not the other way around.

COVID-19, in its relentless insistence at turning our lives upside down, kept my friend from seeing his son on his deathbed. Such cruelty brought by the barely imaginable is difficult to comprehend.

Upon the receipt of his son’s cremated ashes, Ira wrote a heartfelt and beautiful essay. He addressed the emotional strife of losing a child and pondered the questions of Jewish death, our traditions, and the regard for the most precious gift of all—life.

L’ Chaim.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Chicken Paprikash

This recipe was one of my grandmother’s go-to dishes. It’s one of my favorites.

2 Tbs. butter
3 pounds chicken pieces, bone-in and skin-on
2 medium yellow onions, very finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 Roma tomatoes, seeds removed and very finely diced
1 bell pepper, diced
3-4 Tbs. Hungarian paprika
2-3 cups chicken stock
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
3 Tbs. all-purpose flour
3/4 cup full fat sour cream
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream

Heat the butter in a heavy pot and brown the chicken on all sides. Transfer the chicken to a plate. In the same fat, add the onions and fry until golden brown. Add the garlic, tomatoes and bell pepper and fry another 2-3 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the paprika, salt and pepper.
Return the chicken to the pot and place it back over the heat. Pour in the chicken broth. The chicken should be mostly covered. Bring it to a boil. Cover, reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 40 minutes. Remove the chicken and transfer to a plate.
In a small bowl, stir the flour into the sour cream/cream mixture to form a smooth paste. Stir the cream mixture into the sauce, whisking constantly to prevent lumps. Bring it to a simmer for a couple of minutes until the sauce is thickened. Add salt and pepper to taste. Return the chicken to the sauce and simmer to heat through.