I went to New York City last weekend.  I find it an exhausting proposition but I had two very good reasons to visit.  More on that in a minute, first a bit of history.  I was born in Manhattan and lived in the same zip code for years after college: first in a grand old apartment building on Central Park and next in a brownstone with my future husband just blocks away from that childhood home.

Then, pioneers that we were (but are no more), we bought in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1988.  We were (and still are) so far from hip as to be tragic–as opposed to tragically hip.  So, it should surprise no one that soon after our first son arrived, we moved into a grand old apartment building on Prospect Park (see it, on the left?), and into a grand old apartment with two maids rooms (two!), a fireplace, a formal dining room, and a host of clanking radiators.  It was an extraordinary time for us.  We were ‘safe as houses’, even though we had to eat beanies and weenies (as David would say) every night to pay the mortgage on the one we were in.  We had two bonny boys scrambling around the place (there they are, up there, not scrambling), two good jobs, and, most important, a family of six capable children across the courtyard.

Our kitchen windows looked out at each other and I would watch the cheery controlled chaos as the mother made dinner for eight each night and the father cleaned up.  After I put the boys to bed and turned off my kitchen light I’d look up to their window for a last peek.  There would be Charlie Garvin, patriarch, sweeping up, straightening the chairs and filling beautiful, antique glass bottles with water for the next day.  There might be Gina Garvin having a final cup of tea, reading through someone’s homework.  Now and then one or another of the kids would spin through, peeling a clementine, singing into a hair brush, header-ing a soccer ball.

I had a wonderful city childhood, like the Garvins, although there were far fewer of us.  My sister and I roller skated through our lobby chased by the doormen, crossed the street to play in Central Park without supervision and actually used a friend’s baby monitor to try to communicate with her some six blocks away (it didn’t work but it made me feel terrifically clandestine).  We stayed up late on Thursdays to watch Star Trek (the only TV we were allowed other than Masterpiece Theater), snuck Cap’n Crunch into our beds while we read with a flashlight under the covers, walked to Broadway for ballet class.  Later I took the bus to Lincoln Center to study ballet there.  We babysat for various neighbor kids every weekend.  I remember it was mostly a Saturday because I watched MASH, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett in an almost delirious swoon as soon as I could get my charges into bed.  One neighbor had a swing in the archway between the foyer and living room.  Their kids had tired of the novelty of swinging wildly between the two rooms but, again as soon as I got rid of the little buggers, I was on that thing until I was motion sick.

I went to school on the Upper East Side (I don’t suppose it’s really capitalized, but it is to me).  I would either walk or take the crosstown bus and always ran into friends on the way.  There were only nineteen of us in our graduating class.  It was a homey school, never mind that it was located in a beautiful limestone mansion off Fifth Avenue.

We all learned a musical instrument, sang in flawless harmony, could sew, craft lovely ceramics and water colors, and made our own textbooks.  We did everything by hand except knit our diplomas.  It didn’t matter what your father did (it didn’t occur to us to ask) where you lived (although one kid’s dad lived in the Dakota, zowie!), or how much money you came from (really, who talked about stuff like that?).  Once you were inside the school it was all about your little class.  Too small for cliques, too close for real fights, we all kind of bumped along together until we moved on in a flurry of hop-sack graduation gowns and Rye Crisp mortarboards.  OK, not really.  I didn’t see those classmates for 35 years until last weekend.  Most of them, anyway.  I did have drinks with a few 33 years after graduation.

Ah, here we go, there’s her point, just there, on the distant horizon.  Why yes, it is.  Last weekend I saw a few of my classmates and all of the Garvins at a memorial service and a birthday party.  Clearly, or maybe not, they weren’t the same event.  The memorial service was for the father of a classmate.  He was old (as are all our parents now) and while it was sad because he was obviously much beloved by his family and friends, it was exhilarating and inspiring in the most unexpected way.  I remember this man, Henry Leichter, as Freddy’s father.  I know that he was clever, wore glasses, made us laugh, told a good story and was an accomplished magician.  Of course, that’s what I remembered most, that and the fact that he roped his three boys into being his assistants at every school show.  They looked suitably horrified, but the rest of us were too busy figuring out where the rabbit went to notice.

Here’s what I learned at his service: Henry Leichter was a hero.  Hounded out of his native Austria by the Nazis, left motherless with his little brother in tow, Mr. Leichter made his way through Europe to America.  Halfway through his college education (Swarthmore) he became an American GI and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.  Then, after the war was won, he made his way back to Austria because he wanted to return to his homeland as an American.  Not one thought, not one word of revenge or bitterness made its way into Henry Leichter’s story.

33 years after…

I chatted with my former classmates for a bit after the service.  We drank cold, crisp Reisling and Gruner Veltliner and marveled over how we still recognized each other after all these years.  That’s not completely true, I had to introduce myself to one guy who came perilously close to a spit take.  Each of these people had wanted to be there for Freddy that afternoon.

Before the gathering we all remembered his father in such a way that made us happy.  After, we were awed and proud to have ever wandered through his orbit at all.  I left, stumbling out into the sunshine and crowds of students on the Columbia Campus.  When I say stumble, I mean it.  Remember, I had that birthday party to attend and knew I’d have no time to change.  So, I was wearing a little black dress with a somewhat full skirt and ridiculous heels.  I looked like Peggy Fleming, spinning around searching for the ice.

I arrived at the birthday party a bit late, my little speech clutched tight, my shoes in my hand until I got off the elevator because, Jesus, those heels are murder.  There they were, six Garvins as handsome and beautiful as anything you can imagine: each of them beautifully turned out (grown up versions of the smocked dresses and hair ribbons, small blue blazers and grey flannels of their childhoods), each of them as proud of their father as if he, too had escaped Nazis and fled persecution.   But of course, he didn’t.  Charles Aloyius Garvin was lucky.  An Irish gentleman through and through he nevertheless was born in America.  All he did was raise and educate six children, each of whom have gone on to careers that span everything from teaching to the law and some crazy good stuff in between.  All Charlie had to fight was the most expensive city (New York), the ugliest street (Wall), the scariest monsters (kids).  You see then, another hero after all.  Another magician.

So, there it was, either end of a spectrum: Omega and whatever the Greek letter is for turning 75.  There I was saying goodbye, reuniting (if only for an hour), wondering how it is that years and years later I still feel so connected to these people; the remarkable classmates and the so much more than neighbors.

That weekend was a celebration, all of it.  So the extremes weren’t so extreme, not really, not in the end.