I went to Fogo de Chão yesterday to watch the Brazil-Switzerland match and feast on the extensive salad bar (which includes meat – cold cuts like prosciutto and salami – and the black bean stew feijoada).
A large screen TV hung at either end of the bar, where I took a seat next to two men speaking Portuguese. I ordered a Xingu Black, a kind of Brazilian Guinness, and soon after it arrived a plate containing four balls of pão de queijo appeared.
After the first half, a man with a ginger goatee took the seat next to me and ordered a beer in what I took to be a European accent. “You’re not Swiss are you?” I asked, fearing he might be in for a disappointing lunch.
“No, Swedish,” he said. “But I’m for Brazil. My girlfriend is Brazilian.”
I asked him what happened to Sweden this year.
“We were in the group with Spain and Poland,” he said. “We lost to Poland.”
I told him my wife is Polish.
We were in St. Petersburg over the weekend to attend a memorial service for our friend Jeanne Meinke, whom we met in Warsaw in 1978. Jeanne’s husband Peter, a poet and English professor at Eckerd College, was spending the academic year in Poland on a Fulbright scholarship, and we all found ourselves one evening at the home of a U.S. Embassy couple. Jeanne, we learned, was a gifted artist; many of her drawings – rocking chairs, wicker baskets – appeared in The New Yorker, Gourmet, and Bon Appetite. When Jeanne mentioned that they also had four children, the hostess said, “You’re like Ozzie and Harriet.”
“More like the Addams Family,” Jeanne said laughing, thinking more of the drawings, I imagined, than of the television show.
Jeanne and Peter were sui generis. Many life partners are compatible; they were symbiotic. In addition to her work for magazines, Jeanne often illustrated Peter’s articles and books. And, unlike some people of an artistic bent, they were loving and devoted parents. Every summer Jeanne taught the children a new skill: cooking, sewing, baking, etc. This impressed Hania and it pleased me, as it gave a good impression of the country I was trying to convince her to move to as my wife. I was extremely tempted to tout the Meinkes as the typical American family.
One evening we all went to dinner at the Budapest Cristal, one of Warsaw’s few ethnic restaurants. Over flame-heated bowls of goulash, Jeanne commented on the unjust imbalance of the bare-minimum materialism in the Soviet bloc and the extravagant excess in the West. Why, she wondered, couldn’t there be a middle ground? Then I told them that I was having trouble getting my visa extended, and might soon have to leave the country. It helped to have their sympathetic ears.
And their eyes as readers of my letters from Greece, where I spent a very lonely winter.
When I came back to Warsaw in June, on a tourist visa, Jeanne and Peter and I played tennis on red clay courts, sweet Jeanne unexpectedly tenacious at the net. One evening they came for dinner to Hania’s new apartment, during which Jeanne recited a line from one of my letters that had amused her. As someone who was desperately trying to get published, I found it intoxicating to be quoted.
My return to Poland was a bit overshadowed by that of John Paul II, who was making his first trip to his homeland since becoming pope. The morning of his mass, Jeanne and Peter stopped by the apartment and presented us with a book, Larry the Lizard, that Peter had written and Jeanne had illustrated. Then we all made our way to Victory Square, where something more than a religious service was taking place. Fourteen months later, Lech Wałęsa scaled the gates of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, and Solidarity was born. That fall I returned and married Hania.
We moved to the States two years later and settled in Philadelphia. One weekend we flew to St. Petersburg, Hania’s first taste of Florida, which included Jeanne’s baked grapefruit for breakfast. Their house, which resembled a cottage, sat amongst live oak trees in the secret garden of Driftwood. Everything - the neighborhood, the house (which faced a small park), the life within the house - had the charmed air of a fairy tale. I loved the Spanish moss, though Jeanne worried that it was harmful to the trees. I, who knew nothing about plants, assured her it wasn’t. I also loved the wall of the guest bathroom, which Jeanne had papered with the titles of old magazines.
In 1989, I was offered the job of travel editor at the newspaper in Fort Lauderdale. We had never thought of living in Florida, but Jeanne and Peter made it seem like a desirable place. And of course now we could see them more often. On one of our first visits, I sat on their second-floor balcony as Jeanne took my author photo for my first book. One year we came up for the St. Petersburg Times book festival and stayed at the Vinoy, a hotel I knew of because Jeanne’s pen-and-ink drawing of it hung on our refrigerator. (I also remembered her story of one of the boys, Tim perhaps, sneaking into the hotel when it was closed to admire the terracotta floors. “At least that’s why he said he snuck in.”) They took us to the Don CeSar and, walking past the bar, I pointed out to Jeanne a bottle of Polish vodka. “You’re so good at noticing things,” she said, demonstrating that gift she had for expressing more belief in you than you had in yourself. Once we drove by a pizza place and, sitting in the back seat, I was about to say “I love pizza” but thought it too mundane a statement in the presence of a poet. So I said “I am a great lover of pizza,” which sounded ridiculous as soon as it was out of my mouth. Jeanne, turning around with a twinkle in her eye, said, “Is he, Hania?”
In the spring of 2016 I visited alone, after a reading in Sarasota. We walked to the dock – Driftwood, to solidify its title as the perfect neighborhood, was rimmed by an inlet of Tampa Bay – and sat with some people who used to live nearby. Then we walked to the home of a neighbor, a French chef, who cooked a delicious meal for a dozen people. There was a dog in the house, who added to the festive atmosphere. It seemed the perfect Driftwood evening.
In the morning, Jeanne placed in the mailbox a retirement card she had drawn for their mailman.
We visited twice after Jeanne had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was, in all the fundamental ways, the same as always: dear, loving, more focused on the people around her than on herself. She had put out the photo albums from our days in Poland, which brought back many lovely memories. Jeanne was always taking photographs, recording life – just like in her drawings – as the precious and fleeting thing it is.
We went to the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show on Friday thanks to tickets given to us by a friend. It was only our second time at the show and I was impressed by the set-up – the floating world of walkways and sales offices – as I was by the boats. Around sunset we climbed to the top of a yacht named, appropriately, Hospitality, for a cocktail party. Then, after waiting in a boisterous line of people who had obviously been to their own parties, we boarded a water taxi for the ride to the Riverside Hotel. Passing the waterfront mansions, many of them illuminated, was even more unreal than the boat show had been. (One, viewed from the dock, had looked like a picturesque European village.) It was difficult to believe we were taking a popular, if touristy, means of transportation through an American city; instead it felt like a Disney ride: “It’s a Rich World After All.”
I love reading The Spectator, not just for the witty writing but for the different perspective, a perspective, I should add, that I don’t always agree with but always admire for the flair with which it’s presented.
Not surprisingly, this week’s issue, which just arrived on my iPad, is full of stories about the new prime minister. Toby Young, writing in the back of the book – the part of the magazine I read first, and most enthusiastically – applauds the great breakthrough Rishi Sunak’s appointment represents, noting that “25 years ago someone with his characteristics could never have become prime minister.” Two sentences later he writes: “I am thinking, of course, of his height.”
At 5’7” Sunak apparently ranks as one of Britain’s shortest prime ministers.
I am not a fan of press trips, and back in 2010, when I took one of my last, I was not a big fan of country music. But the two combined to give me a memorable weekend in Nashville.
It was shortly after the city had sustained considerable damage from floods. Vince Gill, performing at the Ryman Auditorium on Friday evening, told the audience that he had lost most of his guitar collection in the floods. He added that his wife, Amy Grant, told him: “Honey, you only need one.” Then for the next two hours he and his friends played bluegrass with an infectious joy.
I returned to the Ryman the following night for the Grand Ole Opry, which had been moved back to its longtime home because of flood damage at Opryland. On the bill was Loretta Lynn. When she came on stage, the audience gave her the welcome of a legend. And when she sang her biggest hit it transcended autobiography and spoke to the assembled of overcoming adversity.
I’m coming to the end of a long essay I’ve been working on for a while and I’m thankful I’m not a figure skater. For then one little stumble would ruin everything I’ve done so far. If I falter as a writer – something that's pretty much guaranteed – I will just delete and try again, and again, until I get it right.