Cue the Violins: Lessons From a Life Well-Lived

Arthur Samuels (1926-2020)

Arthur Leon Samuels of Tenafly, NJ, would have been 94 this week.

To me, he is forever ageless.

Arthur died peacefully in the arms of Harriet, his loving wife of 55 years, just three months ago.

In my memories of him, I've discovered lessons that are more relevant in my life today than when he first tried to teach me how to play the violin.

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I met Art (I called him "Art" -- which is very meta -- although I now realize he was "Arthur" to his family) on a hot August day in 2007.

I had replied to an ad placed by a luthier in the Twin-Boro News. A man with an older, slightly accented voice called back immediately to ask if I wanted to stop by for an estimate. He gave me an address, but instead of providing directions, he said, "You have a GPS, right?"

Arriving at a suburban home, I knocked on the door with my grandmother's violin case in hand. I had rescued the violin from a potential garage sale, and I was looking for someone to restore it.

Art had kind eyes. He politely directed me inside a house decorated with religious artifacts. "I'll look at the violin," he said, "but you must know that an instrument is meant to be played. I will only restore it, if you promise it will be played."

He also mentioned that he happened to give beginning violin lessons. He asked to see the fingernails on my left hand. "Too long," he commented, as if I had already disappointed him, then asked that I accompany him to his basement.

I did, contrary to everything I had learned from watching horror movies. We walked through "Bubbie's Kitchen" (as a wall sign proclaimed) and down a steep, narrow staircase. It opened to a room filled with old violins, violin parts, books about restoration, and a workbench. The clutter and the smell of aged wood reminded me of my grandfather's workshop.

Art put on thick reading glasses and examined the violin. He commented on every aspect of its construction and what work it would need. He pronounced it a good violin; it deserved to be played.

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I agreed to the violin lessons, of course. Over the next three years, I learned much about Art (both upper and lower case). And now, out of respect, I will forevermore call my friend Arthur. 

Here's an excerpt from his obituary:

Drafted into the United States Army in his senior year of high school during World War II, Arthur served in the 3rd Army, 15th Corp. As a musician in the Special Services division, he performed with USO shows throughout Europe. [A graduate of Julliard], Arthur taught music in the NYC Public School System for over 20 years, becoming... a highly sought after private instructor in violin. In addition, Arthur was the Concertmaster of the North Jersey Symphony Orchestra.

A multifaceted person; he published several short stories, enjoyed metal detecting, riding his motorcycle, photography, building model trains and airplanes... He was also a member of the Tenafly Rifle & Pistol Club.

Arthur's first lesson: The best people will surprise you.

For all the time I spent with Arthur, and for all the stories he told me, absolutely everything in the above second paragraph was unknown to me until I read his obituary. 

I didn't know that he wrote (like me) or rode a motorcycle (unlike me). Or that he enjoyed building models (like young me) and photography (like older me). Or (and this would have been great to have known when I first followed him to his basement) that he liked guns.

My grandmother's violin

Before I read his obituary, I honestly thought I knew everything about his life. It turns out I probably know a bit about his life as a professional musician and his theories of music and love of the violin. But I didn't really know Arthur.

He was complicated. Aren't we all more complicated than other people think?

Repeat after me: "Underestimate me. That'll be fun."

Do we ever really know or appreciate the people we love? The first lesson of Arthur Samuel (and, spoiler alert, it's related to the last lesson) is that our lives would be better, and more interesting, if we tried.

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Arthur's second lesson: Strive for, and appreciate, excellence.

I've taken many hours to write this post because of all the things I've left out: all the details about violins, and great violinists (many of whom Arthur knew and played beside), and music in general and classical music in particular.

I kept a diary during the time I took lessons, but I'd need thousands of words to recount those stories here.

So let me -- like music, like poetry -- try to compress things.

Imagine it's before sunrise on Saturday morning. You are home, practicing a violin in a downstairs bathroom with high ceilings and excellent acoustics. Behind a closed door, you aren't disturbing the rest of your family.

You struggle, but the music doesn't come.

Violinists can play a simple "C" note a thousand different ways, depending on finger placement and pressure and bow movement. All the ways you play a "C" sound awful.

Then you pack your grandmother's restored old violin in the new case that you bought (because your teacher said that other musicians will judge you on your case... it's one of those unwritten rules, reminiscent of when dads explain the secret etiquette of golf). And you drive to a suburban home in a neighboring town and ring the doorbell that is the wake-up call for your violin teacher.

Arthur Samuels, now in his 80s, shuffles to answer the door and leads you to his studio. He smells like sleep. He absently reaches for his violin.

Loud and clear, you hear the "C" you were trying to replicate. It's followed by note after note after note in quick succession, and each tone is graceful and effortless and evocative.

It's Arthur, playing a simple warmup exercise. You get goosebumps.

Malcolm Gladwell will tell you that what Arthur just did resulted from a lifetime of experience and at least 10,000 hours of appropriate, guided practice.

I will tell you, it's magic.

Hard as I tried, I could never replicate that magic. Still, the hours I spent with Arthur taught me to appreciate the violin, and this has been a blessing to me and has extended to other areas of my life.

Midway through my second year of lessons, both Arthur and I realistically concluded that I was a horrible violinist. I am impatient; I have no sense of rhythm and, most damning of all, my middle-aged fingers and wrist movements physically could not produce even an approximation of what Arthur could literally play in his sleep.

But Arthur would tell me stories about the great violinists. Stories about his own career. He played tapes and records for me. What Arthur lacked in computer literacy, he made up for in curiosity, so I taught him how to find and download YouTube videos. I'd project violin performances to his TV and we'd listen and watch them together. He'd critique each one, except for performances by Jascha Heifetz, which were always flawless.

My old violin case

I learned to love the violin.

I remember trying to hold back tears during a recital I dragged my wife to in Teaneck, NJ. A twig-armed young violinist tuned up by playing pitch-perfect phrases from Vivaldi at a very fast speed. Her bow bounced from one non-adjacent string to another with the faintest flutter of her slender forearm, with seemingly as much effort and interest as if she were flicking a butterfly from her shoulder.

My corollary to Arthur's second lesson: Sometimes, when I am at my very best as a writer, I hear his encouraging voice in my head.

This mitzvah is a constant reminder to be confident and ever-curious as a writer. Many years after he stopped giving me "violin lessons" and to this very day, Arthur still encourages the belief that I can transcend my own mediocrity, even as the limits of my abilities and my accomplishments come more into focus with the passing of time.

Arthur tells me that when I write, I can do anything.

My words can keep pace with the young violinist in Teaneck. They can be just as fancy as her grace notes. I can provide the countermelody and add perspective to her careless perfection.

All this, and I'm just warming up.

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Arthur's third lesson: Everything is secondary to love.

This past Monday night during the Giants' game, a Caller ID message flashed across my TV screen. It read "SAMUELS, ARTHUR" followed by his telephone number.

I looked at my wife and waived my hands skyward in surrender. "I can't believe these spam callers," I said. "This has to be a spoof."

But curiosity got the best of me, so I answered the phone, anyway.

It was Harriet, Arthur's wife.

I had made a donation in his name to a local community center after reading his obituary. Harriet was calling to thank me.

She said she was writing thank-you cards, but she couldn't recall who I was.

I explained that we had met only once or twice for a moment at her house, but that I was one of Arthur's last violin students.

"Oh, you're that Bob," she said. "I thought it might be. Of course, I remember you!"

We talked for several minutes about Arthur. Harriet spoke with warmth and affection. She also informed me I was not quite his last student. Arthur had even given a violin lesson to his granddaughter from his hospital bed just days before he died after complications from a fall.

Harriet said, "Of course, since the spring, we quarantined together in our house. You know what? COVID brought us closer. I've never been more in love with Arthur than the last few months we had together."

This, too, gave me goosebumps.

Arthur and Harriet Samuels were married 55 years before his death three months ago. In the end, they grew more in love every day.

Nothing else matters.

More Adventures in Photojournaling

Last night, in photojournaling class, we were asked to imagine a photo and write about it. I accidentally wrote a poem:

Source: www.galeriacanvas.pl (public domain)

My Last Words to Vincent

In a cornfield in the middle of a dream,

I recognize the countryside.

This must be Arles.

I’ve never been to France in real life,

but I know what I know.

Cue the murder of crows.

In the distance, a man reimagines the scene on canvas.

It's a matter of hours before he shoots himself

and takes three days to die.

He works as if possessed.

I want to run to him, tell him his work will endure,

but the crows won't let me near.

I shout, "It isn't too late!"

He turns his head; I take his photo.

It captures the long view of both of us:

Imaginary proof of all our useless dreams.

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You can view other modest adventures in photojounaling here and here. Or just follow me on Instagram at @bvarphotos, where sometimes I just write long captions. Life it too short; I always follow back.

NY Images / Pre-Election Pandemic / Captions in Haiku

All photos by me.

My poetry may be bad,

but I blame the news.*

Greetings from Ghost Town.

Times Square on a weekday night.

Crossroads of Covid.

Church and State at dusk.

All await, with a prayer,

the dawn's early light.

Radio City.

Anarchist Jurisdiction,

in living color.

The children of God

seek marble sanctuary,

find cardboard refuge.

East 43rd Street,

relentlessly blowing steam,

stirs man's shuffling pace.

Suspended in March,

Grand Central in October,

returning to life.

Venmo accepted.

The city re-forms. Because

true greatness is rare.

Skyline at sunset.

As far as my eyes can see,

light blesses these souls.

Vanishing tower.

The only place in New York,

surrounded by ghosts.

*- With apologies to Lana Del Rey.

Photos taken in October 2020. Follow me on Instagram.

A Dozen Images of Haunted New Jersey

This place no longer exists.

It's Halloween 2020, and as if things aren't scary enough, I'm haunted by a review of some photos from past posts.

In New Jersey, you can't take photos anywhere without a ghost looking over your shoulder. Here's what I mean:

Clinton Road (West Milford)

Clinton Road is the setting of a 2019 movie about the nearly 10-mile stretch of road that cuts through a thick forest in former iron-mining country. Ghost stories abound, and you've no doubt heard a few yourself if you grew up in the Garden State. As a character states in the movie's trailer, "Everyone knows that place is haunted!"

This story in The Record, including the photo here by Michael V. Pettigano (other photos on this page are mine), does a great job in detailing the backstory. As David M. Zimmer writes:

"Tales involve a ghost boy who throws back coins dropped over a small bridge, a phantom car that appears at the rear bumper of nighttime visitors with lights blaring, and a satanic cult that gathers at odd stone structures in the woods."

Devil's Tower (Alpine)

The Devil's Tower is located at the end of tony Esplanade Road. Manuel Rionda, a U.S.-based sugar baron in Cuba, built it in 1910 for his wife, Harriet Clarke, so that she view New York City in the distance.

Legend has it, she was enjoying that view one evening in 1922 when she saw Manuel kissing another woman. Overcome with anger and rage, Harriet leapt from the tower to her death.

As every schoolgirl at nearby Academy of the Holy Angels (both my daughters are graduates) will tell you, if you drive or walk backward around the tower three times, you see the ghost of Manuel's wife. Another version of the legend states that, visiting there, you might also find yourself face-to-face with the actual Devil.

Devil's Tree (Bernards)

Here's what Weird New Jersey has to say:

"This is one sinister looking tree, and according to the locals, who told us of its legends, everyone in the vicinity of Bernards Township seems to have a story about it.  They say that at one time a farmer killed his entire family, then went to the tree to hang himself. According to some, numerous suicides and murders occurred around the evil arbor. Supposedly anyone who tries to cut down the tree comes to an untimely end, as it is now cursed. It is said that the souls of those killed at the spot give the tree an unnatural warmth, and even in the dead of winter no snow will fall around it.

"We noticed evidence that many attempts had been made over the years to fell the unholy oak, but all have failed. The tree stands all alone in the middle of a large field off Mountain Road. Its trunk has been severely scared by axes and chain saws, some wounds appearing to be quite old. Why no one has yet been successful in toppling the timber we cannot say for sure. Nor do we know what has become of those who have tried."

Bernardsville Library

Not far from the Devil's Tree is the old (and former) library in Bernardsville. It used to be the Vealtown Tavern, built in the 1700s.

Phyllis Parker, the tavern owner's daughter, has been rumored to haunt this building ever since. Librarians claimed to have seen her or heard her crying so many times, they issued her a library card.

The historic marker, which looks like a tombstone, states, "By this route, Washington with his army retired to Morristown after his victory at Princeton, January 1777 -- erected by the DAR."

Hermitage Museum (Ho-Ho-Kus)

Built in the 1840s in Gothic Revival style, this site is Bergen County’s first National Historic Landmark. Guests of the original estate included a who's who of Revolutionary War heroes, and Aaron Burr was married there.

According to a story in The Record, tour guide Craig McManus reports that lights and motion detectors have gone on unprovoked, and a woman has been seen in the upstairs window. "We think there are about four or five spirits in the house," he said. "The house itself is kind of a paranormal hot spot."

The Hermitage has been known as a ghost house since at least 1917, when Bess Rosencrantz and her niece opened a popular tea room there. The tea room operated for about 15 years. Its haunted tales made newspaper headlines as far as North Dakota.

Easton Tower (Fair Lawn)

Here's what Hauntedplaces.org has to say:

"Easton Tower is a stone and wood frame structure, once an irrigation pump, built in 1900 as part of a scenic park. It now abuts the Saddle River Bikeway. It was named after Edward D. Easton (1856-1915), founder and president of the Columbia Phonograph Company. It is sometimes mistakenly called the Red Mill because in the early 1800s a mill nearby was painted red, and many mistook it for the Easton Tower.

"Residents who live near the tower say strange noises come from the building at night, and at least one witness saw a white apparition at the window."

Red Mill (Clinton)

This is a photo of the Hunterdon Art Museum, across Clinton Falls from when I stood at iconic Red Mill. You don't need to see another photo of that! As Only In Your State explains:

"Clinton's famous Red Mill is often hailed as the most photographed building in New Jersey. While there's no way to track that data, it has been featured in numerous films, calendars and advertising campaigns. Today, it's a charming museum and popular wedding venue… but it has quite a dark past.

"[Some] say the spirit of a young girl whose father worked at the mill often comes to visit. A verified tale involves the tenant house on the property -- documentation shows a death by heart attack. Guests have reported hearing footsteps in vacant areas of the tenant house, objects moving with no clear cause throughout the property and even seeing a man on the third floor of the mill. Many have mentioned the authentic period re-enactor on the third floor -- but the mill does not employ period re-enactors."

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Finally, here are three haunted places from in and around the town where I grew up. This isn't counting the abandoned asylum (photo at the top of this post), which has since been completely leveled and is now a construction site. Never mind. I have no doubt it will soon be an addition to my list of haunted places.

Dey Mansion (Totowa Road, Wayne)

Every time I've visited here recently after stopping by Mom's house, the place has been closed. Blame the pandemic. Or maybe it isn't closed and it's filled with visitors, and I'm one of the ghosts haunting the site!

Here's what the Try to Scare Me site has to say: "Built in the early 1700's by Dirck Dey, the Dey Mansion (pronounced Die)... served as headquarters for Washington twice. [He] returned to the mansion after learning that Benedict Arnold betrayed the Americans. It was said that Washington battled his own ghosts and internal battles during his stay after this devastating news.

"There are numerous rumors of visions that appear on the road and grounds. Late at night while drivers pass the mansion, they might come across the ghostly apparition of a soldier."

Annie's Road (Totowa)

Annie is the ghost of a teenager, dressed in white, killed by a pickup truck as she tried to find her way to safety along unlit Riverview Drive. She fled her boyfriend's car after an argument on Prom Night.

All the locals call this stretch of Riverview Drive "Annie's Road," and roadside memorials keep her legend alive. A Halloween tradition is to spill red paint on the blacktop and guard rails so that drivers will think they see Annie's blood.

Annie's Road snakes behind a cemetery and bypasses an alcove of small homes called, with no pretense of political correctness, Midgetville.

Laurel Grove Cemetery (Totowa)

There are over 96,000 people buried in Totowa, a borough with a population of only 11,000 living souls. Following the Passaic River north on sharply bending Annie's Road, right past "Dead Man's Curve," is Laurel Grove Cemetery, where Dad is buried.

Reading a paranormal investigator's adventures at the site reveals quite a few "orb photos" (circles of light seen only on film) in images of the mausoleums and at various locations on the cemetery grounds.

In visits here, I'm mostly taken by the assortment of odd and curious gravestones and monuments. You can see one while passing through town on the highway -- a large, majestic elk on a bluff overlooking Route 80. Perhaps the most unique gravestone there belongs to Sal Giardino, the "World's Greatest Electrician."

The Most Romantic Place in New Milford, NJ

This is the gazebo next to Borough Hall in my hometown earlier today. It's a humble structure, maintained by the local Girl Scout troop and "Borough of New Milford Clean Communities" (aka DPW).

It's also the most romantic place in town.

How?

Take a look at the Facebook page of New Milford's mayor's office.

The gazebo is where Mayor Michael Putrino officiates civil wedding ceremonies.

Ever since the start of the pandemic, I've seen some of the most heart-warming images on the site, including these six wedding photos in just the past two months.

Congratulations to all -- although it looks like this past week's newlyweds, Connor and Kristen Bohling, found an alternate gazebo to pose with Mayor Mike.

All the same, I still think this is the most romantic place in town...

5 New Jersey Stories (October 2020)

From Heaven to Hell to home, the world is full of stories.

Beginning with the Devil's Tree.

A Thrillist story this past week calls it the creepiest place to visit in New Jersey.

It's located along Mountain Road in Basking Ridge, and Amber Sutherland-Namako writes:

"Out of context, the tree's silhouette alone is enough to inspire nightmares: a warped, half-dead oak looming in the middle of a lonely field, with dozens of ax marks lining its trunk. Then there's the gruesome history. A purported meeting place for the KKK, notorious suicide site, and rumored gateway to the depths of hell, the Devil's Tree is infamous among locals and has evolved into a chilling tourist attraction. Legend has it, anyone who harms the tree will suffer swift and violent retribution..."

A few other Garden State stories piqued my interest this week.

Here's a Record story about the rededication of St. Anthony of Padua Church in Passaic:

More than 3½ years have passed since the church was forced to close its doors after the ceiling partially collapsed on Holy Thursday. Parishioners organized raffles, festivals, carnivals and other fundraisers to raise $1.3M for renovations. It shows.

"This beautiful church is a symbol, and we pray for 50 and 100 and hundreds of years more [that] we continue to be here in this community, this beautiful symbol of all of God's goodness and blessings that he gives to us and that we receive,'' said Bishop Kevin J. Sweeney of the Paterson Diocese, who led last week's rededication Mass in both English and Spanish.

Passaic has a special place in my heart because my Mom always talks about it affectionately. More about that later.

Closer to home, I found two stories practically outside my front doorstep. Here are Instagram posts about each:

View this post on Instagram

🎶 I’ve always looked forward to possibly hearing live music whenever I passed this porch on my weekend runs. Today, I was able to wave hello for the first time since the start of the pandemic. 🙂

A post shared by Found in NJ (@foundinnj) on Oct 10, 2020 at 2:17pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

Saw this on the ground today, nowhere near a ballfield ⚾️ #RoyHobbs

A post shared by Bob Varettoni (@bvarphotos) on Oct 10, 2020 at 2:52pm PDT

Returning to Passaic:

I once wrote about how proud Mom was to be known there as "the girl in the photo shop window" when she worked at Kresge's in the 1950s. A photographer on Main Street displayed a large portrait of her – a print from her engagement photos – in the main window of his shop.

I recalled this story as I sat with Mom on my recent birthday at an outdoor cafe on a beautiful Sunday morning. She had an egg and cheese sandwich, and I ordered eggs over easy with bacon and rye toast, which is what my Dad always used to order for breakfast.

Dad died 15 years ago on Oct. 24, and we both miss him terribly.

Before we left, I asked Mom if she would pose for a photo with me. Mom readily agreed, but she made me take about a half dozen photos before she said I took one of her that was good enough for me to post.

Decades pass, and life is so post-pandemically weird, but some things never change.

3 Haikus for New York City

Just blowing off some steam...

I love New York, and I have the photos to prove it.

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Radio City.

Anarchist Jurisdiction?

No Ghost Town tonight.

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A Trump-made tower,

melting into the background.

Soon to disappear?

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A precovidian memory...

Rain glistens at night. 
Two, under an umbrella,
seek the Rainbow Room.

🌈 

That Old Cape Magic (or 'What I Did During My Summer Vacation')

Chatham (top) and Provincetown

There's this scene in the opening chapter of Richard Russo's 2009 novel, "That Old Cape Magic":

The narrator recalls himself as a child in the back seat of his parents' car as they drove along Route 6. Crossing the Sagamore on their annual trip to Cape Cod, they would sing "That Old Black Magic," substituting "Cape" for "Black." If it was a prosperous and happy year, they would rent a place in Chatham.

2020 has not been a particularly prosperous and happy year for any of us, but I tried to capture some of that spirit with a recent short visit to the Cape with my wife to celebrate our anniversary. (Massachusetts being one of the few places we could visit from New Jersey without quarantining ourselves afterward.)

It indeed made us happy to visit Chatham for a few days, with a side trip to Provincetown. All around were subtle signs that reminded us how quickly things can change, and how lucky we are to have this moment in time together.

So I took more than a few photos. I wanted to try to capture happiness and preserve it... and share it here.

Four from Chatham: turkeys roaming the street... social distancing at the Queen Anne Inn... no lifeguard on duty, a lone photographer at sunrise on Lighthouse Beach... when I stopped running along the road to admire the distant haze and a fisherman in a pickup truck slowed down to call out, “It’s a California sunrise!” (referring to wildfires more than 3,000 miles away).

Four from Provincetown: Lobster Pot up close, Nancy in the distance... an artist working on the corner at the library, his signs say "Reality: still preferable to going online" and "No the world isn't broken. Yet..." the old stone sign for the Provincetown Theatre... unexpected greenery along Commercial Street.

Related post from six years ago today: "A Taste for Something Different"

Here Is New York in 2020 (Stylized by Google)

At the close of this summer of discontent, I side with Jerry Seinfeld and Patti Smith, and against James Altucher, on the subject of New York City.

Not that it matters. All four of us are privileged, so New York isn't really ours.

Also, as E. B. White eloquently noted in the 1949 foreword to his love-letter/essay, "Here Is New York," the city can't be written about or "brought down to date" by anything other than opinions and observations offered at the speed of light.

But what if...

What if, in 2020, we have the speed-of-light technology to see into the soul of New York?

I think we might.

This summer, returning to work in New York in mid-July after sheltering at home in New Jersey in mid-March, I took many cell phone photos that needed no development process. The files automatically uploaded to a digital cloud. Instantly, using a mysterious algorithm that mere mortals cannot initiate, Google's vast artificial intelligence (AI) engine selected several images to machine-edit.

My little corner of the Google Photos cloud is now filled with "auto-stylized" images of New York in the summer of 2020 that differ from the New York I saw with my own eyes.

This technology is not new, but it appears to be evolving. Before the pandemic, after taking cell phone photos of New York, I would often be surprised to see an additional image or two that had been auto-stylized by Google in my photo feed.

Almost invariably, the AI had edited the images in black-and-white -- as if Google had the same nostalgic view of New York as E. B. White in 1949.

In 2020, many more of these auto-stylized images have magically appeared on my phone in a very different form. 

As if it has transported me to the land of Oz, New-York-as-stylized-by-Google now appears in hyper-vibrant color.

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My return to New York was a plot hatched by my daughter Maddy, who lives in an East Side apartment just one block from composer Irving Berlin's former home, two blocks from Katharine Hepburn's former home, five blocks from the workplace where I met my wife Nancy, and eight blocks from the site of our first date (when Nancy lost her wallet outside a movie theater playing "The Natural," yet with great relief found her cashed paycheck stashed separately in her purse... for we all lived from paycheck to paycheck in 1984, the year before E. B. White died).

My daughter and I are enamored with New York's poetic nature. Poetic, in the sense that it "compresses all life... into a small island and adds music." That's how White describes the city in his famous essay.

He also describes his enchantment at living in such close proximity to so many magical people. For White, only 18 inches separated these random encounters -- the distance between his luncheonette booth and one frequented by Fred Stone, a local actor who played the Scarecrow in the Broadway version of "The Wizard of Oz."

When I lived in New York before marrying Nancy (29 blocks from Maddy's apartment, on the other side of Manhattan), I think perhaps I once shared a wordless ride on the 7 Train to Shea Stadium just 18 inches from writer and Mets fan Harper Lee.

In 2020, 18 inches has become 6 feet, and my daughter has experienced her own random link with Oz in a casual nod of recognition exchanged with actress Mary-Kate Olsen in her Turtle Bay neighborhood.

Maddy is perceptive and literate. In April, she offered great editing suggestions to a pandemic-related short story I wrote. A few weeks later, she said she planned to be out of town for a week and suggested, just like White's editor Ted Patrick, that "it might be fun" for me to hole up in the city in mid-July to write about New York.

Maddy offered the use of her apartment, but between her work responsibilities and other family obligations of my own, the "week" turned into the Sunday night before I was scheduled to return to my office at 777 3rd Ave., between 48th and 49th streets. Instead of spending several days alone in 90-degree heat at the Algonquin Hotel, I spent a single, comfortable, air-conditioned night with Nancy in Turtle Bay.

We drove in and parked that Sunday at the U.N. Plaza, where Harper Lee's friend Truman Capote once lived, and Nancy and I gingerly explored our old stomping grounds.

As I posted here last month, a feeling of great forlornness and forsakenness struck us. We had the sense that New York had become strangely vulnerable during the pandemic.

We were comforted by a visit to an old, familiar bar.

"At least Murphy's will always be here," I said -- then learned in the weeks that followed that it too had closed for good at the end of August.

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Which brings me back to Google, and its conjuring of New York's ghosts.

E. B. White wrote that summertime is a good time to re-examine New York and to receive what he called its gift of privacy.

So much is happening in New York at any given time, he reasoned, that individuals can choose whether to attend or pay attention to any particular thing, and that no one thing can throw the city off balance or inflict itself on a person.

He also wrote that although no plague could wipe out New York, the city was -- with the then-recent development of planes carrying nuclear warheads -- for the first time in its history, destructible.

It seems to me that in 2020, Google (which I am using here as shorthand for "Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, ubiquitous connectivity and high-speed Internet access") has dramatically changed these equations, and White is now wrong on both counts.

People nowadays can ignore what they choose, creating their own realities from a vast global storehouse, with myriad ways to experience sudden rejuvenation. Because of technology, "New York" is now everywhere. And we now know that, over time, pandemics have the same destructive power as our bombs.

I think the idealized version of New York today -- which Google's AI somehow senses and changes over time and then reflects back to us -- is the idealized version of what's best in each of us. It is the New York of the person in quest of grand achievement, a more meaningful life or simply better days to come.

I think these stylized images are digital versions of the old willow tree that E. B. White wrote about.

Off and on in the '40s and '50s (and while he wrote "Charlotte's Web"), White lived in Turtle Bay Gardens, a complex of 20 contiguous townhouses in two rows on the north side of 48th Street and the south side of 49th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Personal favorites Bob Dylan and Kurt Vonnegut lived there in later years too.

The buildings enclose a private, central backyard. White particularly loved a willow tree that grew there. It stood outside his apartment window and next to a replica of a fountain at the Villa Medici in Rome.

In "Here Is New York" he wrote that this "battered tree, long suffering and much climbed... symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun."

He concluded: "Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadows of the planes [bearing possible annihilation overhead], I think: 'This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.' If it were to go, all would go..."

As it turns out, White's willow is now gone... like Murphy's, like the New York we all remember. The tree died and was removed in 2009.

With support from composer Stephen Sondheim and other Turtle Bay Gardens residents, Urban Arborists in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn cared for the tree until the very end, and founder Bill Logan has been nurturing its cuttings so that they may be replanted in parks across the city.

(PS - On Sept. 23, Logan sent a note that Urban Arborists replants more cuttings from White's willow every year. The original offspring from the tree "is now more than 40 feet tall in our yard in Brooklyn.")

All this is alright with me. I don't want New York back again, back the way it was. I'm excited by the prospects of the New York that is to come.

Besides, Google has my back. It is creating little digital snapshots of an idealized version of New York that will truly live forever. Technology has dispersed these ageless pixels into the ether, to be perhaps deciphered one day by the life forms discovered this past week on the planet Venus.

I cannot bring New York down to date on paper. But if each picture can be worth a thousand words, then the seven auto-stylized images posted here are Google's homage to White's 7,000-word essay.

The photo on top of this page, for example, is a Google-styled vision of Turtle Bay Gardens. When I returned to my office on July 20, I realized -- for the first time -- that our Board Room windows on the 23rd Floor overlooked these buildings, and the interior gardens where White's tree once stood.

Our building had been vacated due to the COVID-19 lockdown, and the windows had not been cleaned in more than four months. Google's AI brightened my camera's God's-eye view and nostalgically blurred the dirty, dried droplets of rain as if they were heavenly stars.

Google -- like me and Jerry Seinfeld and Patti Smith -- knows the value of this city... this mischievous and marvelous monument which, not to look upon, would be like death.

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This post is dedicated to White's stepson, the writer Roger Angell, who is celebrating his 100th birthday this weekend. Angell originally commissioned White to write "Here is New York" for Holiday magazine, and his foreword graces the 1999 edition of its publication. Below is Edward C. Caswell's illustration of White's willow tree from the tailpiece of the original 1949 edition.