Postcard sticking its tongue out at a rival, the telegram. Sent to Miss Freda Fayman, Hall, West Virginia, June 30, 1913 (all postcards collection of Jeff Weinstein)

Can tweets, texts and email save the post office? Seems a foolish question, same as asking if Facebook or HuffPo could rescue newspapers. Congress has again been going postal about the semi-Thatcherized U.S. Postal Service, on the one hand not wanting to spend a sou to keep it going, on the other not willing to offend business lobbies and scotch that expensive Saturday delivery. Yet there was a time when a similar absurd idea really did work: More than a century ago, the tweetlike penny postcard, enemy to the ostensibly profitable two-cent letter, brought struggling postal services worldwide into the black.

Boomer readers who moan about today’s kids’ texting addiction probably remember their own, equally tiresome grandparents telling them about two, even three, visits from the mailman every day. There were other ways to communicate, of course — oldsters may recall the vaudeville joke “telegraph, telephone, tell a woman” — but letters, they wrote letters, they wrote stacks and stacks of letters. Cursive script was actually taught at school, and anyone who owned a shirt or shirtwaist, or worked for those who did, knew how to remove blots of India ink from starched white lawn.

Typing ribbons were messy, too. But at the turn of the last century, a typewriter could be both the worker and the machine, as the punning “working-woman threat to the home” card at far left shows. And in case you think kiddie texting is stupid in a particularly 21st-century way, here’s what’s hand-written on the back of the other card:

“Has Rose written to you lately she is coming back and forth again, so we are having nice times together again, and I am very glad she is for she is very nice to go out with. this time for not answering my letter, but I think you might think of me once in a while. Don’t you?

Lurena”

Can’t tell if the card’s target is male or female, but I bet young Lurena and her beribboned friends called the Sears, Roebuck catalog their “dream book” and exchanged fat, leatherette albums filled with the postcards they hoarded.

In either case, they wouldn’t have been the only ones actively asking images to create desires — even a desire for more images, which is one way to understand the worldwide craze for picture postcards that started just after 1900 and peaked a few years before the outbreak of the First World War.

A craze? Well, in 1905, over seven billion postcards — yes, a B — were mailed internationally, with almost one billion just in the U.S. Also, deltiologists estimate that about half the cards produced in that period, which they have dubbed the postcard’s Golden Age, were bought not to be mailed but to be pasted in Lurena albums. So those billions are doubled.

A planet awash in Niagaras, littered with Main Streets, overrun by risque ankles and Peeping Toms. Picture postcards provided the greatest profusion of pictures the world had ever seen.

Oh, what is a deltiologist, you ask? Invented in 1945, the high-rent word, derived from the Greek deltios (a small writing pad or letter), means “postcard collector.”

This writer is one of them. He has worn a T-shirt printed with the words RESTAURANTS and GAY TOPICS to postcard bourses and fairs so that sellers would know just which category of sucker he was.

Now, deltiological history is rather complicated and truly interesting only to deltiologists, as our spouses and friends will confirm. In short, advertising and message cards paralleled the rise of postal services from the 1860s on; the struggle between private postals and government-issued blank cards was resolved, more or less, in the 1890s. Austria printed the first color card in 1889, and souvenir and view cards were produced and sent in greater and greater numbers until the economic collapse of 1893 forced many printers to close (my husband just left the room).

Reverse

An early (1883) U.S. Postal Card, advertising or business only, one cent

The U.S. government tried to regulate private cards, which cost a penny to mail, but finally gave up. In 1899, the first card made of photo paper, the so-called Real Photo Post Card, was sent, and Eastman Kodak saw nothing but opportunity. Think of that first 1900 Brownie as a smartphone, the photo postcard it snapped as a jpeg, the postal system that delivered it as the Internet. A family photo explosion! Staid studio photographers fought to stay alive.

By 1905, real-photo cards were homemade and soulful; German-made chromolithograph view cards of everything from everywhere were lusciously colored; hastily shot and mailed news cards showed industrial strikes and first views of the San Francisco quake; theme and novelty cards were gooey, saucy or slightly insane. Few could resist this thoroughly modern eye candy, and a craze was born, a creative effusion of visual and personal interaction.

Sent from Baltimore, Oct. 20, 1910. H.L.W. to Miss Clara Smith, Cazenovia, N.Y.

No postmark, but undivided back, so pre-1907. Addressed to Mr. and Mrs. S.A. Hendricks, Hermon, Ill.

May 23, 1910 from “your Ant Rose,” Columbus, Oh., to Mrs. Blanche Meyers, Stoutsville, Oh.: “Dear Nease, I will send you a postale of the strike!”

Sept. 18, 1909, New York, N.Y. to “Miss L.M. Bodine, 37 West 128 St, City.”

July 19, 1907. “Your Coz, Ora” sent this to Chas. W. Baker, Lancaster, Pa.

Those frivolous postcard pennies kept postal services everywhere afloat, and history abounds in lessons. Can the USPS find a way to cash in on “digital postcarding” now?

By Milton Rogovin. Copyright and reprinted with the permission of the Rogovin Collection LLC and the Board of Regents at the University of Arizona.

“Out There” has been on indefinite holiday, but during this cheerful pre-election period of lies, greed, and cynicism, Obit Magazine has taken the opportunity to repost an essay and video slideshow (with an odd voice, mine) about a man whose life was an antidote to all these awful things: the late photographer Milton Rogovin.

So I’m using this opportunity to say hello, “Out There” friends, and cheer you up with an appreciation of a life lived right — rather, left.

I haven’t read each and every

Frankenthaler was proud of her conservative stance, as this 1989 piece by her in the New York Times opinion section makes clear. A sample: “I feel there was a time when I experienced loftier minds, relatively unloaded with politics, fashion, and chic.

For those on Facebook, you may wish to read a fine post by historian and critic Mira Schor about the topic, with a fascinating thread of comments. Schor links to NEA-topic columns by Village Voice art reporter Robert Atkins (which, for transparency sake, I must admit I edited).

Take a look. They will give you the tenor of that art-world time.

Neither my brother nor I can recall sitting down to eat meatloaf when we were Brooklyn kids.  But we must have, because we share a childhood “meatloaf ghost.”

“It had something red and burnt on top,” he told me on the phone. “But I can’t remember anything else about it.”

That must have been tomato sauce or, more likely, ketchup — probably Heinz in our conventional household. We have no idea how the ghost’s corpse tasted.

I wouldn’t blame Mom’s particular meatloaf for that. No matter how good the food she gave us every single night was, our kitchen-table meals tended toward forgettable. Dad was rarely home for them, which may have been both the cause and the effect of our sullen suppers.

One of my fine Facebook friends in the deep Midwest likes to promote her circle’s meatloaf contests, which is why I decided never to post a photo of actual meatloaf ready on a plate. How many years of eating pleasure must you bank to imagine that something so mud-ugly could make anyone happy?

But camera-ready or not, the end of 2011 is my meatloaf moment.

The ever-twee village of Bellport, New York, on Long Island’s glistening South Shore, has a block-long commercial center of shops. Anchoring these is a small supermarket called Wallen’s.

A Wallen Market (which everyone calls Wallen's) beef promotion, c.1960. From "Bellport Village and Brookhaven Hamlet" by Victor Principe, photo courtesy Robert Wallen

It had been the Roulston Grocery Store, which moved across main street in the ’30s to its present site, taking over the Comet Theater — where in 1917 Irving Berlin sang “Yip-Yip-Yaphank” (or “Yip! Yip! Yaphank!” according to a 1918 review in the New York Times, which must be right, no matter what the sheet music says). If you look hard, you can see remnants of the old vaudeville dressing rooms in Wallen’s storage area.

As long as I’ve been shopping there, Wallen’s has offered a freshly ground “meat loaf mix”: one-third each of beef, veal, pork, sometimes in three discrete lumps, lately blended together. Wallen’s cordial butchers have never failed me, and my gratitude rises especially high for their boned legs of lamb, having learned the hard way (from Beck, Bertholle and Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking) how wrist-aching and messy it is to bone the thing myself. Did the sweat of pride season my first, garlic-larded result? Sure it did; always does.

Decades later, just as I have fashioned a meatloaf worth writing about, Wallen’s announces it must close.

Yes, some disasters are local. This December, as before, you pull open the door to a sepia, quasi-utopian zone. You slow down; your iPhone dissolves. Norman Rockwell fantasies are seductive and usually emotionally false, but when corn-flake nostalgia takes neighborly, shopping-bag form a few blocks away, it’s hard to resist taking part. The Jean Arthur-Jimmy Stewart you in this scenario could really be you. Why in heaven not?

Wallen’s price for Hellman’s mayo is higher than that at the “local” Stop & Shop, but it almost equals out in the cost of gas that buys the corporate bargain. And after the farmstands close at Thanksgiving, Wallen’s still finds apples, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower grown within pickup distance to put in its cool produce bins.

After Wallen's closes, will I have to grind it myself?

My praise won’t save the store, not now or a year from now. Yet every writer knows that we treasure most what we know we’ll lose, so we pretend to try.

With a cossetting smile, the butcher tells me that even though they’ll be gone, all will be well, thanking me for my concern. I’m relieved for him, but how could all be well or tolerable if I can’t get my meatloaf mix?

I have spent years making fun of meatloaf, which technically is a way to stretch meat — a primitive Hamburger Helper. Those who claim that day-old-meatloaf sandwiches are better than the steaming aromatic preliminary have been easy to knock down, in a “so you love leftovers?” way.

They are right, of course, but the hot stuff must be worth getting cold in the first place.

The problem with meatloaf is its total surrender: each ingredient just gives up. Keeping the animal muscle moist with milky breadcrumbs and canned tomato isn’t enough; the parts should gain and strengthen through their baking, not wave the gray-meat flag the moment they spy an oven.

Yet a meatloaf’s blending of identities, not ideal for creativity but the essence of democratic cooking, should result in a satisfying culinary negotiation. I have never cooked or eaten great meatloaf, because that’s not a possibility, but I’d like to offer one you could bed down with.

I am aware that home cooks across the country will draw swords at my claim, but martial meatloafing is not the point. The sweetest thing about meatloaf is that there’s no best one. It’s a meat mirror, reflecting the face of the one cooking it, and the one eating. All I may do is show myself in the following flexible recipe, developed over many winter tries:

• 1 1/2 lbs. ground beef-pork-veal mix, or all ground chuck
• 1 raw egg
• 1/2 cup of fresh or dried breadcrumbs (or panko) with or without crusts, makes no great difference
• 1/2 medium onion
• 1 small carrot (more makes it too sweet)
• 1 rib of celery
• 4 or 5 peeled cloves of garlic or to taste (I like garlic)
• 3 or 4 pitted prunes
• good salt
• some kind of pepper: black, red flakes, powdered cayenne, even a lively chile, seeds removed
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
• optional: 1 or 2 crushed anchovies or a shake of Worcestershire sauce. Cider or wine vinegar. Some folks like nutmeg or allspice (I don’t).

The goal is to make two medium-size loaves you shape by hand, moist enough so they won’t dry out, but not so loose they sink and flatten in the pan before they hit the heat.

Set oven at 350 degrees. Lightly oil an ovenproof pan — I use 8″ x 12″ Pyrex — or two pie plates.

Place the chopped meat in the largest bowl you have, handling the sticky mass as if it were fluffy. Make a well in the middle and crack your egg in. If you squint, the yolk will look like a glazed orange garnet set in a brooch of deep carnelian. That shining jewel, I realize, is my only foregone meatloaf memory, one that waits for red-tipped fingers to break it.

Loosely chop the vegetables, prunes, and possible anchovy into chunks, and either Cuisinart them quickly to retain some texture or continue to mince by hand.

Oh, before you do that, soak the breadcrumbs in milk. A recipe for meatballs in the Sarcoptes or “Meat Mincer” chapter of ancient Rome’s Apicius cookbook adds red wine instead to its filler, which you may do too. One ripped slice of any bread in that same machine above takes a few seconds to crumb.

Add the vegetable mixture and sodden crumbs to the bowl, with modest amounts of salt and whichever pepper. I season by eye. You don’t want to mask or strip the flavor that sits in the meat; you hope to provide accompaniment.

We were given hands in order to stick them into Cthulhu treats such as the one in front of you, so pretend you’re mud-wrestling or caught in quicksand and squish everything around until a single, though particulate, tone is reached. Don’t squeeze and press the air out; play staccato piano in the bowl. Do not even think to answer the phone or door until you are done.

Add more milk or a dash of vinegar if too dry; more dry crumbs if too wet.

No need to rinse your hands. Grab half the stuff and place in half the pan, patting and poking it into a rounded, oblong loaf a few inches high, sides away from the edge so an almost-crust may form. Do the same in the other half. Manipulate the pair so they at least appear to be the same size (they never are), which also allows them to cook at about the same rate.

Present the unattractive duo to your eating partner as if they were a king’s ransom, put ‘em in the oven and bake for a little more than half an hour (depends upon how cold the meat is when you start) to an internal temperature of 155 degrees — that’s all. A siren fragrance will fill your kitchen, one that invites you to the food, but paradoxically always surpasses it.

Remove the pan and test the loaves if you need to. Everyone else’s meatloaf is overdone: not ours.

Tomorrow you may burn the remainder crisp and sign your snack with ketchup, enjoying it hot or cold, for breakfast or dinner, on bread or off, anyway you like. Meatloaf is meatloaf, and your own loaf life is now completely up to you.

Update: When I wrote “loosely chop the vegetables,” I meant the prunes to be included. One charming reader couldn’t read my mind, so I made their place in the mix crystal-clear.

Do you wonder, as I do, what every faded stain once tasted like?

Oh, the captions for the Obit slideshow seem to have slipped away, so just in case you’re curious, here they are:

1) Menu from the Hotel Oxford Restaurant, Coffee Shop, Piccadilly Circus Cocktail Lounge, San Francisco
2) Portion of Oxford Hotel menu
3) WWII cover of a New York Central railway menu. The “V” stands for Victory, not Veal.
4) Dinner menu from “Bermudian” steamer, May 12, 1910
5) Another San Francisco menu, this one printed as a balsa-wood postcard that Grison’s Steak & Chop House would mail for free, c.1940
6) Menu cover for Mon Lay Won, the “Chinese Delmonico,” c.1915. Mon Lay Won was considered a “destination” Chinatown restaurant for both Chinese and non-Chinese customers.
7) Portion of Mon Lay Won’s bill of fare. Yellow Fish Brain is a hefty $1.50.
8) “Two of a Kind” photo pasted on back of “Bermudian” cruise menu

Best not to read old menus on an empty stomach.

You need not ask me to explain the piles of old restaurant menus and food ephemera loaded into boxes and bags in my closet, because each item is more than glad to tell its story. The 1920s candy wrapper with crumbs of ancient chocolate hiding in the creases or stained S.S. Lurline dinner card (to and from Hawaii) are straining to brag about their former flavors and who last sampled them. Vintage object are patient in the long run, but they ultimately demand total attention.

When I brought that candy wrapper home from the flea, it forced me to wet my finger, press it down, and lift a very few of the tiny brown specks to my mouth. Thrilling! The ghost of chocolate past. In the same way,  I was compelled to read my hundreds of menus and labels and play a version of the “catalog game,” picking one thing from each I’d most like to have.

The blackberry fried pie, crossed out in the unused glassine wrapper above, is no doubt better than the apple. I’ll take it.

What would I order from Hackney’s on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, the “world’s largest seafood restaurant”? A proud vacationer took this menu home on Monday, June 23, 1947, a few months before I was born — the date’s scrawled on the cover.  Would it be the Lobster Thermidore with French Fries — double French on the classy Jersey shore — and biscuits , plus coffee or tea, $2.50? Don’t get too excited, Jeff, that’s the equivalent of $25.50 now. Or the Soft Shell Platter, much cheaper, but probably fresher, at $1.75.

The fantasy is that everything was fresher in the past, in the world you never saw. Tastes, and pleasures, were embryonic and unsullied. Laughs were sweeter, too. Each item on every old menu is the apple before Eve.

Next week, Obit Magazine  will post a piece of mine called “What Dead People Ate.” (I’ll alert you.) The hook is the 40,000-strong menu collection of the New York Public Library and how the staff is crowdsourcing in order to create a menu-item database. But I’d like to share with Out There readers a menu of my own and story I didn’t include.

Mon Lay Won, the “Chinese Delmonico,” was a turn-of-the-last-century destination restaurant for Chinese and non-Chinese New Yorkers at 24 Pell Street. The site now holds the not-bad Vegetarian Dim Sum House.

Here’s a photo of the place c. 1910, cropped from one on the fascinating website Shorpy:

Mon Lay Won, the Chinese Delmonico, 24 Pell St., New York (1910)

Chinese food had already entered non-Chinese U.S. culture, the “exotic” dishes garnished with Tong Wars spice and the usual racist pigtail-caricature. On Dec. 12, 1897, the New York Times ran an almost too perfect example of how Mon Lay Won could serve as a journalistic stage for such charming cultural control: a piece about a Chinese wedding party, described as if the attendees had dropped from Mars. “Between the click, click of the chop sticks, a babel of sounds, gutteral and nasal, could be heard….”

Most times, of course, you must look past the Gray (not Yellow) Lady to get at any multifaceted story. The latest China Heritage Quarterly published by the Australian National University has a rich and unexpected article by Scott D. Seligman about how Chinese merchant New Yorkers in 1903 helped Jews to raise money for pogrom victims in Russia. Here, Mon Lay Won plays a somewhat different role; it may help to know that the Mr. Singleton mentioned below happens to be Chinese:

After the benefit, which raised $280 for the Kishinev Jews, Singleton threw a banquet for some prominent New Yorkers at the Chinese Delmonico Restaurant. No ordinary chop suey joint, Delmonico’s–Mon Lay Won (Wan Li Yun) in Chinese–was a handsomely decorated, somewhat upscale establishment at 24 Pell Street that catered to Chinese and non-Chinese diners alike and was known throughout the city. It had Chinese-style coffered ceilings adorned with lanterns, wooden arches richly carved with dragon motifs and Chinese paintings on its walls. Round tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl decorations filled the hall, and guests sat around them on wooden stools.

Mon Lay Won (1905). From collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

Among the dinner guests that night was the famous Yiddish theatre actress Bertha Kalisch, who was appearing nearby. She and the other Jews present were apparently unfazed by the fact that Mon Lay Won, which featured pork and shrimp dishes prominently on its menu, was the antithesis of a kosher establishment. Exactly what was served that night is not recorded, but at a similar dinner Singleton had hosted there a few months before – also attended by several prominent Jews–pork and shellfish were notably absent from the table. That night, roast squab, chicken stuffed with reindeer ham, bamboo shoots and mushrooms and several varieties of fruit were served, although there was a course of shark’s fin soup. It appears that the Chinese hosts were trying, within their limited understanding of Jewish dietary laws, to make their Jewish guests as comfortable as they could, and that the Jews–at least some of whom surely were observant–were doing their best to meet the Chinese halfway.

Maybe now my Mon Lay Won menu will be quiet, and I can pass over its mongrel chop sueys and choose instead the Yellow Fish Brain for $1.50, Chinese Green Sprouts for 25 cents, and Green Plum preserves for my dessert.

A portion of the Mon Lay Won bill of fare

The other day I typed in my Manhattan tenement address and whirled the Google eye to one of our two street-front windows. Let’s see how close I can go … there’s the air conditioner, the tree branch blocking a shape …

I gasped.

You can see what I saw in the image above. Is that me looking out, being caught by some Universal Intelligence and now being observed by another me?

It sure does look like my suit-and-tie Gravatar at the top-right of this page. But if that is indeed my face, or any face, why is it so pale? Isn’t that the way a ghost, my own ghost, a Google ghost, would appear?

It’s a normal, unthreatening block I live on, as the less magnified Google shot below makes clear. The street’s not obviously haunted, although decades ago, standing at that same window, I saw a man I knew from the neighborhood plunge a knife into another man on the sidewalk directly across from me. The guy I recognized may have been defending himself, I couldn’t tell, and I don’t know what happened to the victim. The one with the weapon was led away by police.

Now I see that once handsome man-with-the-knife behind the counter of his own Polish luncheonette, fat and gray, dishing out kielbasa.

Soon after we moved in to our tiny place, my spouse wrote a sad short story called “The Previous Tenant,” about the traces such a young, possibly gay, probably disturbed presence left behind. John had found some wrenching journal scraps, some scrawls on the wall. Where did the poor fellow disappear to?

For that matter, I discovered a small stash of creased, black-and-white snapshots buried in the drawer beneath the apartment’s only closet. Each one showed a drab older lady in a Ukrainian-style babushka, no expression on her face. The photos could have been taken in the 1920s, the ’30s, it was hard to know. No expression, no telling details, a record of life that’s no record at all.

Do you know the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”? It too looks out a window, after husband Gabriel hears wife Gretta, for the first time, recall and weep over “delicate” Michael, her long-lost love:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

After Halloween, we know, comes the snow. Even with Google off and curtains drawn, we’ll never want for ghosts at the window.

Each of us is poised to be haunted by our very own.

"Protest Stencil Toolkit" samples in a gallery

Late last week I received this email:

Attn Jeff Weinstein, Blogger
Out There
In light of the current Wall Street protests, the PROTEST STENCIL TOOLKIT could
really come in handy. A clever book of die-cut stencils, each page reflects a
concern (financial, environmental, political…) while including examples from
the great protest movements of the 20th century. An interesting resource for
designers and artists, this book is also a serious look at the powerful graphics
of protest.
J-pegs and books are available upon request. Thanks for sharing this timely
book with your followers.
Debra Matsumoto
US Press & Marketing
Laurence King Publishing

Gosh, I had so much trouble fitting “Get Anita Bryant Off Our Breakfast Tables” on one sheet of oaktag, so maybe this would help. Odd that I couldn’t find a link to the book, so I Googled it. Protest Stencil Toolkit was done in the U.K. by one Patrick Thomas, also invisible in the email, and published in May.

What a smart firm, to have anticipated such a trenchant mass-consumer market. Here’s the beyond-apt catalog copy:

The enabling tome by Patrick Thomas

With this book anyone can create protest graphics. The 46 die-cut stencils, plus a bespoke typeface, can be combined to create both slogans and powerful visual messages, and are robust enough to be re-used any number of times. There are classic symbols from the great protest movements of the twentieth century, as well as new images reflecting contemporary concerns – such as the environment and the economy. These are the building blocks of visual statement, and this book is the essential toolkit for the graphics of protest.

I especially like “robust enough to be re-used any number of times” — like, for the rest of our lives.  I myself am looking for a way to incorporate that sweet cow, above.

Reader quiz: Can we think of any other backlist gems to piggyback on current events? Das Kapital doesn’t count.

Overhead shot of Occupy Times Square, Oct. 15, 2011

Ray's Pizza, 27 Prince Street, New York -- but not for long

If you read the New York Times, you may know that Ray’s Pizza is about to bite the dust. I’m going to direct you to a piece I wrote for Obit Magazine on that very subject in just a minute, and all the pertinent links are there. But first, I need to say some things to those few who hadn’t heard the tremendous news and are now beginning your slow swoons of nostalgic regret.

Ray’s isn’t that good. It never was. It’s just OK.

Ray’s, the first one on Prince Street and not the many famous original first authentic namesakes around town, isn’t all that old, either. Yours truly was in eighth grade when it opened, and I’m still a boy at heart; JFK would be elected one year after. Paris is peppered with bistros and restaurants two, three times its age, a few of them with opening-day napkins still being used.

None of that makes any difference, because if you love Ray’s or, more likely, love the idea of Ray’s, you will feel its loss terribly. Imaginary madeleines are just as powerful as real ones, because both lead to memories of pizzas past. Don’t be confused when, as you return for a last supper at Ray’s or any of your shuttering favorites, it doesn’t seem “the same.” Every bite we take is different from all our previous ones — even of the same thing. Can’t help that, it’s the way we’re built.

Here’s that link, but do come back.

Me, I have no “best” pizza in my repertoire. I can tap only novel ones with bacon marmalade, chain-store ones I carefully burned to a tasty crisp, flaccid ones that dropped their glop onto my single pair of good pants.

Then there was the one brought to us by Mercury, the fleet-footed waiter. He ran to the kitchen to pick up the tray, ran back toward the open archway, grabbed some salt from an open bowl– I hope it was salt — and flung it on top. Never stopping, he placed his gift gently on our outdoor table, smiling a young man’s wooing smile.

It was almost midnight. Ana, John and I sat at the edge of a small, ancient piazza, its dead fountain and dirty columns lit by Fellini floods that turned the holes of darkness around us into black velvet. The crust of my first Rome pizza cracked under my hand, but I scooped the loose tomato and hot, white cheese before they could fall and lifted everything into my mouth.

Earth.

Grass.

Sun.

Our friend Ana, artist Ana Mendieta, knew how we would respond, and for a moment at least she didn’t say a word — just threw back her head and laughed a generous, raucous laugh that echoed and bounced around the piazza’s cold stone.

Still, I’m going to take a risk and post a piece I wrote right after 9/11 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, if only to demonstrate to myself how words can erase a decade.

I was then a back-of-the-book arts editor, and though departments dissolved as we all pitched in to gather and edit every bit of information we could, we also had to put out a features section. For the first day, we decided on a package in which staffers could volunteer to each write a short piece about one emotion: anger, revenge, etc.

Although we were doing our jobs soberly, like Front Page pros, emotion was the elephant in the newsroom.

Here’s mine:

Fear

By Jeff Weinstein
Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer
Sept. 13, 2001

He told me he was going to the gym before heading to the office, and of course I thought nothing of it. You wouldn’t either. He worked out every other day, in one of two places: on East 13th Street, or “near the World Trade Center” when he wanted to swim.

Was it a morning he wanted to swim?

I write this with a photograph in front of me of one burning tower and a plane about to crash into the other. I can hardly keep my eyes on the keyboard.

And why, why had I never asked him just how near that gym was?

Reader, relax. He’s all right.

My body and my brain have been home to many emotions, but fear, thank goodness, has been something of a stranger. I have had guns pulled on me, and a few times I’ve almost died, but for the most part things came too fast or too shallow for me ever to have feared for myself. Fear, it seems, bares its teeth mostly when you’re afraid for someone else.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. When that “someone else” is as good as a part of you, fear shows no favorites. Him, you, all the same. He’s at risk, you’re at risk. He’s hurt, you’re hurt. He dies, …

Tuesday, that intolerable equation was my new math.

At 9 a.m. I tried to phone him, my partner for life, but as we now know, one terror of terrorism is that rapid bleep, or the “call cannot go through,” or the petrifying nothing on the line. I finally got through to his workplace, but by 10, and then 11, he hadn’t arrived. They hadn’t heard from him, didn’t know where he was.

So, without warning, without even a proper introduction, I came, as they say, “face to face” with fear. I did my best to make sure no one at the office knew he was with me.

Here is the reporter’s description:

He breathed short and hard, like an asthmatic without inhaler.

His skin was hot and damp. It prickled, too, in a way that would make anyone pray the feeling would stop.

His heart was audible, a permanent busy signal.

He was, physically, inside-out, as if every part of him, not just his stomach, were immersed in nausea.

I know that many others have met fear: mates and lovers of firefighters and police, pilots and train engineers. Parents – not all, but some – are thoroughly familiar. But fear so intimate was new to me.

What helps? Weeping blurs the feeling, but does not erase it. Around 2 p.m., the phones relented, and I reached my partner. I told him how worried I was. It turns out he had been evacuated from a subway into a street of thousands of ash-covered refugees, and he walked miles with a shirt over his head so he could breathe. He was unhappy, he said, that he had caused me worry.

He himself hadn’t been afraid, just “sort of numb.”

When I hung up, I looked around, and he was still there. He didn’t leave my side until I received this on the computer:

Hi Jeff. E-mail now working but can’t get long distance. 5:37 p.m. Most stores closed, since they are run by people who live in the boroughs. Sounds of sirens. Still big smoke billowing up downtown….St. Marks Bookstore open. Kim’s Video closed.

Am O.K.

Johnny