MountainMornings

My sister Kay is home in her vintage apartment. She’s been here for over 50 years, as long as I can remember. Stunning artwork is sprinkled around her dusty pink walls, it seems that nothing has changed. The old lady upstairs is still moving furniture every night.

Luckily the doormen are divine! That is a very important part of life on the Upper East Side.

When I was a teen I would arrive at the Port of Authority-now I wonder about that moniker but then I took it for granted- and she would meet my bus. We’d hail a cab and head uptown. There were no lines, no Uber.

Kay was my beautiful big sister. She taught me how to walk in NYC, never looking UP like a tourist. She told me not to smile at strange men. We went to the finest restaurants and she would say, “Order anything you want!”

Kay would correct my speech, so that a NJ accent never took hold.

I admired and adored her as only a little sister could. Marriage just wasn’t her thing, she tried it for awhile, but a wild rose is hard to tame. So when she fell and broke her hip she was alone.

Our niece Karen drove up from DC before her surgery and Kay told her a sub-acute rehab hospital was not in her vocabulary. When I arrived on the Fourth of July she was eager to recover. But please people, don’t end up in a hospital when new residents are starting their training, or on a holiday weekend.

Recovery can be slow going.

Today I walked down Madison Avenue making faces at the children clutching the hands of their nannies looking down at their phones. I would always get a smile.

I stopped to pet the French Bulldog who just returned from Nantucket. His name is Gus!

There are more nail salons than I remember. The Armory where the police kept their horses is now a school. Things change, but not my sister’s apartment.

In this heat wave she is worried about running the AC. It is a balancing act; I turn it on and she turns it off. She grew up really poor, whereas I guess I was just poor. She was only 14 years old when our Father died and and the Year of Living Dangerously commenced.

It was a midsummer nightmare on the Fourth of 1949.

Now post-surgery my sister Kay is rallying as usual, walking with a rollator and taking no prisoners. The Flapper would be proud!