Rules of Civility (47 page)

I love Val. I love my job and my New York. I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.

Back in December 1938, alone in that little room on Gansevoort Street, having already cast my lot with Mason Tate and the Upper East Side, I stood beside Tinker's empty suitcase and his cold coal stove and I read his promise to start every day by saying my name.

For a while, I guess I had done the same—I had started the days saying his. And just as he had imagined, it had helped me maintain some sense of direction, some sort of unerring course over seas tempest-tost.

But like so much else, that habit had been elbowed aside by life—becoming first intermittent, then rare, then lost to time.

 

Standing on my balcony overlooking Central Park almost thirty years later, I didn't punish myself for having let the practice lapse. I knew too well the nature of life's distractions and enticements—how the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises.

No. I wasn't too hard on myself for all those years that had passed without my saying Tinker's name. But on the following morning, I woke with it on my lips. And so I have on so many mornings since.

APPENDIX

The Young George Washington's
Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation

 

Acknowledgments

Foremost, I thank my wife and children along with my parents, siblings, and in-laws, for providing me with endless hours of joy and support. I thank Messrs. Arndt, Britton, Loening, and Seirer for being such extraordinary colleagues and friends over the last fifteen plus years. I thank my close companions and fellow readers Ann Brashares, Dave Gilbert & Hilary Reyl, as well as Sarah Burnes, Pete McCabe, and Jeremy Mindich, who all gave valuable feedback. Special thanks to Jennifer Walsh, Dorian Karchmar & the team at William Morris, Paul Slovak & the team at Viking, and Jocasta Hamilton at Sceptre who helped bring this work out into the world. And thanks to all the excellent purveyors of coffee from Canal Street to Union Square as well as to the Danny Meyer and Keith McNally organizations for providing such terrific stomping grounds.

Looking further back, I want to thank my grandmothers who had such poise and verve; Peter Matthiessen, whose early confidence made all the difference; Dick Baker, who remains my paragon of intellectual curiosity and discipline; Bob Dylan for creating several lifetimes' worth of inspiration; and Chance for landing me so unexpectedly in New York.