Beer with Havel

Rachel had thirty years or so on me, give or take a month, but when I was not yet forty I could barely keep up with her. A typical whirlwind jaunt through the upper west side- sometimes after a full six hour and twenty minute day of grappling with a barrel of exploding hormones in a high school English class- might very well involve checking out any number of boutiques and book stores where we undressed and redressed at lightning speed and thumbed through myriad novels, stopping to speak with random strangers on the street as we went, then grabbing a quick snack of arroz con pollo in some postage stamp of a Cuban Chinese eatery to fuel our further wanderings before we careened back up the West Side Highway in one of her newly acquired second hand Volvos, which she frequently insisted I drive because that was the one thing she really hated.

I met her in the laundry room of the building in which we both lived  and she began talking about authors as if we were old friends who simply were in the middle of a conversation we’d been having for hours. I was hooked. She was barely five feet tall with a gravelly, knowing voice and the proverbial piercing, sea blue eyes set in a face straight out of a Russian shtetl, from whence it turns out she actually had arrived nearly seven decades earlier at the tender age of barely toddlerdom, back in the glory days before WWI. Her impeccable diction and intonation belied these infant immigrant roots and emanated straight from the universe of FDR, where the only theng to feeah was feeah itself. She was a tiny and well read presence of great importance and in a word, authoritative. She also had a dry and potent sense of humor of the caustic type, a scarily discriminating eye and a hugely capitalized Gusto for life. In no time at all she became my role model. I wanted to be Rachel when I grew up and old, and go anything but gentle into the good night.