The New Yorker

Somewhere along there in my formative years, starting during my time with Hilary but then in full immersive fashion once Mary and I became first a couple and then a family, I became aware that this magazine The New Yorker had within it a full culture which contained its fullest flowering in the William Shawn era before its famous debasement under Tina Brown and more or less redemption under David Remnick. I remember feeling somewhat left out of it all, of encountering mounds of old magazines in the attic in Larchmont that were never quite old enough to get back to the very best stuff, compounded by the fact that I was too busy learning to survive/flourish in the for profit world and raise children to actually plumb its depths.

As it turns out, of course, the golden age of the magazine is all preserved in books and I've read much of it that way, first and foremost the work of books of Johns Brooks and McPhee but also McPhee's student Peter Hessler. In fact, it is much harder to find a good non-fiction writer who hasn't at one point in time been associated with the magazine than one who has. For example, it is likely not accidental that Michael Lewis somehow was never a staff writer there. There is probably a story there about him fighting with Tina Brown, or somebody on the staff being close to John Gutfreund, or...

But I degress. 

When Dwight first came into the Berridge house in Larchmont the night of our rehearsal dinner in 1997, he was immediately struck by how much it was the quintessence of an old New York City suburb house with decades of stories baked into everything. To me it was just the Berridge house, I guess it was the first such one I had ever spent a lot of time in.

And now, as 2023 kicks off, I find myself once more in the bedroom of George and Susan's in White Plains, a pale shadow of Larchmont, but surrounded by much of the old stuff, even if it is shoehorrned into the middle of the southern bric a brac with which Susan furnished this house before retreating first to Texas, then to Mississippi.

I have myself long since felt myself a naturalized citizen of the NYC metro area, even though we live in NC. I love much about this place, though I am happy that we just visit it now. I can live with that.