Elegy for Sandy

 

A car service is a distinctly New York City outer borough thing.  Cheaper than a Yellow Cab, and often cheaper than Uber, a car service is the cheapest and easiest way to get somewhere the Metropolitan Transit Authority doesn’t go.  In order to use a car service, you call them.  The dispatcher answers and assigns a driver to pick you up.

 

About 15 years ago I got priced out of Manhattan and moved to Brooklyn. Shortly thereafter my partner and I adopted Augie, a beagle/Brittany mix whom we rescued from Animal Care and Control.  We tried a series of daycare places, and finally lucked out with Paws in Paradise on Fifth Avenue. 

 

A car service is the easiest way to transport a medium-sized dog who weighs too much to take on the subway in a crate.  At our current car service we usually got one of three drivers.  One of them was Sandy.  He started driving us years ago, and during Covid-19 nearly every weekday.  Sandy was of average height, barrel-chested, wire-rimmed glasses, shaggy gray hair and a walrus mustache.  He was a few years older than me.  Like me, Sandy was divorced, an anti-racist Democrat and had lived in New York for a long time. 

 

Over the years, Sandy and I became close. Some mornings I’d wait for his car, thinking of what I needed to tell him.  Sandy always had a treat for Augie, and Augie always had a tail wag for him.  They actually grew quite attached to each other.  Sandy and I talked about our families, our health and politics.  We both had had all different kinds of jobs; Sandy had originally studied to be a social worker, then went into the restaurant business and wound up managing a parking garage on the west side of in Manhattan.  When we traveled, Sandy would pick my partner and I up from the airport and know to drive us straight to Paws in Paradise so we could pick up Augie.  After one long flight, Sandy picked us up with Burger King burgers because he thought we’d be hungry.  He always gave Augie a special Christmas treat.  One year, Sandy even gave gifts to my partner and me. 

 

In June 2021, Augie and Sandy both got diagnosed with cancer.  I worried about both of them.  Sandy went through multiple hospitalizations and endless tests.  Augie became unable to breath on his own anymore, and we had to put him down at the end of October.  When I had to tell Sandy, his eyes were brimming with tears.  “You see, since we both got diagnosed at the same time, Augie was my cancer buddy.  I needed him,” Sandy said.  He couldn’t talk about Augie anymore, he got too upset.  Sandy Seeman died last month.  It feels so strange not to be able to tell him things anymore, and that he won’t grow to love our new dog, Buddy.  I haven’t been able to find any kind of memorial for Sandy. So I wanted to write one of my own.  We miss him.            

Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

    Alan Trachtenberg, above

During COVID-19, I have found some great books in Little Library's in Brooklyn.  I stumbled on Reading American Photographs in one of them a few weeks ago.  

I thought the book had the potential to be pretty interesting, or really boring, and it was the former.   Turns out that it's this famous book from the late 1980s.  I certainly learned things from it, like the fact that Mathew Brady was the front man for a whole bunch of photographers.  There wasn't one female photographer who Trachtenberg covered seriously; frankly, I think Dorothea Lange or Berenice Abbott is way more interesting than Walker Evans, but that's just me.    Trachtenberg did have interesting things to say about history per se, in addition to the history of the way US audiences perceived photography.

There is only one page where I spotted an error, not obvious to most people.  Chapter 4: Camera Work/Social Work covers Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz.  Trachtenberg describes Stieglitz returning from Europe to New York City, and feeling dislocated. He writes:  "Hearing the Italian opera singer Duse one evening in 1893, he felt a sudden charge:  a contract existed between myself and America.'"  I was shocked to read this, because as any theatre history geek knows, Eleanora Duse was one of the great European actresses of the early 20th century, not to mention the fact that her boyfriend, Gabriele D'Annunzio, inspired Mussolini to invent fascism.  So, Duse did not sing anything.  But presumably Stieglitz saw her act onstage in Italian, and that made him feel more connected to the US, not less (which I think is an interesting thing to contemplate).