Bolshevik on the Roof

"Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life."

—Irving Berlin

As usual, it's slow going here in the morning, with a knee that's still giving me fits, mostly in the dead of night when my foot hangs on the comforter and gives the knee a painful twist as I roll over. Hips hurt too. This bed is too damned soft. I guess I'm getting there myself.

Last night sitting in my estate planning class, it occurred to me that I'm now making the transition from the "isn't this cool?" phase of the NYU adventure, to "oh shit--this stuff is incredibly hard." I remember the same inflection point nearly forty years ago when I arrived at Columbus AFB for pilot training. At first I was excited to parade around in my Columbus Class 88-02 Undergraduate Pilot Training sweatshirt (I wonder what became of that?), to walk into the squadron in a crisp flight suit reeking of nomex. Hey, look at me!

Then guys started washing out, instructors sat next to me in the Tweet alternating between eye rolls and frustrated, sometimes sarcastic commentary on my fundamental inability to make the jet do what I wanted it to do. The honeymoon ended, and the grind began once it became manifest that I could actually fail at this.

So I found myself in a brooding mood on the walk back from campus last night after utterly bungling an estate tax classification (lesson learned--don't think, Donk. Run the checklist!). Along the way I found my appetite, and dreading the thought of eating microwaved leftover stew alone in a dark apartment, stopped into Remedy, a classic New York diner less than a block away. The place was mostly empty, Spectrum TV News playing on the big screen at the other end of the restaurant with highlights of the day's mayhem around town. A guy was giving an interview behind me, talking about favorite desserts and other trivia. My waitress was a nice lady from some Caribbean island, about my age, with unnaturally pinkish red hair. She kept calling me "sweetie", which I sort of liked. These solitary weeks away from P are the worst.

Today I have work stacked up, mountains of study as the syllabi move from introductory materials to some pretty technical and complicated stuff, and a couple hours in partnership tax class to break up the day. Long considered the hardest but most essential thing in the tax law curriculum, I find it's the easiest of the four courses. Which is saying something.

Every day on my way back here from Washington Square, Comrade Vladimir Lenin greets me with a wave from a rooftop over on Norfolk Street, right behind where I'm sitting.

The Lenin statue is one of many weird and endearing touches to this neighborhood.

You see, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Vladimir Ilyich found himself lying in a garbage heap in Moscow, where he was discovered by two real estate developers from the City who brought him home to the East Village. He spent a couple decades atop a building known as Red Square, where the lefty building owners faced him down toward Wall Street and the Financial District, as sort of an "up yours" to the Wolf of Wall Street crowd. This neighborhood has a long, long history of leftist politics, at least until it became the gentrified version I'm occupying today.

About a decade ago Red Square was redeveloped, and old Volodya faced another existential crisis. Again, however, he was saved and moved to his present location over on the next street, where he greets the traffic flowing down Essex, drivers and passengers probably blissfully unaware that the father of Soviet communism stands perched a few stories above.

A happy ending, I guess. Lenin's not going anywhere, but at the same time I don't see much enthusiasm for anything he stood for.

Time to lean in. Did I mention this tax stuff is hard?