You can never hold back spring

Margie and I postponed our conversation this week because I got Pfizered on Monday and was knocked out on Tuesday. She’ll turn 95 this year, and her kids have asked her what she’d like, in the way of a celebration.

New York City. 

“What I love best is free. It’s the life of the streets: watching the people, feeling that energy of being young and alive and ambitious in New York. If they could get a wheelchair and wheel me all along the High Line and end at the Whitney Museum, I would love that.”

She’d go to the Bronx, where she was born, and to P.S. 23, where she went to Elementary School. She’d like to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), to Washington Square around NYU (where she was a student for two years before her marriage). If her kids (one of whom is a physician with offices in an old brownstone and a condo on Fifth Avenue) would wheel her into Bergdorf-Goodman’s, where her mother worked in the basement, wrapping packages, she’d like to smell it again. “It has a smell like nowhere else on earth, Bergdorf-Goodman.” 

To Central Park, of course. “Many places in Central Park are right next to my brain stem. Big events of my life happened there.”

Maybe she’d like to see a play, go to an opera. But maybe not. “Mainly I want to sit somewhere and watch the show. It’s the greatest show on earth, New York. The kids tell me it’s changed, well of course it’s changed. Look at me. I’ve changed. I’m not expecting that it hasn’t changed. But I still want to see it. I want to see all those changes, and it’s still my home.”

You can never hold back spring. Definitely not in the heart of Margie Karter.