I have been very frustrated of late at the handful of views this blog now gets — unless I also put it on Facebook and Twitter.
Is it that boring?
WordPress tells me 23,000 people follow it and I am appreciative of the loyal band who does show up to read and comment.
Anyway…life for now:
Torrential rain has hit our area — affecting 23 million people. The subways of New York — an essential service — and even the buses! — have been flooded. Streets are impassable. Even the commuter rail system shut for a while. Any climate deniers remaining are absolute ostriches. I moved here in 1989 and have never seen weather like this.
I have a severely arthritic right hip that, until the past two weeks, has really been destroying my quality of life. There have been days I can barely walk and leave the gym in tears of pain. Now, for no reason I can fathom, I am walking almost normally. It is an enormous relief to not be in pain every day for months!
I tutor a teenager in French, a new venture for us both. One of my blog friends in England shared a great BBC site of lesson plans, so we’re using that, conversing and doing some dictations.
I go to a weekly French conversation group at a local library for an hour, then an hour of Spanish after that. Whew! My brain is very tired at the end, but it’s such an easy way to get out of the apartment, free, and have lively chats. One of the women in the French group told us she’d celebrated her 75th birthday by riding an elephant.
Mahjong is a game of tiles that I associate with ladies wearing cat’s eye glasses and bright caftans. Now I am edging my way into it as well, thanks to some neighbors in the building who ask me to join their group from time to time.
I’m still writing for The New York Times, now on my third personal finance story this year for them. I have a second session scheduled this coming week with a global PR agency who hires me to review pitches to journalists that failed to get traction and discuss how they might have worked better. I’m very glad of the income.
I also still coach other writers at an hourly fee; here’s the link. One of my clients recently sold a story we worked on to the Washington Post, a much-coveted outlet for ambitious writers. Another was delighted to find an outlet for a story he had had difficulty placing — and our session was much enhanced by the presence of his tiny perfect hedgehog!
Two great bits of news — we paid off our mortgage! Now we own our apartment outright.
And we leave soon for four days ‘ vacation at a Quebec resort we love, then five days renting a house in Vermont, a state I love and haven’t been back to in decades. October is the perfect time for both. My husband works so hard at his three freelance jobs and we need time off the computer and away from home, which is also our workspace. Can’t wait!
Me in stripes (circa 1905) on my 1st wedding day; my maid of honor in a Victorian cotton gown
By Caitlin Kelly
For some people, it’s not an issue, nothing they ever think about. For others, an obsession.
I love love love people with a strong sense of style, in their home and their wardrobe. I spent my 25th year living in Paris and have been back many times since, every time noticing the many ways French women choose to dress and accessorize. I’m also very inspired by the architecture, patina, color combinations and use of materials I see there.
The marbled streets of Rovinj, Croatia
I grew up around people who had great style, and it very much influenced me. My father had an absurd number of safari jackets, my late stepmother was truly mad for costly clothes and accessories and my mother wore everything from saris (it was the 60s!) to a glossy dark mink with an emerald silk lining. My maternal grandmother, who was very wealthy, wore custom made raw silk muumuus with matching turbans, often with a massive jewel pinned to her bodice or hat.
My mom, in younger years
Hard not to emerge, then, without some appreciation for visual wit and beauty!
This recent New York Times business story is about several young women who are making a very good living telling other women what to buy — as women’s magazines have all disappeared, it’s very challenging trying to find anything I want to wear. The market couldn’t care less about women over 50, and I’m not a fan of Chico’s and Eileeen Fisher, deemed the default for older American women.
Here are my 10 tips:
Know your taste! It’s easy when young and broke to just wear and live with whatever we can afford at the time: Ikea, thrift, stuff on sale. I still remember exactly what I wore at 19 as a broke university student. Once we have a bit more disposable income we have choices! Then it’s time to start deciding what we really like best…I read magazines, look at social media, see what stylish friends choose. It’s not per se about money but making thoughtful choices.
When I first met my husband, Jose, I was immediately attracted to his unusual and confident sense of style — he combined a vintage wool coat with a (!) red silk Buddhist prayer shawl as a muffler and he smelled divine, his cologne the classic 1881. DONE! He occasionally wears slim silver bangles and they look terrific on him.
Vintage clothing/accessories always add a fresh bit of style, whether a great hat or scarf or battered leather jacket or a band T-shirt. I have a gorgeous small mirrored handbag I got at the Dublin flea market — Indian — that always wins compliments. I splurged on a vintage man’s ring with a Gothic lettered C which is my initial and the font of the NYT, for whom I’ve written more than 100 stories. The ring isn’t diamonds or rubies, but carries great personal significance for me — and I wear a fair bit of black. My black and white snowflake obsidian oversize vintage Navajo ring is another treasure, bought for $50 in the New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences.
Choose a a color palette for your clothes and accessories that flatters your hair color, eye color and skin tone. Some colors will wash you out, some will be too harsh. I live in black, brown, cream, navy, olive green, teal. I don’t wear red or purple or bright yellow or neon colors, any of which might be stunning on someone else.
A terrific hair cut and color are huge. I see too many women with lousy hair color (usually too dark or too bright or stripe-y “highlights.”) It took me four different not-very-good local stylists before I asked one of my physical therapists for the name of hers — and I now drive an hour into Manhattan for a great cut and I drive 20 minutes to Connecticut for color. Men can be sure to keep their hair well-trimmed and all stray nose and ear hairs…under control! Great grooming is a major element of style. And please hem your trousers to the right length — even men in their wedding photos seem to have no clue.
Choose a consistent clothing style — mine tends to be minimal: no prints, patterns, flounces, frills, plaids. Knowing what suits you best means saving a lot of wasted time and money on things you know aren’t really you at all.
But…take some chances and mix it up! I splurged this past summer on a pair of gold sandal clogs. They’re unlike anything I’ve ever owned and they’re gorgeous; from my favorite clothing site, Sezane. I recently helped a much younger friend choose possible accessories for a wedding she’s attending. I suggested a few colors she had never thought of and loved; I did get an A in my color class while studying at the New York School of Interior Design. (Red and green, for example, aren’t just deep, bright Xmas colors together — think or a soft rose with a light olive green.)
I found these little metal lanterns in a Minnesota cafe for maybe $18 each
Same principles apply to your home…if you adore Mission furniture (not me) or Lucite or big chairs, make sure your home doesn’t end up looking like a hotel or furniture showroom — all matchy matchy. The most stylish rooms pay careful attention to all the details: wall, ceiling and floor color (people forget that your bare floor itself adds a huge pile of color); lighting (avoid overhead lighting when possible or put it on a dimmer); the shape, size, color and finish of your hard goods like chests of drawers, side tables, etc. Avoid a tedious sea of gray or dark brown or glass!
A consistent color palette will unify your space, even in a studio; stick to maybe 3 or 4 colors.
Design books (available at the library) and magazines and dozens of design websites like Canada’s House and Home or Apartment Therapy or the UK’s Homes & Gardens offer plenty of inspiration and ideas. Stampeding to the style du jour (shiplap, sliding barn doors inside, etc.) can leave you behind a few years later.
Four of my favorite sites for great design inspo are British — of course! Oka now has several U.S. stores and the two fabric stores are very helpful and ship abroad — The Cloth Shop has gorgeous linens in a wide array of colors and lots of lovely cottons. I bought their blue chenille in 2017 and used it cover our bed’s headboard. It still looks brand-new. Fabrics and Papers sells fabric and wallpaper, some of it scarily expensive but so much of it stunning and in much more interesting colors and motifs than anything available here without hiring a designer.
And you know my love for all Farrow & Ball colors — so obsessive I visited their Dorset factory while on vacation in July 2017. A thrill! One of the many things I like: small sample pots for $8 and the fact you can have an older archived color made up for you again even years later. Our apartment is mostly their soft gray Skimming Stone, the sitting room now the deep raspberry Rangoli, the kitchen their blue-gray and the bathroom straw.
I bought this signed 1920s lithograph at a NYC auction for $600. Seemed like a bargain to me!
Vintage/antique items can be a terrific and affordable way to add style to your home — from posters and photos to tea towels and table linens and pillowcases and quilts to glassware, cutlery, bowls and larger pieces like a gorgeous sofa or dining table. Items can be refinished or painted to suit your palette. Groups of three have immediate style.
Travel is a fantastic way to notice other styles, in any form. It might a color (Sweden and Mexico very much influenced my eye) or a style of clothing more popular elsewhere or a seating configuration or a way to present a meal or…Snap photos for your inspiration. Easy to forget what we saw.
Confidence is key. I wore my gold sandal clogs and thought…too young? Will I look silly? People loved them and so do I.
I fell so hard for this Nova Scotia house — perfect in every way, affordable…
but huge plumbing/sewer issuesmeant I had to walk away.
By Caitlin Kelly
I loved this amazing story about Paris and a very fun way to get people together — cheese!
From The New York Times:
“Everyone bought something else that related to them, in a way paying homage to the diversity of France,” Mr. Dard said. Mentioning a former French president, he added, “It’s like de Gaulle said: ‘How can you govern a country where there are 300 different kinds of cheese?’”
The meet-up, known as the Talking Cheese — which combines a smorgasbord of dairy goods with talks by local residents on their subjects of expertise — is one of a dizzying galaxy of activities run by the Republic of Super Neighbors, a grass-roots initiative whose territory spans about 50 streets in the 14th arrondissement, a largely residential district on the Seine’s Left Bank.
More than 1,200 of these so-called Super Neighbors communicate via 40 WhatsApp groups dedicated to queries like finding a cat sitter or seeking help to fix broken appliances. They hold weekly brunches, post-work drinks and community gatherings at which older residents share memories with younger generations. To much fanfare, the group also hosts an annual banquet — La Table d’Aude — for the residents on a table 400 meters long, about 440 yards, running through the middle of a street.
I have now lived more than 30 years — which stuns me — in a small town north of Manhattan. I can see its towers from our street, 25 miles north. I had never ever planned to spend my life in a suburb, that’s for sure! I do love our town and its beauty and history and economic diversity, unusual in Westchester, which has pockets of staggering wealth. I ended up here with my first husband as we could afford a one bedroom apartment near his medical residency. We married, he left, I stayed.
I’m not sure where else I would go — NYC is difficult, costly, dense — and I knew I would never get a mortgage self-employed and didn’t want to subject myself again to the vagaries of the rental market, anywhere.
But suburban life is also a terrible fit for someone with no kids who doesn’t want to spend her weekends hiking. So I am booooooored a lot of the time.
I spent my life, ages 5 to 30, in London, Paris, Toronto and Montreal — all lively cities full of culture and all with excellent public transit. Now I drive everywhere as bus service out here is a bad joke and even a local 5-minute cab ride now $10 with tip.
I lived for 18 months in small town New Hampshire (to accommodate my then boyfriend, then a medical resident there.) It almost killed me. I have never ever been so lonely!
So as I think about moving — when? where? if? how? — it raises a lot of questions about what really makes life joyful for me and my husband. He is much less social and prefers life out here to the city. I’ve also found living here extremely lonely — people obsessed with family or work or people they already know.
So I scour real estate ads for houses — never apartments! — in Quebec and Ontario and parts of France. We don’t have a lot of money to spend so this limits our options. So the houses are small (OK) or need a lot of renovation or are very isolated or too close to a neighbor or right on a busy road or…
Some people are moving to lower-cost places like Portugal or Mexico or Panama, none of which feel right to me.
But if the Republicans win here in 2024, this may also be the deciding factor. I don’t love what Biden has done but the prospect of more right-wing hatred is too chilling.
As someone very happy to flee university after four years, with no appetite for further academic training, I’ve found some less formal ways to learn about the world; the fancy word for someone self-taught is auto-didact and that feels like me.
I later did study again formally, 15 years later, at the New York School of Interior Design and loved every class except for drafting. Our classes were very small and I realized that hands-on and visual learning were a better fit for me than sitting in class listening passively to lectures.
While some people are thrilled to be back in a classroom setting, there are so many other ways to learn.
These are some of the informal ways I learn about the world:
Ballet
The way I’ve discovered some of my favorite pieces of classical music is through watching the ballets they are set to; ballet is an art form I studied for years and love. Two of those pieces are Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev and Serenade, the first full-length ballet created by American choreographer George Balanchine. The music for both is so perfectly aligned with every character and scene. I never tire of hearing it.
The opening chords of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade slay me every single time, bringing me to tears. Here’s the ballet — 30 minutes. It’s been said that its powerful opening gesture — every dancer standing still while holding her arm high at an angle was inspired by working with them outdoors, they shielding their eyes, a gesture he kept.
Wine
Jose recently bought a bottle of crisp white wine, a pinot grigio with an unusual German name, made in the Alto Adige….which is what? where? It’s the northernmost part of Italy, with stunning mountain vistas, and a prime winemaking region. Now I want to go there! I had never heard of it. Every bottle of wine originates somewhere, from Ontario, Canada to Napa Valley to Argentina to Cyprus. I love learning about all of these places.
TV
It’s been a terrible summer — my right hip is so painful I just can’t go very far and I’ve lost hours and hours napping to rest from the fatigue it causes. So my travel (except for 8 days in Toronto in June) has been limited to the screen. Thanks to so many great shows, I now have a better understanding of/appreciation for rural Portugal (Gloria), Tasmania (Deadloch), Yorkshire (Happy Valley and other shows there), Call My Agent (Paris), London (The Diplomat and others). Many shows include trivia and insider details — like explaining the indigenous words and names used in Deadloch.
The most exotic, oddly, has been Murder By the Lake, set in and around Lake Constance (Bodensee in German), bordered by (who knew?) Austria, Germany and Switzerland. One episode hinged on the traditional abduction of the bride, carried aloft on five people’s shoulders, for the groom to find, another on a hops farmer who makes a deadly deal with the owner of a local brewery. I had no idea what hops in the field even looked like! I love seeing how different each show’s local dress, clothing, dialect and architecture are.
Travel
Unless you only do cruises or Disney or resorts, you are likely learn a lot when you travel, either domestically or internationally, about food, culture, history, politics, architecture, art. Sometimes it’s weird things, like a large golden horse head mounted high up in some Paris streets (they sell horse meat.) I discovered two much loved forms of music when visiting France — a Corsican band called I Muvrini and a great jazz station, TSF Jazz.
Movies
I hate to admit this, but I didn’t know much growing up about WWII; Canadians don’t spend a lot of time teaching it. The one film that really brought to life for me was Saving Private Ryan. When we finally visited Juno Beach and the Canadian cemetery in Normandy, I recognized those fields and landscape through films I’d seen. I love the film Cabaret and it has led me to finally read its origin, The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood, who lived for four years in Weimar Berlin, a period that fascinates me. Cold Mountain, which is such a visually stunning film, taught me a lot more about the American Civil War and the women left behind to cope on their own; it stars Renee Zellweger and Nicole Kidman. It’s heart-rending, but so good.
Documentaries, obviously!
Books
From every reference book — design, cooking, history — I learn so much! I especially love what’s called “social history” and recently enjoyed “How to Be a Tudor”, a dawn to dusk guide to Tudor life (16th century.) I picked it up at the Met museum after a show of Tudor art and artifacts, and loved all its details, from what people wore and ate to what they earned. As a nerdy only child, I loved reading a history of medicine — so I knew even then who Galen and Vesalius and Jenner and Semmelweiss were and how each advanced our knowledge.
Twitterchats
My favorite has been #TRLT, (The Road Less Traveled) as it draws a wide array of adventurous people. Unlike too much travel coverage in magazines, it’s not focused mostly or solely on luxury or resorts. People check in from Vancouver, Glasgow, Kenya, Malawi and more.
Museums
I’ve been a sailor since childhood and knew the names of many legendary sailors like Isabelle Autissier, Robin Knox and Tania Aiebi, some of whose memoirs I read. But only in March 2023, on a visit to the new Sailing Museum in Newport, RI, did I learn of Bill Pinkney, the first black man to sail the world using the dangerous southern route; the link is to his recent NYT obituary.
I do read the wall descriptions in some museums so was intrigued, during a show at the Met, to learn that even (!?) Michelangelo and da Vinci had some difficult, broke years —- as did Japanese legend Hokusai, whose Great Wave (1831) is surely one of the best-known Japanese images. He also relied heavily on his talented daughter, also an artist, which I learned from a great museum show at the British Museum in July 2017. At show of Degas at DC’s National Gallery, I learned that he often used photographs as the basis for his famous pastels of ballet dancers, making use of that then new-ish medium.
Of course, there’s also Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, none of which I use; not for lack of interest, per se.
I’ve never lived in the city, as we call it — as if there were no other! But I love exploring it, and have been since I would visit in my early 20s, even getting into the legendary Studio 54 for a night of dancing with a gorgeous guy I met in the shoe department of Brooks Brothers — both now long gone. I had visited the offices of Glamour magazine (now only digital) and left my heavy black portfolio with examples of my published writing (pre-websites) — and they decided to buy one (typewritten) that had not even been published yet by the Canadian magazine that commissioned it. Heady days!
My favorite spots, I admit, are mostly in Manhattan — the other boroughs too far away for me or not of much interest except for one. They’re also places that have survived decades, a few even centuries.
They have staying power!
Here are some:
Arthur Avenue, the Bronx.
Here is a slice of New York many tourists will miss, and it’s so great! Fab food shops — bakeries, fresh pasta, fish, huge vats of olives and nuts. Terrific restaurants. A streetside clam bar. This is old school New York. Here’s a whole blog post I wrote about it on my last visit, in January 2023.
Fanelli’s
I’ve been dropping into this classic bar since I first arrived here in 1989. I used to take fencing lessons up the street at NYU night classes from a 2-time Olympian and the school’s fencing coach. The food is adequate but the crowd a glorious mix and its etched glass doors feel like you’re in London or Dublin.
Bergdorf Goodman
Oh my. Barney’s is (also) long gone but this is a shrine to costly style with an elegant restaurant upstairs with great views.
The Tenement Museum
I love this place — a true glimpse into this city’s gritty and challenging history. Here you see the tiny rooms that housed multiple members of the many European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic to start a new life in this tough city. Very worth a visit.
The Neue Galerie
Pretty much the polar opposite of the Tenement Museum — and which offers the stunning Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Cafe Sabarsky, in the basement of this Beaux Arts mansion, is also lovely.
Casa Magazines
This tiny, cramped shop at 22 8th Avenue is a total joy if you still love reading in print, whether newspapers or magazines. I always leaving staggering beneath the weight of $150 worth. Snag a Casa T-shirt, tote bag or hoodie.
Morandi
Delicious Italian food, pretty room.
Via Carota
Same. Have a Negroni, their legendary green salad and cacio and pepe. Line-ups likely.
Old school elegance: white tablecloths, a dining room that feels like a world away from grimy, noisy midtown. The lobster bisque is excellent.
Grand Central Terminal
Terminal, not station! The place is full of beauty (and commuters heading north): its stunning turquoise ceiling covered with gold constellations, its central clock, the hanging lanterns and elegant ironwork. The Grand Central Market (a food hall) offers two classics — Murray’s cheese and Li-Lac chocolates, where you can buy a chocolate Statue of Liberty.
Edith Machinist
The city has many vintage clothing stores but this stalwart is my favorite, owned by the woman whose name is on the door. Great stock and reasonable prices. I rarely leave empty-handed.
John Derian
Gorgeous stuff for the home. Go!
The Oyster Bar
A classic, beneath Grand Central. Sit at one of the curved counters, slurp some oysters and notice the curved Guastavino ceiling tiles and the lamp fixtures with boats.
And here are even more new and cool NYC bars and restaurants, thanks to the NYT. The city has so many terrific options and every neighborhood has a different vibe. Just be sure to flee noisy, crowded midtown!
Broadside 
