Last year’s COVID shuttering was probably less of a blow for the Frick Collection than for other New York museums, as the Frick had planned to close for major renovations and temporarily relocate to the former site of the Whitney. Frick Madison opened in March, but I was glad that, at the end of 2019, I got in a visit to Henry Clay Frick’s Fifth Avenue mansion and some of the world’s greatest paintings.

The most memorable part of that trip, however, turned out to be a reunion with the bronze angel—forged in 1475 by Jean Barbet—that overlooks the fountain in the Garden Court. The slim, comely figure points his left index finger in a way that people used to do in mimicking Bogart-style gangsters. Or maybe it’s what the bartender in a polo shirt does when you ask for another round: You got it. I’d forgotten that when I first visited the museum in 1992, I came away thinking of Barbet’s sculpture as “the necessary angel of earth” from Wallace Stevens’s “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” the final poem in The Auroras of Autumn (1950).

Barack Obama reportedly calling Donald Trump “a corrupt motherfucker” and Barack Obama indicating there could be UFOs and Barack Obama mourning the death of Bo. We’ve recently had flashes of our beloved First Dad seeming as vulnerable and uncertain as we feel ourselves to be—this exemplar whom Brian Beutler described as always taking a “methodical, ethic-of-responsibility approach to the many crises he faced in his presidency.”

Once in a while you read articles in the same sitting that seem to be parts of larger narrative, or maybe it’s that the second one is a clap-back to the first.

This happened recently when I read an archived article by A.J. Liebling that the New Yorker online reprinted after the death of Prince Philip. Liebling’s post from November 29, 1947, looked at how the press was covering the royal wedding of the future queen, honing in specifically on reportage by one correspondent billed as “Noted American Society Woman and Authoress.”

Sometime during the COVID spring, I was walking behind a young couple and overheard the guy ask the girl, “Did you hear the Luke Combs cover of ‘Fast Car’?” I wasn’t familiar with Luke Combs, but I was surprised to realize that the Tracy Chapman song had remained in the pop vernacular for more than three decades.

As a Black lesbian folk singer appealing to white audiences, Chapman was a pop anomaly. But her song is a perfect slice of Americana. I heard her busking “Fast Car” in the Harvard Square subway station a few times in the 1980s. I remember hearing it once from another part of the station, and the reiteration of “be someone, be someone” in that large space seemed portentous to my young self.

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Early in COVID lockdown this spring, Americans enjoyed watching penguins pause their role as aquarium attractions to temporarily become commanders of the gaze. First they waddled the halls of Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium to have a gander at their fellow marine life. Then another waddle from the Kansas City Zoo ventured to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for a look-see.

Suddenly we thought a lot about animals captive in zoos because we had ourselves become captive. The parallels could not be starker: the primary complaint of zookeepers is the incessant drudgery of shoveling out feces; our own obsession at that time was hoarding toilet paper.

I was recently sitting between friends, a couple, at a movie theater, waiting out the seemingly endless stream of commercials for Peak TV filler. The he of the couple would lean across me to whisper “Yes” or “No” to his partner in regard to giving some series a go. They were usually in alignment, but when it came to Amazon’s Carnival Row, he vehemently declared “NO.” She worked in theater lighting; “Yes,” she countered. He was resolute: “Nothing—with—wings.”

His reaction owed to the fact that he taught an undergraduate short story writing course in which his students were solely interested in fantasy—lots of dragons and interspecies wing-flappers, lots of GOT homage. (This is a school where the tuition is well over $50,000.) His students explained their decisions as partly lucrative (“there’s a lot of money in YA fantasy”) and partly to express themselves, to put their “rampant imagination” on display. When responding in class to a story about a gender-fluid elf, my friend brought the Wrath of Kahn down upon himself by asking “Aren’t all elves gender fluid?”

In my early twenties, I was seduced by the trees and nighttime illumination of the Belgian painter René Magritte, and in Le Seize Septembre I found the best of both. This 1956 painting shows a tree at the last moments of dusk, but the crescent moon shines not from above but from the heart of the tree, casting a strange light onto the surrounding ground.

I will always associate my secondhand Magritte monograph featuring this painting with an old paperback of Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) because I bought them at the same time. Having been raised Catholic, I was ready to shed the dogma but still wanted to have faith in something. Watts—a British Zen Buddhist who gained renown in the San Francisco Bay area in the fifties and sixties—had something of a renaissance in the eighties, and The Wisdom of Insecurity was considered essential reading.

There were many parts of summer I hated when growing up. From fourth through eighth grade, playing in the local Cinderella Softball League required that you practice next to a sewage treatment plant in a swampy valley that was buggy in addition to stinking to high heaven. I had a slew of untreated pollen allergies, which meant rubbing my red eyes with my right hand while swatting away mosquitos with my mitt.

Though I grew up in a small city, I had plenty of access to what we called “the sticks.” I had no overriding passion for rural America, probably because in Western New York, rural meant poor. But thanks to novels, stories, and paintings, I fell in love with the summer landscapes of pre-industrial America.