Last week I went back to the Algonquin Hotel.  The visit is a periodic ritual.  The whole lobby is now a bar, I suppose because everybody who knows of the Algonquin Hotel wants to drink there.

     The usual gang wasn't there munching on celery stalks.  As often as I now go to the Algonquin, the usual gang has not been there.

     An unusual woman sits half way across the room from me drinking from a bottle labeled Poland Spring.  I  am drinking rum and Coke through a straw so I shouldn't compare our relative levels of sophistication. 

     I wish I were forty-one again when I would walk up to the reception desk and the clerk would say, "Hello, Mrs. Kaye - we are so happy to see you back" and I would put all those drinks on my expense account.  I was drinking gin then.

     But I am not forty-one and now the whole lobby is a bar and the golden cat is gone and people push baby strollers around the tables as they are seated in the soft green upholstered armchairs.  Everyone is clean shaven.  No, there is a man with a beard but he is sitting with the woman rocking the stroller so he doesn't really count.

     I love this hotel.  Every time I have come here I am able to pretend that I am one of them - waiting for my friends to join me. 

     They will come up to my little round table with its spindle legs and say, "Em, you are early.  You look so sad sitting here so alone."  They will call me "Em" because we are such intimates and my public, published name is on for hangers on.  To these, my friends, I am "Em."

     My train leaves in less than an hour.  When I was forty-one I merely took out my key and went to my room on the seventh floor.  Now I must rush to the Pennsylvania Station and hurry to New Jersey -- where I now stay with my daughter, who doesn't know Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley or Edna Ferber and doesn't drink gin and sleeps in a bedroom suite on the second floor of her million dollar house and isn't as happy as I.  I sleep in my imagination.

     The tone is so burnished inside the Algonquin.  So still.  Standing, throwing my coat over my shoulders, I spot a dusky Underwood typewriter on the window sill in the corner of the room.  An Underwood.  The spirits hover. 

     A man sits typing at a laptop next to the Underwood and sees my eyes light up.  "Yes, it's an original Underwood" he nods and goes on to tell me how his uncle bought up a warehouse full of Underwoods during the war and sold them to the Army.  Made a lot of money so he has a soft spot in his heart for Underwoods.  He wanted to give me his uncle's telephone number so I could contact him for paths to parts that my original Underwood needs and we decide together that the internet might be a better source.

     The waiter brings my check and asks if he can charge my room.  He thinks I am staying here.  I still look right.  I still belong.  I love this waiter.  I love this room.  I love this hotel.  I love this street.  I love this city.  And I look like I belong to it.  I tip him heavily.  Hell, I've just dropped a hundred for a seat in the Walter Kerr Theater, a ten for a rum.  What's another bunch of bills?  I am going home where there is no place to spend money.

There is this urban legend going around the middle generation that mothers live forever.  Fathers come and go, but mothers, well, they are always there.

Then one of them dies and a little flurry erupts.  "No, it cannot be!"

"Yes it is. She died.  Did you hear?  Call mom.  See if she's OK."

So they call her and she's more than OK.  She has a luncheon date at noon, is meeting some friends for an early movie and some bozo is coming over at eight for chocolate cake.

"But what if ... ?"  The daughters gather.  Alpha flies in from the East Coast. Beta and Gamma live in the distant suburbs.  Delta comes down from the North Woods. "What if ... ?" they ask.

They make a plan.  "Mom, we gotta know all the time that you're OK. So here's what we want you to do. Every day you call one of us.  Well chart out who gets the call on what day and if the call doesn't come through we'll send out the alert.  You'll never be lying around looking for help."  Lying around decaying is what is on their minds.

"Sounds good, kids," she says.  But I'm not much of a phone person in the morning.  There's not a lot to say at six in the morning."  That's when she normally shakes herself loose of the bed sheets.  "How about if I call as soon as I get up; give you a ring; you don't pick up; I leave a message on your answering machine that all is well, and we go on with our day.  Everybody secure."

"Great," they say in unison.  "We'll start tomorrow.  "Call Alpha on Monday, Beta on Tuesday, Gamma on Wednesday, Delta on Thursday, then Alpha will get the Friday call and we start all over again.  OK?"

"You want weekends too?" she asks.

"Yeh, weekends too."

"OK Alpha, it's you tomorrow."

"Good enough."  Alpha marks her calendar for every fourth day.  The others do the same with their respective days.  And they all go home.  Alpha back to the East Coast, Delta back to the North Woods and the rest to the far-flung suburbs.

Tomorrow comesw.  She's up at six and dials her daughter's number.  The phone rings a couple of times and Mr. Alpha picks it up.

"Hello?" he asks with wonderment in his voice. After all, it is onlly seven in the morning on the East Coast.

"Hey Alpha-boy, it's me.  I am supposed to call in healthy and you are supposed to not answer."

It's too early in the morning for all this in Mr. Alpha's sleep-muddled mind.  "Oh, I didn't know.  Nobody told me.  How are you?"

"How I am is not the point."  And she explains the process to him in spite of the fact that she prefers not to speak until at least ten in the morning.

Tuesday and a call to Beta follows Monday.  "Hello?" the sleepy voice of a six-year-0ld answers.

"Hi baby, this is grammy.  Tell your mommy that I am OK."

"Huh?"

"Just tell your mommy that grammy called."

"Huh?"

Wednesday with suburban Gamma fares less better.  The phone rings and rings and rings and a mechanical voice reports that the recorder is filled and unable to take a message.  "I am OK," she tells herself.

Delta's phone on Thursday rings until AT&T automatically shuts off the call.  She hangs up when she hears the dial tone.  On Friday she keeps her luncheon date without checking in on anyone.  Nobody sends out an alert.

Believe?  I believe in angels, especially the one who is hanging on to me, sometimes with her knuckles turning white.

I always suspected she was there.  She grabbed me by my buckle when I was a young schoolgirl and pushed me out of the alley where a predator was beckoning, shoving me toward the safety of my home. I remember the pressure.

She once tangled up the bus schedule making me late for work so I wasn't walking by the parking garage when a car burst through protective cables and landed on the sidewalk, pinning down pedestrians minutes before I arrived.

She once kept my four wheels on the asphalt as my car spun around and around and around totally out of control on a freezey, rainy morning -- with four wide-eyed kids clutching each other in the back seat.

She kept a street in Paris car-free as I tripped in the middle of it and sprawled flat-out, trying to hurry across without the aid of a stoplight, thinking I was in some small town in Kansas.

Every dozen years or so, she puts love right in my face, in the form of a small child, a poet, a frail old woman, a student, a less than perfect man.  Someone who loves me, whom I love with comfortable, gleeful abandon -- for a moment in time. They come, these loves.  They go.  But they leave behind the exquisite proof that I am loved, that I am able to love in return.

For years I have been saying "thanks for that" when some of these mystical salvations occur -- when anxiously behind schedule, all the lights turn green as my car approaches each cross street on a busy thoroughfare; when, without cash, I find a twenty dollar bill secreted in last season's coat pocket; when on a particularly lonely day, flowers are waiting at my door; when the phone rings with a long ago friend on the other end.

It had occurred to me that this assigned protector must have a name.  How gracious it would be to be more personal with him/her/it.

"It" is a her.  I met her last month, finally, while soaking up the oils and mists of a massage room.  As she worked my skin and muscles into butter, she talked of politics and religion and life, assuring me that we will be OK, we will make it through the lines if we just believed in goodness.

Religion and politics?  Is this the stuff of a massage?  Stress relieving conversation?  But she soothed me outside and in with her repeated promises that everything will work out fine. This unconventional monologue and the well-being it was instilling prompted me to ask her to repeat her name -- suddenly significant.  Had I met my angel after all these years?  I think so. Her name?  Karen Love.  Care and love.  Who wouldn't believe?

A GRAND CHILD IS BORN

a child,

blood of your blood,

can take you to the universe.

this imp

jumps on your soul

and rides it through a lofty course

awake.

time is again

then and now interspersed

The touch of your knee on the 146

The smell of your hair on the 9

The chicks who are riding the CTA

Are fine, fine, really fine.

You brain-heavy broads on the 171

You cute little nymphs on the 3

I want you, I want you, come sit next to me

And see what a ride this can be.

Good ass I admire on the 126

Great bobbing boobs on the 4.

But little old ladies that smell of their gin

The 206 takes to their door.

The 72, the 100 and 3

Hither and yon they roll by

Crammed with the ladies I want to be near.

Could one of you give me the eye?

I stand at the bus stop with no place to go

I stand with my hands hanging bare

The coaches go by; I continue to stand

I stand cuz I don't have the fare.