Osler's Razor

I’m about ready to call a spiritual crisis here.

For the second time in a month, I got an email that I feared to open. This one was about my friend Greg Tishar.

Long-time readers of the Razor know that New York is a special place to me, and much of the reason for that is because of Greg Tishar. More then anyone, he showed me what New York really is, and how to enjoy it—something that has brought me great happiness.

I met him in 1988, when we both worked on Sen. Paul Simon’s presidential campaign. I was in law school up in New Haven, and took the train down to Manhattan for the meetings. Greg was a local organizer, and we became friends immediately. What I loved about him was his wonderful combination of openness and knowingness—he had an open heart and mind, even while he knew the truths that surrounded us in that big city. He became my guide to one of my favorite places.

He worked for the phone company, and was beloved there, but that was never really the core of his being. He was a consumer of the arts, and he was in the perfect place. It was Greg who first showed me the Met’s Family Circle, where the less-than-wealthy opera addicts sat. It was Greg who first led me to the photography at the Museum of Modern Art and the scene on the Lower East Side (which in the 1980’s was a fascinating miasma of cultures). He knew every show, and had an opinion on it; he knew a bar for every mood, and he sometimes got fed up with New York altogether and would decamp to Berlin for a month.

He was there for one of my favorite conversations ever. We were at a party in Fort Green (a neighborhood in Brooklyn), and he motioned me over and whispered conspiratorially “This is going to be good.”

And it was. An argument over a political point had begun, and one guy quoted something he had heard on National Public Radio. His opponent lit into him: “You mean National Pretentious Radio? Ha!” And… it was on, followed by the yelling and then another round, and then the Irish toasts, and finally singing. All that wasn’t crazy; it was just New York, and it was Greg who taught me how people talk in New York, which has done me well ever since. This week when New Yorker Susan Stabile (correctly) told me my clothes were a mess, I knew how to hear that—and I have Greg to thank for that.

He taught me, too, how opera should be like watching hockey—that your passions should be engaged, and you should love the good and hate the bad. I sat by him as he waved his hand over his head like a Baptist church lady yelling “bravo!” and at other times when he booed with the rest of the family circle and yelled (with all kinds of accents) at the failed performers: “Terrible!” and “Go back to Llubjana!” He was not a believer in polite clapping, and to this day I am not, either.

My last lunch with Greg was at the Yale Club a year or two ago. We sat with the usual cast of characters there and told stories and laughed. But then,… his parents died back in Springfield, leaving their house to him. He left the phone company, and the opera, and the MOMA, and all of New York, and moved into that house. That was where he took his own life.

On Friday, I was not a good teacher. In the morning, during Criminal Practice, I lost my place. In the afternoon, in Criminal Law, I started talking about the wrong reading. At the end of that class, I told them why I was not… well, not all there, about Katherine and Greg. I didn’t have some big lesson from it, or long story, I just apologized for not having my all that day and told them why. I trust them with that-- to see me as human, as hurt in this moment, baffled and lost. I often am better, and will be again-- will get back that part of me I borrowed from Greg, the part that can wave my hand like a Baptist church lady and yell "bravo!."