DIANE NOTTLE

For the first time, I went to Poland without my camera.

That  statement will shock most of my friends, who can expect to find e-mail from Snapfish.com announcing “You’re invited to view my photos” in their inboxes every now and then. I travel, I take pictures — usually hundreds of them — and my friends know it. But not this time.

We’ve come a long way from the days when a seemingly innocent dinner invitation could lead to hours of forced viewing of the hosts’ vacation slides. (Then again, there was the time my relatives all but begged me to show my slides from Kenya, then proceeded to talk throughout.) The beauty of Snapfish is, you can invite people to look, at their leisure, and they may or may not, with no  hurt feelings.  

In fact, we’ve come a long way from slides. In the old days, you needed not only carousels of slides, but also a projector and a screen, or at least a more or less white wall. Then came videotape, then DVDs, and many photographers transferred their memories to the new media.

I have not, whether for reasons of cost or sheer negligence, and so I have not seen some of my best pictures — that Kenyan safari, my first trip to China — in decades. But I know where they are: in my book closet, packed in boxes from my last two moves, probably deteriorating.

I had long since stopped taking a camera on my visits to Florida. Nor did I take one to the Bahamas last spring, for what was, after all, a working trip. (Really.) “Will there be lovely photos of this trip?” asked  one of my most loyal viewers, my college friend Ann Rittenhouse Martin. I’m afraid not.

The fact is, I’m not in love with my current camera — a Konica Minolta bought on eBay for my first trip to Wroclaw, long since discontinued, and not the top of the line. I bought this starter digital out of loyalty after a quarter-century with a beloved Minolta 35-millimeter SLR, which had been rebuilt twice and simply wasn’t worth it anymore. It retired, and I bought the digital for my first trip to Wroclaw in 2007, when everything in that 1,000-year-old city was new and fresh to me.

This summer was my sixth visit to Wroclaw. I’ve seen just about everything there, and so have my friends. They know what the Rynek, or market square, and Ostrow Tumski, the cathedral island, look like.  They’ve see where I live, where I teach and where I swim.  So this time I packed light, photographically speaking — my camera bag once weighed 12 pounds, what with two or three bodies,  three lenses, a flash, batteries and film — and decided to do what journalists these days are expected to do.

On May 30, The Chicago Sun-Times, the 10th-largest newspaper in the United States, announced that it was laying off its entire photo staff of more than 20 and that henceforth reporters would supply pictures with iPhones. The announcement  was roundly protested by journalists for both the perceived disregard for photographers and the impracticality of trying to report and shoot a story at the same time.

But if they can do it, why couldn’t I? In Wroclaw I’m not trying to report anything, just teach a little English. So on this trip I decided to follow The Sun-Times’s lead and rely on my iPod Touch, essentially an iPhone without the phone. My first iPod touch died last spring, to be replaced by a newer model —  thank you, Groupon — with a built-in camera.

Normally when traveling, I shoot like a photojournalist, to document places and people and tell the story of my journey.  Now, as journalism becomes less and less my world, I find myself shooting less like a journalist  and more like a civilian. My online Wroclaw 2013 album, if I ever make one, will consist mainly of photos shot for utilitarian purpose (the aqua aerobics schedule at Wroclawskie Centrum Spa) or for specific people.

For example: the sail-shaped condiments holder on my table at Greco for Maureen, my sailing buddy; the Michiko Sushi menu for Michiko, my CUNY student last year; the portrait of the famous film director in Leslie’s extended family, on the wall of my local kino. Most of all, I was shooting for the friends from my practicum year in Wroclaw: the Rynek by night;  a new plaza where a row of dingy kiosks once stood; the screen on the square for the annual New Horizons Film Festival, and the festival “beach” on Plac Solny; Le Bistro Parisien’s outdoor expansion; Mary’s “zipper church,” zippered no more. I e-mailed these, I hope, at reasonable intervals; last year an otherwise esteemed former colleague nearly drove me mad when he sent dozens of superb images from India, one by one.

In all I shot just 37 frames that were not immediately deleted. Only a few irresistible ones were for myself:  a wedding party coming out of the Baroque university; the table at my party for friends and former students; witty posters for Polish cities (black cats for Kocie Gory, white dots on blue for Boleslawiec, home of the traditional blue-dotted pottery); the car of an English-language school, for future reference. I just couldn’t resist one more at the airport, where a large group of Poles, some in saris, was apparently seeing off a guru.

Does an iCamera compare with my  old Minolta SLR? Hardly. I miss the control I had, the effects I could produce by manipulating shutter speed and f-stop.  I have learned to zoom, just as I would on any web page, by moving my fingers on the touchscreen. Beyond that, though, the only artistic choice I seem able to make is horizontal or vertical. But then, neither of my Minoltas could e-mail photos instantly, or as instantly as the spotty public wifi in Wroclaw allows.

From a 12-pound camera bag to a mere slip of a device — but one that’s so much more convenient and immediate. Like everything else in life, it’s a tradeoff.

Photos supplied upon request.

This morning, I was both delighted and chagrined to read an article by Leah Rozen on nytimes.com about her decision to let her hair go gray. Delighted because I knew Leah as a freshman reporter on The Daily Collegian when I was a senior; chagrined because this post, which covers much the same ground, has been sitting in the computer of The New York Times since March 15. Leah and I were, of course working independently, with no way of knowing what the other was doing and thus no possibility of plagiarism on either side.

I lost it at the movies — my youth, that is.

The first time was a few years ago, when I handed over the Clearview Cinemas gift card I’d been given for my birthday. It came back with an odd balance remaining, $41 out of the original $50; I shrugged, figuring gift card holders must qualify for some special discount. More recently, I handed a $20 bill to the ticket-seller at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square. “Do you have 50 cents?” she asked. I looked at the register: $10.50. For a first-run film in Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon during Christmas season?

It’s happened at the pool, too. “Ten, please,” I asked the young woman behind the glass one day last fall, pushing $20 though the slot. She printed out my tickets and pushed them back, along with an unexpected $10 in change.

By now, I’ve realized there’s only one possible explanation: senior discount. The problem is, I’m not a senior. Whether the cutoff is the standard 65, the more generous 62 or even 60, I still have a few years to go.

We boomers have gone from being desperate to look older to looking older than we ever dreamed possible, from being the don’t-trust-anyone-over-30 generation to the we-can-fool-anyone-under-30 generation. It’s not necessarily their fault; young people think everyone older is old, and we all go through life assuming our generation is the baseline. Who’s more guilty of that than boomers?

There’s an invisible, perhaps imaginary line between young and old. It’s not like the way a woman immediately becomes invisible on her 50th birthday. (My friend Lois, nine years older than I, warned me about that, and I laughed. When the day came, I found out, quickly and painfully, that she was right.) Maybe it’s not so much a line as a gray zone, a period of years over which we gradually shift from one side of the divide to the other.

My personal gray zone — my hair — may be one reason for mistaken generational identity. About 10 years ago, I deferred to nature and stopped coloring it. The auburn I’d been sporting for 15 years yielded to brown-going-on-gray, a shade my hairdresser diplomatically termed “ash brown.” If questioned, I say, “I’m going for the aging-hippie look.”

The occasional bit of age discrimination, especially in hiring, aside, it’s paid off. Recently a colleague was talking about feeling depressed when she was offered seats on the bus or subway. “Do I look that old?” she moaned. I smiled. I used to be given seats because people apparently thought I was pregnant. (I’ve been genetically pear-shaped since I was 8.) Now I get them because of my hair. My herniated disk, acquired at 17, isn’t vain; it’ll take any seat it can get.

Not that my hair did me any good the time I ordered a bloody mary at a bar in Tampa International Airport — and was carded for the first time in decades. “We have to see proof of age from everybody,” the waiter, in his early 20s, explained sheepishly. I leaned forward and pointed to my roots, but that wasn’t good enough. A Manhattanite whose last driver’s license expired sometime in the early 1990s, I was flummoxed — until I realized that of course I was carrying my passport.

It’s a little disconcerting to realize how closely I’ve been following the politics of Social Security and Medicare this past year. And although I’m not yet old enough to borrow back the “Where’s my senior citizen discount?” T-shirt I gave a friend when she turned 65, I’m already looking forward to the discounts. Top of the list, especially as fares keep rising and service keeps declining: the MTA’s half-price senior Metrocard.

AARP defines itself on its website as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization for people age 50 and over.” But a friend of a friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being blacklisted when the time comes, joined when he was about 25 after receiving an invitation when his father turned 50. “They asked for a birthdate, and I gave them my own,” he said, but he got the card anyway. “People would say, ‘You’re not old!’ I’d say, “I don’t care. I want the discount.’ ” (He’s no longer a member.) And here I’ve been tossing out the AARP membership offers that have been landing in my mailbox since I turned 50, on the grounds that I’m nowhere near retired — i.e., that old. (David L. Allen, AARP’s senior manager for media relations, anyone under 50 may join as an associate member and receive the publications, but no card or discounts)

I did, however, accept the offer from Smithsonian Senior Discount Services of a year’s subscription for just $10. (The newsstand price would be $65.89, though on Smithsonian’s website the regular subscription price is just $12.) A customer service agent, asked about the cutoff, polled her office and said no one knew of a specific age. She suggested that Smithsonian might have obtained my information from the database of another organization — most likely AARP.

These kinds of early-bird specials raise ethical questions of passively accepting discounts to which you’re not strictly entitled. Buying movie tickets at a machine in the lobby or online, I would never press “senior.” Nor did I lie to the pool manager, the one who knows which end is up, the time he was selling tickets and said, “I apologize for asking, ma’am, but are you a senior?” At least he asked. When someone looks at me and simply assumes, I tend to smile sweetly and let the employer’s profits take the hit — small punishment for no doubt denting egos less resilient than mine.

All I know for sure is, I’m never coloring my hair again.

Leksi is dead. There, I said it.

I didn’t mean to write about it, beyond the official death notice e-mailed to 20 or so of our closest remaining friends. The Internet is so awash in cat videos, cat memorials, cat this, cat that, that you’d think that’s why it was invented. Surely I didn’t need to add to the pile. (And just think how this is going to look on my LinkedIn profile.)

Anyway, to paraphrase Erich Segal, what can you say about a 15-and-a-half-year-old cat who died? That he was beautiful, brilliant and affectionate? That he was beloved by houseguests the world over, especially Australians? That he was the embodiment of good?

But I’ve reached the stage of life where death is becoming an all too familiar occurrence. Each death is a boundary in our lives, and cats mark the passages in mine. So attention must be paid.

I grew up with cats, though most of their lives were short. We lived in the country, they were outdoor cats, and they couldn’t resist crossing the road. Our longevity record was Buffy, who lived to 9. Buffy was smart enough to notice what happened to his brothers, Puffy and Fluffy, so he simply didn’t cross the road. When his health failed, my father took his police revolver and shot him in the field behind our house. Euthanasia, country-style.

After college, I learned that cats could live indoors, quite healthily, thanks to my roommate, Teresa. To our apartment in Roanoke, Va., she brought a longhaired calico named Carmen, and I was delighted that Carmen came to like me as much as I liked her. When she would jump on my bed and purr me to sleep, I was hooked.

Carmen, Teresa and I parted company after a year, when a new job and a boyfriend beckoned me north to Rochester, N.Y. In the last 35 years, I have had just three cats. I’ve upped the record to 15, twice.

Cora, gray and white, was 10 weeks old when she moved in with me in Rochester; I was 23. She was the cat of my 20s and 30s, the one who moved with me from Rochester to Boston to New York, who watched me agonize over my career ladder, who saw me grow from extremely callow youth to middle-aged resignation. She died at 15, to be succeeded after a mere week of mourning by Cassandra, a black Siamese. The cat of the transition into my 40s, Cass lasted just five years, lost to cancer, but there was never a more affectionate and trusting cat — except maybe Leksi, who looked just like Cora but with longer fur. He spanned my early 40s into my late 50s, seeing me change from a solid citizen with full-time employment into an aging bohemian who, quite frankly, doesn’t much give a damn about anyone’s expectations anymore. If my next cat lasts 15 years, she will see me through my 60s and into my 70s. She could end up burying me.

Leksi started to fail a couple of weeks ago. He rallied briefly after a trip to the vet but then, gradually, faded again. I thought his finale might coincide with those of two TV series we had been watching, “Smash” and “The Big C,” but he outlasted both. The last episode of “Smash” was as unmemorable as most of its two seasons, but “The Big C” had resonance.

“The Big C,” on Showtime, is a moving, funny four-season show tracing the seasons in the life of Cathy Jamison, a teacher, wife and mother in her 40s whose melanoma recasts her life. The storyline took her from summer, when her diagnosis seems unreal and all she wants is a pool in her backyard, through treatment, remission, recurrence and hospice. Throughout, Laura Linney plays Cathy — who is no saint — with spark, humor and grace.

In the finale, Cathy does die, at home, half an hour before her husband arrives. Leksi did much the same. He collapsed on the kitchen floor while I was working the Sunday matinee at the Beaumont a few hours before the Tony Awards, when I hoped he’d be on my lap. I sobbed when I found him — not for my loss, as I did when Cora died, but because I hadn’t been there to hold him and ease his transition. I must be maturing.

In the penultimate episode of “The Big C,” when Cathy is in hospice, she sees the souls of dead patients miraculously restored to their prime rising from their corpses, smiling and waving goodbye. No, I didn’t not see Leksi rise to leave me with one last meow, but so far as I know, I’m not dying.

After petting his lifeless fur a few times, I slid him into a pillowcase and put him in his carrier — no resistance, for once. Maybe this was the day I truly became a New Yorker: I took my dead cat to the vet for cremation by subway.

Where does the survivor find solace? As usual, I looked to musical theater. To drown out the sound of what I call “the happy idiots” (whose turn will come) on the ride home, I turned on my iPod and found William Finn’s “Elegies.” This song cycle, a series of tributes to people who have died or otherwise left the singers’ lives, is ideal for someone in the throes of loss. Whether the subject is a prickly teacher, an actor and songwriter who wouldn’t take his insulin, a 9/11 victim or a dying mother on her last ride around the town where she lived her life, the songs rip up the heart, then make it whole again. The only one banished from my iPod is “My Dog,” whether because it’s about the opposite species or because it just goes on too long.

Back home I let myself wallow in the most embarrassing way possible, with an LP I hadn’t played in years, maybe decades: “Cats.” We now know “Cats” was among the worst excesses of the 1980s, but the truth is, I’d been hearing its lyrics in my head ever since Leksi became ill: “He isn’t the cat that he was in his prime” and ‘Who would ever suppose that that/Was Grizabella the glamour cat?” and finally the rousing “Up, up, up to the Heaviside Layer,” which I quoted in Leksi’s death notice. So what if the music is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s? The words are T.S. Eliot’s, so surely “Cats” is partly respectable.

The grand finale, my ritual whenever I lose a cat, was last night’s screening of “The Three Lives of Thomasina,” a Disney film I first saw when I was 9. Back then Karen Dotrice, as the little Scottish girl whose cat seemingly dies but is resurrected through love, looked like a big girl to me; the next time I saw it, in my late 30s, her father, Patrick McGoohan, looked young, but when a cat of mine dies, I am that little girl. While the film’s message does jerk the tears, my favorite part, and the one that makes it must-see bereavement viewing, is Thomasina’s near-death experience, when she climbs a staircase lined with cat statues, the air sparkling with gold, to come face to face with Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess. I could just see Leksi climbing those stairs ever so elegantly, and afterwards meeting Cora and Cass at last.

Rest in peace, Leksi, and regards to Bast. We’ll meet again — after another cat or two.

For 25 years, I’ve been posing as a native New Yorker. “Wave to the tourists!” I call out to friends whenever a double-decker bus passes by. Of course, I’m no such thing, any more than I’d be a native Nantucketer if I’d been born on the ferry as it rounded Brant Point instead of waiting until it docked. But I’m no longer a visitor, either.

“I used to be you,” I think when I see the day-trippers getting off their buses in the theater district, nervously looking around as if they expect to be mugged any minute.  Like them, I used to get out of the car from Pennsylvania, or the Trans-Bridge or Fullerton bus (five hours each way from State College), or the plane from Rochester, or Amtrak from Boston. As usual, Stephen Sondheim — consummate New Yorker that he is — said it best:

Another hundred people who got off of the plane  

and are looking at us

 who got off of the train

and the plane and the bus

maybe yesterday

On May 6, 1988, I got off the train and the plane and the bus for good. That day, I bought a one-way ticket on the Eastern Shuttle, flew down from Boston (with Cora, tranquilized, in her carrier under the seat in front of me) and took a taxi from LaGuardia Airport to 347 West 57th Street in Manhattan, where I was to occupy 33F for the next 10 years. I set up my answering machine and, over background music by Kander and Ebb, recorded my outgoing message: “Yes, if I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere. This is (212) 974-3293 . . .”

The following December, during a raging snowstorm, I was heading back to the subway from lunch in the Village with my college friend Gina, with whom I was reconnecting after 15 years.  Through the white,  the dark figure of a man came toward me. I froze: was he that inevitable mugger? “FAAAB-ulous coat!” he purred, and walked on. (It was — a bright red wool Burberry with scarves attached.) I smiled and went home to 57th Street.

That was the moment I knew I was really in New York. But when did I become a New Yorker? That’s a tougher question.

Was it on 9/11, the day I decided it was better to die in Manhattan than to live anywhere else? The entire city was in shock, but I knew instinctively what to do and where to go – in fact, had a place to go.  Watching anonymous heroes rescuing people from the rubble and lining up to donate blood, I felt I was doing nothing of value. Only months later did I realize that I had done something: I kept going, and that’s what New Yorkers do. On that day, I discovered my personal brand of patriotism: I care deeply about my country, but my country is New York.

Was it seven years ago, when I joined the ranks of the rent-stabilized? Was it last Christmas, when I brought my tree home from Lincoln Center by subway?

Or did it happen gradually over the years as I learned where to stand on any subway platform so I’d be right at the turnstiles when I got off — why waste time? I’ve even mastered the art of moving between cars while the train is in motion.

I can hum the Mr. Softee jingle and calculate tips in a split second by doubling the sales tax. I can converse using words like shlep and mishegas. But there are native skills I have yet to master — for example, haggling over prices or pushing my way to the front of any line. I suspect I’ll never be able to wait on line instead of in line. Not that I have the patience to do either. I’m a New Yorker.

Will I remain one forever? Frankly, I never expected to make it this long. Now I see young people on the street, briskly marching to their urgent tasks, and realize I used to be one of them, too, but no more.  The idea of stealing off to a quiet, affordable, beautiful place where I could do little but read and write is appealing.

Less than a year ago, during a nightmare of a summer, I was almost ready to pick up and go. Months later, in The New Yorker (where else?), I read the recently discovered introduction to a never-completed memoir by the longtime staff writer Joseph Mitchell. His words echoed my thoughts:

 “. . . I used to feel very much at home in New York City.  I wasn’t born here, I wasn’t a native, but I might as well have been: I belonged here. Several years ago, however, I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn’t belong here anymore. I sometimes went on from that to a feeling that I had never belonged here, and that could be especially painful. At first, these feelings were vague and sporadic, but they gradually became more definite and quite frequent. . . . Then, one Saturday afternoon, while I was walking around in the ruins of Washington Market, something happened to me that led me, step by step, out of my depression. A change took place in me.”

Mitchell doesn’t say what happened, but maybe it was something  like going to Shakespeare in the Park on a perfect summer night, or taking visitors from the other side of the world on a walk along the Hudson to the Little Red Lighthouse under the great gray bridge. At times like these, I chide myself: “How can you even think about leaving?”

New York is a city that’s hard to leave. My late more-or-less mother-in-law, New York-born and -bred, moved to Boston in her late 20s but remained a New Yorker to the core until the day she died, at 96. Still, people do leave; even Elaine Stritch has gone home to Michigan after more than 70 years. “Two years ago,” The New York Times reported in her farewell, “Ms. Stritch answered New York magazine’s question ‘What makes someone a New Yorker?’ with a single word: ‘Stamina.’ ” Hers has apparently run out, and some days, so does mine.

But next weekend, for the 24th time, I’ll walk 9th Avenue during the annual food festival, which I regard as my personal anniversary party. (I’ve missed twice, but only because I was abroad.) I’ll feast on my favorites: Asian chicken salad from EAT, jambalaya from Delta Grill, cherry strudel from Poseidon Bakery, the world’s best chicken fingers and lemon meringue tarts from Mitchell London — 2 for the price of 1 at the end of the day. More than that, though, I’ll savor being part of the crowd. I’ll look up at my old apartment on 57th Street and, in my head, sing another Sondheim anthem: “I’m Still Here.”

Googling “Cherry Jones” and “luminous” produces about 35,000 results in 0.32 seconds. Allowing for duplicates and entries that have nothing to do with the actress in question, that’s still a lot. As a theater critic friend of mine once grumbled, “Aren’t there any other adjectives for Cherry Jones?” Apparently not.

The headline of this post is borrowed (not to say plagiarized) from “The Glass Menagerie,” the Tennessee Williams classic that, as its protagonist states at the outset, is all about memory. My ticket to American Repertory Theater’s production in Cambridge, Mass., was a belated birthday present. (Thank you, Maureen.) For me, any trip to the Boston area these days is a memory play of sorts; the city, right down to the subway maps, overwhelms me with flashbacks to the nine years I lived there and 25 of visits since, what I did there and with whom. So many of those whoms are gone now, making the memories bittersweet.

But one of them is Cherry Jones. In a sense, I grew up with her, though we’ve never spoken except for thank-yous exchanged over a Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS basket. The record indicates that I first saw her onstage at ART’s home, the Loeb Drama Center, in 1980 as Helena in the company’s inaugural production, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Mark Linn-Baker’s Puck, snarling at the audience from a ramp just off my left shoulder, stole that particular show. But I do seem to remember a rosy-cheeked young woman in a long white dress, sliding across the stage in a pratfall. By Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” in 1983, I was a confirmed fan.

In the ’90s, we were both in New York, she on her way to becoming a star on Broadway and off, I trying to do the equivalent at The New York Times. (She fared better.) I skipped her Lady Macduff, having already seen it in Boston, but I managed to catch her as a First Fleet prisoner transported to Australia in the brief run of “Our Country’s Good.” Then came “The Heiress,” and a richly deserved Tony Award. In the Times review, Vincent Canby wrote of “a splendid young actress who is new to me, Cherry Jones.” Later, when I smugly informed him that I had been watching her for 15 years, Vincent seemed envious.

The list goes on: the Roundabout’s “Night of the Iguana”; my beloved “Pride’s Crossing” at Lincoln Center Theater, now my home away from home; “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” opposite Gabriel Byrne. I saw a Saturday matinee from the balcony at the Walter Kerr Theater, which meant I was looking down at the top of her head, but just listening to her speak Eugene O’Neill’s words was sublime. That was the occasion of the AIDS basket, and for a moment at the theater door, her light shined on me. Another Tony followed, for “Doubt,” and so did “Major Barbara” and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” at the Roundabout. Her level-headed performances as Hallie Flanagan in the film “Cradle Will Rock” and especially as President Allison Taylor on TV’s  “24” — a welcome break on that male-violence show — were a delight.

So naturally I looked forward to “The Glass Menagerie,” on the same stage where I had first encountered Jones all those years ago. Time seemed to have come full circle when I was ushered to my seat,  just about where I was sitting when Puck snarled in my direction from the ramp. But as the play progressed, it brought a slow-burning shock: Cherry Jones wasn’t luminous.

Or, rather, her Amanda Wingfield isn’t luminous. Amanda is, as Tennessee Williams wrote her, a faded Southern belle whose grasp of reality in Depression-era St. Louis is none too firm. She’s put on some pounds; the skin of her chest, as seen in the second act above the lowish neckline of an outlandish dress from her youth, is that of a woman in her 50s. So is her face, which does not glow, even under stage lights. It is matte, not glossy — the face of a women past her prime, who has nevertheless faced life and all its disappointments with a will, greeting each day and torturing her children with a determined “Rise and shine!” Seeing that face, drained of its light, is enough to stop the heart. We know Amanda has aged, but has Cherry Jones? Have we?

Then, after two and a half hours, the lights fade, the play is over and the curtain calls begin. Holding hands with two of her three castmates, Jones rushes forward, smiles as if this is the happiest moment of her life, and takes a bow. Once more, she is luminous.

Can she turn it on and off? Is it nothing more than an actor’s trick? I prefer to think not, but, rather, that the luminosity is inborn. What I know for sure is that, even in a truly dreadful play  (“Tongue of a Bird,” the Public Theater, 1999), Cherry Jones spoke and acted every word as if she absolutely believed in it.

In the wake of rave reviews, “The Glass Menagerie” is rumored for Broadway this spring. To my mind, the ideal house would be the intimate Circle in the Square, whose form — a horseshoe thrust stage with all seats looking down at it — would highlight the reflections from the three performance platforms in the dark pool surrounding them. It’s the stage where I first saw Swoosie Kurtz, in “Ah, Wilderness!” in 1975. But that’s another story.

It was only fitting that I sat on the steps of the Public Theater last night eating jiaozi.

Jiaozi — in English, potstickers, those crescent-shaped Chinese dumplings so named because they stick to the pot when fried — used to be my dinner en route to weekly Mandarin classes (Triangulingual, May 18, 2010) when I taught at Hunan University of Science and Technology in Xiangtan, On the food street near my apartment,  I would pick up a bag of them, maybe a dozen, hot sauce poured into the plastic bag, and eat them as I walked the dusty, barely paved streets to class. I was actually dexterous enough to walk and use chopsticks at the same time. Three years less agile, I took to the steps en route to the evening’s performance, “C’est du Chinois.”

Last night’s potstickers came from a cart — A-Liu’s Taste, “Originally From Taiwan” — often found on the south side of Astor Place in the East Village. As New York street food goes, potstickers make a nice break from hot dogs and halal, and I usually look for them when I’m in the neighborhood. They come in four varieties: pork, chicken, Korean beef barbecue and Japanese vegetable. They can be mixed and matched: $3.50 for a snack of five, $6 for a very filling 10, and I don’t even want to think about what $9 buys. They’re bigger and less crisp than the ones in Xiangtan, but they do the trick. The cart also serves “Chinese spaghetti,” that equivalent of Proust’s madeleine that I first encountered in Roanoke, Va., with some doubts about its authenticity, and later learned was for real at Will Long in Xiangtan. (Red, hot chili peppers, March 6, 2010.) I hope A-Liu’s isn’t just plain old lo mein.

The Public, right around the corner from A-Liu, has spiffed up considerably since my last visit — could it be two years ago? The last performance I remember attending there was Tony Kushner’s “Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide . . .” in 2011. A sleek oval bar now dominates the lobby; the box office has been moved behind it. The counter gift shop is gone. As for the restrooms — well, any woman who ever stood in line for one of four stalls in the freezing-cold old one will swoon. (But it’s as hard as ever to squeeze into the elevator to the third-floor Martinson Theater.) I was afraid outside food might not be tolerated in this new environment; hence the steps. But in the new loft lounge called The Library (named for the  building’s previous incarnation), a couple ate from a plastic-foam carton identical to mine containing, yes, potstickers.

“C’est du Chinois” — roughly translated, “it’s all Greek to me” — was having its last performance as a presentation of the Public’s Under the Radar series. Conceived and directed by the Hungarian-born, Amsterdam-based Edit Kaldor, the play has been performed widely in Europe  and in Brazil. It tells a story in the form of a language lesson, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Five Chinese actors, each wearing a pitch pipe on a lanyard, take the stage. “Ni hao,” one begins, then indicates the audience is to repeat it. After this initial lesson, a voiceover informs the audience, in English, that the actors represent two families from Shanghai who have recently immigrated to New York. “We have developed a good method to teach you Mandarin,” the voiceover continues. It urges the audience/students to follow along carefully: “Otherwise you will get lost — completely lost.”

With each new word, an actor blows into a pitch pipe, the audience’s cue to repeat the word. The vocabulary was simple: phrases like ni hao and hen hao and zhong guo. “Zhong guo hen hao”  (“China is very good”)  — yields to an admission that New York is also hen hao. Seeing mei guo (the United States) pointed out on map reminded me that I am mei guo ren — I mean, wo shi mei guo ren. Watching the actors demonstrate the words for eat, drink and sleep was a lot like doing  Rosetta Stone, my only instruction in Mandarin before leaving for China.

As the story progresses, the prompts trail off and comprehension becomes the goal. The girl (nu er) in one family marries the older brother (gege) in the other. He is hen kuai le (very happy), she less so.  They have a baby, which nu er bu ai (doesn’t love). Gege becomes a businessman; nu er becomes a hippie. Gege drinks. There are in-law tensions. Blood is spilled before the family comes to an uneasy resolution.

The lesson reminded me just how foreign a language Chinese seems to Westerners, with its ideogram characters and the tones that pinpoint a spoken word’s meaning. I didn’t get completely lost, though by the middle some developments were eluding me. For learners like me who need to see words written before they can hear them properly, it would have helped if the Chinese characters accompanied by pinyin (Roman letters) had been projected on the upstage wall. Still, I got the gist —  a giant step in acquiring a new language.

Instead of a blackout and a traditional curtain call, “C’est du Chinois” ends when gege opens the door and the family gathers at a table of the language DVDs he sells: Ni Hao $5.99. What could I say on the way out but two phrases they didn’t teach: “Xie xie! Zai jian!”

“Did you see Boris?” Joie asked when I mentioned in the usher room that I had just come from Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.”

“Our Boris?” In fact, I had not recognized him, although the face did seem familiar. Boris  is the actor Boris McGiver; in “Lincoln” he plays Alexander Coffroth, a congressman wavering in his commitment to the 13th Amendment. What makes him “our” Boris is that he spent most of 2011 playing the father of Albert Narracott, best friend to Joey, the title character in the Tony Award-winning “War Horse” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

My travels with Joey have ended: the Broadway production of “War Horse” closed on Sunday after 718 performances. I worked nearly 300 of them, and the experience has taught me more about theater than I learned in decades as a member of the audience  or, for that matter, an arts journalist. Ushers may not play the most exalted role in the theater; few New York Times readers who saw Saturday’s  stunning half-page picture of the Beaumont would have given a second look, or even a first, to those black shapes on the stairs stuffing Playbills. But, just as it’s better to see a bad play than not go to the theater at all, it’s better to be an usher than not work in theater at all.  Much better.

The way I said  “Our Boris?” made me realize that, while I may be the eternal sub, there really is an “our” to this experience. In the 21 months since I started at the Beaumont, I’ve gone from being  an interloper to feeling like part of the usher corps, and the show. More than that, I’ve made friends: of the 46 numbers programmed into my phone, eight belong to Beaumont people.

“War Horse” being my first show as a professional, I wasn’t sure how closing day would affect me, other than that I was sure to cry, just as I had when I first saw the show from B501. As the daily fight rehearsal started, I found myself acutely conscious that everything was happening for the last time: Joey and Topthorn rehearsing their first-act faceoff, for example, or the first charge, which I would perform sotto voce: My God, what the hell is that? Machine guns attacking right flank! Break the line, fall  back! Break the line, fall back, fall back! Machine guns! Blackout. Lights. Ya-a-a-a-ah! (I’ve been saying for months that we should have an ushers’ performance before the show closed. We know all the lines and can sing all the songs, and sometimes do.) This last  rehearsal ended with the entire cast gathering in a circle onstage. Alyssa Bresnahan, who has played Albert’s mother throughout the run, was holding her own tiny daughter, Shannon Rose, a frequent presence in the house. The run of “War Horse” has spanned most of Shannon’s life.

The last performance proceeded much like any other. I watched favorite scenes through the excellent eye-level crack between the doors at the top of Aisle 4 — that scene with Topthorn, so much more dramatic with lighting and music, and the one in the second act in which Joey meets the future of warfare, the tank. A pregnant woman’s  search for the restroom made me miss seeing Joey emerge from the Aisle 4 door for his break, but I did wave farewell when he disappeared into the house again. Somewhere on that aisle, Joey — who is, however much we believe otherwise, a puppet — lost a hoof pad, occasioning a discreet search of the aisle in the dark by my colleague and neighbor Barbara Hart before she found it found it under a ramp during intermission and returned it to the backstage crew.  Otherwise, it was “War Horse” as usual.

Until the curtain call. The actors were more exuberant than ever as they formed their customary semicircle upstage, then ran forward one by one to take their bows. Having quietly entered the house at the top of Aisle 5, I clapped hard and shouted “Bravo!” as the magnificent Joey galloped onstage in the mist and reared for his final bow.  The tissue in my pocket being already soaked, I let the tears run down my cheeks. So sue me. I’ve never had a show close before.

Every show does eventually run its course — even “Phantom” will die someday — and despite full houses for the last few weeks, Joey has run his, at least in New York. (The show is still playing in London and on tour.)  But as Stephen Sondheim put it in “Merrily We Roll Along”: There’ve got to be endings/Or there wouldn’t be beginnings — Right? Right. In my case, it will be a matter of not so much beginnings as resumptions. This month, I return to teaching and to writing projects that have been on the back burner (including this blog), in part because I’ve been spending 22 hours a week at “War Horse.”

The anthem that opens and closes the show — the music that signals ushers it’s almost time to open the doors, close the house and go home — may have been written as a memorial to the soldiers and horses who die in the course of the play. But the lyrics apply to everyone who has ever lived and ever will: Only remembered for what we have done.  No doubt the 758,000 people who have seen “War Horse” on Broadway will remember the artists and technicians for what they have done in bringing Joey’s story to life. If they give a thought to the ushers who showed them to their seats and helped them enjoy a night at the theater, that would be nice, too. For me, it’s enough to believe that the real-life Joey died peacefully on the Isle of Wight at a ripe old age, as a Briton in the audience told Judith last week, and to know that the Joey I’ve loved onstage for almost two years will live as long as I do, in my memory.

Trying as my summer was, August brought a major mental-health break: an open-air opera festival on the plaza at Lincoln Center. On the big screen mounted on the Metropolitan Opera House’s arched facade, the Met showed 10 of its Live in HD productions, previously broadcast  to movie theaters worldwide and on PBS. I took advantage of the festival — free, no tickets required — to catch up with productions I had missed: Gounod’s “Faust” and a double dose of Rossini (“La Cenerentola” and “Le Comte Ory.”)  I attended three nights in a row, three clear, warm summer nights perfect for sitting on metal chairs with a hardy, well-behaved band of New Yorkers, the ones who hadn’t fled the city, to enjoy the evening air and some glorious music.

Those nights triggered something of an opera binge, specifically the Met’s operas and entirely onscreen. Last winter in Vancouver, I used the HD broadcasts to keep in touch with home (A Morning at the Opera, Jan. 26). I wrote then that, heretical as it sounds, I was actually coming to prefer the HD broadcasts to seeing the performances live, and twice within the last week I’ve heard friends express the same view. Yet, rather than cutting into the Met’s audience, Peter Gelb’s brilliant innovation seems to have expanded it. At least one of my fellow ushers at the Vivian Beaumont Theater next door took a seat on the plaza  to experience opera for the first time. Here’s hoping she’s a convert, and all those in the audience like her.

Not two weeks later came the biggest opera binge there is: Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle. This time the venue was my living room, courtesy of PBS. My trusty DVR captured all four operas, adding up to 16 hours of music.

Although it’s generally believed that the “Ring” is best experienced on four consecutive nights, I chose to spread it out.  I did watch the prequel — “Wagner’s Dream,” a two-hour documentary on the making of Robert LePage’s new production —  and the first installment, “Das Rheingold” as they were broadcast.  I took a breather of several days before “Die Walkure,” and another before “Siegfried” (four and a half hours each). I wasn’t really planning to watch the five-hour grand finale, “Goetterdaemmerung,” since I had already seen the live broadcast in Vancouver and admittedly nodded off once or twice during the earlier installments. (If you’ve ever fallen asleep in the opera house, it’s even easier on a soft couch with a glass of wine.) But I did dip in and out  while copying it onto DVD for my private archive.

I came to LePage’s production with some skepticism about the design. The concept is known as “the Machine,” 24 planks pivoting on an axis; with projections on the surface, it continually morphs from one set into another. I had seen nothing wrong with the Met production this one replaced — Otto Schenk’s more Romantic version, my first “Ring” sometime in the early 1990s — and been less than enchanted with painfully avant-garde ones since  (a “Rheingold” at the Semper Opera in Dresden performed on rows of gold chairs facing upstage;  the Mariinsky’s “Rheingold” and “Walkure” during the 2007 Lincoln Center Festival, where George Tsypin’s design was dominated by giant mummy-like figures hanging over the action).  So the Machine in action was a pleasant surprise.

When I saw “Goetterdaemmerung” in Vancouver, I came away thinking yes, I get it, thank you very much: moving parts, projections on the slats, one set fits all. Then I watched “Wagner’s Dream,” which invoked Iceland — land of the Edda, the source of this saga of gods, heroes and scheming mortals — as the inspiration for the design. Suddenly I really got it: the broken surface of a landscape still forming, the red glow of lava, the geothermal mists rising through the cracks, the crevices inhabited by trolls, the low-roofed huts of the mortals, even the steeds of the Valkyrie. Mr. LePage, I approve.

I couldn’t help noticing how much Wendy Bryn Harmer’s Gutrune reminded me of Gudrun, my Icelandic  student in Vancouver, who was so envious at my having snagged a ticket to the “Goetterdaemmerung” broadcast. Or how these “Ring” broadcasts represented a generational passing of the baton, from James Levine, who conducted the first two operas recorded during the 2010-11 season, to Fabio Luisi, who finished the cycle the following season after health issues forced Levine to withdraw.

I finished the “Ring” on Sunday, but the binge continued on Monday, a day that began with a visit to the new National Opera Center and ended back at the Met. On two floors of a building a few blocks south of Times Square, Opera America, the national service organization for opera, has opened a complex of rehearsal rooms, recording studios, a library and archive, a green room and the stunning cobalt-and-magenta Audition Recital Hall, all at the disposal of singers and opera companies, two of which had already held auditions there. Could this become the 890 Broadway — a rehearsal center for dance and musical theater — for opera?

That night, back to Lincoln Center for the Met’s opening night, on the plaza once again. (Even as an editor on The Times’s culture news desk, I was more likely to be back in the office working the event than in the opera house.) It was now late September, and in the jacket I had put on that morning, I was underdressed for the chill in the air — but so, I suspect, were the bare-shouldered celebrities and socialites entering the Met. (“Patti Smith!” exclaimed the soprano  Deborah Voigt, last seen as Brunhilde, on red-carpet duty. “Rachel Dratch! Courtney Love!”) This being opening night, even the metal chairs were assigned seats requiring tickets, and the summer’s casual ambience — people coming and going at will, some with their dogs — gave way to an enclosure where Met ushers made sure the audience behaved.

No matter. Donizetti’s “Elisir d’Amore,” starring Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani in roles I had last heard sung live by Kathleen Battle and Luciano Pavarotti, was as heady as the bottle of the wine at the center of the plot. It was fun to realize that the larger-than-life images on the screen were coming from not far behind it, and to watch the director, Bartlett Scher, take his curtain call, knowing I’d probably see him within the week at the Beaumont, where he is the resident director.

By 11 the next morning, the thousands of metal chairs had vanished from the plaza, as sure a sign that summer was over as the last batch of homemade pesto. As predicted, Bart Scher passed through the smoke ring at the Beaumont while I was working the Wednesday matinee. “Nice job the other night,” I told him. “Oh! Do you know the opera?” he asked. “Mezzo-mezzo,” I wanted to say, but didn’t. “Not as well as you do.”

When you feel sad, or under a curse
Your life is bad, your prospects are worse . . .
Temples are graying, and teeth are decaying
And creditors weighing your purse
Your mood and your robe
Are both a deep blue
You’d bet that Job
Had nothin’ on you . . .

This blog has been mostly silent through a summer filled with just such tribulations, which neither began nor ended with the burglary that cost me my laptop, my work, my sense of security and empowerment. (Robbed, July 14). “What  more could possibly go wrong?” I moaned one night in late June when I misplaced a brand-new $104 Metrocard. “Don’t ask,” said my friend Leslie, who knows about these things, having lost a daughter to cancer last year. She was right. The burglary happened the next day.

What else went wrong this summer?  In chronological order:

My brief return to the pages of The New York Times served mainly to remind me of all the reasons I left. A dream trip to Italy turned out to be, while far from the trip from hell, something less than a dream. Through no one’s fault but my own, I lost as good a friend as anyone could ever hope to have. A happily anticipated return to Columbia University proved physically and mentally draining. My three weeks at Columbia opened  with a cold and closed with food poisoning. Whether cause or effect, a paralyzing (though apparently short-lived) depression took hold through July and August, making everything else that much more impossible. No wonder I spent much of the summer humming that cheery little number from “Godspell.”

But summer has come to an end, and with it, I hope, a season sadder than any summer should be. The pace of life in New York has picked up, and mine with it; I’m starting to feel and act like myself again. I’m back to ushering at “War Horse” (Travels With Joey, July 13, 2011), though the end is in sight; a closing notice has been posted for January. One of my Columbia students hired me to teach him and his wife English privately until they return to Japan at the end of the year. Most promising is the new role I’m inventing at  City University’s Graduate School of Journalism, as ESL coach to the international students.

Talk about niche marketing. I must occupy the narrowest niche in history: I’m either the only journalist who’s trained to teach English as a second language, or the only ESL teacher who knows journalism.  Whichever, this unusual combination of skills has led to a most intriguing assignment.

Going back to school has always been a pleasure for me; I was better at school than anything I’ve done since. My mother sounded so wistful when she remarked, sometime in the early 1990s, “This is the first time in 50 years I haven’t had a kid going back to school.”  (In a family with four children born over a 20-year span, three of whom grew up to be high school teachers, the passage from first enrollment to last retirement did indeed last a half-century.) I feel much the same in years I’m not going back to school myself. This fall I’m disappointed not to be teaching in Poland for the first time in five years, but it does feel good to be back in a building filled with classrooms, students and possibilities.

The CUNY gig came about after I approached a professor at the J-school about  what role, if any, might be open to me there. “Is there any need for someone to help international students with English?” I asked. “No,” he said firmly, and that, I thought, was that. But he passed my C.V. along  to a writing coach who responded with an enthusiastic  “Yes!” Now I’m holding office hours on Monday afternoons and by appointment.

So far I’ve coached eight students privately — one Japanese, one Chinese, one Austrian, one Portuguese, one Belgian and three Russians.  During  their orientation, I got back up on the horse that threw me and conducted a formal class, an introduction to American and journalistic English; it went fine, confirming my belief that this year’s Columbia experience was an aberration. This work can only enhance the course I wanted to invent for Columbia and still hope to offer in Poland or elsewhere: “English for the Media,” an intensive for working journalists, students, broadcasters, online content producers, press officers, public relations specialists and any other non-native English-speakers  whose work involves contact with the media. (Any takers? For the proposal, click here.)

For someone trained for classroom teaching, where one curriculum must fit a dozen or more students, the opportunity to address individual concerns is a luxury. One student needs help with prepositions; another, whose native language has no articles, must be reminded when to use them and when not.  Nearly all need some fine-tuning in pronunciation — the correct O sound in product, for example,  or why the final A’s are different in caravan and corporate. A session that begins with language may end with an explanation of the New York State Legislature or Rosh Hashanah.  One Russian student asked if she should be reading journalism or literature to get a feel for English writing. (My answer: “You should be reading everything you can get your hands on.”) Nearly all are challenged by accuracy in note-taking, especially in a second language.

Being a firm believer in the Mrs. Anna School of Pedagogy — “If you become a teacher/By your pupils you’ll be taught” (from “The King and I”) — I’m also learning. (Take that, Bill Maher! Your remark on last season’s closing show that any teacher claiming to learn more from her students than she teaches them is a lousy teacher was unusually mean-spirited and just plain wrong.)  What’s the most gratifying thing I’ve learned this semester?

Despite all the new technology, all the available (and mandatory) platforms, all the bells and whistles, today’s journalism students have the same problems my generation had when we started J-school 40 years ago. They may have arrived already adept at Twitter and Final Cut Pro, but they need to learn how to do research, how to organize information, how to walk up to total strangers and get them to talk. In short, they need to learn how to do journalism. My clients have the added burden of learning to do it in a foreign language and a foreign culture.

To help address students’ questions between sessions, I’m initiating yet another blog, English for Journalists, hosted by CUNY.edu. If you’re an international student confused about word choices, uncertain about prepositions or totally ignorant of an arcane grammar point, this blog is for you. If you’re not a student but confused anyway, you’re welcome, too. Look for the first post soon.