New York missive no 43 - Windy walk, dogs, and inspiring people

Two sensations from last Thursday. In the evening, putting back on the same warm socks I’d just worn for a work-out at the gym. Should have been disgusting but was strangely comforting. And in the morning, a wonderfully frantic winter wind that blew me about on a walk down the Hudson to work – or at least, from 109th to 50th, before I had to succumb to the subway. The water was whipped up choppy, the boats on the 79th street pier bobbed like horses at their bits and there weren’t many people around except for dedicated joggers and walkers of happy dogs. I arrived at work with witch-like hair.

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There were a lot of posh dogs posing about this week on the stretch of Seventh Avenue just North of the office. There was a perfectly clipped Bedlington, a proud Briard oblivious to admiring crowds and svelte greyhounds rippling with pedigree. They looked superior to the people milling around them in their clumpy winter coats. I later realized that the reason for this canine conglomeration was Westminster dog show (the winner: a Sussex Spaniel called Stump).

People so love dogs in this city, and while I used to find that bizarre for an island with so little green space for them to run about in, I’ve come to think it’s precisely because of the lack of space that people love their dogs. They re-connect their owners with nature – giving them a reason to get out and find it, or just rubbing it in their faces with a shake of a shaggy head and a wet lick, with the thump of tails and paws on a wooden floor. That love, of course, can lead to (usually) harmlessly irrational behaviour. T and A, who hosted S’s birthday party last weekend in their expansive Chelsea apartment (too expansive in my view, because however big the party people always feel conscious of saggy pockets of empty space floating around them), spend more on conditioner for the fur of their proportionately expansive, immaculate Rottweiler as they do for their own hair. TE, at a KBG Bar reading by a quartet of Writer’s Studio teachers, read her poignant and hilarious story about a man’s love for his Black Labrador “Bird”. And Ch described how the other day running in Central Park she almost stumbled over a famous elderly actor, as he scooped up his dog’s turd. Their eyes met briefly, they smiled, and she jogged on (of course I’ve forgotten the actor’s name, me being so crap with famous people’s names…pun kind of intended).

[Added later: Ah, just remembered, not an actor but a musician, it was Lou Reed. Re-christened Poo Reed by Ch].

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A sense of priority totally recalibrated this week by the stories of four inspiring people. One of the 50 people killed in the Buffalo aeroplane crash on Thursday was Alison des Forges, an advocate for justice for the Rwanda genocide. As Ken Roth says in Human Rights Watch’s tribute to her, "She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist - principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.” Journalist Michael Kavanagh says in his Slate article on des Forges: "The most common criticism of Alison's work, particularly on Rwanda, is that it sometimes failed to take into account the unique political and security needs of a country just emerging from conflict. The criticism is not unfounded, but it misses the point. The job of a human rights worker is not the same as that of a politician who needs to make unenviable compromises between security and justice. A human rights worker is in the business of giving voice to the voiceless, uncovering injustice, and advocating for its redress. Alison Des Forges—brilliant, indefatigable, and, above all, passionate [him and Ken Roth must have been talking re different kinds of passion...] —reveled in this."

Then today in the gym I caught by chance a documentary on Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two African American athletes who gave the black power salute from the podium when they won the gold and bronze 200m medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. On their return to the US they received a torrent of death threats and it’s only relatively recently that their bravery has been recognised. The documentary wove accounts of the build-up to their salute, with its aftermath, with their moving return to the stadium in Mexico last year.

And just now I’ve posted on our website an article about Ma Jun, the Chinese environmentalist who persistently, patiently and effectively exposes polluting companies in China and pushes them to clean up their act.