I learned the other day that the two lions outside the 5th Ave New York Public Library (see NY missive no. 63) are called Patience and Fortitude.
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At the prenatal yoga class a group of expectant mums maneuvers and breathes deeply with their bellies of different sizes, releasing all the blockages that build up during the day between them and their babies who wait patiently for birth. No hurry.
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In an increasingly complex world it becomes more and more important to be simple. Otherwise you just blur, for yourself and others. That’s where Bush had the benefit over Obama (simplicity can be dangerous).
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Never did I think I’d see the day when I’d be busily making wedding plans. There’s only a week to go now, with the pending arrival of friends, parents and sisters (this lucky kid is going to have three aunts: one in the Swiss mountains, one in San Francisco, one in the Dominican Republic). My brain’s been getting a bit addled with to-do lists but the whole process has involved plenty of laughter and learning, bringing together people from across the city to help create an event.
There’s Grace from Table Tables in South Street Seaport with whom we’ve concocted a British (small eats) and Dominican (main course) menu. Sarah the Brooklyn-based photographer. The people from Omonia café in Astoria, who made the cake that featured in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and are also making ours on a somewhat smaller scale. Gabriela the DJ. David who is conducting the ceremony: we met with him today and suddenly the occasion feels whole. And the miracle-working Nelly in Flushing, who with a few weeks notice is making me a dress that will fit me and my expanding belly, with fabric I tracked down one lunchtime in the garment district.
Through all of this I’m learning about relationships too of course. The wonder of a a complete commitment to respect another person for who they are, share with them and love them. And how, far from being confining in anyway, when those feelings work in both directions it is liberating. C and I have compressed encountering each other, getting to know each other, pregnancy, moving in together, engagement and marriage into less than a year…with childbirth and a whole new journey to embark on in May. We could be frazzled by this emotional roller-coaster but instead it's somehow made us steadier, there's a strong quiet calmness beneath it all.
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We recently saw “Note by Note,” a documentary about the Steinway piano factory in Astoria, with an ecclectic bunch of people at the Astoria Historical Society. The society shares its building with a funeral parlour. And in the room next door to ours a Weight-Watchers meeting was underway. Despite the quirky surroundings it was well worth going. The documentary was fascinating and beautifully filmed, an elegy to the kind of craftsmanship that involves ten stages or more spread out over a year, each involving a different person or group of people with precise skills passed down from previous workers, to create a piano. The workers interviewed had the same kind of now-rare pride in their careful work that Nelly clearly has making and mending clothes, in the studio where she has been working for over twenty years.
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My pregnancy hasn’t come accompanied by cravings, quite, but yes by a hankering for certain foods (which, this being America, I go and get and eat): oatmeal, Kit-Kats, coconut juice, leek and potato soup.
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In the introduction to a New Yorker photo series of veterans of the civil rights movement, David Remnick says that Obama, talking about the relationship between their struggle and his own campaigning, rejected any direct comparison but added, “they are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement…there is a voice that is best captured by King, which says that we, as African-Americans, are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union – which is a very optimistic story, in the end. It is fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries…There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries – that sense that, through the deliverance of the least of the these, the society as a whole is better."
A belief in the possibility of the perfection of the union can be used for harmful ends, when driven by a sense of American exceptionalism. But at the same time it creates an environment of striving optimism and energy, one of the reasons why when C pointed out today that I’m clearly not a US-bashing European, I agreed.
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Baby-to-be was kicking a bit less these past few weeks, to the point at which I wondered if he’s ok. Then a couple of days ago the flutters began again, bringing smiles of delight and relief. And I wondered, how much of his character has been formed by now? Can babies have depressions in the womb, sink into a funk for a bit then pull themselves up again?
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In London in December C was startled to see British ancestors watching him from sepia photographs in the bathroom. “How can I do what I need to do with them looking on?” he asked. Good point. Is a downstairs bathroom really the right place for them?
