New York missive no 134 - Moving

I’m sitting on the balcony of our third floor apartment at 23-19 30th Drive. It’s the last night I will, because tomorrow we’re moving to our new home, just some blocks away at 37th Street, still in Astoria. The pear tree leaves are so heavy in Summer that they completely obscure the view West to Manhattan, just an orange window light peeks through here and there. There’s a breeze, a relief at the end of a humid day.

This is where C, Dad and I toasted the arrival of JNH, a welcome glass of champagne in the midst of sleep deprivation and discombobulated amazement. It’s where two years later, C was sitting with newborn CMH on his lap while chatting to a friend on his cellphone – the more relaxed mode of the second child. Of course there’s sadness at change, but it’s also time to move on.

Moves like this may accentuate the sense of time passing, but in an odd way they also create a block of permanence. I won’t have new memories of living here now. The ones I have, I have – some will last and some will fade. This was my experience of this place.

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On the morning that the newspaper stands were splattered with the news of Robin Williams’ suicide, I was at Woodside station in Queens. I was at Woodside to switch from the 7 train to the somewhat quaintly-named Long Island Railroad to go to Hicksville, to get a bus to Jericho, to close on the house and C and I were buying in Astoria. The closing was in Jericho because that is where the bank attorney is based.

Having hung around all Summer (says she, as if not travelling is such an ordeal!) for the long drawn-out deal to finalize, or else for us to decide to look elsewhere, this happened to be the one week when C had to be in work every day, filling in for the Chair of his English department. So I was headed to the closing on my own.

On the Woodside train platform I noticed one of my nails was split, so I bit the wayward strand off. I imagined that the other women around the table at the closing, like the seller’s and bank attorney, would have long painted nails. Then, that no doubt they would find it eccentric that I’m travelling to a house closing by subway, train, and bus. She’s buying a house, but doesn’t have a car?! Then, that they might put the inadequate nails and public transport and me not seeming to be bothered by either down to my being English, but why should being English be either here or there, but of course, being anything-ish is always a factor.

There goes a similar thought-pendulum to buying the house itself – a small “single family” to use the realtor terms – a process in which an under-current of conviction has been chopped at times by doubts (and annoyance at the predictability of those doubts!).

Isn’t this just what ‘people’ do, investing in a place they can only own a quarter of, committing to a big mortgage payment each month, believing they ‘need’ space, when perhaps a small and more affordable apartment would give us more freedom to the live the lives we want to lead?...A sense of responsibility to do the ‘right’ thing with our downpayment money but wondering if that ‘right’ thing is really right for us all, and back to the conviction again, to having to believe a decision is right or else we would stagnate. The idea of home holds so much more than merely a place to live.

One of the attorneys did indeed have meticulous long and painted pink nails. While at times since we’d signed the contract it had become easy to start doubting the seller and questioning his motives, suddenly with all of us there in the room the process became much more human: a man and his family of grown-up children who wanted to sell their house to move on, another family with young children that wanted to buy it. Papers were signed and exchanged, faster and faster, so many of them crossing the table and then the realization that now that was it, we’d bought the place.

My attorney drove me and the title insurance guy (such a team involved in one purchase!) to the station in Hicksville to catch the train back to Woodside – he sped round corners and cut through parking lots to get us there in time for a particular train. When I emailed him at the end of the day I said thanks for your help through this process, and also: we just made it onto the train. “It’s the little things, isn’t it?” he replied.

New York missive no 133 - A tower rises on 30th Street

There is a skyscraper going up on the North East corner of Sixth Avenue and 30th Street. A notice says that the planned completion date is April 2016. One would have thought that conveys time's sprawl. So many months! Instead, the construction seems to have the opposite effect, when I walk past each day on my way to work. It contracts time.

I can’t remember what was there before the building site, what was torn down. But I do remember when the foundation pit was a gaping square hole in the ground (reminiscent of others). I remember when hoardings went up around it, so you could only see the site by peering through diamond-shaped holes cut out of the splintery timber, when the cranes arrived (“New York Crane & Equipment Corp”), then when the second floor rose up above the hoardings bringing workers with their yellow hats up into view from the sidewalk.

So many phases, so much time, but I know that one day I will be walking by the completed tower, observing the stores that occupy the ground floor, then craning my neck up, up, to its top, surrounded by all the other skyscrapers it has joined there. The whole thing may as well have happened in the blink of an eye.

New York missive no 132 - Rainey Park and "The Father of the Bridge"

The Sunday after 4th July I took the boys to Rainey Park. Two things meant the Summer heat was delightful instead of oppressive. There was a breeze, and we were there in the late afternoon when the Sun was low in the sky. The breeze was intensified because the park is by East River.

A couple of weeks previously we’d been here in the morning to celebrate CMH’s second birthday with friends. Now, there were parties going on everywhere, this being 4th of July weekend. Groups of folding chairs were circled around portable barbeques that released the smell of lighter fluid and burgers into the wind. The parties merged into one another because the park is only small and the children created a constant stream weaving between them, across each other, over the play area with its soft tarmac hills and slides that were too hot to slide down, unless, that is, you tipped buckets of water down which made them thrillingly fast, too fast for the little ones.

Most of the people in the park were Latino, presumably because many of Astoria’s whites headed out of town over the holiday weekend. The whole neighborhood had had a dropped-shoulders feel from Friday 4th because of the reduced population and changed demographic.

CMH headed straight for the water fountains. For an hour he ran in and out of the jets, putting his foot on them at times to block them, or observing groups of older kids with their water games, sticking out his belly to assert his toddler-confidence. JNH gravitated to the other side of the play area, a slope of unkempt grass tilting down to the river. He chased dragonflies. Huge ones swung about in the air above him. At one point he asked for a pot or a net to catch them, but when that didn’t come through he just ran beneath them, waving his arms excitedly but clearly with no real intent to catch them.

I later learned that Rainey Park is named after Dr. Thomas Rainey, who had dreamed of building a bridge from that same place across what is now Roosevelt Island (then Blackwell Island), to Manhattan. A group of Long Island City-dwellers incorporated the “New York and Queens Country Bridge Company” in 1871. Rainey became its treasurer and traveled the country to raise funds. But the War Department was worried a bridge could weaken the defense of New York and access to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and didn’t approve it. Anyway, most of the interest was for a bridge project linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. By 1892 the project was on hold. But a community group called the Committee of Forty kept the idea alive. It gained momentum after the consolidation of the three boroughs into New York City in 1898, and finally the bridge was built a few blocks South of the original location. It was called Queensboro bridge.

Dr Rainey walked across the bridge on opening day in 1909, and received a gold medal with “The Father of the Bridge” inscribed on it. He said to the New York Times:

“This is my bridge. At least it is the child of my thought, of my long years of arduous toil and sacrifice. Just over there, are the old towers of my bridge, which I began to build many years ago. I spent all I owned on the project...It is a grand bridge, much greater than the one I had in mind. It will be in service to thousands in the years to come, when Dr. Rainey and his bridge projects will long have been gathered into the archives of the past.”

In 1912, after Rainey had died, the area which he had planned for the bridge was named after him and then turned into a park.

So there we were. In a park that commemorates a man’s dream for a bridge. The air contained children’s yet-to-be-formed dreams for their future, teenagers’ emerging dreams, adults’ abandoned, lingering or realized dreams, but just contained them. All were suspended on a Summer afternoon when attention was occupied in the present, with barbeques, water-jets or dragonflies.

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Two phrases I’ve been encountering recently with implications that outstretch their mundane context:

1. The way that yoga teachers describe crossing your arms in the direction that you’re not used to:

“A non-habitual interlace.”

2. And what New York subway drivers say to their passengers, after warning them to keep a close eye on their possessions (or to report instances of sexual harassment):

“Remain alert, and have a nice day.” (They give a big emphasis to aLERT - the ER sounding the same as in "jerk").

Which of course means "keep alert – oh, and have a nice day too". But it could be understood to mean that if you remain alert, you will have a nice day.

New York missive no 131 - Two taxi rides

Astoria in the snow, not on the same evening described below, but another one some weeks later

Aquí y allá.

On 2 January we arrive back at JFK in a snowstorm. It is around 8pm. For the swirling flakes and the dark we can’t see the ground until we are about two feet (so it seems) above it, then after landing the wheels spin and slide and other jets loom beside us as the pilot navigates to the terminal. Then there's the taxi ride back home to Astoria along the Grand Central Parkway, driving at 10mph (so it seems) on the icy roads. CMH on knee and sleepy JNH beside me, I am full of that travelling-mother-near-end-of-journey feeling that I always have on that taxi ride even in normal weather, heart in throat just in case now, as a trip is almost over, something happens. Imagination heightened by tiredness. C will tell me afterwards that he loved that particular ride. The driver has “1010 wins” playing. That’s the radio station C’s Dad always listened to in his taxi. No doubt there is the familiarity too of New York in the snow, of blizzards past.

Such a different ride to the one a week earlier from the airport in Santo Domingo. It is my parents’ first visit there. We emerge out of customs into an airport hall brimming with people waiting for relatives, among them tía D who JNH leaps up to hug, to my relief given that despite many skype-calls he hasn’t seen her in person for over a year. The seven of us – three generations – cram with too much luggage into a taxi that seems it might collapse, windows down to catch a breeze as we drive along the sea to the city, merengue blasting, and stopping for a minute to dig out the cooler that has got buried at our feet and crack open beers, “No really, beer right now?” says Mum, then “Oh alright, go on then.”