NY missive no 199 - Cold spell

A few glinting drops falling from the awning of Ovelia restaurant along 30th Avenue marked what could be the start of a thaw in NYC. Since a huge snowstorm in January the temperatures have stayed determinedly cold, so nothing melted. Now it seems like those drops were just a temporary hint of a thaw. An “extreme cold warning” for this weekend is showing up again on my phone.

The initial storm brought down 12 inches of snow. It was the first weather-test for newly inaugurated Mayor Mamdani, who passed it if not with impossible flying colors, with aplomb. The challenging part has been afterwards, as sanitation workers have had to balance clearing frozen snow-heaps by roadsides - at times using massive melters - with picking up garbage (all while navigating said snow-heaps). 

The snow-heaps have also changed the rhythm of the sidewalks. Instead of the usual arbitrary hurried movement of New Yorkers buried in their phones, we’ve had to filter ourselves through narrow paths cut into the snow at crosswalks, single file. Going at the pace of the slowest. Stepping up onto a pile to let a parent or carer navigate a stroller carrying an agog child, or children, through a gap not wide enough for its wheels. This new dance has made us more aware of each other. You can feel the shift. I really hope, though I doubt, it will last. 

The cold didn’t stop thousands turning out for a march from Foley Square to Chinatown against the tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement across the country, a sea of woolly hats, steam from warm breath, and placards saying “ICE out”, “NYC heart immigrants” and “Chinga la Migra". The killings in Minnesota of two American citizen protestors by federal agents are just the tip of the iceberg of a system of cruelty and intentional chaos playing out in the country’s homes, streets, prisons and detention centers. 

As America approaches its 250th anniversary two opposing visions of this wild, big country are playing out. They will be on display at this Sunday’s Super Bowl, where Bad Bunny’s half-time show will be countered by a parallel “All American Halftime Show” organized by Turning Point USA. A few will experience the Super Bowl live, but the majority will do so digitally, amplified by whatever media bubble they’re in. 

In addition to shifting our pedestrian patterns, the snow in NYC has been a reminder that we still live in an ultimately physical world. The snow will melt when the temperature rises, in the meantime we make do. The garbage is cleared when sanitation workers and their truck come down the street, not when a button is clicked or a screen swiped. There’s a simple presence of care in the air. Precious, fragile, but there. Something of it will last because it always has done.

New York missive no 88 - Choosing tributaries

I choose my own tributaries. In a world of seemingly endless sources of information (seemingly being the operative word), that strikes me as the most practical approach. At least, it’s the only way to make some sense of it all and weave a narrative. We all do that to some extent of course, even if the tributaries sometimes bring surprises. Thank god they do.

Given the quiet, incessant choosing and filtering, references that seem to be coincidences but in fact are nothing of the sort arise. One example from yesterday: the artist Jacob Lawrence popped up twice. In the afternoon, at an exhibition on the Apollo Theater at the Museum of the City of New York, a description panel included an image from one of Lawrence's Migration Series paintings. Then in the evening as I fed JNH listening to the radio my wonderful former journalism teacher Hariett Gilbert referred to him, during an episode of the BBC program The Strand.

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One of the things on my 40 before 40 list was to learn about and make maps. I’m making a gentle start. I'm channeling some map-related sources into my life and finding that I’m holding on to random references to maps as I come across them.

I devoured Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer on my subway journeys to work. About which more in a later post when I’ve had a chance to digest it properly. (In the meantime, just “a magnificent book”).

A couple of recently-encountered quotes:

“This is a deep and mysterious happiness, to confirm the accuracy of a map.” Don DeLillo, in his short story Human Moments in World War III.

“More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.” The last line of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem The Map. Of course the whole poem is about a map but that line bowled me over.

And I’d had the idea, before JNH was born, to decorate a wall of his room with maps. Then I realized that it would look rather pretentious and ridiculous in a baby’s room and not be much fun for him at all. (Instead there are black and white stencils of a boy sitting in the moon blowing bubbles, some animals and a quirky tree). Maybe when he’s older.

In the meantime he does now possess a special map. His baptism present from m and d was a 1799 wooden puzzle of the "Post Roads of England & Wales", passed down through m's family for 8 generations to arrive, for now, with JHH.

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On Friday C and I saw three girls leaping in excitement on Steinway Street just south of 30th Ave waving a big Egyptian flag. We walked further up the street to see what was going on in “little Egypt”. It was a few hours after Mubarak stepped down. The street was surprisingly quiet, perhaps because of prayer time or work or both. But that image of the three girls with the flag was plenty to stay with me. A real-life image to accompany those rolling across the TV screens.

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Today JNH went on a swing for the first time. We were in the playground on 45th Street near 30th Ave, which still had un-melted snow on the ground. That’s another image that will stay will me. His big two-toothed grin framed by the blue of his snow-coat, swinging forward and back, forward and back.

New York missive no 87 - Out of the ordinary

The white of snow brings out dark lines that in other weather go ignored.



I knew early on that my journey to work last Thursday would be different than usual. Walking along 30th Drive towards the 30th Ave subway station, first I saw a tiny dead mouse on the sidewalk. It was smaller than my thumb and looked like it had been frozen by the cold.

Then I saw a dog doing an orange poop. (The dog had positioned itself on the grassy verge in such a way that you couldn’t help but see what it was up to). The poop wasn’t orange in a normal way. It had swirls of fluorescent plasticy-orange like the jackets of track maintenance people. I got to the station, and learned that there were no trains running from 30th Ave to Manhattan because of an “incident” at Queensboro Plaza.

So I walked down to Queensboro Bridge and over the river. Walking across that bridge is always a bit thrilling. It’s thrilling because the bridge soars high above East River, its thick steel girders reaching to Manhattan which is, of course, center of the universe. But the thrill is qualified by a “bit”, because the thick steel girders and a mesh fence stop you from seeing much of the river below except in glimpses. And your walk is accompanied by the roar of traffic.

For me, the bridge now always makes me think of being driven across it in a taxi, in labour with JNH. I was being whisked towards an experience I knew would change my life, change “me”, for ever. It was good to revive that vivid memory unexpectedly on a diverted Thursday morning journey to work.

New York missive no 85 - resolutions, Dominican Republic, and Oakley sunglasses

Well, so much to write and not the time to write it in.

Briefly, new year’s resolutions include: interviewing people in my neighborhood for a new website I’ve set up www.30thAve.org, taking JNH swimming, and doing a bit of yoga and running (no over-commitments there!).

It’s funny looking at my list of “40 before 40”, half-way down this post, to check how I’m doing with six more years to go. I’ll do a line-by-line report sometime soon. But to summarize, I’m making inroads. That's strangely without trying to, or taking the list seriously at all. As if it was more premonition than to-do list (ok, not the novel-writing bit).

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We spent Christmas and New Year in the Dominican Republic with C’s sister D. Two selected highlights: visiting the municipal cemetery in Santiago where C’s mum is buried; and the discovery and purchase of a painting of a “Gallo Loco” by Miguel Ulloa in the village of Guyacanes.

In the cemetery, I remembered the many times I’d wandered as a tourist around cemeteries in Latin America, and looked at the names in the stacked niches. And here I was visiting the grave of my mother-in-law, with the grandson she never knew snoozing in a papoose on my chest. D had lost the key to the padlock on the niche grate, so the flower vases inside were empty and there was a lot of dust. But a man who worked at the cemetery tipped a few buckets of water over to clean it up. And as always when visiting a grave it was the moment that mattered rather than the physical thing. The fact that here we were, C, D, JNH and I, pausing together in our lives to think about E.

On our way out, D and her friend R who was also with us came across the graves of other people they had known. “Mira, aquí está tal-y-tal….y aquí su esposa…etc”.

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In Guyacanes village, near a small resort where C, JNH and I spent New Years in the company of lots of large Italians, I stumbled across an art gallery with one of Miguel Ulloa’s “Gallo Loco’s” in it – a crazy cockerel against a bright orange background. Now it’s hanging above our bed in New York, greeting us each morning with an imaginary cock’a’doodle doo.

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Racial lines are accentuated everywhere in DR, it seems. In the car parks in Santo Domingo, the people leaving their cars were light-skinned, the people minding them were dark-skinned. In the resort, most of the guests were pale-skinned, all the staff were dark. JNH was much admired by everyone – would he have been so much if he didn’t have a whiteish complexion and blue eyes? The obsession with paleness seems a bit ironic given that white people haven’t exactly had a history of benevolence on the island. As C pointed out, much of it comes from a superiority complex over Haitians, as well as advertising influences from allá.

I was struck by hearing "allá" in DR understood instinctively to mean the US, while among Dominicans in New York of course allá is DR. It's as if the actual allá isn't in either place, but somewhere in-between.

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When the 33 Chilean miners were extracted from their 69-day burial they were wearing Oakley sunglasses. Oakley had donated them, to protect the miners’ from the glare. They were going to need them.