NY missive no 203 - Reaching across

On a beach in Martinique - Grande Anse d’Arlet - we heard the word “Tortue!", "Tortue!” from time to time in excited tones as children came back from a swim and reported to their parents that they had seen a sea turtle.

It created a sense of anticipation, of being on the fringes of delight (with a hint of FOMO). There were turtles somewhere nearby, but well, what are the chances of seeing one, and perhaps it’s fine not to, and just to hear the awe in the air...

Until CMH, still very close to the shoreline, said “look!” and for the next twenty minutes or so he, JNH and I floated a few meters above and behind a sea turtle as she (or he?) went about her way, grazing food off the sea-bed and swimming calmly, sometimes coming up for air when we would surface too and watch her reptilian head rise above the water for a second or two. As we followed I felt astonishment at the details - her ringed eyes, quilted skin and shell, the folds in her neck. And also a closeness, our human movements really not that different from hers.

Various factors had contributed to us being in Martinique this August, an unforgettable break with us four and Dad. There was C’s suggestion of it in May, and me taking it up given that earlier in the year I’d read Martiniquais writer Eduard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-Monde / Treatise of the Whole-World.

It has been a year of mind-opening (mind-guiding) reading, with the joy of each book's interpretation of the world functioning individually as well as in conversation with the others. I had come across some of Glissant’s writing and thought that perhaps I could find a copy of Traité du Tout-Monde at Albertine on Fifth Avenue, one of those loose-yourself wooden-shelved bookshops with the occasional nook for reading, and with a statue of Le Petit Prince nearby. 

They didn’t stock it though. I bought Le Bastion des Larmes / The Bastion of Tears by Abdellah Taïa instead, and ordered Traité du Tout-Monde online. I know that I missed parts of the meaning of Tout-Monde with my rusty French but understood enough to keep marking the margins like a school student, a student of Glissant’s post-colonial perspective on connectedness and “relation” (rejecting “totalité") which seems such a clear way to read the history and present of the Caribbean, with its tumultuous journey of brutality, slavery, mixing, resisting, emerging, and which also seems to be just the way of thinking that is going to keep humanity alive in its complexity and dynamism during a time when dull binaries and blustering simplicity and turbo-charged concentration of wealth, narrowly-defined, seem to be the dominant trajectory. 

Then in Le Bastion des Larmes, the gay narrator reckons with his past on a visit back from Paris to his childhood town of Salé in Morocco (just over the Bou Regreg river from Rabat) to help his sisters organize his mother’s affairs after her death, and to sell the last part of their home. Physical places build the book's narrative, containers of deeply personal experience and memory, both traumatic and delightful. A hamman, the house, the streets, the Bastion des Larmes itself.

At the beginning of the Summer, we drove up to Lake Placid. (It was a jump in the deep-end driving-wise as neither C nor I have driven in the past 18 years or so, having had little need to in the city). C has bad memories of the bicentennial of the United States when he was a small child in NYC. He wanted to be somewhere different for the 250th, and also for the kids to have a good memory of this anniversary. In particular, he wanted to visit John Brown’s farmhouse, so that’s what we did on the first morning there.

At some point on the 4th itself I browsed in the bookshop on Main Street while the boys were in a nearby arcade. I picked up The Bear by Andrew Krivak (apt for where we were), and Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls (“work related?” asked Dad, when I was reading it in Martinique - and that’s not at all the case, but just shows how I gravitate to all things cities and buildings. C had said, “I guess you chose it because of the title").

Like Glissant, Murakami also engages in boundary-blurring in The City and Its Uncertain Walls, though rather than blurring the boundaries of real places his borders are between places real and imagined, and even more so, between our real and imagined selves, our conscience and sub-conscience. 

In S.L Huang’s brilliant science fiction Language of Liars, which I read next, the boundaries in question are between cultures (across galaxies, and time), and the motivation for bridging them - in this case literally involving “jumping” from a culture to another - can be life-affirming or life-obliterating. 

And now, back in NYC, I’m halfway through The Bear. It brings the reader into an almost post-human future inhabited by a girl and her father in the wilderness, and then just the girl, who journeys with the bear as her companion. Here again I’m experiencing, this time through the page rather than in the ocean, the sensation of being up close to an animal that humans are not used to being close to. Realizing that perhaps we have more in common than we think, what stands in the way is an openness to understand. 

When the girl asks the bear why he can talk: 

“The bear shifted and sighed and was quiet for a time. When he spoke finally, he said that long ago all the animals knew how to make the sounds the girl and her father used between them. But it was the others like her who stopped listening, and so the skill was lost. As for the bear, he learned it from his mother, who learned it from her mother. Not all animals had the range of voice that could be heard, he said, but all living things spoke, and perhaps the real question was how she could understand him.”

NY missive no 202: Himalayan White Pine in Fort Greene Park

Just inside the Southeast corner of Fort Greene park is a towering Himalayan White Pine.

It’s one of those trees that demands your attention as you walk past. “Stop your steps, look up a moment!” Its branches bear finger-like fronds that brush in the wind. It’s comfortable in its majesty. I know that it is a Himalayan White Pine because a sign at its foot says so. And as I stood there this week, I wondered whether, despite the apparent comfort, it’s lonely, displaced, aware of its origins in mountainous terrain while stuck in a curated park, surrounded by city blocks.

On the subway ride home I looked more into the trees of Fort Greene Park. It turns out that many, probably this one included, were planted when the park was first designed in in the 1860s by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, with the intention of featuring trees from around the world. You can do a “tree tour” of the park following a map (the Himalayan White Pine in the Southeast corner is number 15).

I was reminded of the Glyptoteket’s Winter Garden in Copenhagen, where with fishing nets hanging from the ceiling the artist Alia Farid interrogated the process of transporting palm trees - and other objects - from their local habitats to create an environment for Europeans to enjoy. The movement of trees echoes that of humans of course, transplanted voluntarily, and involuntarily, and through processes in-between the two, from place to place, continent to continent.

On reflection I’ve come to see the pine another way. As neither severed and sad, nor oblivious to its displacement, but as an honest connection between North America’s Atlantic Coast (specifically, Brooklyn, New York City) and the towering Himalayas so many thousands of miles away - where other white pines brush their fronds through the sky.

NY missive no 201: World Cup 2026 gets underway

This epic tournament planned over several years, taking place in 16 cities across North America, kicked off today. 

For me it felt like something of an anti-climax though obviously it depends where you were. Along Steinway Street in Astoria a couple of days earlier, stores and cafes were adding extra Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, Egyptian flags in anticipation with posters in doorways announcing that venues will be showing the matches. For the kick-off game between Mexico and South Africa I was at home. 

The corporate performance of the whole thing felt elevated, with the newly-introduced hydration breaks brought to you by Coca-Cola’s PowerAid and the polished FOX broadcast. (FOX has the exclusive English language rights in the US, Telemundo has the exclusive Spanish-language rights here. When you zoom out to look at the broadcasting rights everywhere though, there’s still something mind-blowing and boundary-blurring in the sheer reach of the event).

Mexico won handily 2-0. Their opponent South Africa got two red cards and closed out the game with just nine players on the pitch. A colleague in Mexico City described a bifurcated sensation during the day, featuring the excitement of the football and the sounds of helicopters over the city monitoring protests by parents of the disappeared. Here in the US, the morning’s headlines were i. The Knicks historic comeback from a 29 point deficit to beat the Spurs in game 4 of the NBA finals 107 to 106, and ii. new attacks by the Trump administration against Iran. 

On a close-to-home plane…CMH’s soccer practice this evening was cancelled due to extreme heat: the same heat that many of the professionals will be playing in during their World Cup games (will those PowerAid sponsored hydration breaks be enough?). 

NY missive no 200 - Clock

For a while I was using my i-pad as my alarm clock. Instead of reading a book - which, at night, invariably would send me to sleep so that C would come in later and find me glasses on, book in hand, light still on yet snoozing away - I would be clicking through news, reading a few paragraphs here and few paragraphs there. 

Then after my alarm went off in the morning I would decide to “check out the latest” before getting up, finding myself again wallowing in horrifying headlines. I say decide to, but it was more of a reflex action. Not the best way to start the day.

So I bought an alarm clock. Kind of ridiculous how that simple act became an important thing on my to-do-list which sat there for a while before I actually got around to it. And when I did, I shamefully spent five minutes doing so on Amazon instead of checking out Moon Electronics around the corner on Astoria's Steinway Street. (Outside of which I had stood on a sweltering hot May day nine months pregnant with tía D’s dog on a lead while she bought something inside - a camera I think? JNH was born that evening). Next time that I need something practical…Moon first. 

Because I had ordered in a hurry online, the clock ended up being much bigger than I thought it was. Its numbers and hands kind of leap out at you when you enter the room. I love it though. It’s just a clock. It has three functions: telling the time, waking you up when you need to, and a little light you can click on the top right in case you need to see the time in the dark. 

It was advertised as not ticking, which is true, but it does have a very feint almost imperceptible whirr which could be annoying but which I’ve got used to. And I honestly feel lighter when I go to sleep and when I wake up. Somehow more in the world, rather than being simultaneously barraged by it yet distanced. It takes being further into the waking day to navigate that gap in a meaningful way.

*******

This is my 200th EWINY entry. Next year it will be 20 years since I wrote my first one the day after I arrived in NYC to live. I was 30 then, and next year I’ll turn 50, and writing here, sometimes much too sporadically, has accompanied me through discovery, love, young children, my mother's death, teenage children, getting older gracefully and sometimes not so gracefully...with the constant of this magnificent city and its millions of residents living through the phases of their lives.

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.

NY missive no 198 - Corral de Comedias, Alcalá de Henares

 

I climb into a bubble bath on a Friday evening with a red leaflet I had picked up the previous week by some outdoor bookstands in Madrid.

I realize it’s a leaflet about “Book Friday”, a project coinciding with the American “Black Friday". It recommends that people read a book rather than falling for the Black Friday appeal of discounted deals for other kinds of object. The day was the idea of Hugo Prestel, a third generation bookseller and a Madrid garbage collector. It celebrates, the leaflet says, “el objeto más enriquecedor y duradero: el libro” / “the most enriching and enduring object: the book.” 

Speaking of lasting books, the Madrid trip re-introduced me to one in particular, Calderón de la Barca’s play “La Vida Es Sueño”, which was one of the books I’d studied as part of my Spanish courses back in university. We were staying in Alcalá de Henares, actually its own city albeit part of the Community of Madrid, as CMH had been invited to do some practices with Atletico, and that’s where one of their practice grounds is. It’s quite a way out, I thought, when first organizing things, then realized that Alcalá is a UNESCO heritage site and figured that may actually be kind of interesting, and it was. 

On our last evening there, we took the short tour of the Corral de Comedias, a theater alongside Alcalá’s main square, Plaza Cervantes, that first opened in 1602. It wasn’t a regular tour. The guide recited a monologue. Her words, expressions and gestures transported us back through the stages of the theater’s life. She began right back when the theater was a patio, tucked between houses, and resident animals had to be shooed away to make room for the performers. In those early days the plays were religious, “translating” stories that were in Latin for people who did not understand Latin. 

The theater then became a place for entertainment, a more official structure, where hundreds crammed in to watch long plays - calling out for lines to be repeated if they hadn’t heard them over the din of the audience. Women were in a cordoned-off area at the back, fanning themselves in the heat and using their fans to communicate with suitors in other parts of the theater. The theater established connections with the court in Madrid, linkages that meant it kept going when the majority of other corrals were shut down for their unsanitary conditions.

Eventually though it entered a period of decline, as people found other forms of entertainment. It became a cinema for a while, then students at Alcalá University researched its origins, took a look behind the movie screen and discovered the structure of the theater still largely intact, leading to its renovation and re-opening in the 2000s, done carefully and thoughtfully so that when you walk down under the stage you can still see the original patio, as well as a contraption that was used for people to magically disappear and reappear on stage, and a machine for making the sound of thunder. Earlier in the monologue the guide had shown us another machine, a spinning barrel that generated the sound of wind. 

Some of Calderón de la Barca’s plays were performed there, says a sign near the theater entrance. I imagine one of them was La Vida es Sueño. Back at home, I dug my old copy off the shelves, pencil marks on all the pages, and marveled at the way these words have travelled across four centuries - books are lasting indeed. 

That last evening that we were in Alcalá was the city’s Christmas lighting festival, and it was packed. Though a waiter told us that that is usually the case during the weekend in Alcalá, regardless of the season. What I had thought would be a sleepy town on the outskirts of Madrid turned out to be quite a party place. A procession of giants (a tradition from the early 1500s) arrived outside the town tall next to the theater, a stage hosted music that all generations could bop to and a small ferris wheel provided views of the festivities from up in the air. 

A while later we returned to the theater for the evening’s performance. It happened to be a monologue too - “El maestro Juan Martínez que estaba allí" - this one transporting us to the life of a flamenco dancer traveling through Istanbul, Romania and then Russia just as the Russian revolution broke out in 1917. As the play draws to a close, Martinez is looking out from the Odessa docks to a boat that is likely taking him back, after six years of chaos and hardship, to Europe. Suddenly he feels frozen to the spot. What will “home” be like and will he be remembered? Which is real, he wonders, the life he left behind or the one he is about to return to? They are thoughts that echo Segismundo’s refrain in La Vida es Sueño: 

¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.

¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,

una sombra, una ficción,

y el mayor bien es pequeño;

que toda la vida es sueño,

y los sueños, sueños son.”

“What is life? A frenzy.

What is life? An illusion,

A shadow, a fiction,

And the greatest good is small

As all of life is a dream, 

And dreams, are but dreams.”

NY missive no 197 - From "Blink" to "PureGym"

Blink on Steinway as it was, plus double rainbow

Our local, low-cost gym was Blink, on Steinway Street. Their primary color was orange, and there was a cheery all-are-welcome vibe about the place. That was even set out explicitly in their slogans, “The gym for every body”, and “Mood above muscle”.

You would swipe in with a tag on your keychain at the front desk, where two employees were on hand to welcome customers and help out with anything that might come up. In the locker rooms of course the modus operandi was people plugged into their own content on their phones, going about their business while listening to music, or a podcast, or calling a friend.

But sometimes there’d be chit chat among the gym-goers. I remember getting into a discussion with two other women, one much older than me, one younger, about mountains or big hills we had either climbed, or would like to climb. I haven’t climbed many (despite that being on my “forty before forty” list), but I mentioned that, like one of them, my sister once climbed Kilimanjaro. Invariably in front of the changing room’s wide mirror someone would be posing in a conscious yet unselfconscious way for selfies, holding their camera up at this angle or that to get the best shot.

Blink was owned by Equinox - a “luxury fitness and health club” company. Equinox in turn was (is) owned by the real estate conglomerate Related Companies, which in turn is owned by billionaire and Trump pal Stephen Ross. All those layers didn’t really make their presence felt in the Blink on Steinway. Until things began to change. 

The first thing that happened was the name above the entrance. The bright lettering “Blink Fitness” was replaced with “PureGym” in teal green. Over a period of a few weeks, the cheesy signage inside ("I blink therefore I am", "Blink and be merry") switched to nondescript PureGym messaging and emergency cords marked with big red arrows went up on each wall.

Contractors came in and worked on an elaborate project in the entranceway, which turned out to be the installation of two of those revolving door containers that you get at airport security. Scan a QR code on your phone, enter a plastic tube and the door revolves shut behind you. Wait a few seconds praying that the thing works, then the other side opens up and releases you into the gym. Then the reception table was removed, along with the employees who used to stand behind it. 

Blink had gone bankrupt - the “mood above muscle” membership model hadn’t worked out for Equinox-Related-Ross. And PureGym bought them out. When I learned that PureGym is a UK company I thought, as an American Brit, ok, that’s kind of cool. But when I learned that PureGym is joint-owned by two private equity firms, Leonard Green & Partners and the giant KKR, I thought well that’s less cool. It explains why the gym now feels pretty much like an extraction machine, even if it is less crowded as the “bring a friend once a week for free” perk has gone and the equipment paired down a bit accordingly. Gone are the elements of fun and the presence of human staff, so that our weight-lifting tread-milling bodies generate healthy corporate returns. 

I still go a couple of times a week. One time I thought I’d make more of an effort to chat with other gym goers to compensate for the overall reduced humanity but my conversant’s politics riled me up (with her sweeping dismissal of all people who voted for Trump, aghhh), and I went back to listening to my music, watching the CNN headlines on the screens above my head, and bemoaning the increasing atomization of the world. 

PureGym’s motto is a rather cold and functional: “stronger than yesterday.”