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.

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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.