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.