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 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.”

NY missive no 192 - Steinway-Broadway walk and a "Nomenclature of Colors"

 

Screenshot from Pantone's
 introduction to its 2018 color of the year, "Ultra Violet"

One day this Summer CMH and I went to the Broadway post office in Astoria to mail a book to tía P. It was one of those spontaneous moments when it was just me and one of the boys (C and JNH were headed to the supermarket at the same time).

On the way, we passed the Hour Children thrift store on Steinway and resolved to check it out on our way back. CMH chatted about his process of writing an essay for school. Turning left along Broadway, we passed the library that has finally re-opened after a multi-year renovation - cue a brief reflection on why building projects take so long in this city - and passed another thrift store with books outside: that’s where a few years ago I’d come across a copy of architect's Daniel Libeskind's "Breaking Ground", just as I was beginning to obsess about all things "built environment". 

In the post office, the postal worker who helped us took an understandably long time typing in tía P’s address in the Swiss mountains. At another window was the postal worker who has been at that branch as long as I can remember, who keeps heroically calm during holiday rushes when the queue extends out the door.

On our way back, we went into Hour Children and tried out different sofas and chairs. 

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The book we were mailing to tía P was “Werners Nomenclature of Colors”. We had found it the previous weekend at the Cooper Hewitt design museum - the first time any of us had been (this has been an NYC Summer, and as we weren’t making it to visit P it seemed a perfect thing to send her, to have out on a table for guests at her mountain lodge to browse). Darwin used it to accurately describe colors of the places and creatures he came across while voyaging on the Beagle: blood red, leek green, snow white…

A lovely New Yorker article by Michelle Nijhuis gives more background on the book. The article includes insights from Tanya Kelley, a professor of languages at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, who says that the guide was one of many attempts in nineteenth century Europe to develop a standard way of describing colors: to bridge “word and world.” 

Now there are more mechanized systems to convey specific colors. (I remember being delighted when I discovered how simple it is to reproduce an exact shade with RGB or Hex codes). But Kelly argues that “language still matters, because it moves both the intellect and the emotions, often evoking qualities beyond hue”. 

For example, Homer described the Aegean Sea as “wine-dark” (oínopa). Scholars have come to think may have referred less to its color and more to the “movement of its water”, “shimmer of its surface” or to its depths. More recently Pantone’s 2018 color of the year was “18-3838 Ultra Violet”, which the company described as a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade” that evokes the “experimentation and non-conformity” of Prince, David Bowie, and Jimmy Hendrix.

I have to say, that the 2024 “color of the year” is much less inspiring: peach fuzz. 

NY missive 190 - Cherry

 

One Spring break I was with the kids in London when C messaged with pictures showing that all of the trees next door had come down. These were the trees that had “waved their branches” to JNH during the pandemic, and cast dancing shadows on the back wall of our house in the mornings as the sun came up. They were the trees in G’s back yard, that were older than any others along the block - thick trunked and sprawling branched - a heaven for birds and brave cats, a compact 15-10 meter forest in the city. G’s wife had died, and not very long after, G moved to an apartment by the sea in Brooklyn with his daughter. New G (no relation, same first name) moved in with his wife and soon-to-be-born daughter, with big plans for transforming the place.

The house went through an epic and stressful renovation, and down came the trees - every branch, twig, leaf removed - to be replaced by a…swimming pool! There were scenes that August of workers digging its pit by hand and carrying buckets of earth through the house to a dumpster outside. There were quite a few pauses as the city shut down the project - and the pit would be covered up - before somehow it would get going again.

Then there was the trench for a new wall between our yard and theirs. I’d said please take care of the roots of the cherry tree on our side, which stretched across that divide. The tree was planted by H who lived here before, and was now the tallest around. Assurances notwithstanding, one day I heard its roots being hacked through with a saw - no fault of the guy doing it, who just had his job to do - and I flew outside like a crazy person, yelling please, don’t cut those roots. But of course you can’t have roots running right through a wall foundation.

The tree is still standing. The remaining arc of two thirds of its roots must be tough enough to support it. And it’s not only standing, but thriving, probably because of all the extra light that it has. Now there is a yard with a pool - and the daughter, who arrived mid-construction, splashing around in it - a wall, and then a cherry tree. The tree is sprouting more cherries than it ever has, and its reaching its branches high, as if growing into the spaces left behind by the trees that were removed.

NY missive no 180 - Unisphere and a city coming back to life

 

Unisphere, May 2021

On Wednesday evenings, JNH’s soccer practice is in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. While he plays, I walk up to the Unisphere. The first time, trees nearby were covered with pink and white blossom which floated down in the wind as people beneath the trees took photos, played, embraced, or sat depending on their age and as so often these days I was struck by the immeasurable value of public spaces with nature – breathing space for bodies and minds, collectively and individually (don’t get me started on the fact that there are growing efforts to put a price tag on nature, co-opting what’s left of the planet as a profit machine ostensibly to save it).

This Wednesday, the blossom was no longer there, but a new spectacle had arrived. Misty fountains of water came up from the ground all along the walkway leading up to the Unisphere, capturing sunlight. The photo illustrates it better than words can. The name “Unisphere” feels more resonant than ever. 

The kids’ soccer practices and matches have taken us all over the city this season. There's been a long subway ride on the N train out to Coney Island, where CMH was thrilled by the sight of the recently re-opened Cyclone and resolved to come back to ride it with C (JNH and I decided we'll do the Aquarium instead). Getting on to the homewards train (after a loss – there have been many) I looked back to glimpse the rollercoaster’s red lettering “CYCLONE” against the night sky. 

There have been taxi rides over the Triborough Bridge to Randall’s Island, invariably looping around and around a few times in search of the right field. The island has over sixty of them, but clustered within small groups for the 10s, 20s, 30s and so on, their assigned numbers go up to 91 which seems even more overwhelming. There have been pier pitches – fancy Pier 5 in Brooklyn Heights looking across to the Financial District, with signs around its edge saying that you’re welcome to fish, but that pregnant women, women of childbearing age and children under 15 shouldn’t eat fish or eels from the East River's waters, and Pier 40 by the Hudson, the athletic field looking less snazzy than it would have done back when it opened in the late '90s.

Back here in Queens, we frequently take the Q18 winding bus to Frank Principe Park in Maspeth. The square of playgrounds and sports fields is edged by Queens-defining elements: a cemetery (Mount Zion)…a gas station (Exxon, handily with a Dunkin’ Donuts outlet inside)…an auto repair shop…a roaring highway (the Queens Midtown Expressway section of the I-495)…suburban-style houses…and a hazy Manhattan skyline in the distance. 

The soccer has taken us to other places too, from Astoria Park to Manhattan Beach, from Long Island City to Sheepshead Bay. Throughout New York there’s an atmosphere of reunification – people reuniting with their city and with each other in typical New York proximity - of relief and fragility, barely-buried trauma, and a heightened appreciation for small things.

Unisphere, April 2021

NY missive no 179 - Eternal Flame

Yesterday would have been Mum’s 74^th birthday. She died soon after her 70^th, four years ago. As I often do on her birthday, I walked down to Socrates Sculpture Park, where we scattered half of her ashes in the East River (the other half we scattered by a big tree in London, which P and I used to climb as kids). 

Down on the sand at Hallet’s Cove there were seagull footprints. We all leave our marks. To be considered, appreciated, each one absolutely unique, eventually erased – actually I should say absorbed – by tidal flows, or generations. 

There was sculpture in the park, called Eternal Flame. As P said when I sent her a photograph, it’s not beautiful to look at. (In fact it could almost look like a crematorium chimney). But the idea is beautiful; it’s a concrete chimney with four barbecue grills at the bottom, which visitors are welcome to use, and which prompts thinking about the communal act of cooking and the fact that at any moment in time, somewhere in the World someone is tending to a cooking fire. 

I sat down on one of the brightly-painted picnic benches by the sculpture, and sent my photo and message to P. I told her that I had walked down to the Sculpture Park with the little blue backpack that Mum used to use, which she always said was so practical and useful. And that, writing "backpack", got me crying. Funny how it can take a very specific object like that to cut through the nonsense and get to the center of how you’re feeling. A kind of emotional acupuncture by objects and memories. 

On Mum's birthday, invariably a bright Spring day, I always feel a mixture of deep sadness, with being inspired and recharged by her memory. 

Eternal Flame sculpture in Socrates Park, from when I was there

And Eternal Flame sculpture from above, from the Socrates Park website

NY missive no 177 - Birthday and tomorrow's inauguration

So this is my first pandemic birthday, let’s see if it’s my last. The sun’s pouring through the front window. JNH is watching the pre-class videos for his online class which will start soon. (He’s using the big desk that was Mum’s, and her Dad’s before that, which has “skipped a generation” as he puts it). CMH is on the sofa having his 30 minutes of allocated FIFA-game-on-i-pad time. C is on his morning walk. And I’m writing this with a coffee and a chocolate croissant from Leli’s bakery, which we picked up on our morning “walk to school” round the block. The small details like that have taken on so much more weight this past year when everything is in flux and fragile. Like stepping stones over a river. Down the coast from here the mall and Capitol are pretty much barricaded as DC prepares for the inauguration of Biden as President and Kamala Harris as Vice President tomorrow, with 25,000 national guard troops protecting the area from potential insurrectionary attacks. 

The storming of the Capitol on January 6^th was not surprising. Disturbing, yes, but not surprising, and for everyone who’s commenting “this is not America”, it totally is – a through-thread that’s been embedded in the country from the days of the colonists alongside the narrative of a trajectory towards a shared ideal. I remember when Biden’s winning was confirmed a few days after the election. Spontaneous celebrations burst out on the streets, including down the road here in Astoria, and it did feel like an elephant that had been sitting on our heads the past few years had just got up, but that was accompanied by a sense that any over-emphasis on restoring “normality” and going “back” to a better time was flawed and dangerous, just as when Trump talks about making America great again. I’m hoping that the next few years sees politics connecting deeply and practically with people - with everyone - where they are at in their lives, drawing lessons from the long-term door to door organizing in Georgia that brought black voters to the polls and flipped the Senate. 

Connecting with people where they are at is easier said than done, especially when there’s instant-community-at-the-fingertips on the web. The role of the social media giants in recent election cycles, as they have profited from misinformation – including fanning the myth of a stolen election which will have enormous repercussions over the coming years – is an example of corporate capture of politics to an extreme (another age-old force, though not unique to the US by any means). Time will tell which forms the street landscape and the online landscape take over these coming years, how they relate, and which holds the most sway.

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Right, so JNH is now out of his online class, and their (awesome) teacher, who had wanted to stream tomorrow's inauguration for them, said the Department of Education isn't allowing it because there's no knowing what bad things might happen in the middle of it. 

Update: Both kids watched anyway on TV and were glued to it.

NY missive no 176 - A hot day and a cold night

I’d long wanted to go to the wildlife refuge in Jamaica Bay, and we finally went there at the height of August, on a bus through Maspeth, Ridgewood, Glendale, Woodhaven and Ozone Park. The place is beautiful but August is not the best month to go. At the center of the expansive bay, and sheltered from the Atlantic by the Rockaway Peninsula, the refuge is watery, windswept, and a stop-over place for flocks of seabirds on their long migrations. As it’s close to JFK there would usually be planes thundering low overhead too, but this being Corona-time, there were hardly any. 

It could have been peaceful. But as soon as we set off along one of the tracks we were rudely reminded that August is peak bug season. We didn’t have bug spray, and quickly our sweaty bare legs and arms lured fat mosquitos from all around, and hornet-y things came careening up to us. Had there been other people around we would have been a ridiculous sight, dodging out of the way of insects, actually running at times, while swatting ourselves with one hand and carrying umbrellas with the other to keep off the glaring sun. The pandemic’s accentuated (as it has everything) our interconnectedness with nature and the fact we meddle with it at our own peril. The Jamaica Bay trip was a close-to-home example of nature saying it's better off without us.

Fast-forward to December, and there was a heavy snowfall the week before Christmas. CMH’s soccer club went ahead anyway with their Friday evening practice. So CMH and I found ourselves arriving at Astoria Park running track (the football field is in the middle of the running track) to see it transformed into an other-worldly scene, the whole area a swathe of shimmering snow under floodlights. In the far corner of the field, 15 or so other little players and their parents had also shown up and were using shovels to dig a pitch out of the snow. We tramped/floated over to them like astronauts and joined in. Once the pitch was created the kids played the beautiful game, while the parents moved their feet and clapped gloved hands to keep warm, and right there you had the resilience of all the people of this city who have been finding ways to keep themselves and others together.

NY missive no 174 - Rosebud

I’ve never been so happy to see a rosebud.

Through these months of having a smaller radius of existence the roses of Astoria, which come out around April, have taken on extra meaning. 

When the video of the killing of George Floyd came out, their beauty was jarring. At the time I wrote:

How to reconcile

The roses’ beauty

With the image 

Of George Floyd’s head

Crushed beneath

Derek Chauvin’s knee

On the road

Crying out

I can’t breathe

Crying out

Please

Crying out Mama

Until he breathes no more.

Through the Summer, I would often walk around the block before the kids woke up, looping back up along a stretch of 36^th Street. There are roses all along that stretch, where each building has a small garden in front, and I would pause to watch their poses, tilting against walls or just growing upwards, bobbing gently on the end of their stems. Solidarity roses, and roses in abundant clusters. (Now that the kids are back at school after the Summer but virtually, all four of us walk that block together after breakfast, as a pretend “walk to school”).

Back in August I decided to try planting roses of our own in front of the house. Off I went on one of my infrequent missions to Home Depot on Northern Boulevard. I walked back with two little rose bushes in our maroon laundry cart. The laundry cart drives home for me the incongruity of having a house (albeit mostly still owned by the bank) and not a car. It means we don’t use the cart for laundry because we have a washing machine, but that we do use it as a surrogate car whenever we have to move more than we can carry by hand. It came in very handy in the depths of the pandemic when we’d venture out, masked and gloved-up, to stock up on food for multiple days rather than our usual daily food shopping.

So there I am, wheels rattling along the sidewalks, thorny branches sticking out. Back at home I start working on the holes to plant them, which means moving the garbage bins around to the side. I soon had doubts, and that defeating feeling of not being able to do something that you were hoping to do and that felt important. The ground was dry, hard, and stony. Worse than that, the evergreen shrub in front of where I was digging had a thick patchwork of spindly roots, so dense that it started to feel ridiculous trying to dig through them. How was a rose bush going to survive, let alone thrive, here?

I wiggled and dug and shook out the dry mud till two shallow holes began to appear. I tipped some potting soil around them to raise the surrounding ground and make them seem deeper. 

“You want to do planting in ‘R’ months”, said neighbor M from two doors along, who misses nothing. 

“Sorry?”

“Months with R in them. March, April, September, October. Not November or December of course, but those middle months that have an R.”

It was the last week in August. 

Doubting the holes were deep enough but not being able to get any further, I lowered the rose bushes in and packed them tightly with soil. Each time I came in and out of the house I checked up on them, and watered them most days. They looked decidedly shaky, and took it in turns to have their leaves get black spots. Then a bud appeared on the bush furthest from the door. Now each time I passed I willed the bud to still be there, and to open. Red petals began peeking through. It opened out into a fully formed rose.

NY missive no 172 - At Astoria Heights playground

Two teenage boys on the bench next to me at Astoria Heights playground, talking in a blend of Portuguese and English, while JNH and CMH practice their soccer goals nearby. “Call her,” says one.

The other makes a call. “Hey, we’re hanging in the Park if you want to join”. And when he hangs up, “she said she might!”. 

As they head round to the basketball courts, one is saying “my Mom wants me to go fully virtual now.”

It’s in between Summer vacation and the start of school, with its staggered, mostly online and uncertain start because of Covid. It’s in between whether the girl comes to the park or not. Most of our lives happen in the in-between times, between “moments” which are more like punctuation, important but actually not essential, creating rhythm. The other day I read that the Inca have two forms of constellation: one formed by the stars, and one by the dark spaces between the stars in the Milky Way. 

NY missive no 142 - Some summer scenes

Quite some Summer. Dominican Republic with tía D, Summer camp here in Queens for the boys interspersed with city weekends (wobbly starts on bicycles etc), and then London and Devon.

New York weekends

JNH’s imagination is heightened in moments of transition. So it was the last weekend of Summer, at the end of the long holidays and before he started 1st grade. As we came back over the Triborough bridge on the M60 bus from Harlem he recalled how this was the bridge that the herd of bison were travelling over.

On other occasions, in Astoria Park, the trundling traffic on the bridge overhead as it reaches down into Queens was, for him, a herd of stampeding bison from China. They kept coming, and coming, thousands of them. And now here we were bang in the middle of them on a bus. Nose pressed to the windows he watched the cars overtaking us and the ones we overtook. The slow ones were tired from their long journey, but on they ran.

A river swim in Devon

As the tide goes out, you can swim from a jetty near the mouth of the River Avon to Bantham Beach. I say swim, but it’s more like get swept. Mum and I donned unflattering wetsuits and J swam without one, used to it from many swims in the Devon water, and in we went. Back on the shore were C, CMH, JNH and Dad. We’d been crabbing on the jetty, the kids patiently luring four or five crabs with strips of raw bacon hooked onto their lines, who got to swim about in small buckets for a while before being tipped back into the river. There were two pulsing jellyfish as well, scooped up in nets as they floated by.

CMH is four and a half now, which means he’s a little boy in many respects but still clings to babyhood at certain moments. This was one of them. He was distraught at me wading into the wide river and being whisked away by the current – separation anxiety played out in rushing water. As the current carried me away towards the beach, for a while I could hear his crying, and had those familiar mixed feelings of guilt combined with “this is my time, I will enjoy, this, will enjoy.” And of course soon the crying was out of earshot, and I did enjoy the rest of the swim, even though once out of the water on the beach I jogged (in that unflattering wetsuit) across the sand dunes to the Bantham carpark to meet him and the others. C had calmed him down by feeding him a bunch of grapes, and all was forgiven.

Subiendo la loma, bajando la loma

On our second day in Dominican Republic we crammed into tía D’s car to drive from Santo Domingo to Sosúa, the beach town on the North Coast that C had visited many times as a child and teenager. Tía D was nervous about driving over the mountain/hill en route with its perilous bends so we met a friend of hers at Moca, who “escorted” us the rest of the way to Sosúa by driving in front. The plan had been for him to drive her car, but he wanted her to build up courage by driving herself. C travelled over the hill in his car. In ours, tía D drove, tia Y was in the passenger seat, and in the back were me, the boys, and the dog.

The scenery was stunning, rolling green mountains under bright blue sky. I admired the view best as I could with my heart in my throat as we rounded steep hairpin bends while locals on motocicletas or driving small trucks who do that journey all the time veered past us, tía D lighting a cigarette to smoke out the window as she drove, and with the other hand fiddling with the radio button that was tuning in and out. On the downhill side JNH cried a little before falling asleep and CMH puked at some point, and I found myself clutching a plastic bag of sick for the rest of the way. We made it without further incident and spent four days in the village of Charamicos by Sosúa beach. I could now understand completely why C said “but this isn’t a beach” when I first took him to one of my childhood beaches in Devon.

On the return journey, tía D drove all of us with no escort. I felt respect for her: our sporadic visits take her out of her comfort zone, this one being no exception.

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Very few of my teachers made an impression. Those that did, had a sparkle in their eyes. One that comes from a profound interest in the world around them.

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“Mama, I am allergic to something.”

“Really?”

“I am allergic to the light part of fireflies if I touch it at night. Just the light.”

“What does it do to you?”

“It makes me cough”.

New York missive no 137 - Bridget Riley's stripes and Miles Davis

Through a random Twitter stream scroll I encountered a London Review of Books article by Bridget Riley on the process by which she developed her colored stripes paintings. I was in bed and sleepy, and it was only towards the end I realized it was written by her. Instead I read it somehow as an unknown artist’s reflections on their journey with lines and color relationships. Eliminating the fame made a difference.

I had been one of those people who responded to Bridget Riley’s paintings with “but it’s just stripes.” Now I get them.

She says:

My studies of the greys paved the way for the colour movement in Late Morning (1967-68). In that painting, I began in a very simple way to draw with colour. The blue to bright green movement is the form. At the core of colour lies a paradox. It is simultaneously one thing and several things – you can never see colour by itself, it is always affected by other colours.

And:

You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter: ‘doing’ is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes.

This discovery-through-doing reminds me of the kids’ book “Andrew Drew and Drew” that follows a little boy as he populates blank pages with creatures that emerge from his imagination.

"he drew...

"and drew...

"and drew...

"Andrew never knew...

"What would happen...

"When he began."

It also reminds me of JNH and CMH's prolific drawing and doodling. “This is heart rain.” “We’re playing ice hockey…”

The day after reading the article I happened to be wearing a new stripy dress. It’s a cotton Summer dress, in bold thin stripes of bright green, red, yellow and black. I was working near home that day, in the air-conditioned predictability of a Starbucks.

A disheveled man in his sixties who’s sometimes there working his way through piles and piles of documents with furled corners said as he walked past, “that’s a wonderful combination of colors." Or something along those lines.

With the sudden switch from work-mode to talking-with-stranger-mode, I came out with a rather odd response, “Thank you. Though it wasn’t me who designed it!” As if I wanted to correct him on misplaced praise.

That didn’t throw him off though, and he embarked on a story about Miles Davis. The man said he was once with a friend of a friend who had to pick up the jazz musician, and Miles was taking a long time coming down to the street so they went to see what was going on, and there he was, captivated by a small TV set. There was no show on though, just the bands of colors that used to appear when programming ended.

*************************************************************

“Mummy, why do you like rivers so much?"

“Because they are always changing and always the same.”

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 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.”

New York missive no 130 - A cat dies on an Astoria sidewalk

I did not realize until afterwards, that I had put my foot probably on the exact place on the sidewalk where that morning a cat lay dying.

I had seen the cat after dropping JNH off at his daycare. A furry huddle among fallen leaves, a cat in the morning light, yes a cat, it became clear when I was a few feet away, stretched out on its side, eyes facing but not seeing me and head, I think, making barely perceptible movements and me in a ruthless rush for the subway walking on by, slowing a tiny bit only, then telling myself well what could I have done, bring her back to life?

End it? Someone had probably already moved her off the center of the road to this unforeseen resting place (like any other) and the flickering life in her was still life after all.

Now, fetching JNH at the end of the day, I walk right over the place where she no longer is, and I only realize afterwards. This dying cat is lingering in my mind, which is why I am writing about her. Is my seeing her unique? Or is this just a rearrangement? Of other cats among fallen leaves. Of other children collected at the end of the day, other footsteps.

Thank you Conrad Manuel Hiraldo - part 5 - Astoria (night): Projection

This is part five of my seven-part essay "Thank You Conrad Manuel Hiraldo." Introduction and part one. Part two. Part three. Part four.

Astoria again, but this time in the dark. Conrad has been fighting sleep so I take him out for a walk around the block. At first he is all wide-eyed at the contrast between the night air and bright lights. By the time we return he has nodded off, and maybe those bright lights are still sliding by in his sleeping mind or maybe there is just quiet darkness.

Outside the Irish pub Kelly’s Bar on the corner of 31st Avenue and Crescent Street two rows of marigolds in a flower bed that are beacon-like enough in the day are even more so now. Red light lands on them from a string of bulbs along the pub wall. Whatever is going on in the pub is hidden from the street. During the day time its door is open and drinkers come to and fro, some hanging out on plastic chairs on the sidewalk providing a running commentary on passersby. Now the pub is one world and outside it, another.

A couple gets out of a car and goes into an apartment building.

“Yes,” he says.

“Does it live in water?” she asks.

“No,” he replies, and they enter the building beyond earshot.

We pass the diner on the corner of 30th Avenue and Crescent St. aptly called the Crescent Corner Coffee Shop. Recently an episode of 30 Rock was filmed there. That created a buzz in the community as film trucks hogged the streets and large cameras rolled about the place. Now it is closed and empty. It looks like Hopper’s Nighthawks without the people. There is enough light from unidentified sources to make out a single pepper shaker, salt shaker and sugar jar on each of the pale green table tops, ready for the next morning when the sugar will be tipped into cups of coffee and the salt and pepper sprinkled over eggs. There are croissants in military rows beneath a transparent plastic cover, and next to them the till, hard worked but currently silent. I can just make out our reflection in the mirror along the back of the bar.

Round the corner, lamps in a doorway cast latticed shadows over the sidewalk. Virginia Woolf in her essay Street Haunting describes how the walker’s roving eye singles out beauty. “Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty…the eye is sportive and generous: it creates; it adorns; it enhances.” Yes, it creates. An alchemy takes place between observation and imagination, from which a new, independent reality emerges. The city is not so much the sum of those realities as the simultaneous being of all of them. It relies on this healthy collision between external features and the internal mind. The more those two become detached from one another, separated by car windows, glass screens, the weaker the fabric of the city becomes.

At night a walker is less visible to others. The dark of the outside world puts bright interiors, such as can be glimpsed, into sharp relief. Along 30th Avenue we pass a hip Italian restaurant that lures twenty and thirty-somethings from all around, and there they are, tonight’s crowd, like last night’s no doubt and yet unique, never to be repeated, in terms of who is sitting where, pressed up along wooden tables, cozy among their kind.

Just around the corner from there, the bar that has been in place much longer contains three solitary drinkers. Then we pass a new condominium building. They are sprouting fast along 21st Street, which until recently was a busy traffic thoroughfare dotted with drive-thru McDonald’s, the occasional fire station or place of worship. The building's ground floor is still wrapped in marketing placards that promote views across the river to Manhattan. Those views will remind residents that they are here because they cannot afford to be there. They will also present a there that is far more appealing seen from here than lived up close.

The apartment building has a reception area that looks like it should have a doorman but does not yet. The white walls, black leather furniture and white lilies seem to be there just for their own sake, or posing for a brochure photograph soon to be removed ready for the next shoot. A delivery guy arrives clutching a box of food. Who is on the receiving end?

Part 6: Part five - Chinatown and the Lower East Side: People