New York missive no 109 - Gluing things together, and City Island

Last weekend I glued various things together that needed gluing. I’d even written a list of them to keep track – ready for when I got around to buying the superglue. They were things that JNH had broken unintentionally at various points through play and exploration (in most cases, through me letting him play with things he probably shouldn’t). They were:

- A fox’s head back on its body. The fox is from a set of china Beatrix Potter characters that I’d had as a child, gathered on top of a little shelf of Potter's books. One day JNH tugged the top of his bureau. The bureau, its drawers, the books, the china fox and his friends, came tumbling down.

- The tail back onto a china tiger (more china!), given as a good luck present when JNH was born by Dad’s business contact in China: JNH was born in a year of the tiger.

- The groom back onto our wedding cake decoration, which despite its tackiness we keep on top of the fridge as a souvenir. Good thing neither C nor I are superstitious.

- A tail and ear back onto a giraffe piggy bank.

- A small joining piece back onto the bridge from a wooden train set.

- I gave up when it came to the fragile ladder from a plastic FDNY fire truck.

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The mind moves like plate techtonics. Ideas grind and slide alongside one another, their movements barely perceptible. Then a clunk, a shift. On occasion an earthquake.

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After visiting the Bronx Zoo JNH’s godfather W picked us up in his car and we drove to City Island. It dangles off the Bronx shore into the far Western hip of Long Island Sound. With the architecture of a quaint New England fishing village, at the weekend it still feels the pulse of the city as Bronx-dwellers come for a getaway. We ate fish and chips at one of the rammed sea-food restaurants overlooking the Sound, accompanied by the roar of revving motorbikes, salsa beats and seagull cries.

New York Missive no 108 - Bronx Zoo

(My camera's broken so till I have it fixed I'm using images from elsewhere. This is from the Wildlife Conservation Society headquartered at Bronx Zoo, used in the book "A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future", in which I found some of the historical details below. It's of the first Director of the zoo William Hornaday, at his desk in 1910.)

Last Sunday we took JNH to the Bronx Zoo, for a second birthday outing. Apparently its first Director William Hornaday wasn’t at all happy with it being described as the “Bronx Zoo.” When it opened in 1899 it was called the New York Zoological Park. He told newspapers that “the nickname ‘Bronx Zoo’ is undignified, offensive, injurious, totally unnecessary, [and] inexcusable.”

But of course the name stuck, to the extent that Bronx Zoo is a powerful brand. When we walked up from the East Tremont Ave subway station, following beneath the rickety iron of the elevated tracks before they curved off to the right, we soon saw the huge sign in block capitals above the Asia Gate entrance ahead of us: “BRONX ZOO.”

The place puts all other zoos I have visited to shame. Most leave you with a lingering feeling of guilt for gawping at animals in cramped enclosures. Not so here, where it almost seemed the other way around. Most of the animals appeared utterly at ease in their environment and in pristine condition, somewhat superior to the clumsy crowds who wove their way between the exhibits clutching their crumpled maps and sipping on sodas. (We timed our visit well, arriving only an hour or so after the zoo opened, and leaving by three. By that time the toddlers and babies who had not yet succumbed to their middle-of-the-day snooze emanated hot grumpiness, their tired parents likewise).

Two words particularly come to mind in thinking about the zoo: proximity and participation. Visitors work their way through the middle of some of the enclosures in tunnels protected by glass, so that you are right up next to the animals. Hornaday had been critical of attempts to place animals in realistic habitats when that meant having to keep them far away from the visitors. When the German zoo pioneer Carl Hagenbeck approached him with a concept for “barless bear dens”, Hornaday said that, “I pointed out to him the great disadvantage that would be entailed by having our bears separated from our visitors by a distance of sixty or seventy feet. We deliberately decided against the Hagenbeck idea [and] we have never regretted it.”

Thanks to technological developments, a later Director of the zoo William Conway could go much further in combining realistic habitats with spectator-proximity. He set up an in-house design team that has approached zoo layout as theater. Epitomizing that approach is the Congo Gorilla Forest, which opened in 1999. It was our first target destination (we purposefully didn’t want to try to cover the whole zoo on one visit, we just had a few things we were keen to see while leaving the rest to random encounter). The route there brought us past camel rides for kids, then African Plains with its gazelle, lions and giraffe – and a “Dora [the Explorer] & Diego’s 4D Adventure”.

Once in Congo Gorilla Forest you work through narrow pathways (strollers are left at the entrance) that feel remarkably like navigating a real forest, without the bugs and heat. First we came across an Okapi, just a few feet away behind glass, grazing on a tree. They’re striking creatures, like a cross between a zebra, a gazelle and an Avatar from the recent film, with black extending tongues. This one was displaying his/hers as it grasped the leaves. Then we found the gorillas, getting on with their business rubbing their tummies and yawning and ambling about the place, at ease with the crowds of captivated humans. Words and photographs worked into parts of the exhibit tell you about how the Congo’s forest is threatened. Then on the way out you’re asked to vote how your contribution (some of the features in the zoo cost extra) should be used for conservation efforts.

That brings me to the second word, “participation.” Everywhere throughout the zoo visitors are educated in simple but effective ways about the animals they are seeing. And they’re told stories of conversation and the need for it. One of our unplanned encounters was with the bison. While a group of bison with their mountain-peak shoulder blades sat in a clearing in front of us, we read that they were the zoo’s first conservation success-story. Hornaday, before Bronx Zoo existed, had led an expedition out West to find some bison for an exhibition. The expedition spent five months searching planes where once herds of millions of bison had roamed, and were able to bring back just 25. The expansion of the Northern Pacific Railroad had led to their mass slaughter, mainly for their hides. When the Bronx Zoo opened, Hornaday acquired bison for it and began to build up the herd. From there, bison were shipped back to some of their former locations in the wild: now many of the bison in the Western USA are descendants of those bred in the Bronx.

Two year-old JNH, of course, saw the zoo in his own unpredictable way. For example at Tiger Mountain it wasn’t the tigers that impressed but the fish. Here again you could get right up close. While two tigers sprawled on their rocks a few meters away, right next to us just behind the glass was their cooling-off pool. The water came up to adult belly-level. So it was perfect for JNH to stand pressed up against the glass watching the fish swim their jazzy ballet on the other side. He followed their movements with his hands, “fish up, down, up-down, there, here, there,” one of the zoo memories he would repeat when we got back home.

I realized as we walked around that I have rarely been to a zoo except when I was a child, or accompanying one. They are a place for children to see in the flesh the animals that they read about so much in books. But what do we do with all that knowledge as adults - all those labeled tapirs and colored-in parrots on clipboards? In the midst of a metropolis where our place in the animal kingdom is so easily forgotten, the Bronx Zoo reminds us of the millions of species we share the planet with. It resuscitates wonder and appreciation, even if only fleetingly.

New York missive no 67

There isn’t a lot sea-faring about South Street Seaport, other than the museum ships you can visit. It’s no longer an active port, the old fish market is now a shopping development and conference centre, the cobbled streets are lined with outlets like Body Shop and Benetton. But elements linger – including the Seamen’s Church Institute where we had our wedding.

The room where I waited nervously, increasingly nervously, for the forty minutes before the ceremony, was the Knitting Room. There, well-meaning women come to knit hats and scarves to send to sailors who are out at sea over Christmas. So there I was in my dress and bright blue boa (M tweaking it to get it to sit right) surrounded by walls piled high with coloured balls of wool. C was waiting with Z just as nervously, I’m sure, in the “seafarers’ club” across the corridor, which when not accommodating grooms in their last few moments of bachelorhood has no doubt seen many a knees-up for old salts. That makes the venue sound, as I think I’d mentioned before, more fusty than it is.

The little chapel downstairs has a model ship hanging to one side above the altar. It was jam-packed with people so that I gasped a bit when we walked in (phew, they all came, and omigod there are so many!). The reception just after the ceremony was in a room full of more ships. One was called Sea-Witch – I felt an affinity with it given that the fantastical land I’d conjoured as a 10-year-old was called Sea-Wich. (Yes spelled like that. Mode of travel to reach it – take a flying tiger up the golden steps). And the main party was in the upstairs “Top Deck” with glass walls overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge and East River…so still with a sea presence. I named each of the tables after a seabird, illustrated with a bright photo so that in case they didn’t already, people could learn what their bird looks like. A mix of my and C’s university friends were on Blue-footed Booby. My work people were on Magnificent Frigatebird, and his were spread out between Laughing Gull and Elegant Tern. Some of my Writers Studio people were on Imperial Shag. Etc.

We stayed in a hotel close by, with a little balcony from which we could see the last people clearing up the party flotsam and jetsam then switching off the lights. Next morning as we walked in bright sunshine along the river we were greeted by a Venezuelan selling tickets for helicopter rides over the city – tourism being one of the main industries that has replaced the shipping and fishing. It seemed to make his day when we told him that we had got married the evening before, and we carried on our way with his shouts of felicidades following us.

Then it was joining up with a gaggle of friends and family – S tellingly still in her yellow wedding outfit and high heels – for a walk down the High Line and a jazz brunch at the Garage. During the meal M dug out from a plastic bag the teddy bear I’d had as a child, which she’d brought over from England. I had no idea he was still in existence. He hardly is. He has one eye, an eclectic spread of patches and none of his original fur, and stuffing coming out of his stomach. That prompted many a joke about what C has in store – “well, if that’s the state of her teddy bear…”

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We haven’t honeymooned but instead have been making the most, in-between work, of pre-baby time in the city. There was a 4-borough day starting at home in Astoria then getting the subway through Manhattan down to Coney Island and Brighton Beach for strolling and hotdogs, followed by a Puerto-Rican meal with V and W at Willie's Steak House in the Bronx. C and I had pictured a salsa-club with tables elevated around a big round dance floor, instead the scene was more that of a family dining room with a stage at one end where a traditional band serenaded us as we and our predominantly older fellow diners ate – the livelier latin jazz nights are Wednesdays apparently. There was G’s two-year birthday party in Washington Heights. There was some rather bad but for that reason still amusing comedy at the Laugh Lounge on Lower East Side to celebrate our one (eventful) year anniversary. And quieter weekend days at home watching films and procrastinating over filling in the hundreds of forms for my green card application.

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Over the past two weekends we went to intensive childbirth and newborn care classes in Soho. Intensive as in cramming the classes into three sessions rather than over several weeks, not classes on intensive childbirth – though the childbirth’s guaranteed to be intensive too in ways that no number of classes could ever predict or prepare us for fully. They’re run by a nurse from St Vincent’s Hospital. She has worked there for 25 years and not surprisingly has been active in the campaign to keep it open – it's on the verge of a second bankruptcy and has been going through a series of buyout/restructuring negotiations. Luckily it looks at the moment like it’s going to survive. That’s a relief for me too, because that is where I’m supposed to be giving birth.

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Meanwhile my bump’s been getting progressively bigger. One the one hand being pregnant is such an animal-like experience, bearing and giving birth to children being something that females of all species, at least all mammals, share. At times recently I’ve felt like a big bear. Especially when I’m wrapped up in my winter grey duffle coat that’s now very tight round the belly. Watching the rather graphic videos of birthing women at the classes last weekend made both C and I, for some reason, think of cows. On the other hand it’s so human, in an emotional sense. Is that because we are the only species, at least think we’re the only species, that’s so conscious of where we have come from and the fact we’re going to die? At my 32-week sonogram last Monday we were startled by how vivid C’s father’s characteristics were in the little face that appeared on the screen. We were startled by the vividness both of the 3D images those machines can produce, and the vividness of the likeness. Here are the genes of a man I never met, and of C’s mother who I never met – I wish I could have known both of them – and of so many other people too going back in time, being mixed with my own and carried in me into a new life.

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Astoria isn’t exactly a leafy borough, nor an architecturally appealing one. There’s not a lot of green space and the new buildings that are going up with much clanging and banging despite the downturn are tall identikit apartment buildings. They overshadow the row-houses squatting between them, which themselves, for the most part, are not exciting to look at. But there are more trees around than I’d realized at first, and because of the urban surroundings they stand out. There are fig trees brought over by Greeks, magnolias, and a tree just outside our living room and balcony that I’ve become captivated by. A pregnancy-enhanced attachment? When we moved here in November I thought it could be an evergreen because it still had dark green leaves. But then they quickly turned deep orange and fell. Now in March they are growing back again, pale green at the moment and accompanied by sprigs of tiny white flowers. I must find out from P and P downstairs what kind of tree it is. Just as I want to find out more about the birds that hang out in it. A few minutes ago there was a parrot-like bright red one singing his heart out. Maybe there’s an unrealized twitcher in me. “Birds of Astoria – exploits of an urban ornithologist,” I can see a best-seller brewing.

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I’ve never been much of a bath-person, too quickly I start thinking of things I want to do when I get out. But now with my big belly and a back that’s started grumbling as a result of it they’ve rapidly become more appealing. Lying in our blue bath tub the other day piled high with bubbles I suddenly remembered my sister P and I having baths at our grandparents’ house when we were children. It was a narrow, olive green bathtub. We sat opposite each other with the wire soap wrack across the middle like a bridge between us, carrying my grandmother’s pumice stone, my grandfather’s pumice stone and a big bar of soap.

I’ve been having lots of strong place-associations. I’ll be doing something very mundane, like washing up or walking to work, and will picture a place from my past. A traffic jam on a road in Kingston, in South West London. K and I sheltering from monsoon rain with some street-sellers just to the South of the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok.

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The fragility and arbitrariness of creating a life seems inadequate next to the enormity of it. Or as C put it so much better than I ever could in a poem, “An accident like the universe”.

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We found ourselves having a “What is God?” conversation the other day. Then I riffed in my diary that I am content to believe not in some omnipotent creator but the fact that life itself is a miracle, potent enough without some higher being. If we need a God or Gods in various forms to remind us of that, so be it, but too often they steal the show, become a distraction.

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At a talk at CUNY by the author of “The Prison and the American Imagination” I learned that Eastern State Penitentiary, at the time it opened in 1829, was the largest building in the world. It had running water before the White House. And people went on guided tours (they still can). The idea was that an extensive prison system though which criminals could be reformed through solitary confinement and then re-inserted into society reflected the post-Independence ideal of a citizen, and was so much more humane than the barbaric treatment of criminals in Europe and elsewhere.

New York missive no 17 - Dead orchids

Last year George Packer wrote a long article for the New Yorker (which New Yorker articles aren't long?) about the experiences of Iraqis who worked as translators for the Americans after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. How their hopes for realising the lives they had long dreamed of were quickly shattered as the country descended into a new chaos and they became fearful for their lives, targeted as traitors by fellow Iraqis and refused US visas despite the fact the US government had been so dependent on them and paid them for their services. A few have been given EU passports and found refuge, of sorts, in Sweden. Packer said that after the article was published the translators’ voices stayed in his mind. Their story needed more telling. So he turned it into a play, “Betrayed”, that’s brought those voices to more audiences in a different, somehow more immediate, way. R and I saw it last week. It must have been a difficult process for Packer to distill months’ worth of interviews and reporting into a 2.5 hour play revolving round the lives of just a few characters. Yet in that way he conveys so much of the insanity of the occupation and the situation that’s emerged from it. Free from statistics, soundbites or an attempt to grasp the full picture, the intense experiences of individual human beings can say so much more about what that situation means, and its meaninglessness.

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A quietish weekend, in which one day was Spring-like and the other wintery. I interspersed work with a Writers’ Studio evening of readings by Edward Hirsch (poems that touch nerves by avoiding analogies and cutting straight to the reality of things), Junot Diaz and Cynthia Weiner – in which a common thread, as in much writing, seemed to be illness and death approached with humour and shock – a party at A and St’s at their apartment in Inwood, and a Sunday excursion with M to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to see the Orchid Show. Where the death theme was carried through: it was the last day of the show and many of the orchids were shriveled, except the ones from Singapore.