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 80 - Art in Harlem

Yesterday C, JNH, W and I strolled around Harlem looking at art. Like the SONYA art stroll in Fort Greene last year, the Harlem Art Walking Tour involved artists opening up the galleries, apartments, and beautiful brownstones where they work to visitors. As before, the buildings and their occupants were as intriguing as the art: it’s a wonderful way to explore behind normally-closed front doors. Interior worlds are exposed to the outside for a day.

This is the painting that C and I would love to buy if we win the lottery - by an artist called Brian Patrick Kelly (it's huge but somehow I can only get the pic to appear tiny here which doesn't begin to do it justice, though it's bigger at this link):


There was another I loved too, by a woman who squeezes thirty or forty hours a week of painting round the edges of her full time job as an army engineer. Angered by the gulf oil spill, she had used olive oil and paint to create a canvas of swirling blackish blue.

The art was followed by feeding JNH in Marcus Garvey Park, then feeding ourselves on heaps of soul food at Sylvia’s off 125th Street. I had smothered chicken. I wondered briefly if the name is a reference to the way the chicken is killed - but no, it's just that it's smothered in gravy.

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I recently went through and tagged this blog with placenames, the purpose being to create a kind of personal geography of the city. I’ve tried to be strict with myself, street names and district names only. No landmarks, venues or other buildings to avoid too much clutter.

New York missive no 25 - Abyssinian House in Harlem

No rushing in NYC at the moment. It’s too hot. This weekend everyone’s been longing for a thunderstorm that hasn’t yet come. In the meantime the heat is building, building, pushing into people’s heads and making them oh so slow and sleepy. Of course that doesn’t stop them doing things, just makes them do them at a more considered pace.

I spent yesterday morning with kids from Abyssinian House, a transitional shelter on 138th Street in Harlem. It has brightly coloured murals that soften the blows of tough times, a bit. Sh, who organized the morning, had planned an Olympics theme – reading about the Games in the air-conditioned library nearby, then going to the park to for a mini Olympics and medal ceremony. We cut out the park part though because it was just too hot to be running around.

There was J, whose Mum came too. She’s Scicilian-Irish-American. His Dad’s Jamaican and was deported to Jamaica a few years ago so now it’s just the two of them. His Mum missed watching the Tour de France this year as she hasn’t had access to cable. She used to watch it with J’s Dad who’s a passionate cyclist, and she had endless stories about the trials and tribulations of previous races – I realised how a long-distance bike ride can in fact be exciting. J is beautiful from inheriting all the best features of his mixed parentage and grandparentage. He’s a voracious reader. Mum described how once, while she was working with PSEG when they were remediating sites in New Jersey, J, then seven, got into conversation with the geologists, jaw-dropping them with his smart words and questions.

There were the mischievous girl twins with near-identical names. I tried teaching one of them to write the word MARATHON, which proved ambitiously long. We got there though – albeit in a muddled two-letter-per-line pattern filling the page, with some of the characters lopsided.

MA
RA
TH
ON

There was C the funky puertorriqueño who slipped effortlessly from Spanish to English. Back in Abyssinian House and after our lunch of cheese and ham sandwiches, chocolate cookies and watermelon, he wrote a story about his trip to the dentist. He’d called the dentist rabbit woman because of her buck teeth, had got scared when she started treating him and ran away, “through the rainforest." But rabbit woman ran after and gave him a toothbrush to take away. Moral of the story, he announced, “don’t judge people by appearances.” And there was born-to-act M who had seemed shy all morning then had us in stitches with his “shower dancing” sketch about a boy who loved dancing to MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This and Michael Jackson’s Thriller in the shower, to the annoyance of his family members queuing at the door.

Then back to Weehawken Street for a rooftop barbeque, a swan-song as Sa described it because in a fortnight’s time I’m moving to Morningside Heights. Lots of beers, burgers, too much salad that didn’t get eaten, then a sweaty boogie at Cielo. And now time for a long sleep – up really early tomorrow to interview the first four of our Ukraine candidates.

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A July Friday night in the meatpacking district: to be witnessed, enjoyed, and not taken seriously. I found myself on the Soho House roof again – S had been invited by someone through work. More than the previous time the roof oozed attitude. Women still in their bikinis from the afternoon’s poolside sizzling purred beside men in jackets and chinos. The air was zig-zagged by gazes hunting out someone better to talk too. We downed our Margaritas then explored the rest of the building. In the 6th floor lounge, we had a second extravagant Margarita. A girl and three guys discussed the plots of crime shorts on the cluster of velvety sofas next to ours. One of their girlfriends sat beautifully and bored on a chair behind them, gazing out of the window, sipping a glass of red wine, glancing from time to time at a book on her lap and at her phone for messages. A few floors further down we snuck into the cinema and rather randomly watched Hancock, the new Will Smith film.

Then we escaped. Perched on the concrete slabs positioned for posing in the middle of the cobble Gansevoort-9th Ave intersection we watched a procession of open-roof sports cars rev by, got chatting to a physiotherapist and his patient who were on a date of some kind, and a pair of fabulous fifty-year old women down from Westchester Country with their well maintained manes and trim figures (one’s a personal trainer), glowing with the energy of a night on the tiles. Their eyes widened when we told them where we’d just been. S had the bright idea of giving them our pass. Say you’re A and S and friends of Charles blah-de-blah, and you’ll be in. The next thing we knew they were texting us from the rooftop, their night out made.

Tom Wolfe’s article in New York about its former editor, Clay Felker, who died the previous week, described a man obsessed by status. Does status still seduce in New York? In places like Soho House perhaps yes, where a combination of connections and cash (or in the case of S’s guy, more dubious means, he implied) is what gets you a membership. But status seems to be loosing its lustre. Not that I can talk from experience. People can’t resist aspiring to it but on arrival, mirage-like, it’s disappointingly empty, easy and fragile, quite capable of disappearing overnight with a quiver in the market, a negative headline, the discovery of an infidelity. And for most people in the city there’s no time to think about it. Instead there's ambition, whether to get a pay rise, find a better apartment, fall in love, make a bigger profit, write a bestseller, be content.