NY missive 194 - The House of Rust

The southwest corner of Central Park, early on a Friday morning

On the N train from 30th Ave, after a couple of stops I put my phone back in my bag and resist its tug and take out The House of Rust.

I had found it in the Strand bookstore, when we took the kids during their Winter break. I was by the “B” fiction row, which due to idiosyncrasies of shelving is tucked away in a corner, a bit removed from most of the fiction. I was looking for James Baldwin books. C and I had seen the “Baldwin in Istanbul 1961 - 1971” photo exhibit at Brooklyn Library for my birthday, so he was on my mind - also because the timeless clear anger and love that permeates his prose and is so needed at the moment. I was debating which of his books to buy when I saw a book by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber - The House of Rust - nearby, and chose it instead.

It was one of those moments that said “this is the book for you now”, with undercurrents perhaps being that it is set in Mombassa - I am somewhat obsessed by cities by the sea - and that the blurbs on the back made it clear it is something special, but more so being those mysterious ways in which books find their way into our lives in timely ways.

Anyway. I start reading on the train. It’s a part in the middle of the book when the main protagonist Aisha has ventured out to sea in a boat made of bones in search of her missing fisherman father. Along the way she has encountered and battled strange sea monsters, and just as my subway rattles in the tunnel between the Lex/59th and 5th Avenue stops the most significant of these encounters comes to a head in the most breathtaking, wild and beautiful way.

I’ve been battling my own demons these past months that seemed to come to a head yesterday. And here is this amazingly determined and resilient girl in her boat out in the ocean and my hands tighten on the pages and I smile with respect and relief.

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Once out of the train I walk up to JNH’s school for a monthly “coffee and donuts” gathering for parents. The theme of this one is teaching social studies “in these times”. JNH has followed his instincts for drama and film, and is now a drama studio freshman (almost at the end of the first year already!) at LaGuardia - a mighty change of scene from his small local middle school in Queens, but that’s a story for another day.

I walk up 6th Avenue to Central Park and cut through its bottom left (ok, southwest), corner. The weather’s a leaden gray which has an ominous tinge as I know this is the edge of a weather pattern that has ripped roofs off homes, and daycare centers, and megastores through the center of the country. 

I used to think tornadoes happen from time to time as grizzly one-offs, but no, this was a whole procession of them. Nature’s been getting more and more broken and mad at us, including here in the US where the year kicked off with rampant wildfires in Los Angeles. People get hit across the board but the building back is toughest for the poorest, and is physically done by the poorest, while insurance firms get wary of insuring anything that might dent their comfortable returns, and come up with creative mechanisms to avoid pay backs. 

For example, 2024 was the year with the third-biggest insured losses in over 40 years, the Economist reports. And yet “catastrophe bonds” that aim to protect issuers of insurance from major losses in natural disasters generated 20% and 18% in returns to their investors in 2023 and 2024 respectively, their strongest performance in recent decades. There are stringent criteria applied to when they have to pay out. When Hurricane Beryl caused devastation in Jamaica last year, a bond issued by the government and the World Bank did not pay out because the air pressure during the hurricane was conveniently just a touch higher than the level at which the bond would be paid out.

New York missive no 100 - an N train commute, Whitney Houston and Christopher Hitchens

C’s poem about Christopher Hitchens ends with the lines

The thing about death
is how efficiently
it silences.

Those lines sprung to mind again on my N-train subway commute the other morning. Two people along from me a woman was listening to Whitney Houston at full blast on her headphones. It was a couple of days after Houston had died, and there was her distinctive voice accompanying Queens-dwellers on their way into work: I Will Always Love You, I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me), Where Do Broken Hearts Go? The woman with the headphones wasn’t crying but was visibly upset as she listened. It annoyed me how little notice everyone took, or at least how consciously they seemed to be pretending they couldn’t hear.

On one hand it was a reminder that artists secure some kind of afterlife through their creations; they can be read, listened to, watched, after they have died. But that also makes death's silencing all the more dramatic. The carriage was full of an immensely powerful voice that would never sing again.

I then noticed that the woman sitting in between me and the Whitney Houston fan was reading Hitchen's autobiography Hitch 22, published soon before he died last year.

That’s two rather morbid posts in a row. I’m five months pregnant. I wonder if that has anything to do with it: amplified hormones and all that.

New York missive no 94 - Ducks in the kitchen, history lessons, Irene

One of the (many) things I love about having a kid is the random things that pop up around the place. Like today I realized I was carrying a blue felt drumstick along the street. And sometimes ducks appear in the kitchen. JNH has a set of rubber ducks – red, blue, green and yellow. Even though he only really plays with them in the bath somehow they manage to find their way out. So I might find a red duck on the kitchen table with the food. And once the green duck made it outside in JNH's stroller till he dropped it. We walked back down the street a bit to fetch it: it looked very forlorn and out of place there in the middle of the gray sidewalk.

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I was asked the other day if we had been taught anything about the American Revolution at High School in England. We weren't. It was a reminder of the skewed and dishonest portrayal of history that most kids are given. And it made me wonder, where can you find a realistic high school education in history, and what would it look like?

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Last Monday I was engrossed in Crossing the Boulevard on my subway ride to work on the N train. The book is full of the stories of immigrants living in Queens. It conveys their experience through a beautiful combination of their words, and photographs of them and of objects that have played an important part in their lives. I had the book open at a page with a large photograph of Sultana Wakili, a woman from Afghanistan who had come to the US recently to join her daughter. It’s tempting to tell her whole story, but buy the book if you want to find it out – along with many, many other unforgettable stories. Talking of the ideal history lesson, this book would be a good place to start.

The woman sitting next to me on the train said, “excuse me, who is this lady?”, pointing at the photograph. I explained. She went on to show me what she was reading – a book of biographies of Jewish Nobel Prize-winners, in Russian. She said that she had bought it in a store in Brooklyn and that maybe they would also have copies in English. “I like history,” she said, and went on to say that in Ukraine, where she is from, she was a history teacher. She mentioned that Kiev is over 2000 years old.

She (I never discovered her name) won the green card lottery and came to the US in 1992. First, when she had no English at all, she worked as a nanny. Now that she speaks some English she works in a post office in Manhattan, carrying on her English studies from 6-9 in the evenings. Her subway stop was approaching. She said thanks again for showing me the book and added, “the lady is very beautiful, for that race.” Once a book like Crossing the Boulevard is released it can continue to inform and influence attitudes if not change them in all kinds of ways.

She said that encounters like ours on the train made her happy. “When you have a conversation like this on a Monday, it’s going to be a good week!” and she was on her way.

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Hurricane Irene has been and gone. She was more tropical storm than hurricane by the time she hit New York. On Saturday there was plenty of pre-disaster capitalism on show as queues of people (ourselves included) hit the shops to stock up on essentials like water…and whiskey. Booze sales definitely got a boost this weekend.

I’d been wondering if we should sleep in our kitchen, in the middle of the apartment, to avoid any flying glass if the beloved pear tree fell. But we all slept like babies through the night in our usual places, lulled by the sound of wind and rain, and woke to an Astoria that was ruffled but not battered.