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…”
*********************************************************
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.
*********************************************************
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.
*********************************************************
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.
*******************************************************
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.
*******************************************************
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.
************************************************************
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”.
************************************************************
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.
************************************************************
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.
Showing posts with label South Street Seaport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Street Seaport. Show all posts
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
New York missive no 65 - Patience and Fortitude, the lions
I learned the other day that the two lions outside the 5th Ave New York Public Library (see NY missive no. 63) are called Patience and Fortitude.
***********************************************************
At the prenatal yoga class a group of expectant mums maneuvers and breathes deeply with their bellies of different sizes, releasing all the blockages that build up during the day between them and their babies who wait patiently for birth. No hurry.
***********************************************************
In an increasingly complex world it becomes more and more important to be simple. Otherwise you just blur, for yourself and others. That’s where Bush had the benefit over Obama (simplicity can be dangerous).
***********************************************************
Never did I think I’d see the day when I’d be busily making wedding plans. There’s only a week to go now, with the pending arrival of friends, parents and sisters (this lucky kid is going to have three aunts: one in the Swiss mountains, one in San Francisco, one in the Dominican Republic). My brain’s been getting a bit addled with to-do lists but the whole process has involved plenty of laughter and learning, bringing together people from across the city to help create an event.
There’s Grace from Table Tables in South Street Seaport with whom we’ve concocted a British (small eats) and Dominican (main course) menu. Sarah the Brooklyn-based photographer. The people from Omonia café in Astoria, who made the cake that featured in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and are also making ours on a somewhat smaller scale. Gabriela the DJ. David who is conducting the ceremony: we met with him today and suddenly the occasion feels whole. And the miracle-working Nelly in Flushing, who with a few weeks notice is making me a dress that will fit me and my expanding belly, with fabric I tracked down one lunchtime in the garment district.
Through all of this I’m learning about relationships too of course. The wonder of a a complete commitment to respect another person for who they are, share with them and love them. And how, far from being confining in anyway, when those feelings work in both directions it is liberating. C and I have compressed encountering each other, getting to know each other, pregnancy, moving in together, engagement and marriage into less than a year…with childbirth and a whole new journey to embark on in May. We could be frazzled by this emotional roller-coaster but instead it's somehow made us steadier, there's a strong quiet calmness beneath it all.
***********************************************************
We recently saw “Note by Note,” a documentary about the Steinway piano factory in Astoria, with an ecclectic bunch of people at the Astoria Historical Society. The society shares its building with a funeral parlour. And in the room next door to ours a Weight-Watchers meeting was underway. Despite the quirky surroundings it was well worth going. The documentary was fascinating and beautifully filmed, an elegy to the kind of craftsmanship that involves ten stages or more spread out over a year, each involving a different person or group of people with precise skills passed down from previous workers, to create a piano. The workers interviewed had the same kind of now-rare pride in their careful work that Nelly clearly has making and mending clothes, in the studio where she has been working for over twenty years.
***********************************************************
My pregnancy hasn’t come accompanied by cravings, quite, but yes by a hankering for certain foods (which, this being America, I go and get and eat): oatmeal, Kit-Kats, coconut juice, leek and potato soup.
***********************************************************
In the introduction to a New Yorker photo series of veterans of the civil rights movement, David Remnick says that Obama, talking about the relationship between their struggle and his own campaigning, rejected any direct comparison but added, “they are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement…there is a voice that is best captured by King, which says that we, as African-Americans, are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union – which is a very optimistic story, in the end. It is fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries…There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries – that sense that, through the deliverance of the least of the these, the society as a whole is better."
A belief in the possibility of the perfection of the union can be used for harmful ends, when driven by a sense of American exceptionalism. But at the same time it creates an environment of striving optimism and energy, one of the reasons why when C pointed out today that I’m clearly not a US-bashing European, I agreed.
***********************************************************
Baby-to-be was kicking a bit less these past few weeks, to the point at which I wondered if he’s ok. Then a couple of days ago the flutters began again, bringing smiles of delight and relief. And I wondered, how much of his character has been formed by now? Can babies have depressions in the womb, sink into a funk for a bit then pull themselves up again?
***********************************************************
In London in December C was startled to see British ancestors watching him from sepia photographs in the bathroom. “How can I do what I need to do with them looking on?” he asked. Good point. Is a downstairs bathroom really the right place for them?
***********************************************************
At the prenatal yoga class a group of expectant mums maneuvers and breathes deeply with their bellies of different sizes, releasing all the blockages that build up during the day between them and their babies who wait patiently for birth. No hurry.
***********************************************************
In an increasingly complex world it becomes more and more important to be simple. Otherwise you just blur, for yourself and others. That’s where Bush had the benefit over Obama (simplicity can be dangerous).
***********************************************************
Never did I think I’d see the day when I’d be busily making wedding plans. There’s only a week to go now, with the pending arrival of friends, parents and sisters (this lucky kid is going to have three aunts: one in the Swiss mountains, one in San Francisco, one in the Dominican Republic). My brain’s been getting a bit addled with to-do lists but the whole process has involved plenty of laughter and learning, bringing together people from across the city to help create an event.
There’s Grace from Table Tables in South Street Seaport with whom we’ve concocted a British (small eats) and Dominican (main course) menu. Sarah the Brooklyn-based photographer. The people from Omonia café in Astoria, who made the cake that featured in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and are also making ours on a somewhat smaller scale. Gabriela the DJ. David who is conducting the ceremony: we met with him today and suddenly the occasion feels whole. And the miracle-working Nelly in Flushing, who with a few weeks notice is making me a dress that will fit me and my expanding belly, with fabric I tracked down one lunchtime in the garment district.
Through all of this I’m learning about relationships too of course. The wonder of a a complete commitment to respect another person for who they are, share with them and love them. And how, far from being confining in anyway, when those feelings work in both directions it is liberating. C and I have compressed encountering each other, getting to know each other, pregnancy, moving in together, engagement and marriage into less than a year…with childbirth and a whole new journey to embark on in May. We could be frazzled by this emotional roller-coaster but instead it's somehow made us steadier, there's a strong quiet calmness beneath it all.
***********************************************************
We recently saw “Note by Note,” a documentary about the Steinway piano factory in Astoria, with an ecclectic bunch of people at the Astoria Historical Society. The society shares its building with a funeral parlour. And in the room next door to ours a Weight-Watchers meeting was underway. Despite the quirky surroundings it was well worth going. The documentary was fascinating and beautifully filmed, an elegy to the kind of craftsmanship that involves ten stages or more spread out over a year, each involving a different person or group of people with precise skills passed down from previous workers, to create a piano. The workers interviewed had the same kind of now-rare pride in their careful work that Nelly clearly has making and mending clothes, in the studio where she has been working for over twenty years.
***********************************************************
My pregnancy hasn’t come accompanied by cravings, quite, but yes by a hankering for certain foods (which, this being America, I go and get and eat): oatmeal, Kit-Kats, coconut juice, leek and potato soup.
***********************************************************
In the introduction to a New Yorker photo series of veterans of the civil rights movement, David Remnick says that Obama, talking about the relationship between their struggle and his own campaigning, rejected any direct comparison but added, “they are related only in the sense that at the core of the civil-rights movement…there is a voice that is best captured by King, which says that we, as African-Americans, are American, and that our story is America’s story, and that by perfecting our rights we perfect the Union – which is a very optimistic story, in the end. It is fundamentally different from the story that many minority groups go through in other countries…There’s no equivalent, if you think about it, in many other countries – that sense that, through the deliverance of the least of the these, the society as a whole is better."
A belief in the possibility of the perfection of the union can be used for harmful ends, when driven by a sense of American exceptionalism. But at the same time it creates an environment of striving optimism and energy, one of the reasons why when C pointed out today that I’m clearly not a US-bashing European, I agreed.
***********************************************************
Baby-to-be was kicking a bit less these past few weeks, to the point at which I wondered if he’s ok. Then a couple of days ago the flutters began again, bringing smiles of delight and relief. And I wondered, how much of his character has been formed by now? Can babies have depressions in the womb, sink into a funk for a bit then pull themselves up again?
***********************************************************
In London in December C was startled to see British ancestors watching him from sepia photographs in the bathroom. “How can I do what I need to do with them looking on?” he asked. Good point. Is a downstairs bathroom really the right place for them?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)