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 117 - Crossing Sunnyside Yard in the rain

Yesterday I walked with CNH down through Astoria and Sunnyside to the 40th street stop on the 7 line. We were meeting C there, to go to have lunch at the Thai restaurant SriPraPhai in Woodside. It’s one of the few locations that pulls Manhattanites and Brooklynites to Queens – as well as drawing a big local crowd.

It was a humid day. Rain fell at times, either in a torrent or a drizzle but never enough to lift the humidity. You could see it shifting about in patches in the sky as if debating when and where to descend. It was falling as I reached the bottom of Steinway Street and embarked onto the 39th Street overpass.

The overpass is a concrete swish over Sunnyside Yard, where trains, tracks, cables and diggers make a tangled nest. The sidewalks on the overpass are narrow enough to make pedestrians feel, not quite threatened, but vulnerable, especially if pushing a stroller as I was.

On the left as you walk South is a high mesh fence that prefaces a view of the yards. On the right is another mesh fence, prefacing a view West to Manhattan. Yesterday the Manhattan skyline had shed its alluring sparkle for an even dark gray, leaving much to the imagination.

Despite the weather I was upbeat. Or was it because of the weather? There’s something wild and cleansing about a wet day, especially when it follows the glare of Summer. I was intensely conscious of time. Three years before, I had walked in the opposite direction over that overpass with C and his sister D to get beers at Astoria’s Studio Square, just pregnant with JNH but not yet aware I was. Here I was walking on the pass again with JNH’s little brother.

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Work dominates the geography of Queens (auto repair shops rub shoulders with taxi depots rub shoulders with mom-and-pop shops) while play dominates Manhattan’s.

New York missive no 89 - St Michael's cemetery

One of the pieces in “Forgotten borough – Writers come to terms with Queens” is Marc Landas' "A Queens Necropolis: The Burial and Building of New York." It starts with a fabulous description of boats in the mid 1800s bringing the dead from Manhattan over the East River and up Newton Creek to Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

Queens is full of cemeteries that received waves of dead from Manhattan: produced simply by the expanding population, or the revolutionary war, or outbreaks of cholera – and that are now still in use for Queens residents.

C, JNH and I went to one of them yesterday morning. St Michael's Cemetery is an 88 hectare triangle of land that hangs down from the Long Island Expressway as it slices its way from Astoria to La Guardia airport.

We’d planned to spend the day doing something special. I’d come up with various options in Manhattan then tagged “or we could go to see St Michael’s cemetery” on the end. C knows my fixation with cemeteries. He said he thought that was probably what I really wanted to do and he was right.

We got the M60 bus a couple of stops to the cemetery and wandered in. We found ourselves in the midst of a funeral. A crowd of South Asian mourners was congregated outside the building where we slipped in to ask for a map. They didn’t seem particularly sad though. The gathering felt almost like a celebration.

We guessed that perhaps the dead person had been a taxi driver with an extended network of friends and colleagues who liked and respected him and who had come to send him off but were not as affected as close family would be. Some of the mourners had big SUVs which they stood next to proudly. It was a very Queens scene.

The young woman in the office must have been a bit surprised to see us there, baby in a papoose, requesting a map. “Are you looking for the grave of anyone in particular?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing Scott Joplin," I said. I’d heard that he was buried there. “And if there are any other noteworthy graves...” Though I didn’t really mind if the graves I was looking at were of famous people are not.

“No, he’s really the only famous one here,” she said with the strongest New York accent I’ve ever heard, and a little loudly for my comfort given the funeral gathering next to us. “But Scott Joplin is very easy to find…” She pointed us to a beige SUV and told us it was on a corner just beyond it, with a little American flag marking the spot.

The grave is a small stone slab lying flat in the grass. It says, Scott Joplin. American composer. November 24, 1868 - April 1, 1917. I loved its simplicity.

And I loved the higgledy-piggledy authenticity of the rest of the cemetery. There were few ostentatious mausoleums and fancy statues (it was founded in 1852 by the Rev. Thomas McClure Peters who wanted to "provide a final dignified resting place for the poor who could not otherwise afford it", according to the cemetery website).

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the layout of the cemetery though maybe we were missing it: there are old gravestones close to recent ones, some are clustered closely together and others are spread out.

The stones echo the waves of immigration to New York and particularly to Queens. There’s an Irish name next to an Italian name, next to Greek next to Chinese next to Puerto Rican. What a story, what stories, the cemetery could tell. Yet unlike Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and others with their detailed tourist information, even tours, St Michael's seems to exist un-narrated.

The stories of the people who are buried there are merely hinted at by the minimal details on their gravestones.

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From St Michael's we wove by foot and bus down to Woodside where we feasted on what must be the best Thai food in New York at SriPraPhai – one of those much-hyped restaurants whose hype is totally justified.

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San Francisco and New York, two cities that other than their liberal leanings couldn’t be more different. We spent five days in San Fran taking JNH to see his tia Z, who has lived there since she was posted there with the army (now she works with kids with learning difficulties).

If you project the two cities to the future then San Fran is the clean, green machine city with purring hydrogen-fueled air-taxis and New York is the apocalypse, in a good way. I say in a good way because I’ve got so used to its pulsing chaos and endless surprise that San Fran felt too pristine and smooth. (That impression was probably amplified by the fact our hotel was in the swanky Mariner district. San Fran does have its rough edges, but they seem to be segregated from the bulk of the city rather than infusing it as in New York).

That said, we had a good time. Z has a car and we spent the first day moving from district to district: up to admire the view from Twin Peaks, down to her place in Bernal Heights, up and down to Mission for Peruvian fish, up and down again to Dolores Park...next day over the Golden Gate bridge to Napa Valley, then day three downtown and Fisherman's wharf...we crammed a lot in.

New York missive no 12 - Extravaganza

Recovering from another late night that wound up in 205 club, at the end of Ra’s last Saturday night in NYC before going to India for 5 months. Am listening to Jorge Celedón on my i-pod speakers, which I’ve finally set up in my bedroom: it’s been a slow process of getting the various essentials, like music, and a duvet, which I just bought yesterday, together for this room.

Speaking of Jorge Celedón, B, Ch and I trekked to Queens last Sunday to see him in concert. I’m sure they wondered where on earth I was leading them as we walked down a windswept road of warehouses, drifting plastic bags and newspaper pages, somewhere between Woodside station and La Guardia airport. At the far end of the road the blue neon words “La Extravaganza” marked our destination. We entered a cavernous club with round tables set out across the room, a bar in the middle adorned with artificial flames and palmtrees, a stage and dance floor set up on one side. Waitresses wove in and out of the tables in gold and black corsets, their boobs bursting out of the ribbons. B was in seventh heaven as one of them leaned over our table to take our order: a bottle of vodka, jugs of tonic and Coca-Cola, a cup of limes, and a mountainous plate of meat. The room gradually filled up, a DJ started playing a mixture of salsa, merengue and vallenatos, and couples got up to dance. Two hours later, I asked the couple sitting behind us what time Jorge Celedón was coming on. “A la una. Más o menos," they replied. We felt the ultimate tourists when we decided, as it was a Sunday, not to stay on for the concert and headed Manhattan-bound at 12ish, just as the club was bulging with expectation. So another Annabel-escapade that falls a bit short for being over-stretched. But worth it for the atmosphere, and lessons learned for next time Celedón's in town.