New York missive no 87 - Out of the ordinary

The white of snow brings out dark lines that in other weather go ignored.



I knew early on that my journey to work last Thursday would be different than usual. Walking along 30th Drive towards the 30th Ave subway station, first I saw a tiny dead mouse on the sidewalk. It was smaller than my thumb and looked like it had been frozen by the cold.

Then I saw a dog doing an orange poop. (The dog had positioned itself on the grassy verge in such a way that you couldn’t help but see what it was up to). The poop wasn’t orange in a normal way. It had swirls of fluorescent plasticy-orange like the jackets of track maintenance people. I got to the station, and learned that there were no trains running from 30th Ave to Manhattan because of an “incident” at Queensboro Plaza.

So I walked down to Queensboro Bridge and over the river. Walking across that bridge is always a bit thrilling. It’s thrilling because the bridge soars high above East River, its thick steel girders reaching to Manhattan which is, of course, center of the universe. But the thrill is qualified by a “bit”, because the thick steel girders and a mesh fence stop you from seeing much of the river below except in glimpses. And your walk is accompanied by the roar of traffic.

For me, the bridge now always makes me think of being driven across it in a taxi, in labour with JNH. I was being whisked towards an experience I knew would change my life, change “me”, for ever. It was good to revive that vivid memory unexpectedly on a diverted Thursday morning journey to work.

New York missive no 86 - NYC subway people who stay still

Most people in the New York City subway system are moving. Even when they’re standing on a platform waiting for a train they fidget, peering down the tracks as if to lure the train into the station. When it arrives, on they get and off they go to their next destination. But there are some people who do not move. You could call them fixtures.

On the NQR southbound track at 34th Street station there is the man who sits on a box at the bottom of a pillar and plays his accordion. I see him when I’m waiting for my train on the other side of the track. He plays classic melodies. La Vie en Rose, Lara's Theme. If you close your eyes you could be on the South Bank in Paris, just about.

On the NQR northbound track at 34th Street station there is the black guy with his possessions in plastic sacks piled high in a shopping trolley. He occupies the end seat on one of the wooden benches at the northern end of the platform.

Occupies, that is, until one day when I saw that a Navajo Indian had taken his spot. The new occupant had a sign, “Navajo Indian. Trying to get back to Arizona. Please help.” He was gazing into the distance and held out a little Dunkin’ Donuts plastic cup. The first day I saw him there I put a dollar in the cup. His eyes sparked up and he opened his gold-filling filled mouth to say “god bless you” before gazing back into space again. Who knows if he is really trying to get back to Arizona, but I felt motivated to give him the dollar.

The second day I saw him there, the black guy with the shopping trolley came down onto the platform. He looked distraught when he saw somebody else in his seat. He leaned against a nearby garbage bin, his trolley and bags gathered around him. And there he was, leaning against the garbage bin, when my train arrived, on I got and off I went.

New York missive no 85 - resolutions, Dominican Republic, and Oakley sunglasses

Well, so much to write and not the time to write it in.

Briefly, new year’s resolutions include: interviewing people in my neighborhood for a new website I’ve set up www.30thAve.org, taking JNH swimming, and doing a bit of yoga and running (no over-commitments there!).

It’s funny looking at my list of “40 before 40”, half-way down this post, to check how I’m doing with six more years to go. I’ll do a line-by-line report sometime soon. But to summarize, I’m making inroads. That's strangely without trying to, or taking the list seriously at all. As if it was more premonition than to-do list (ok, not the novel-writing bit).

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We spent Christmas and New Year in the Dominican Republic with C’s sister D. Two selected highlights: visiting the municipal cemetery in Santiago where C’s mum is buried; and the discovery and purchase of a painting of a “Gallo Loco” by Miguel Ulloa in the village of Guyacanes.

In the cemetery, I remembered the many times I’d wandered as a tourist around cemeteries in Latin America, and looked at the names in the stacked niches. And here I was visiting the grave of my mother-in-law, with the grandson she never knew snoozing in a papoose on my chest. D had lost the key to the padlock on the niche grate, so the flower vases inside were empty and there was a lot of dust. But a man who worked at the cemetery tipped a few buckets of water over to clean it up. And as always when visiting a grave it was the moment that mattered rather than the physical thing. The fact that here we were, C, D, JNH and I, pausing together in our lives to think about E.

On our way out, D and her friend R who was also with us came across the graves of other people they had known. “Mira, aquí está tal-y-tal….y aquí su esposa…etc”.

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In Guyacanes village, near a small resort where C, JNH and I spent New Years in the company of lots of large Italians, I stumbled across an art gallery with one of Miguel Ulloa’s “Gallo Loco’s” in it – a crazy cockerel against a bright orange background. Now it’s hanging above our bed in New York, greeting us each morning with an imaginary cock’a’doodle doo.

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Racial lines are accentuated everywhere in DR, it seems. In the car parks in Santo Domingo, the people leaving their cars were light-skinned, the people minding them were dark-skinned. In the resort, most of the guests were pale-skinned, all the staff were dark. JNH was much admired by everyone – would he have been so much if he didn’t have a whiteish complexion and blue eyes? The obsession with paleness seems a bit ironic given that white people haven’t exactly had a history of benevolence on the island. As C pointed out, much of it comes from a superiority complex over Haitians, as well as advertising influences from allá.

I was struck by hearing "allá" in DR understood instinctively to mean the US, while among Dominicans in New York of course allá is DR. It's as if the actual allá isn't in either place, but somewhere in-between.

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When the 33 Chilean miners were extracted from their 69-day burial they were wearing Oakley sunglasses. Oakley had donated them, to protect the miners’ from the glare. They were going to need them.

New York missive no 84 - Wollman rink, 34th St station & a London walk

In the early morning light the long shadows of skaters on the Wollman rink in Central Park slice like windmill sails. An analogy of life is being skated out. There are the skaters who dance well and effortlessly, weaving with ease among the rest. Others stride out but stumble clumsily, others cling to the edge and still others clutch a partner for support. All of them carve a trail that will disappear soon after they leave the rink.

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Moment of realization at 34th Street subway station recently. The reason why New Yorkers move so fast isn’t always because they are in a hurry to get somewhere, but that they want to create some space between themselves and the next person. A perpetual and futile instinct to escape the crowds.

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In London a couple of weeks ago I walked from Waterloo station up to our office on Charlotte Street, on the morning of our trustee meeting. I had a tingling tiredness because JNH, discombobulated with jetlag, had been awake till 5am so I’d had just a couple of hours sleep. It was strange seeing such an utterly familiar walk through outsider's eyes.

By the steps leading down from the station to Shell Centre, a man dressed in orange with a collection bucket stood next to a sign saying “Orange for Orangutan Day”.

I passed through the art installation that hardly feels like one – wall of feintly-outlined white neon bricks – in the approach to Momi and the Archduke pub.

I admired Mandela’s head at the top of the steps by the Festival Hall.

I entered the Pain Quotidien – like the other brand memes I mentioned in missive no. 83 Pain Quotidiens are everywhere now – to buy a “walnut and raisin flute” of bread to munch on my way over the bridge. It cost £1.50. I paid with a £2 coin and felt its heft compared to US currency.

I walked over Hungerford pedestrian bridge, one drop in a steady stream of people heading northwards like me, against a trickle of people heading south, with the occasional solitary seagull passing overhead.

I saw a splash of gerberas by the flower stall next to Embankment station.
I passed Fitness First gym. Through the gaps where the laminated commercials advertising the kind of body you could have had peeled off the windows I saw the exerting real bodies behind, not far off those promised bodies actually.
I smelt Burger King as I went through Charing Cross station.

I smiled at the statue of Oscar-Wilde with his wild hair lying down and the inscription at his feet, “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.”

I passed the Crypt, then the Chandos, thinking I’m looking forward to drinking again, having a pint.

I looked up at the theatre where Art was on for so long and now there’s a show with Bill Bailey.

I skimmed the edge of Gerrard Street in Chinatown where P was scared of the dragon at my 10th birthday.

I passed the Curzon on Shafesbury Avenue, then up Frith street which felt fresh it always does in the early mornings, breathing easy after another night of crowded activity: Balans, Café Italia, Ronnie Scotts, Barra Fino, Arbutus, spreading at the end into Soho Square.

I dodged through the heaving traffic of Oxford Street (quick as possible) to Rathbone Place that leads straight up to the red-brick office, where the gingko tree outside faithfully marked the season with its bright yellow leaves.

New York missive no 83 - Dragonflies, Rally to Restore Sanity, NYC marathon

The fact that we move the clocks an hour twice a year is reassuring. It shows that time doesn’t control us completely.

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There are brand-memes that suddenly go into multiplying overdrive it seems, achieving ubiquity. At the moment in New York those are Snapple, Boars Head, Stieg Larsson. The shop and subway-vendor fridges are stuffed with Snapple drinks, Boar’s Head meat and cheese is on display in all the delis and at least one passenger in each subway carriage is clutching a Stieg Larsson book…The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo… The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest…

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JNH harmed something for the first time the other day. It didn’t matter much, but I felt it. He has a mobile of felt dragonflies hanging above his crib. From the kitchen I heard a rustling and crunching sound, and went in to his room to see he’d stretched up and grabbed hold of one of the dragonflies. The whole mobile was a tangle. The round frame was at a jaunty angle, the threads were all twisted and the dragonflies all over the place. The green one had lost two wings.

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C, JNH and I went on a 5 hour bus journey last weekend to join a latte-sipping rabble rallying to restore sanity in the Mall in Washington DC. It was worth it for the evening walk to the White House, the Washington and Lincoln Memorials etc. in fading October sunlight after we arrived, and for the fun and relieved atmosphere among the 200,000ish (Stephen Colbert put it at 6 billion) gathered the next day, with signs saying things like Floridans Against Rational Thought, This is a Sign, Grumpy Old People, Death to Extremists, I’m with Stupid. Though the feeling I’d had before we went – that, while funny, the fact that so many people including us saw a rally organized by two comedians as the only rally worth traveling for this year, reflects a seriously sorry state of affairs.




H having moved back to London, and the Quincy hotel where I’d stayed before being booked up, we found ourselves somehow staying at the ridiculously big and wannabe-posh Omni Shoreham hotel , one subway stop up from Dupont Circle. It’s the kind of place where guests feel like profit-fodder, buying a $3 coffee here, paying a debit card fee there and feeling disproportionately subversive when tipping an underpaid porter.

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Opposite me on the N train on the way back from Brooklyn on Friday, an elderly man from Malta who was here for today’s Marathon got talking to the local man sitting next to him. The former was on his way to a Maltese social club in Astoria – he had the address written down on a little card – the latter was on his way back to his home near Steinway street, where, he described, Egyptian and Serbian communities rub shoulders. “There’s a bit of everything round there,” he said, “I didn’t know about the Maltese social club though.” Maltese guy asked about the Marathon route and whether the boroughs were island or mainland. His neighbor explained slowly, patiently a few times, and Maltese guy repeated after him. “So…Staten Island – island; Brooklyn And Queens, part of Long Island, island; Manhattan – island; and the Bronx, mainland! I get it, thank you.” He looked delighted. I kept an eye out for him today as JNH and I watched some of the 45,000 runners approach the daunting climb of the Queensborough Bridge, but didn’t see him. From his wiry but strong-looking form I imagine he’d already sped right ahead.

New York missive no 82 - Looking up, a big bee, stealing, Anna Quindlan on motherhood

I passed a man on the corner of 6th Ave and 31st street, gazing up at a point in the sky a couple of blocks South. Then I realized that he wasn’t gazing up at the sky. (Of course not. Who looks at the sky in Manhattan?). He was looking up a towering new block of apartments. A Manhattan experience, gazing upwards, dreaming you can be higher. When you reach the top of one of those buildings though, don’t you feel a bit removed from the life going on so far below?

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At the International Diamond Conference on Thursday Peter Singer said that stealing is a crime unless, for example, you’re stealing millions in oil profits from Angola or Equatorial Guinea. By chance in the subway on my way home I overheard a Polish guy say to the woman sitting next to him, “In America if you steal a loaf of bread you’re a thief. If you’re a corporation stealing a few hundred thousand here and there you get away with it. You can pay for the lawyers to get you off the hook.”

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A huge bee careened into our living room a few weeks ago, black and bigger than a hornet. It crashed drunkenly into walls and the ceiling then the bars of a hanging metal lamp. C was trying to hit it with a rolled magazine and for some reason my fear was more intense than with any normal bee. This one was huge. And the presence of little J on the floor nearby further jangled my nerves. Each time C thwacked and hit the metal but missed the bee I felt its anger grow and imagined a deadly sting. Then it committed suicide. It flew into the glass bowl lamp on the kitchen ceiling and whirled there buzzing, buzzing until frazzled it lay still. You could see the black shape up through the clouded glass, a smudge. Yesterday I happened to look up at the lamp and it was gone. C told me he’d taken it out when he changed the bulb. I felt sad, like I’d missed something, the chance to see that great bee right up close and not be afraid.

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In this interview with Charlie Rose, the journalist Anna Qindlan says of her youth, “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have kids, which shows how much I know.”
“Because…?” asks Charlie Rose.
“Because they’ve taught me about ninety percent of what I know that’s worth knowing.”
After these five months of being a mother I know just what she means.

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I copied a friend's idea and took a series of photos on my way into work to post on Facebook. The process of taking the pictures made me notice so much more than usual, of course. So now on my journey in I try to remember to photograph the things I see, even if only in my mind.



A woman looks out over midtown.

New York missive no 80 - Underneath "Undercover boss"

I’ve watched three episodes of the CBS TV series “Undercover boss”. No more! At first it seems a good idea. CEO gets to work undercover in different roles throughout his company to experience what his/her employees have to do and is humbled in the process – by his/her own ineptitude (which makes for good humor) and the tough work for little pay that the employees do (which makes for good pathos). Every CEO should be required to do that, just not for a reality TV show.

I've seen the episodes in which the CEOs of 1-800 flowers, Choice Hotels and Great Wolf Lodge indoor waterpark company go through the process. By the second, it became apparent that the show is completely formulaic. (Ok, the fact an American reality show is formulaic really shouldn’t come as a surprise). Boss gets to work alongside selected employees who are all hard-working, excellent at their jobs and struggling to realize their dreams – which might be putting their kids through college, getting a promotion, affording a too long-postponed knee operation. Boss is inspired by them. In weepy asides to the camera he admits his shortcomings and resolves to be better in the future. At the end of the show, boss reveals true identity to employees and individually “grants” them their dreams – a pay-rise, a higher position, more time to spend with their kids, a bonus to pay for the knee operation. At which point the employees are overwhelmed with relief and gratitude, often breaking down and crying.

Formulaic format aside, the problem with Undercover Boss is that it plays on exploited workers to make tear-jerking TV. You can just imagine the programmers scouting employees for the show thinking “great, a Mexican immigrant who has held down two full-time jobs for ten years to pay for his kids education. And he's still smiling." "Fabulous, a woman who has thrown herself into her work since the death of her nine-year-old daughter in a car accident – working alongside her will make the CEO realize how little she appreciates and spends time with her own children, providing for some good, emotional drama” (that was in the Great Wolf Lodge episode).

In a grand finale all the firm’s staff are gathered together to watch excepts of the CEO’s undercover experience. The camera pans back over the joyful faces of the selected employees. I couldn’t help but think if it wasn’t for this reality TV show their lives would be just the same as before. And for each of them, there are millions of workers who haven’t got chosen for a show so are still holding down the two jobs, unable to fix an injury, or having to choose between getting enough food on the table for their kids and spending any time with them. Undercover boss makes all that into entertainment.