The last Saturday before the kids went back to school, JNH and I were on the Sean’s Place basketball courts on 38th Street, playing tennis.
I say playing tennis, but it was more like trying to hit the ball to each other and get a rally of more than three. I was wearing a sleeveless Japanese-style print shirt in turquoise, pink and white, and sneakers with pink laces, which made me feel a bit clown-like. We’d been to the US Open at Flushing Meadows the week before, which inspired the kids to get rackets. JMH was particularly impressed by Kyrgios. Tennis on a basketball court, I thought...talk about gentrification.
CMH kicked a soccer ball nearby. And while there was this touch of tennis towards the end, it had really been a Summer of soccer. Of riding the 7 train each Saturday to the pitches in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, where kids from all over Queens played against each other, with team names like Real Astoria, Manchester NYC, Las Malvinas, and ours, 5 Star Soccer Academy.
Ice-cream, empanada and mango sellers moved among the throngs of parents on the sidelines. Always a creature of habit, each Saturday I’d look forward to my zip-lock bag of mango slices shaken with lime and salt, sucking on them under a hot Sun with bits of AstroTurf in my sandals and rooting for 5 Star with their bright blue and white shirts, as airplanes headed down into La Guardia rumbled overhead. The U7s rocked the season, the U10s less so, which made the high moments all the better.
**************************************
At JFK waiting for a flight for a quick work trip to the UK. Scandinavian couple to my right at the bar, sipping very slowly on their Cosmopolitans, and looking somewhat relieved that they are headed back to the peace and quiet of their hometown.
I still love this City like I did when I arrived 12 years ago, actually more so.
Now the Scandinavians next to me have drunk about half their Cosmopolitans, and their conversation is flowing.
Recently I caught up with JQ. She said that returning to New York after a year in Berlin and Budapest reminded her how deeply she loves this city. It struck her particularly on a visit to Chinatown. I too had had a similar reminder in Chinatown, when I took the boys there for the Luna new year celebrations. As my schedule’s more flexible for now (oh yeah!) I can make the most of days like that, when they are off school. We got the train down to Sara D Roosevelt Park where the firecracker ceremony was happening.
The park was packed, but we found a slightly less crowded area on the South Side by a playground and some grass. A nearby store brimmed and spilled out on to the street with lanterns, small boxes of firecrackers, and foam string spray cans for a dollar. The boys loved squirting the foam all over the park where it hung in fluorescent threads from the trees and climbing frames. The air popped with the sound of the fire crackers as little feet leaped on them.
Then we found a little girl who had lost her mother. Tears ran down her face. Everyone was just continuing on their way around her, oblivious to the fact she was on her own. We tried talking with her, but she only understood Chinese. I lifted her up high to see if she could see her mother in the crowd, but no sign. A woman who did speak Chinese came and helped us. We began to head towards the stage to ask for an announcement to be made, when the mother came running up to us, hugged the girl with tears and relief, and all was well.
It’s the year of the pig. The boys talked me in to buying a pig each: bright red, round, squishy ones decorated with Chinese flowers. In that unpredictable way that toys do, they have turned out to be hits. Both sleep with them each night (with a group of other carefully selected animals), and JNH’s joins us when we’re watching TV.
Homewards through Little Italy. Though I’d given up hope of seeing dragons in action, suddenly there they were on a side-street, leaping and glaring to the accompaniment of cymbals and falling streamers in the evening sun: I was taken right back to my 10th birthday party in London’s chinatown, where the dragons frightened little sister P.
We have become so used to talking about the fabric of a place or a neighborhood that rarely do we pause to think about fabric, real fabric - to draw out the texture of the word's original meaning. I mean, what does the place feel like to touch? What's holding it together? How is it held together? What colors does it have, what shades? Is it stretchy, heavy, light, hand-made or factory-made?
I was struck recently on moving from the glassy monochrome fabric of Hudson Yards (freshly opened this weekend) to the deep, rich fabric of a short stretch of 30th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.
Hudson Yards has a disturbing flatness (beyond all else that's disturbing about it, which I wrote about here). The "Vessel" is an empty vessel, a selfie vortex, a mise-en-abyme of unseeing self absorption, by which I mean in these selfies and reflections we don't even see ourselves. Or a giant shawarma as some have observed.
The rectangular mall could be a rectangular wall anywhere. This fabric feels cold to the touch. It does not give. The eyes grow tired quickly.
The 30th Street block is deep and immersive. It is soft to the touch. You can get lost, your eyes and mind alerted to multiple mysteries and possibilities. Walk just 50 paces or so and you've passed old furriers, a drum store, a recording store, a martial arts center, a church, and that's just for starters. You can feel the multiple hands that have worked this fabric and wrapped themselves in it over time, and you know that time will continue to thread new patterns in it, make its mark, build on what came before and extend its history.
Last Wednesday evening as our kids ran around enjoying the crazy games for a birthday party at Chucky Cheese on Northern Boulevard, one of my fellow moms asked me what I’ve been reading recently.
What I’m reading right now came quickly to mind: Carlos’ Fuentes short story collection “La Frontera de Cristal”, set along the Mexico-US border. I chose it as I was hungry for some nuance and lived-humanity narrative about the border territory, while the mediasphere was so saturated with Trump’s wall obsession and the resulting government shutdown.
But before that? Agghhh! My mind went blank, other than realizing that a lot of what I’ve been reading has been work-related: PDF reports sent to my i-pad for rapid digestion. The combination of the partying kids and the fact I’ve been juggling reading various things at once meant I was at a loss on how to elaborate.
Here, therefore, I'm pausing to capture some details of recent books before they get further buried in my mind-compost.
One of the work-related ones was Tom Angotti’s New York For Sale. It describes the way that the international and local real estate dominance in New York actually creates momentum – or more like forces a space - for a juxtaposing creative response in the form of community-led urban planning. I’m now onto his latest book, edited with Sylvia Morse, Zoned Out, which underscores the racist structures behind top-down land re-zonings and has provided inspiration and insights at community meetings throughout the city.
Novel-wise, I recently read Sergio de la Pava’s “Lost Empress”. With similar mastery to his first book Naked Singularity it combines humor and violence and weaves multiple narratives and voices. This time the narratives are linked by two threads that draw on the core of American experience: football, and the criminal justice system.
At Astoria Bookshop I picked up the short stories selected by Roxane Gay for the 2018 Best American Short Stories collection. They include Danielle Evans’ Boys Go To Jupiter, in which a white college student's boyfriend gives her a confederate flag bikini, snaps a picture of her in it and posts it to Facebook. She rides the resulting campus outrage with a disturbing level of insouciance and detachment. Like the best short stories it delivers complexity despite its compactness. And part-way through there's an unforgettable gut-punch of a moment.
A highlight last year was Laia Jufresa’s Umami. It connects the interior and exterior lives of people living in a small group of houses in Mexico City, set around their gardens which are laid out like the flavors on the tongue: i.e. bitter, salty, sweet, sour and the fifth taste, “Umami”.
The novel hinges on two deaths, the tragic drowning of one of the family’s daughters, Luz, when she was “almost six”, and the death of the elderly academic Alfonso’s wife Noelia from pancreatic cancer. The characters' multi-layered processes of mourning and moving on create the ebb and flow of the book, which is written in five sections that move backwards in time. The novel resonated as I still, a year-and-a-half later, am journeying through the process of mourning for Mum. (Process is much too ordered a word).
At the end of a video interview with Sophie Hugues who translated the novel into English, Jufresa says:
“It was very important for me to write a book about grief… I was living in Mexico where grief was very present because a lot of people are being killed and we have 25,000 who have disappeared. A lot has been written about the violence of it, and when you have so many people dying, you basically have no time for grief. Then people become numbers, and disappeared people become this long list of names, and a lot of writers are stopping with the violence. But I felt like no-one…well not no-one…but I really felt the need to say, stop. Grief needs space.
And I wanted to write a book that had nothing to do with the violence but that allowed the time and space just to remember that every time one person dies, a lot of lives are affected. So that’s why I wanted to make this reflection game [in the style of the novel]…Even if it's not your sister, but someone who you used to see every day, you are affected by it.”
In a World where so much is in flux, and where the center, whatever that was, really does not hold, books and stories center us.
They hold our attention, even if only for a short time. And, over time, our reading patterns create stepping stones, guiding us through this mysterious life and creating a story of their own.
A few weeks ago we were waiting outside the kids’ school for a parents’ evening, or something like that. JNH was sitting on the sidewalk buried in his latest Harry Potter. CMH was playing “CandyCrush” on C’s phone. I disapprovingly did was must be mighty annoying for brothers, a compare and contrast, and said to CMH that I hoped he would one day be curious enough to want to read books too.
That evening at bedtime, CMH, who I usually read a story to before bed, said that he wanted to read to me instead. He took “Green Eggs and Ham” off his bookshelf and proceeded to read it to me, slowly, carefully, paying attention to each word and with a gentle unspoken undercurrent of “see mami, I can read perfectly well.” Green Eggs and Ham has taken on a whole new level of significance now – I’ll never forget how completely he took ownership of the text, and carried me through the story.
"Would you, could you, on a boat?
I could not, would not, on a boat.
I will not, will not, with a goat.
I will not eat them in the rain.
I will not eat them on a train..."
JNH, for his part, has now whizzed through to the end of the Harry Potter books. I remember in my twenties when they came out, and the bookstores in London had huge lines of people through the night in advance of the next release. I snootily decided that as they were so popular I’d give them a miss. Now having read the first three to JNH, and heard updates from him as he read the last four himself, I’ve realized their magic of course. While people cautioned that the last book is intense and perhaps too grown up for an eight year old, we let him role with it (Matilda read Dickens at four I thought!!). Even though he might not have engaged with all the levels of meaning in the novel in the same way that a teenager would, he had his own unique experience of it.
I’m seeing this as a third maternity leave, only without a baby.
Another big difference is that I’m creating the job at the other end of it, rather than having one to go back to. But…“I’m creating”… just writing those words is a reminder of what an opportunity this is, one to be treasured. The similarity with maternity leave is that it’s a window of time with a remarkably changed pace and sense of priorities. It’s been disorientating, these first few days. I’ve never since the start of my career not had the next step lined up before moving on. But I’m getting my bearings, while learning a lot about the value of not being crystal clear for a change, and keeping alert to possibilities. "This is living," as C put it.
I’m interspersing planning and building, with walking, as I tend to do. Today, the low sun through the fall trees in Astoria park, with East River flowing alongside, was so beautiful that it was hard to believe that it was the same planet as the one in which Trump's Republicans just won at least two new Senate seats, in which he fired his Attorney General the following day, and in which the news talk shows are an incessant vortex of reality, to the extent it feels like nothing is stable, or real, other than the fact that it all is very real.
There was a lot of cause for optimism too in the results, with a record number of women winning seats in Congress - among them the youngest ever woman, first two Muslim women, and first two native American women. (That said, women will still only be 23% of the total so there's work still to be done!).
The day before the election, I’d got the train down to Trenton and knocked on doors in Bordentown to get out the vote for Andy Kim, who was standing for Congress against the Republican incumbent MacArthur. Unlike today there was no sun coming through the trees – it was an overcast, rainy day. It being daytime, most people were out. Our knocks on the front doors of the wooden houses, their decks festooned with fall decorations, mostly went unanswered. But a few people were in, and we confirmed their plans for voting. It turns out that every door knock throughout that district really did count: the vote came down to a difference of just under a percentage point – with Kim winning.
D, who’s has lived all her life in Bordentown and who drove us both around as we canvassed, gave me a lift back to Trenton station. We talked all the way, in that rare way in which two strangers happen to find themselves alone together and manage to share significant chunks of their lives and perspectives in just a short space of time, before parting ways.
The boys crash their arms and bodies into the breaking waves at Rockaway Beach. It's a grey, windy day so the beach is almost empty other than us. They keep getting bowled over and getting up again, ecstatic to be challenging the sea like it's some wild monster. I'm there, a bit fearful of their fearlessness, watching closely, wanting to be just challenging the waves too, and wondering at the strength of the sea, the fragility of this coastline, the fragility of their lives.
*******************
A voice comes down the stairs, "Mama, can I go to bed now?" and the words are perfectly formed, and I wonder at the fact that just some time ago he knew nothing of words, only noises.
