Sun

February Photo A Day

Sunset, Stealing Light

I only have to walk one short block. First I look right. Then I look left.

One burst of orange approaching, another receding. A city steals the escaping light.

I feel lucky to live where I live at most times of day but especially at sunset.

New York City, Intimate, Exposed

Standing on the subway this morning, scanning, as I always am, for the possibility of an empty seat, that sudden jerk movement upward that sends me flinging forward and down, I watched a stranger wipe tears from her cheek. I caught her eye for the briefest moment, then looked away. To allow her that.

This is something I have seen in New York City countless times.  Not exhibitionist emotion. Not like hand-hipped arguments on street corners, a woman cursing into her cell phone at 23rd and 6th. This is quiet grief. Loneliness. Hurt. The kind that should have been private but faucet-dripped, leaked past, through, where it should have stayed put.

I don't know if this happens everywhere. Maybe suburban tears sit beyond pristine lawns and closed curtains or at steering wheels in crowded strip mall parking lots. Maybe rural tears happen in the shield of sun cutting through crowded, thick brush and wood.  But urban tears are exposed and I have seen them as often as I have felt them suddenly well up, suddenly rush past orange cones and construction workers on concrete sidewalks, the back of my hand ripping across raw red cheeks, thinking, not here, not now, they will see. They will know. 

I remember my first job in New York City, an internship after freshman year of college at a lifestyle and sporting magazine. I was somehow put in charge of talking to restaurant managers about where to eat and drink during the upcoming US Open Tennis Championships, which sounds exciting, but got old quickly, day in, day out, interrupting busy hosts and hostesses during the rush of food service because restaurant managers don't answer their  telephones, do you want to be included in this epic page spread? I'd ask, and then announce the advertising fee and have to justify it with the circulation and the demographic and really, they were too busy, getting lunch out, too busy to talk to me, and why should they pay, really, for this nothing blurb?

I'd go back to the offices, usually empty-handed. I'd try to talk to the staff-writers and editors. I'd say, I could write a story on Agassi's forehand. Do you know Agassi? they'd ask.  I'd shake my head. They'd raise their eyebrows. I could write about the psychology and dynamic between figure skating partners. That's a great idea, how many figure skaters can you interview? Of course, none, none. So I'd be back at places like Le Cirque, restaurant managers suspicious and sighing, what is this magazine anyway?

I remember sitting on the steps of the New York Public Library eating my bagged lunch, in some mis-matching, crooked skirt and blouse combination that the Editor-In-Chief of Style had previously sneered at. I munched on the turkey sandwich my mother made me the night before, that I carried with me on the Long Island Railroad each morning, and I thought, despite everything, I work in the best city in the entire world.  No one knew me. They didn't see me. They didn't know. I could have been anybody.

I have always loved the anonymity of New York City, of Manhattan especially, of walking down the street, completely unknown, nameless, unmarked, and therefore, protected in my own coat of armor. But there are those private moments that become public. Remembering someone you've lost. Realizing you've been hurt or that you might have hurt another. New York City suddenly becomes too intimate. You are vulnerable inside it. The buildings are not tall enough. The crowds not thick enough. For a brief moment you are seen. You are known.

My Writing Tree

So, this is my writing tree.  I don't sit under it, with my back scratching up against the bark. I sit next to it and, if I opened the window, I could touch the leaves.

In the winter, when it's bare, that space of white you see in the upper left, is the Manhattan skyline, and I can see the crisp edge of lights from the Freedom Tower. I can see the neighbor's terrace across the way and I watch as they move their plants from behind the sliding doors and, another day, back again, in a ritual I can not understand. I wonder, as I watch, if they see me, laptop balanced on my knees, my back propped against a pillow my mother knitted me.

But now my tree is green with a few patches of brick against the spine of each branch. When the sky is crayon blue it looks like someone painted it just for me.

What do you see from where you are?

Overheard: F Train, York Street

She had huge brown eyes and a swinging ponytail.  Her backpack bunched up her shoulders. She wore a black coat, black pants.  Her friend was the one dressed in rainbow. Long spidery eyelashes. Earrings that brushed her shoulders.

I think when I'm finished with school, when I'm a nurse, I'll be a nurse for twenty or thirty years and then I'll be done with it.  I'll be something else.

You'll go back to school? The friend asked. When you're fifty?

I don't want one career. I want two careers.  I'll be a nurse and then I'll be something else. And when I'm fifty, I'll appreciate school more. When you're young you don't appreciate school.

What will you be when you're fifty?

Maybe. A dentist.

She looked through the glass of the subway doors as we slowed to a stop.  Her eyes did that frantic zig-zag scan, the kind of flash panic that comes when you've passed where you thought you might be, but you're really ahead of it. 

I totally thought we missed our stop.  This is it.

I loved her way of thinking.  The certainty that she wouldn't be one thing but many. The idea that she may not appreciate now what she might then or that becoming doesn't end with youth.

I started to think if I could be one thing now and something else in twenty years, what would that be?  

What would it be for you?

New York Alive: In Bloom

To me, this scene, these people are magic.  The very essence of New York in spring. 

Blooming

Today the trees look like shattered sky. I know this desire to bloom, to become.

Lately, I've wondered if I've been looking so hard, I can not see.

Silence That Wants To Speak

Today I walked and looked and saw these words but it took someone else to point out the rose sprouting from the wobbling jenga block building below. It struck me, how important it is that we pay closer attention. Especially to silence, to what it might shield, what it desires.

Knowing What's Next

I feel like I've been creeping under dark canopies, wanting to know tomorrow, standing, waiting, between things, beneath them. When I crossed the footbridge, I watched this encounter, and she didn't like me stealing their parting, so it blurred because I wasn't brave enough to stare straight through their splitting seam.

New York has been like this lately, skulking through each day, whispering you can't know me.  It's gathered rain and snow at our feet and sent us inside the caves of umbrellas, forced us into yarned labyrinths of winding scarves.

I've been dreaming many new things.  I've been wanting to unravel them all. I've wondered, too often, over the years, what's next for me?

New York Postcard

Last Monday, I came home late, near the midnight hour, after watching a tennis match at Madison Square Garden. I had an angry fire throat and a pesky cough. I rode the F train and wished desperately for sleep.

The train was crowded but I'd managed a seat while Tyler hung at the pole, and I stared through the cracks of coats and bags, watched as across the way, two burly passengers -- like a children's book, one short and wide, the other large and long -- smashed together into a seat like two cymbals gonging.

There was an immediate confrontation.  The two-seater was suddenly not large enough for all three: the wide one, the long one, and the bag the wide one insisted upon slapping upon the bench.  There were accusations flung.

You didn't ask if you could sit here!

I don't have to ask! 

And over and over, this is a public space, man. This is a public space.

I watched as both of them refused to move and, instead, sat uncomfortably squashed. The wide one clutched his bag beside him, stared straight ahead. The long one smooshed himself between the railing and his enemy, trying to read a newspaper.  He looked like sausage oozing out of the casing, his impossibly long arms bent and woozy, as they awkwardly crinkled the unruly pages. 

On our walk home, Tyler and I laughed at their stubborn, crunched up silence.

I would have snapped a portrait if I could.  A New York postcard.  

Twelve Little Girls In Two Straight Lines

New York City is beautiful for so many reasons. This being one of them. A bar of original paintings by Ludwig Bemelmans, the writer and illustrator of Madeline, my favorite children's book of all time.  The murals circle the entire place, every inch of wall, every candle lamp. 

I spent $21 on one cocktail. I didn't care. It's too special of a place to care.

(I'm only sorry the photos are so blurred) 

                                                                   

Beyond the Fair

Yesterday was a full, whirlwind day.  Long meetings in the morning, walking the floor of the Javits Center for the annual American International Toy Fair in the afternoon, then running off to a workshop in the evening to learn about writing the news for kids.

Toy fair is a fluorescent lit, starburst try-me shout, wow wow, look here spectacle.  Never good for someone who has a fear of crowded spaces, who panics when over-stimulated with bright lights and loud noises.

At some point, I became delirious, nearly falling over in tearful laughter when someone pointed out a baby-doll with a toilet and a little poop inside it that disappears when you flush, leaving me with flashbacks of a doll I had as a little girl, who came with green-slime baby food that went straight through her pliable pink lips and out her butt into a diaper, which was both thrilling and repulsive at the same time.  

So with head aching, armpits sweating (crowds, crowds, too many crowds), thinking about rubber-bodied baby dolls regurgitating green slime, I found myself in some dark corner of baby sippy-cups with flexible handles and looked up.  Windows.  I had forgotten the Javits Center had windows. I could see sky. And the hint of some gray cloud.

Of course I shouldn't have, of course I'm sure that my badge didn't allow access there, but I walked behind the black curtain skirting this building of trade booths, and there, beyond the spit up and break down of the show behind the show, beyond carts and boxes and tape and scrap, beyond a building of people buying and selling and shouting the magic of play or childhood or something so irrevocably lost it hurts my heart, was one of the most beautiful sunsets I'd ever seen.    

Wonderland

When I woke up yesterday I was like a child, went straight to the window to see what magic the night storm had brought.  There were, maybe, ten inches of snow and New Englander Tyler scoffed, that's nothing, but the kids were outside whooping and dragging sleds and the shovels scratched across the sidewalks and I insisted we go to Prospect Park to see it pure.  

I expected to see the long wide meadows of Prospect Park in a sheet of white, but I had forgotten that this oasis is also made of narrow, wandering trails, so we found ourselves inside this wonderland.  

Here in the middle of concrete Brooklyn.  

New York Alive

Chinatown is bustle and movement and wind-swept red. It's my favorite neighborhood in Manhattan. 

Crowded Subway

I'm on a crowded subway, clutching a heavy book that requires two hands not one, but where to place my fingers?  On the warm metal pole, or balance, maybe lean, against a door or a railing where the puff of a stranger's coat already peaks through.

I'm lost in rolling sentences, in the rain of words, and my scarf is warm, too warm, for the scratchy wool on one side of me and that backpack strap slapping at my wrists, with my messenger bag smashed between her angry stare and the dull hum of his headphones.

When she comes on, I'm pushed by someone else and then I'm flailing, slipping from the grip of memory where the period had nudged up against a space. I wonder which word had come before it, which might come next, because suddenly the page is a mash of words I have to puzzle together, like the time I lost a fluttering bookmark to the water on the tracks and there went my place.

She talks of the goodness of God and I would mind it if she was yelling, like the others do, but she's just talking, like we're listening. She likes a crowded train, she says, and God is still good, and maybe that's where I've found the extra o, the roundness of it, in the sentence I have had to let go of, because the train has tossed me again, and my hands are tight to the crinkled binding of the book, not at the slip-away railing, where they should be, and as I falter, then find footing between one crooked-heeled boot and a tattered shoelace, she says, It's okay. You can fall on me.

And, usually, I wouldn't say a word, not so early in the morning, not to someone basketball squeak dribbling, dribbling about the goodness of God but she's just talking, like I'm listening, just that way, so I say, and I don't know why I do, I say, Thank you.

You can fall on me, she says again. I've got nowhere to go.

Upside Down

Late last night on a G train, I looked up from my book and found this.

He looks how I feel.

A Familiar Journey

The morning was damp, hazy. I rode my bicycle to work for the first time in weeks, took the familiar journey.  It went (it goes) like this:

My bike plunks off the curb.  I adjust to the concrete, to the wobble of my handlebars. I ride the wrong way, for just a brief moment, in that I know the way but traffic along this one small street runs opposite, so I tuck myself at the edge, aware that I'm where I shouldn't be.

The stoplight is never long but I watch the corner market.  I remember when it burned, the notes that were left on the windows, we miss you.  Now it's bright and open and I know the owner's smile because it sits beneath an unshaven gray shadow and it's kinder than most.

Clinton Street is wet and crowded but the crossing guard, our favorite, stands at the park, the one where we sat with Tyler's cousins and a little girl, lost in play, wandered towards us because she thought she was ours until she realized she wasn't and toddled away.  The crossing guard is little but sturdy and her glasses are fogged or maybe they're smudged and she doesn't mind it.  She shouts things we've come to expect, Come on bikers!  Hey baby doll!  Watch out for these maniacs!  She points at cars and shakes her head.  In the summer we miss her, and those weeks, this fall, when the road was closed, we wondered where she went.  Because her voice is my morning.  Her voice is the moment you think you are sitting alone and someone sits beside you.

I take the road up and around towards the Manhattan bridge.  I know the ground beneath me, the way it curls first, then slopes just enough for my tires to slow.  Soon, I mark the East river, it's middle.  This is where the road flattens, then slips away from itself, a downhill sled. This is where the air changes. The faint smell of fish.  Cooking oil climbs like a chimney swell from unknown stoves.  No one glances from the rushing carts and they take chances, like a gazelle's very first leap, across the painted lines of street.

I always want to stop here, on the path, where the old women in their winter bundle coats stand in Tai Chi formation across the damp grass.  I always think I will stop, someday, to take their photograph, to capture something I've otherwise been unable to keep.  Sometimes they are still and I think I'm caught in the hush of their whisper.

Sometimes they are dancing.

An Amazing Discovery: Steinway Hall

Today (which, as I write this post, turns into yesterday) I discovered what I now think is one of the most beautiful places in New York City: Steinway Hall, the flagship store of the legendary Steinway & Sons.  

I walked the showrooms in awe. Sheet music lined the overstuffed shelves. Music escaped from the practice rooms. The place is all marble and gold, grand and impossible.  So much black and white gleam, your own image reflects in the propped-up lid and a set of four hands runs across the keys. 

It reminded me how beautiful and regal the instrument can be. The kind of epic stories it can tell.  I will walk this place when I want to feel joy. 

I miss playing the piano.

Also...I apologize if this blog is turning into a strange photography romp through New York City.   I'm going through a bit of a rough patch in this space and I hope to find some kind of focus soon.  Until then.  Well.  I don't know.

This Is: New York Alive

This. As a follow-up to last week's photo. Because we're still counting the years. We're still trying to decode the mystery.

Them. Because they are tangled, windblown, like I used to be. Because they're together but each one looks towards another something else.

Her. Because the words can't wait.

This. Because maybe gold will stay longer than we thought it would.

For the story of New York Alive go here.

Strangely Quiet

All is quiet and strange here in South Brooklyn after the storm.  I woke today to find our street untouched but for a few broken tree limbs.  Then I walked our neighborhood to find enormous trees overturned, Red Hook boarded and broken, trapped under water, and the toxic Gowanus canal overflowing.

Today I feel very fortunate.  We live on the waterfront, tucked in between the New York harbor and that canal.  It is a wonder that the ground slopes just right, to leave us elevated enough to reside in "Zone B", to escape what so much of this city has not.

Our offices are uncharacteristically silent and unreachable. Water has filled the subway tunnels. So the underground veins of New York City, it's lifeline, are empty.  There is no coming or going.  There is no timeframe for repair because there is no precedent.

My window looks out towards the harbor. In the distance I can see downtown Manhattan. Tonight, it is  completely dark.  

I am thinking of those who have lost so much.