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Crossing Waters

22 May

“…it’s a safe wager that half of you never yet have set sail upon that quaint little old uptown ferry, guarded by the venerable ticket seller and his big gray cat, who scans with shrewd and unflinching golden eyes every fare as it is paid.”  — Sarah Comstock, New York Times – June 21, 1914

And it’s a safe wager that over a century later the same could be said of you.

From the 18th Century until the Great Depression, ferries ran from Hallet’s Cove.  The streets of this often bleak and woebegone peninsula, jutting into the East River at the southern edge of Hell Gate, are among the oldest in the city.  Granted to William Hallet by Peter Stuyvesant in 1652, with additional acreage fought over and eventually bought from local Native American tribes, this small nub of land has seen farms, brickworks, British cannons, American forts, 19th century industry, and the fashionable mansions that followed.  And through it all, well into the 20th century, the passengers came, by foot and coach, bicycle and trolley, the rails converging upon Astoria Boulevard before dropping down to the water.  From the Steinway Factory in the north to the busy intersection of Steinway and Broadway to the east, the trolleys rolled down the old thoroughfare to the 92nd Street Ferry Terminal and it’s crossing to Yorkville.

From Long Island City, workers made a similar journey across the river to 34th Street, and then south to Fulton street, convenient to the financial district for those who worked there.  And though, for a price, special boats were run for the more affluent, boss and laborer alike were treated to the morning scent of the Fulton Street fish market.

For decades they thrived, knitting together the disparate peoples of this rapidly growing city.

And then they were gone.  The Long Island Railroad discontinued the 34th Street ferry in 1925, and with the completion of the Triboro Bridge in 1936 the “quaint little old uptown ferry,” despite its continued popularity, had no place in Robert Moses’ vision of the future.  The last of the East River ferries, he personally oversaw the destruction of the 92nd Street Terminal, ripping out the piers so it could never return.

But Robert Moses has failed.  For this morning I walk the ragged streets of Astoria Village down to Hallet’s Cove.  With my NYC Ferries app loaded and ready I step aboard the gleaming white vessel, climb up into the open air and find my seat.  It is not quaint, and I see no cat, but I am on a journey nonetheless, and one well worth taking.  For, surprisingly, the landings of that bygone time have been reborn: Long Island City, 34th St. and Wall Street, with Roosevelt Island thrown in as a bonus.  With connections to other lines, further maritime ports have returned to life: Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Redhook, all the way around to Rockaway.

Plus, they serve beer.

We live among waters.  We travel above and below them without a thought.  The most diverse community in the nation, over half of us crossed untold rivers and oceans to be in this place, where, like the estuary that surrounds us, saltwater meeting fresh, beings from radically different environments thrive.  To travel the surface of the East River as it glistens in the cold  morning light is to the see this world anew.  And  for all the wonder of the trains, buses and bridges that ease our journeys across this city, there is a grace to being on the water, and a humbleness in the recognition that this most basic of elements,  which could so easily divide us, continues to bind us together.

 

An earlier version of this article piece was published in Idlewild Magazine.

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Morning’s At The Corner

20 Dec

I have had the good fortune to be writing for the magazine Idlewild over the past year.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be reprinting some of the pieces originally published there.

When my daughter was very young, and I was sorely lacking in sleep, I would carry her mornings down to Family Corner.  In need of coffee, food and adult voices, I’d drowsily listen as the regulars traded insults with George.  Back and forth, hilariously, they would ride each other.  Warm, raucous and working class, it was the New York of my dreams.

Having just celebrated their 27th anniversary, it’s the kind of place where a young woman brings her own gluten-free pancake mix and they make them for her, and shortly thereafter just add them to the menu.

The kind of place where George, at the end of his day, takes the time to lead a table of out of town visitors to their New York Islanders game.

The kind of place where, on a hot summer’s day, they turn off the ceiling fans to calm a scared little girl.

Along with his father Spyro and brother Phil, George is co-owner and proprietor.  Coming from Greece, after much travail, they settled in Astoria when the brothers were young.  Neighborhood kids, they know a little something about food, home and family.

“That’s my dad, it comes directly from him,” says George.  “He always said ‘get out there, talk to your customers, get to know them.’  In this way your customers become friends.”

As if all this weren’t enough, the food is outstanding, whether you pop in for a cheeseburger, sit down to savor the Pastichio and a bowl of warm Avgolemono, or just treat yourself to two eggs over with a side of hash.  It’s not foodie, pretentious or expensive.  It’s just good.

And if you’re very lucky, there’s Jenni.  Smart, funny and occasionally profane; tough on the outside and all heart within, she is their secret weapon.  Lily and Kristina are wonderful, but Jenni is magic.  She makes bad days good.

My son loves her for the early morning milkshake she made on his 12th birthday, complete with the hand decorated cup we are not allowed to throw away.

My daughter loves how she patiently takes her order, the same thing every time:  pancakes and eggs.

And my wife and I love her for those sleep deprived mornings when we call ahead and she has our favorite booth waiting for us, silverware laid out, coffee poured.

Diners are fading.  In Astoria alone there are whispers that the stately Neptune and gleaming Bel Aire are on their way out.

“Oh yeah, Neptune is gone,” George says, “Gone.”  And he goes on to explain that even a diner doing very well cannot handle the rents a commercial bank will pay, or make nearly as much money as a high-rise apartment building.

But Family Corner remains.  For now.

“What makes us special?” George asks, raising his eyebrows before turning to a young man a couple booths down.

“Hey you.  What do you like about Family Corner?”

“It tastes good.”

“It tastes good.”  George smiles, shrugging his shoulders. “There you go.”

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Depth

20 Dec

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“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time…” –F. Scott Fitzgerald

First light, and Hallie is coming down the stairs.  I hear her footsteps as she pads her way along the dark hallway and into to our room.

“Da?” she asks, standing expectantly at my side. I look up at her solemn face, then lift the covers and she crawls in.  “Da,” she whispers again, exhaling as she cuddles back down into sleep.

Raising the blinds, I see snow.  First of the year, more than expected and still falling.  Hallie supplants me, cuddling into Amy as I head upstairs into the hesitant glow of a stalled sunrise.

Showered and dressed, stepping outside is a release.  Everything a little brighter, a little fresher.  The snow is untouched and the garbage cans are frosted white.  The sky, however, broods.  A gunmetal, end-of-the-world gray, more twilight than dawn.  Even the snow is lifeless, finding too little light to sparkle.

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At Family Corner, Jen clocks me at the door, “What up Bell?”

“Nothing much.  How are you”

“Morning Derek,” shouts George, moving fast over the carry-out orders.

My spirits rise.

“Egg and cheese,” she asks?

“Yes please, and medium coffee, skim milk.”

“Sugar?”

“No, no sugar.”  But as she turns I reconsider, “I’m sorry, yeah, one sugar would be great.”

The cup is warm, and I bask in the flow – the gentle banter, and the comfort of having a place here.

“Egg and Cheese?”  George is looking at me, eyebrows raised.

“That’s mine.”

He tosses it over, rings me up and I’m on my way.

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The snow’s turning to rain.  Sipping my coffee, I move fast, making it to the train relatively dry.  Up the steps and onto the platform, I’m just in time to watch a train pull away.

I walk back to the farthest reaches of the roof, lean against the large metal storage bin and take in the view – my neighborhood from west to east.  The great arch of Hellgate Bridge, rising from the railroad tracks as they make their way over the river before bending north to Harlem, The Bronx and New England; the smoke stacks at Con Ed and their rising steam, cotton on slate.

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The tenements climb Crescent Street, and the steeple of Immaculate Conception stands over it all.  Buildings fall away to the east, and the sky grows large over the Steinway factory.  A jet takes off from LaGuardia and I follow it until, magically, it’s gone.  Vanished into the mist.

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The train arrives and the car is warm.  Stepping in, I take my favorite seat.  Lulled by the rain, I unwrap my sandwich and look out toward the city.  And suddenly I see myself swimming in a vast, unfathomable ocean, and realize that I need to go deeper.  More a feeling than a thought, I’m not sure what this means.

The train begins to move.

Making its way through Queens, small flocks of black parkas clamor for seats at every stop until, finally, we begin the slow turn toward Queensboro, arcing toward the city like the grande dame of all rollercoasters, sweeping into view the 59th Street bridge  and the skyline beyond.  Gravity takes hold and we plunge into the station, pausing briefly for the requisite running back and forth, before continuing on, down to the streets and further still, out of the rain and into the darkness.

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A Christmas Walk

24 Dec

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“It is required of every man,” the ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide…”
― Charles Dickens,  A Christmas Carol

Late in the afternoon, from the 61st floor, I stop to look out  over Manhattan, past the shoulders of the Empire State Building and the slowly rising World Trade Center, down into the late-afternoon gleam of the waters that bathe this archipelago, engulfing the Statue of Liberty and swirling quicksilver past Jersey City and Staten Island, before flowing beneath the Verrazano Bridge, and out into the Atlantic.  Returning to the city itself, my vision hovers over the streets I’ve wandered for the past thirteen years, especially those narrow pathways laid down by the Dutch West India Company at the southern tip of the island over three centuries ago, engulfed now in the buildings and people that followed them, and where, despite everything, late on a quiet afternoon, I can still feel the age of the place, catching the scent of wood smoke on the air before stepping off Pearl Street into a tavern to sip a beer one floor below the room where George Washington said farewell to his officers.

I grew up in Ohio, surrounded by cornfields.  Sometimes, I would wade into them, just for the hell of it, and then, feeling silly, push my way back, scratching through the dusty stalks, to stand for a moment on the side of the road, trying to make something of the experience.  I was looking for a deeper knowledge of the place, something less linear and road based than the world around me. I wanted more dimensions.

Cities are great for this. They just keep giving, every corner you turn, every face you see, every crack in the sidewalk is another dimension, another small accretion in your rapidly growing knowledge of a place. The older the street, the more intricate it’s development, the more there is to be found; more layers of people’s lives, painted one upon the other, and then worn away through the decades, a little bit of each showing through.

My grandmother left  home young, fleeing a small town in Indiana that is now little more than a name on a map; the homes, businesses and the tavern where she would wait for her father, alone in the snow, long faded to lonely roads and empty fields.  My father moved away from the home she created, and I from his, heading east, against the tide, retracing the steps of my immigrant forebears, back to this city they merely passed through as they traveled west in search of new lives.  I roam the streets that must have bewildered them, finding comfort in the knowledge they never had time to acquire.

Darkness falling, I cross the river to my quiet neighborhood, and walk its streets in the misty Christmas rain, marveling at how effortlessly I’ve traveled back in time.  Brought up in a swirl of pre-fab housing and six lanes to the shopping center, I live now in a world I thought lost to me.  A place of diners, bakeries, hardware stores and corner taverns, mixed right in with the houses.  A place where at certain times, when the light is right, I expect to see my grandfather among the men in their coveralls walking up the hill at end of the day. And a place where two young boys are playing ball on the sidewalk while their sister and mother watch from the porch, conversing in Spanish, their front door open and their Christmas lights blinking, enjoying the unusual warmth of the season.  A place of comfort, wrapped in a sense of wonder.  A home of sorts.  And a place that I, and so many others, continue to make our own.

Merry Christmas.

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Chrysalis

3 Jun

Caterpillars are becoming butterflies.  Five little cocoons hang from the side of a mesh cage in Heath’s bedroom, and we are counting the days until they emerge.

Arriving in the mail in a small plastic cup loaded with enough food to sustain this transformation, the five larvae grew rapidly over the past week before attaching themselves to the lid, assuming the much-anticipated J shape, and, in a matter of hours, encasing themselves in a dense brown shell of their own making.  Having moved them to the larger butterfly cage, we wait. 

Patience is not a word that leaps to mind when I think of my son.  But his imagination, so tightly coiled around all things celestial for the past year,  has begun to expand, and as the school year ends and he moves beyond a teacher who never appreciated all that makes him special, he has begun to relax.  With the addition of a new pair of glasses and a daily squirt of Nasonex, the world is regaining its clarity and my little boy is finding the sweetness and vulnerability he has buried beneath anger for much of the year. 

And his sister senses this. 

Hallie Jake.  We loved the idea of a little girl with such a rakish name, redolent of wise-cracking 1930’s aviatrixes, Amelia Earhart & Kate Hepburn rolled into one.  The kind of woman who could hold her whiskey, throw a good punch, and stand toe to toe with any man.  A woman who was smart, independent and, above all, strong.  Which I have no doubt Hallie will be.  For she is fast becoming a spunky, resilient little girl whose buoyant spirit has become a mainstay in all our lives. 

My own feelings for her are, at times, so fierce as to be bewildering.  

I had heard somewhere that in times past Downs children, considered imbeciles, were often abandoned to orphanages where their heads were shaved and they languished under the minimal care such institutions offered.  What haunted me about this story was the lack of love, horrible for any child, but somehow more so for a child who has a greater struggle to understand.  They must have felt unloveable, as if they deserved their loneliness. 

So in those first confusing hours, when I had no idea what else to do,  I vowed that Hallie would feel loved.  And to this day, when I hold her close as she’s falling asleep, I whisper in her ear, so she’ll never forget, “You are much loved, Hallie Jake.  You are much loved.”  This simple invocation, and the feelings it inspires, has lead to places in my soul I never knew existed.  It’s as if, after living my entire life in a small apartment, I’ve opened a door to discover a palace.

And now, days away from her second birthday, the love she’s received has begun to blossom.  I can see it in her eyes, especially when she looks at Heath: her hero, her brother, and her best friend.

As we move into the early heat of summer, Heath is keeping an eye on his five little charges, waiting for them to begin their gentle struggle toward a new life.  He’s not going to want to let them go.  I can see it coming.  And although I remind him daily that all creatures long to be free and that if he keeps them too long, they will die, I know he doesn’t believes me. 

But, we’ll see how it goes.  That’s a battle for another day. 

In the meantime we await the beating of newfound wings.

 

 

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Burgers, Valentines & the Sky

12 Feb

Every Valentine’s day I get Amy a box of truffles from Li-Lac chocolates, which, since it moved from Christopher Street a few years back, is now steps away from my favorite bar.  And so, yesterday afternoon, basking in one of life’s great win-win situations,  I made my annual pilgrimage .  Chocolates for Amy, burger and beers for me.

All the seats at the bar were taken, so I took my beer, grabbed a stool at the window, and settled in, letting the beer, the hum of the surrounding talk, and the stillness of the moment calm me.  I looked out at the red brick houses from centuries past, the Christmas lights twinkling in Li-Lac’s windows, the dishwashers horsing around in the back room of the Italian restaurant across the street, and all the people passing through the slushy old intersection of Eighth Avenue, Jane and West Fourth, deeply focused on the screens of their various devices and oblivious to the gentle glow of the approaching twilight.

Chet Baker’s voice filled the old speakeasy with his world-weary charm.

Let’s get lost

Lost in each other’s arms

Let’s get lost

Let them send out alarms…

The bit of sky visible down Jane Street slid from blue to purple and I thought of my son.  Heath is enthralled with the sky.  He longs to understand it.

“Why is it blue?”

“Why is it purple?”

“Why can’t we see the atmosphere?”

 All questions I struggle to answer, but never seem to satisfy.   For Heath, with his boundless curiosity and seemingly limitless memory, knowledge is all.  Maybe it’s a product of age, or maybe we are just very different people, but I don’t feel that way.  Facts don’t tug at my soul the way they do his.  I don’t need to understand the sky.  I just want to see it, to feel it, and most importantly, to savor it.

Which is also how I feel about love.  Because I don’t understand it.  I do, however, see it, I certainly feel it, and I try my damndest to savor it, all the more so for the knowledge that I owe it all to luck.  Even a cursory review of my dating history shows that I do not deserve it.  In retrospect, my marital forecast during my twenties was for continued turbulence with a strong possibility of loneliness.  A friend of mine actually expressed his belief that I would never marry, feeling I was too immature.  Now, in retrospect he wasn’t much of a friend, but still, this is the kind of confidence I inspired.

And then I met Amy.  Perhaps my five favorite words.

I recently read a quote to the effect that the best way to find love is not to search for it, but instead to work on removing all barriers that keep love from entering your life.  I like this.  I wish someone would have told me this twenty years ago, pointing out some of those barriers along the way.

So, in honor of Valentine’s Day I think I’ll travel back in time and do just that.

Hey you!  Yeh you!  The skinny guy in all that denim with that big mop of hair.  Sit down for minute, I’ve got three things I need to tell you.

Love will not be rushed.

So relax.  Take care of yourself.  Be happy.  Make friends.  Have fun.  Love flees desperation.  Forget love exists.  It will find you when you’re ready.  And for god’s sake quit looking for the perfect person because…

Love laughs at ideals.

Your ideal person does not exist.  You’ve got to let them go.  Because the perfect person is out there, but they are almost certainly not what you expect.  They’re better.  Love has a plan of it’s own, and this is good news because you may know what you want, but (thank you to the Rolling Stones)…

Love knows what you need.

Now this is all assuming that you are in fact looking for love.  Because a lot of people say they’re looking for love, but when it comes right down to it, they’re looking for a transaction, a lightly binding contract in which a person of suitable age, class, education, wealth and appearance will perform the contractually stipulated duties of love in return for the same.  Kids will be born, houses will be bought, retirements will be funded as their bodies grow old and their souls wither and die.  This is not love, this is business.  And I know even less about business than I do about love, so enough said.

Would I have listened to myself?  Probably not.  I’ve always had a wonderful capacity for ignoring good advice.

Chet Baker gave way to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on the jukebox.  As I finished my burger a young woman sat down next to me and after some time with her Blackberry she looked up and asked if the burgers were good here.  I laughed because this place is always in the running for best burger in the city.  Her question seemed genuine, though, so I said yes, it’s what they’re known for.  Nothing fancy, just a good burger.  She smiled.

I finished my beer, paid the bartender, and as I was leaving I told her I hoped she enjoyed her hamburger, and she smiled again.  It was the gentlest of flirtations, and in a moment it was past.  But as I stood outside on the sidewalk, getting my bearings, I couldn’t help smiling.  And then I began to walk to the train, anxious to get home to the woman, and the family, I love.

 

 

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The Ascent

29 Jan

It’s bitter cold here in New York.  Seventeen degrees  and the wind howling down out of the north to shatter against the city’s land mass,  sending shards of atmosphere screaming along the East River and up into Queens where they relentlessly sliced into Heath and I as we made our way to school this morning.

P.S. 122, and it’s eastern approach along Ditmars Avenue,  most certainly rank with Everest and K2 as some the most treacherous terrain on earth.  Seductively flat and populous during warmer weather, amateurs are frequently lulled into a false sense of security on this traverse.  But when the weather turns, it can become deadly.  Heath and I passed several parents who had given up entirely, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk staring blankly into the distance as a thin layer of ice formed over their face and their children tried to prod them into life.  Poor bastards, there was nothing I could do.  To help them would have been to endanger my own mission, and that was unthinkable, the prospect of return far more daunting than the agony ahead.  For if Amy were to spend another day with Heath at home, her head would surely explode.  And after a week of stomach flu in our house, that’s one mess I just couldn’t face.

It’s the flu that kept Heath home these past two days.  Briefly ill, he rapidly returned to peak form, and though he is a smart, funny and completely adorable child, he is also, quite frequently, whiny, demanding and incredibly high maintenance.  As Amy and Hallie were recovering from the flu, and I was fighting it off, the last thing anyone wanted was to print a coloring page of every celestial body in the known Universe, one at a time, at an interval of roughly one every thirty-five seconds, from dawn until dusk, which is Heath’s current idea of heaven.  Nor did we want to read Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” from cover to cover.  And we certainly did not want to spend the day either arguing or explaining about literally everything.  We wanted to rest.  We wanted Heath to go to school.

So we began our preparations before dawn.  Neither one of us spoke much, lost in our own thoughts, knowing what we were up against.  Shortly after the sun had cleared the horizon we kissed Amy and Hallie for luck and began our ascent.  Being purists, we used neither ropes nor oxygen.  However we did hold hands, especially when crossing streets.  We found a rhythm that worked for us and, with slow but steady progress,  we found ourselves, shortly after 8:00 am,  just below the summit.  We stood there quietly, as men will, savouring our achievement.  After a moment I simply handed Heath his lunch box, gave him a kiss and wished him a fun day.  And then, sensing it was the right thing to do, I let him travel the rest of the way on his own, up the steps and into the school.

My flush cheeked boy, starting another day.

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September 11, 2009

11 Sep

It’s a rainy day here in New York City, and my neighbors are walking gently, as they always do on this day.

Eight years ago on a clear, blue sky morning I walked up Second Avenue toward Twenty Third Street.  At 19th street a loud crash made me turn around, thinking I’d heard a car accident.  Nothing was there.  As I approached 20th Street sirens sounded and cars began to pour out of the Police Academy.  At the 23rd Street post office I overheard a man saying that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.  I asked him to repeat this and he did, pointing to the smoke, now visible through the high windows .  By the time I got to work the first building had fallen, and before long the second had come down as well.  I left to look for my wife.

Heading west across Manhattan, the views down the Avenues abruptly vanished into a wall of floating debris.  The first survivor passed me, a man about my age, his thinning blond hair, eyelashes and the shoulders of his blue suit covered in dust.  Others soon followed, shaken and bleary in their dirty clothes.  “I ran down eighty flights,”  one said.  A woman who spoke little English asked me what was going on and I did my best to explain.

I found Amy, we made our way to a friend’s apartment, and from her 12th Street roof we watched as long lines of people made their way out of the cloud that now engulfed the tip of Manhattan.  A few hours later, when the L train returned to service, we made our way home.

To me September 11 will always be New York City’s day.  Most of the world watched it, while we, to wildly varying degrees, lived it.  And while, in the days following, the country seemed to slowly lose it’s mind in some misbegotten quest for retribution, my people were kind.  We dealt with each other gently and helped where we could.  For a short time we opened ourselves to the fragility of life, and it brought out the best in us.  Every year when this day rolls around I do my best to remember that.  The city often helps.

On the first anniversary Amy and I got up very early and walked to work, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge before making our way uptown.  Somewhere on the hushed morning streets of the Lower East Side we passed a young man quietly going about his business.  He just so happened to be dressed as the Statue of Liberty.  He was also painted blue from head to toe.

The following year I went for a drink in the East Village.  It was a sunny afternoon and to get into the bar I had to step over the ugliest bulldog I had ever seen.  He was warming himself in the doorway and, oblivious to my presence, was not inclined to move.  His name was Buckshot.  The neighborhood police had found him tied to a fence, shot and left for dead.  Outraged, they had nursed him back to health before entrusting him to the care of the woman sitting next to me.  As we talked, Buckshot swaggered his way back into the bar, leaving a generous trail of saliva in his wake.  I could see the scars that peppered his hide as he loudly snuffled and nudged his way beneath my stool, damn near tipping me over in the process.  In his mind he owned that bar.  After everything he’d been through, no one was arguing.

And this morning we took Heath to his first full day of  Kindergarten.  This little person whose existence I could not even imagine eight years ago is already starting school.  His equally unimaginable sister has built herself up to a solid three word vocabulary, the most recent addition being, of course, “Heath.”  They know little of that day eight years ago, and yet, for me, they embody its spirit.  Maddening, mercurial, and totally unpredictable, they are my daily, hour by hour, minute by minute reminder that I am always at my best when I slow down, open my eyes, and approach the world gently, helping out whenever I can.  A good lesson easily forgotten.

Luckily, the kids keep me honest.

 

 

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Hallie’s First Year

12 Jun

In memory it seems a time of fire.  The blood red sun sinking into the darkness of the city, the brutal heatwave that arrived with Hallie’s birth, the heat-dusted Hell’s Kitchen pavements I walked the days following, and the track fire on the N Line that forced us all to find a different way home. 

This June has been different, the mornings wet and cool and the days pleasingly warm.  We celebrated Hallie’s birthday with our friends in Astoria Park, dappled with shade and cooled by an East River breeze.  We ate, we made ice cream, and, as Hallie was passed from arms to loving arms, my friend Ben talked of how amazing our neighborhood is.  And he’s right.  I have never in my adult life felt such a sense of community.  I would have to go back to my childhood in the suburbs of Detroit where almost every house had a pack of kids, our dad’s all worked for the car companies, and our mothers drank their coffee and chatted while watching us play, to find anything even close.  And yet here it is, not in some idyllic small town, as I always supposed, but smack dab in the middle of New York City, where the park, diners, library and bakeries of any thriving small town have combined with a diversity, density and immigrant spirit to create a place where the streets dance with friends and acquaintances and where, in this busiest of cities, I always have time to talk with my neighbors.

The secret ingredient in all this is,  of course, the kids.  Heath lives to introduce himself to people, often complete strangers, almost always winning a smile, if not a full blown converstaion.  Hallie is more subtle, drawing people in with her beauty, her wave, and her pale blue eyes.  For Hallie seems to have a great capacity for joy, and it’s a gift she freely shares with others.  Any sadness or regret I felt at the time of her birth is certainly gone,  seemingly burned away in those first few days, and the gentle happiness of having her in our lives has brushed away any remaining ashes.

Last night Hallie had a fever,  which brought neither joy nor sleep to anyone.  Amy and I took turns holding her until, finally,  she fell asleep.   Restless and warm, she kicked her way through the night, but when morning broke, gray and foggy, her fever had subsided.  We arose, showered, dressed, and after a quick breakfast I kissed her goodbye, testing for the heat that was no longer there.  Then I was out the door and into the mist, feeling the moisture on my clean morning face.

 

 

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Mad Men

6 Feb

The Mad Men were out this clear, cold afternoon on Park Avenue.  They moved with a certain grace for ones so old, and in their trenchcoats and fedoras they maintained an air of courtly, no nonsense elegance that their younger colleagues cannot begin to match.

Any vestige of old New York is a joy to stumble upon.  So much so that I, never a fan of businessmen or their mode of dress, was warmed by the site of these guys.  In a city that buries it’s history with the glee of a child at the beach, any continuity, any connection to what came before is both a comfort and a balm.   

As was Monday’s warmth.  Granting an unexpected reprieve from the winter’s chill, the sun appeared and drove the temperature well into the fifties, creating a glorious day that drew everyone to Steinway Park.  Friends that Heath, Hallie and I had not seen in months reappeared, escaping their apartments to bask in the spring-like warmth.  Heath and his buddies, John Peter and Max, crashed into and piled on top of each other like the puppies they are and, despite all the little boy bumps and bangs, nobody cried, which may be a first.

Hallie sat in the sun and played with her brother’s trains, then rested in my arms and finally laid her head on my shoulder and went to sleep.  With one eye on Heath, I held my daughter and talked with Asja, Sonia and especially Jenny, who did so much for us during Hallie’s first days, and who never fails to make me laugh.  It was one of the nicest afternoons of my life.

I love my neighborhood.  I love the bakeries and the bars, the delis and the diners, the library and the parks.  But most of all I love the people,  the friends and acquaintances who share our little patch of Astoria, and whose paths cross ours every day.  This tightly woven tapestry of lives is another remnant of old New York, one that struggles on despite the TVs, computers and busy schedules that contrive to keep us isolated from one and other.  And never is the vibrance of this tapestry more evident than on those days when the weather, and the kids and everybody’s mood combines to create a gentle party, where we all slow down, love our kids and enjoy our friends.

With little warning the sun began to fade and after a short time it was gone.  Snow clouds arose in the west and their approach brought cooling air and a desire for home.  And so we all departed, pulling our reluctant offspring in various directions, making our way down the familiar streets, racing the cold.

As we crossed Steinway and headed down 23rd Avenue I spotted Jenny’s husband Pete crossing the street a block up.

“Look,”  I said, “It’s Pete.”

“Where?”  Heath said, looking at the sidewalk.

“There!” I said, getting down to his level so he could follow the direction of my finger.

“Where?” He asked again, looking up at the clouds.

“THERE!” I said, turning his head with both my hands.

“Where?” he replied, staring off into some vague middle distance.

As this was going on Pete, a tall thin man with very long arms, standing on a street corner, progressed from a mere wave to something akin to jumping jacks in an attempt to draw Heath’s attention. 

Heath never saw him, but I did, and it made me smile all the way home.

 

 

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