Remembrance

Sacred to the memory of John Stiles.
He came to his death from a bullet from a revolver. It was one of the old fashioned kind and brass mounted, and such is the kingdom of heaven.

Campo Santo Cemetery
San Diego
1849

I'm a Stranger Here Myself

The guys working the counter of my favorite deli on Atlantic Ave are convinced I'm Lebanese. My wool cap, they swear, is a burnoose; my features have a clear Middle Eastern stamp. Not that I know of, I smile, waiting as they take their time packing up my lamb patties. They are unswayed, and throw in a package of pitas for free. Ma'assalama, they call as I head out the door.

Closer to home, I stop by my corner bodega for the Times. The guy working the afternoon shift calls out "Hello beautiful lady!" when I walk in the door. We're friendly; he's had a long day and is eager to chat. It's cold, but at least it keeps the teenagers from loitering on the corner; he has yet to hear about his medical residency interviews. "Are you an immigrant?" he asks, the apparent natural next step in our conversation. "Pretty much everyone in this country is, at some point," I deflect, reaching into the fridge for milk. "No, you look like you just came over." What does that look like, I wonder? Brown hair, brown eyes; I could be from anywhere. I tell him that my mother is first generation American. "Ah, I could see it in your face. And of course, your accent." "I'm from New Jersey, I can't help it!" I laugh in protest as I make my escape.

I myself go through phases of thinking I recognize everyone I pass on the street, but what are the chances of that in New York? In a city of 8 million, I see my deli friends more regularly than I do some closer members of my urban family. No one wants to be anonymous; we all nervously tug at the threads of community, making sure they're there, just in case. Lost in the crowds we recognize what we want to see and, for a moment, feel less alone.

Of note from Sunday's Times Book Review: Jim Harrison's Guide to Living Well

I enjoyed Will Blythe's summary so much I had to post it.

1. Eat well, of course, avoiding the ninny diets and mincing cuisines that demonize appetite and make unthinkable a tasty snack of hog jowls. We're all going to die. Might as well enjoy a little fat along the way.
2. Pursue love and sex, no matter discrepancies of desire and age. Romance is worth the humbling. Doing it outdoors on stumps, in clearings and even swarmed by mosquitoes is particularly recommended.
3. Welcome animals, especially bears, ravens and wolves, into your waking and dream life. An acceptance of our common creaturedom is essential not just to the health of the planet but to our ordinary happiness. We are mere participants in natural cycles, not the kings of them.
4. Rather than lighting out for territory, we ought to try living in it.
5. And finally, love the detour. Take the longest route between two points, since the journey is the thing.

Bonus tip to curing heartbreak...also an excellent way to spend an icy weekend:

Broil a two- to three-pound porterhouse. Eat it with your bare hands. Follow with a hot bath in which you consume the best bourbon you can buy until the bottle is empty. Sleep for a day. Repeat as necessary.

High Drama

Recently, I went to see Jenufa at the Met. Basic plot: Jenufa loves and is impregnated by a well-dressed wastrel who may or may not be her half-cousin and who only appreciates her for her friendliness and her rosy apple cheeks. Another man with rage issues who also may or may not be her half-cousin loves her, but his love goes unrequited. He festers, they tussle, he slices her face open with a paring knife. Her cheeks are no longer rosy nor apple-like. Jenufa goes into hiding, has a son, prays a lot, wears black. The father stops by but can't even stand to look at her scarred face, let alone marry her. The second man stops by, feels guilty, still loves her, would marry her but for the baby. Stepmother freaks out, drugs Jenufa, rushes out into a snowstorm and tosses the infant into the river. Mother is disconsolate, but decides to move on and marry the cheek-slicer, though spends some time feeling guilty because she comes with so much baggage. Come wedding day, all are gathered for the ceremony when news arrives that a baby has been found under the ice, still wearing his red cap. Everyone gets ready to stone Jenufa but the stepmother confesses, and true love between mother and maimer is found at last.

All this in Czech. I love opera.

Some drama was also had off-stage. A friend and I decided to move down from the nose-bleed section into the orchestra for the third act. We shoved our way down the 14 flights of stairs, staggered into the orchestra, and managed to cram all our luggage (2 bulky coats, 3 stuffed tote bags, 1 pair sequined butterfly wings, 1 large box containing 18 glass vases) under seats that we were assured hadn't been taken through the first two acts. I collapsed into my seat, exhausted, only to have a ticket shoved under my nose and a nasally voice intone, "Excuse me; you must be in the wrong seat. I have a press ticket" Blast. I looked up, encountered a black mock turtleneck and helmet hair that looked like it had been subdued by two paddle brushes and a full bottle of Hair Tonic for Men. "Oh dear," I said, all innocence, "we only came down when we saw how many free seats there are in this section." Bat bat, went the eyelashes. I received a basilisk stare in return. "I could find another seat," he said, though made no effort to cast his eyes away from mine. "Oh no, let ME," I growled, and conveyed myself from his seat directly into the empty seat one row ahead. He settled himself in, and my friend decided this would be just the moment to move up into the empty seat next to me. She started tossing luggage around, and I took the moment to look back and have a little chat with our new friend. "So, you're writing a review?" "Yes, I'm with the New Yorker." Oh, really. "Surely you can't write reviews when you've only seen the 3rd act?" I asked, at my most snidely polite. "Well, I would have been here earlier, but the Philharmonic only just let out," he sneered back. We eyed each other coldly. The curtain went up. When it went down again, he was gone.

Great opera. I'm looking forward to reading the review.

Uncharted Territory

My favorite thing about New York, other than the plentitude of coffee, is its vastness, its uncharted territory. I adore exploratory missions. That the city has been discovered before is immaterial, because I wasn't there, and I doubt they were serving brunch at the time. I am currently reading 'Teaching a Stone to Talk,' by Annie Dillard. She is fascinated by the polar expeditions of the 19th century, and of the bizarre personalities who attempted such journeys:

"In 1845, Sir John Franklin and 138 officers and men embarked from England to find the northwest passage across the high Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. They sailed in two three-masted barques. Each sailing vessel carried an auxiliary steam engine and a twelve-day supply of coal for the entire projected two or three years' voyage. Instead of additional coal, according to L.P. Kirwan, each ship made room for a 1.200-volume library, 'a hand-organ, playing fifty tunes,' china place settings for officers and men, cut-glass wine goblets, and sterling silver flatware. The officers' sterling silver knives, forks, and spoons were particularly interesting. The silver was of ornate Victorian design, very heavy at the handles and richly patterned. Engraved on the handles were the individual officers' initials and family crests."

My own discovery missions are less costly and burdened...I just need a metro card, an ipod and an unknown neighborhood. Last weekend I checked out Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Hopstop furnished directions, sending me for a 20-minute trek along the barren industrial wasteland that is the northern edge of Williamsburg. It was so deserted that no one had even bothered to mark the streets, and but for the cold I'm sure there would have been feral dogs. The only danger was my freezing to the sidewalk, but suddenly Kent Street made an anonymous turn and became Franklin (oh, the irony), and I was in the cozy historic district of Greenpoint. There were other people, there was the occasional car, there was brunch, and it was good.

What was also amazing about Greenpoint was the walk back along the considerably more lively Manhattan Ave, which serves as the main drag and center of the neighborhood's Polish community. The signs are in Polish, I heard the language everywhere, and deli after deli had lines of sausage hanging from racks in the ceiling the entire length of the store. I would have bought some, but all the shops were completely packed and ringing with shouts directed from both sides of the counter. I beat a cowardly yet strategic retreat instead.

Needless to say, Sir Franklin should have done the same. His expedition foundered quickly: the boats became frozen in the ice, and the coal soon ran out. Though the shipmates tried to walk to safety, nothing survived but the silverware, which was found, scattered across the arctic, in the pockets of frozen sailors years later.

The Grim Reaper & The Gowanus Canal

Recently, I became worried that a friend of mine was lying unattended, face-down in the Gowanus Canal. As it happened, he was at home eating cheese and drinking a bottle of wine, but the very thought (black and white, 'Einstein on the Beach' in surround sound, Bogart lighting up on the banks) of the oil-slick canal on a cold night was enough to have me frantically checking up on him.

The fact is that New York is a scary place, where peril and injury may lie around every corner. For some this is a thrill; others are oblivious. I prefer to observe and take notes. There is obvious danger, of course, such as oncoming sidewalk-biking delivery men and an unwary tumble onto the dread Third Rail. Evil might lurk, camouflaged, inside bad sushi or a bone-crushing but otherwise beautiful pair of shoes. And we all play Russian roulette with the unexpected, emotionally unprepared for early morning encounters with stale coffee and inbred, mohair-clad shih tzus.

The only answer is to become even more neurotic, or to be sure that if you DO fall into the Gowanus Canal, someone will notice your absence and check up on you. And so, when running late tonight to meet a friend for tea, I received a 'LADY DID YOU PERISH' text on my cellphone, I laughed...and was secretly comforted as I texted back, 'the scythe just missed me; CALM DOWN will be there soon.'

There's No Place Like Home

I once had a crazy ex-Texan roommate. An intense face and brow lift made her look like she was constantly in a wind tunnel, and thanks to a semi-botched childhood tonsillectomy she had a voice that carved grooves in our apartment windows. She listened to NPR on 3 radios in 3 rooms at once, and she never left the apartment...not that I can blame her, as we lived on a sixth floor walkup. I myself chose to spend most of my time on the other end of the staircase. I would have guessed that she'd be the type to have 14 cats running around, but instead she devoted her time and energy to our next door neighbor, who lived in a cave at the end of a corridor stuffed with 40 years of newspapers, and who had a leather and chain-clad dom come huffing up the stairs once a month to spank him and force him to clean up the mess. This neighbor had once attacked our front door with a hammer when he thought my roommate was blaring NPR too loud; the dents were still there but they had made up, for the most part.

What energy was not devoted to complaining about our floormate was focussed on the apartment, her baby, whose lease she'd held for years. I came home one day to find my roommate waiting for me, her visage as close to an expression of concern as possible when one's face is as hard as a melon. Apparently she had noticed some divots in the hardwood floors. Aghast, she had inspected all of her own shoes to find a culprit, but had come up with nothing. Returning to the scene of the crime, she got down on her hands and knees and traced the divots to my room, at which point she went through every pair of shoes in my closet. The offending pair of stilettos with heels worn down to the metal stubs were on the coffee table for my inspection. Luckily for everyone concerned, she moved to Croatia, and I moved downtown.

All this comes to mind because I recently noticed that my current roommate has come into my room and wrapped a giant shower cap over my air conditioning unit in my absence. Have I learned nothing from my earlier roommate experience? Do I need a giant "GO AWAY" sign for my door? (Actually, I have one of those, but it seemed rude and invasive). Should I myself move to Croatia? The easiest answer seems to be that it's New York, and I should be glad he does all the cleaning, and doesn't just snort coke all day through a vacuum cleaner-shaped straw.*

*True story, but not one I can claim as my own...thanks E!

MUDdy Goodness

My favorite thing about my neighborhood is that in the face of the horrific arctic weather recently sent down from the North, venturing even a step off the direct path to the subway is not required to obtain caffeine: the MUDtruck has set up shop by the Christopher Steet station! Though there may be 10 people shivering in line in front of me, I just shut my eyes to the wind and flurries and inch toward Mecca with a smile on my face, because $1 worth of happiness in a bright orange cup is worth the nose lost to frostbite.

I love the MUDman

Check them out: http://www.mudnyc.com/

I See the Sea

The lobster eye is an amazing device. Unlike the human eye, or even the cephalopod eye (which developed separately from the vertebrate eye, but which also features the single-lens model, wherein light enters through the pupil and is focused by the lens to fall on photoreceptor cells at the rear of the eye), the lobster eye has a completely unique model, and is based on reflection rather than refraction.

The basic component of the lobster eye is a perfectly square box, which tapers on four sloping sides to meet at a point, rather like a pyramid. The surfaces of the tapering walls are coated with a substance that serves the approximate function of tinfoil, sending light from the opening of the box bouncing off the sides until the rays converge at the cluster of photoreceptor cells at the point of the pyramid. Each eye contains about 13,000 discrete boxes.

Both creationists and scientists are fascinated by the eye; creationists because the perfect construction of the pyramids and mathematically exact angles required for light to converge at a precise point, indicate a higher being's hand on the exacto knife of the genesial drawing board. Scientists have drawing boards of their own, and have recently begun using the lobster eye, with its vast light-gathering potential, as a blueprint for a new class of x-ray vision space telescope, the Lobster-ISS.

The truly amazing thing, however, is not the very existence of this beautifully designed organ, but that the lobster rarely, if ever, uses it. Why do lobsters have such anatomically perfect eyes when so little light penetrates to the ocean floor?

Wild Swans at Coole, redux

I recently read 'Crossing Open Ground', by Barry Lopez. It's a series of previously-published magazine articles he reworked for the book, and very beautiful. The following passage was written about the hundreds of thousands of snow geese staging at Tule Lake in Northern California during their annual migration.

I remember watching a large flock rise one morning from a plowed field about a mile distant. I had been watching clouds, the soft, buoyant, wind-blown edges of immaculate cumulus. The birds rose against much darker clouds to the east. There was something vaguely ominous in this apparition, as if the earth had opened and poured them forth, like a wind, a blizzard, which unfurled across the horizon above the dark soil, becoming wider and higher in the sky than my field of vision could encompass, great swirling currents of birds in a rattling of wings, one fluid recurved sweep of 10,000 passing through the spaces in another, counterflying flock, while beyond them lattice after lattice passed like sliding walls, until in the whole sky you lost your depth of field and felt you were looking up from the floor of the ocean through shoals of fish.