A moment of Zen

That's what Jon Stewart calls the little fillip at the end of The Daily Show. For me, in New York, there are a lot of moments of Zen, mostly having to do with suddenly seeing the city from an odd angle, or unexpectedly coming upon a place I've heard about but never seen. And a lot of these moments are about seeing the Empire State Building from every which way - sometimes it looks small and distant and it's hard to believe it's the tallest building in the city.

Other times, it's right there in front of you, looming in such a way that you can't really even see the top of it. If you're literally in front of it, you're aware of its presence as a monument (a weak word to describe it), an icon, a surreal thing that is in reality just another building. You notice it more at the level because of the crowds that are always swarming around it.

Sometimes, for me, it's like a lighthouse: I can tell that I'm heading in the right direction because I can see it - there it is, so I'm know I'm heading north or south or east or west. A quotidian thing, useful and amazing at the same time.

On occasion, I've been walking somewhere in Manhattan and I'll realize that a little clutch of people are looking up at something, transfixed, and when I follow their gaze they're almost invariably looking at it. It's a religious experience, like when the sun and clouds accumulate in a certain way and you can see the luminous rays falling to earth - I always call that phenomenon God light, a strange thing for a non-spiritual person like myself.

There are certain things that define a city, and it's almost silly to say it, but the Empire State Building IS New York in some fundamental way - like the subway and the Met and Battery Park, only so, so much more so.

Sometimes I look at the Empire State Building and I get a little shiver of fear that something terrible could happen to it like what happened to the Twin Towers. But then it just seems so singular and strong and tall that the fear goes away and the awe sets in again. It's just a building, but oh, what a building.

(A note about the picture: I took it one night while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, so it encompasses three monumental structures: the Empire State, the Manhattan Bridge and the BB.)

East River interlude

This past week was a busy one at work, not least because I spent a day in Washington DC at the office there. It was a quick trip - down on the train on Wednesday morning and back that same night. One of those business trips that seems useful but in retrospect dealing with something that could have been hashed out in a good conference call. The good thing was that my coworker and I got a chance to walk down to the Tidal Basin and see the cherry blossoms - lovely, even in a misty rain.

Today, I took a walk with a group called the Outdoors Club along the path by the East River. We started at 34th St and walked to South Street Seaport, after which I caught the nearby Ikea ferry (free!) back to Brooklyn. It was a lovely day, clear and in the mid-60s. The walk was notable for the views of Brooklyn, but I don't think it would become one of my favorites because it skirts the East Side Highway and was really noisy.

It was an interesting group of mostly older people from the city and as far away as Poughkeepsie. Some of them have been walking with this group for 30 years or more. I loved hearing one woman's stories about growing up on the Lower East Side before it was chi-chi, and as a working single mom. Her name was Shirley and she lives in Chelsea. I would guess she's in her mid-70s. Shirley was very short, like many New Yorkers (I remember Mary B remarking once that there were a lot more short people in NYC than in Seattle - who knows why? Genetics?). She had a lot of opinions about recent immigrants to New York, some not so positive, and about working moms who leave their kids with these immigrants while they work. Interesting in that she herself was the child of immigrants from the Ukraine and Hungary. "In those days," she said, "Mothers didn't work and they made do."

Another woman, Eileen, came in from Long Island, where she lives with her third "husband" - they're not married but have been together 20 years. "You don't make that mistake three times," she said. But her two husbands before that both died of illness, and her current one is going blind, so she has to take care of him. Thus, she hikes to have a respite from being a caregiver. She was also a first generation child of immigrants, from Ireland. But she had a more tolerant attitude towards the newer immigrants, seeing them as being like her parents - hard working and looking for something better. She very sweetly took me in hand when she learned I was new to the city.

What's interesting in situations like this is that people often ask me where I'm from, a question that I could confidently answer in Seattle - Kentucky. But here it's a bit harder. I am from Kentucky, but I'm also from Seattle, having spent equal and more recent time there. The next question I'm asked is unanswerable for me at the moment: How long do you think you'll stay in New York? After all, I've been here only three months - barely the length of a season.

For this post, I'm including some pictures of what I think of as Dickensian New York. You see these strange things here that are so retrograde, like the guy heating up a bucket of patching tar with a blow torch right on the street, and those weird pipes that seem to be vents for some kind of underworld. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for them, but I just don't know what it is yet.

And finally, a picture of a message written in chalk at a house down the street a few days ago.

Rose