Rhythm of the city

I hear the R train rumbling deep beneath my apartment - not loud but a deep and consonant presence, reassuring in its regularity, like an earth mother.

That's one of the sounds that I associate with my new life in a city that thrums with noise. I'm not the first to observe this, of course. The poet Federico Garcia Lorca said that "New York is Senegal with machines," which just about sums it up on some days.

Outside as I write this, a siren is "burping" - squealing in short bursts in a frustrating attempt to get vehicles to move out of the way, which they will - eventually. That's another part of the rhythm of the city.

On my way to the Y tonight, I walked past a street that the police had blocked off, thinking maybe there was a domestic dispute in progress or something like that. I got a few blocks further and realized that it wasn't just that street but a large area cordoned off by the police. In Seattle, if something like this had been going on, you could stop and ask bystanders what was happening and they usually wouldn't know. No one had thought to ask the cops. But here, I asked a woman and she already had the whole story - suspicious package, the bomb squad was poking around trying to figure out what it was, no big deal.

By the time I left the Y, the excitement was over and the streets were back to their normal rock and roll: Cars moving in that peculiar speed-up-slow down pattern that always reminds me of something David Letterman says - "Traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines."

Back at home, I hear another rhythm - the murmuring of people walking by my windows on their way to here and there, all part of the flow. I like that sound because it's the sound of life going along, moving with the pace of time.

Just another emigre in Brooklyn

I went to a reading the other night for an Irish writer, Colm Toibin, at BookCourt, my favorite neighborhood bookstore (they have a different writer practically every night). His new book is called Brooklyn, and it's about a young woman who comes to Brooklyn from County Wexford in the 1950s. I've just started reading the book, so I can't give you a review. And I've never read anything else by Tiobin.

But what interested me in this book and reading was an article in the NY Times about Tiobin and his take on Brooklyn and Irish immigration.

As a double emigre myself (from Kentucky to Seattle and from Seattle to New York), I can relate. And as a third generation descendent of an Irish immigrant (my maternal great-grandmother), I'm always interested in most anything Irish.

But Toibin talked about something I'd never heard of, a phenomenon in Ireland called the American wake. What that means is the family get-together right before someone heads off for America. It's been such a common occurence over the decades because there have been succeeding waves of immigrants from Ireland, forced by economic circumstances to go -- and possibly never return.

This was the case for my great-grandmother, who came to America (via New Orleans) as a 9-year-old. The two salient facts about her, according to what I heard my mother say many times, were that she never had any contact with her family in County Kilkenny again, and that she always looked sad - indeed, I have a picture of her that is the essence of sadness.

In the 1950s, when Toibin's main character came here, at least there was the possibility of writing letters, even making phone calls. The huge numbers of Irish people who came here in the 1980s could fly back home more easily, and now cell phones and the Internet mean that almost constant communication is possible.

But emigres are always at a loss in a certain way, even if they can talk to those back home or visit often. I think you pick up the spirit of the places you live in - good, bad or indifferent -- and carry that with you wherever you go.

I'm a little Louisville, a little Seattle, and maybe I'm becoming a little Brooklyn, who knows?

I'm not even sure what that means. But the guy at the Korean grocer's where I buy fruit actually wished me a good evening tonight and smiled, which he's never done before. And tourists stop me on the street and ask me where Grimaldi's is or how to find the Brooklyn Bridge -- as though I look like I would know. And I do.

Behind in my work

I've renewed a promise to myself to write a new entry at least once a week. So here goes.

It was great seeing all of you in Seattle, where the weather was wonderful and the company even better. Thanks, Susan and Tom and Mary, for making room for me in the middle of your busy weekend. And thanks to the rest of you for doing your usual best to put together an impromptu party with fabulous snacks.

Here in NYC, we're having Seattle weather - rain, rain, rain. Lucky for them, Sophie and Melissa are in Puerto Rico and missing the precip. Specifically, they're on the Isla de Vieques, where the horses run wild and the water in a certain bay is luminescent.

On Saturday, I went on a garden tour of the Lower East Side. The area we were in is also called Loisaida (pictures here), a word that even appears on street signs as an alternative name for Avenue C. It comes from casual use but also from a 1974 poem by the Nuyorican poet Bittman Rivas. Over the decades, the Lower East Side has changed from Jewish working class to Latino and Puerto Rican to hipster - and it's still changing.

I went there with a walking group called the Outdoors Club - I've done several walks with them, and this was by far the most interesting, culturally speaking. The gardens we visited were mostly community gardens and of wide variety - some purely floral, some with hardscape built by hand, many with found-object decoration. One was filled with stuffed animals and toy robots. These things hung from trees and walls and popped up out of the ground like little buried treasures.

The best was more like a wild prarie field, filled with grass and sculpture. The Kenkelaba Sculpture Garden was a on a lot between two buildings that the community fought fiercely to keep from development when an old building was torn down by the city -- the same was true of many of the other gardens spaces.

The Kenkelaba garden was next to an an apartment building that's run as an artists' coop. Across the street was a gallery owned and run by the guy who owns the apartment building. He came out to talk with us and show us around his gallery, where he has pieces by most of the major African American artists of the last half century -- Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, even Muhammed Ali. A tiny little place filled with treasures, plus a back garden full of chairs made of tools, computers, jerrycans, just about anything you can imagine.

The day ended with a visit to the central courtyard of Stuyvesant Town, a planned community built by Met Life after World War II - very much like the place where Susanne grew up, Parkchester in the Bronx, where affordable housing was made available to veterans, teachers, and other middle-class workers. Stuyvesant Town was recently sold to a corporation and now apartments are being rented at market rates, much to the dismay of the people who live there. Their rents won't go up - it's rent-controlled - but a woman on the tour who lives there said that the new owners have set up a class system, where new tenants can use certain facilities that are no longer open to old-time residents. There's now a private library and a private bar/cafe. Seems like there's a lot of resentment building.

Despite that, the central garden of Stuyvesant Town is lovely -- mature trees, a huge fountain, lots of lawn and park benches. An idyll in the middle of the city.

But in New York, nothing is an idyll for long . . .