Sunday in the Park

It was 77 degrees and sunny in New York today.

My Los Angeles friends and family are politely stifling yawns and trying to look interested at this point.   But here in the east, we've just barely escaped a winter that was like one of those nightmares where you stumble around a maze-like space in total darkness, being tortured with brief glimpses of daylight but never quite managing to get there.

To me, the highest and best use of a 77-degree sunny day in New York is to spend it in Central Park.

We took the 1 train up to West 103rd Street. I've never approached the park from there before. I love the way the geology looms up at you—a startling mountain of schist exploding along Central Park West next to a street light and a Subaru.

The park is lush and woodsy up in those reaches, with lovely pockets of solitude—a gray-haired woman sat on a log reading peacefully, her German Shepherd at her feet—and a sylvan Children's Glade that provides a view almost reminiscent of the island hundreds of years ago (with a Narnia-like lamppost for intrigue).

A wood-chip path and a dogwood in full bloom led us out of the Glade and onto the Great Hill, where Frisbee players and picnickers and a great gaggle of guitarists were in full throttle.

Near the North Meadow, a patch of dandelions waited for wishes.

\

We tried to stay on the offbeat paths, but it's difficult to avoid veering toward the main drive that circles the park, where packs of cyclists will mow you down as soon as look at you. The crowds picked up. We heard Spanish, French, Turkish, German, a little English.

Along about 86th Street, it became clear that 70% of the universe had woken up this morning and said, "You know what would be a good idea? Walking slowly four abreast through Central Park!"

So we zig-zagged back to Central Park West and over to Columbus Avenue in search of a sidewalk cafe. Refreshed with one Negra Modelo (My Beloved) and a margarita that was 9 parts rum and 1 part ice cubes (me), plus a bowl of pozole (My Beloved) and three carnitas soft tacos (me), we wove toward the subway and caught the 1 train back home.

The park was gorgeous, but I'm not sure it was as gorgeous as this woman on the train. I asked permission to take her photograph, saying, "You look so beautiful!" The woman in the Yankees shirt sitting next to her slid one seat over and said, "I'll get out of the way since I'm not so beautiful."

"Are you dressed for an event?" I asked her.

"I went to church," she said. "Happy Mother's Day."

Or as I call it, Happy Day.

** Click any photo to enlarge and see slideshow.

From the ground up

The prompt for my college-application essay asked, "If you could write any kind of book you wanted, what would you write and how would you do the research for it?" I said that I would write a historical mystery set in England, and research it by reading headstones in village churchyards.

I’ve always had a thing for cemeteries and the stories they tell.

Yes, there’s always a ribbon of sadness that winds through cemeteries like a low-lying mist. But I’ve never found them creepy or frightening or dreary or morbid. The opposite: They’re like libraries of lives, the headstones compressed autobiographies, condensed as for Twitter.

I grew up in West Los Angeles, and drove past the Veteran’s Administration’s National Cemetery almost every day, its endless rows of precise white headstones stretching in every direction.

[Los Angeles National Cemetery]

It was awesome, a little overwhelming, a place of national pride shadowed with the realities of war.

There are impressive cemeteries everywhere we travel, from the fantastically gothic Agramonte cemetery in Porto, Portugal…

[Mausoleum at Agramonte, Porto, Portugal]

…to the dramatic, eclectic Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans, where les bons temps no longer roulent…

[Lafayette Cemetery #2, New Orleans]

…to a lush and tranquil churchyard in South Africa, where a friend’s baby is buried. As we bumped down the dirt road toward the church, his two-year-old asked brightly, “See Sasha?”

[Cemetery, Limpopo Province, South Africa]

The grand Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx is imposing…

...hosting Duke Ellington and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with monuments and mausoleums designed by McKim, Mead & White and Louis Comfort Tiffany. It struck me as a place almost devoid of grief—except when the human instinct spoke through the marble.

But the cemeteries that pull me in with an invisible hand are the smaller, rambling affairs with worn headstones listing to one side, where recurring family names pop up in widening arcs, and moss grows on old stone. A place where the local residents make themselves at home.

[Provincetown Cemetery, Cape Cod, MA]

In New Hampshire on a college visit, I left the teenager sleeping at the inn and wandered into the cemetery next door. The graves were tucked in up to their chins by a blanket of fresh snow. 

In one corner, lest anything go to waste, buckets hung on a tree gathering maple sap, flavored with…? I decided not to think about it.

I try to tread carefully between the graves, stooping to read the epigraphs. Of course most are simply names with birth and death dates. Sometimes a name is accompanied by another name, with just a birthdate and that predatory dash, waiting to pounce on a recalcitrant death.

But once in a while, in a few words, a headstone conjures a clear snapshot: maybe of a cheerfully cluttered study illuminated by the glow of a plump lamp, where an elderly husband and wife sit in two comfortable armchairs with a newspaper and a book, occasionally reading a passage aloud or calling out a crossword clue.

[Cemetery in Princeton, NJ: "…classmates at Bates, full partners in marriage,
careful parents, always devoted teachers"]

Or of a sturdy 18^th-century New England housewife, floury hands on a rolling pin and a few wisps of hair escaping from under her cap, dispensing no-nonsense advice in brisk tones.

[Mrs. Experience, Provincetown Cemetery]

And then there are the mysteries. A New Orleans tomb commemorates 22-year-old Mathilda Williams and 19-year-old Dorothy Williams, each “beloved” by their husbands but identified by their maiden names. Sisters. Who died on the same day, May 15, 1949.

[Lafayette Cemetery #2, New Orleans]

What. Happened? A car crash? A boating accident? Were they on a double-date—a picnic, maybe, with bottles of Jax beer and muffuletta sandwiches from Central Grocery—when the Packard took a corner too fast and…? I hate not knowing. I’ve Googled their names every which way, but haven’t found anything. I’ll just have to make up my own story, pieced together between the lines on a headstone.

A few years ago, My Beloved and I were in Boston doing the research for our historical graphic novel for kids, Road to Revolution!, which takes place in 1775. After climbing the worn wooden steps to the steeple of the Old North Church to see where the lanterns were lit (did I mention it was 104 degrees that day?), we walked up the road to Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which dates back to the 1600s. Sexton Robert Newman, who lit the lanterns at Old North that fateful night, is buried here, along with Cotton and Increase Mather, merchants, tradesmen, and free African-Americans.

We set a pivotal scene on Copp's Hill, when our heroes, Penny and Nick, meet to exchange information gathered by Penny, who has gone undercover as a servant girl to eavesdrop on a British general. 

And so my college application essay came, sort of, true. In the library of lives, we found a story to tell to young people just starting their lives. Not a circle of life, exactly; more like a spiral. I like it. 

A vision softly creeping

Walking to the subway yesterday afternoon, Stan and I passed a striking-looking woman standing on a stoop, talking on her cell phone. A black town car waited at the curb, rear door ajar.

“You make me beautiful,” the woman said into her phone as we passed by and out of earshot.  I turned to Stan.

“Her stylist? Photographer? Mother? Lover?”

“This conversation is just the kind of thing I would have put in my strip,” said Stan, whose Village Voice comic strip, “Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies,” specialized in the found art of overheard dialogue.

Click to enlarge

The moment proved to be a propitious segue to the event we were headed for: Paul Simon talking with poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon as part of the weekend's New Yorker Festival. 

I say that casually, but my teenage self was sending up a high-pitched squeal. Paul Simon has been a hero of mine since the 1970s, when I was old enough to swipe albums from my older brothers and sisters. There Goes Rhymin' Simon was my first hot-fisted filch, with its graph-paper album cover design (thank you, Milton Glaser) and its king's-ransom's worth of songs, including Kodachrome, Love Me Like a Rock, Something So Right, and the never-out-of-date American Tune:

I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees.

Simon's music has gotten him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, Muldoon pointed out.

Simon: "Yes, the first time was for Simon & Garfunkel. The second time was to aggravate Artie."

Muldoon: "How did that work out?"

Simon: "It worked out well. He's pretty aggravated."

I love Simon's music, his groundbreaking mixture of global rhythms and musicians on Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints, his guitar-playing—but it's his lyrics I roll around in like a dog rolls in dirt.

"Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance." 

"You've got the cool water when the fever runs high." 

"She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy." 

"There's a girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline." 

"I like to sleep with the windows open, you keep the windows closed, so goodbye, goodbye, goodbye."

And, of course, "The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar"—cited by Derek Walcott, with whom Simon collaborated on the ill-fated Broadway musical The Capeman (whose music I love), as evidence that Simon is a poet.

So it was surprising, often hilarious, and strangely not at all disillusioning to hear Paul Simon talk about the many seemingly accidental ways that titles and lyrics ended up in his songs.

"I was in a Chinese restaurant and on the menu there was a chicken and egg dish. And they called it the Mother and Child Reunion."

"I was flipping through a book on Magritte, and there was a photo with the caption, 'Georgette and Rene Magritte with their dog before the war.' But I thought it should be, 'Rene and Georgette Magritte with their dog after the war.' " 

Asked by a girl in the audience to reveal the mystery of what "me and Julio" were doing down in the schoolyard, Simon said, "If I tell you I'm just going to wreck it for you—that was all about just getting the name 'Julio' into a song."

When another woman cited "The cross is in the ballpark" (from The Obvious Child on Rhythm of the Saints) as one of her favorite lines, Simon said, "Me, too. I wish I knew what it meant."

And he happily admits to quoting many, many lines from the songs he grew up with in the 50s, "when every song used the same three chords."

One of those chords ended up in Graceland—an unexpected minor chord played by South African guitarist Ray Phiri.

"They almost never use minor chords in South African music, so I asked him, 'Why did you use that chord?' " Simon said, "and he said, 'Because you use that chord'—a chord I took from Earth Angel. That's when I knew we were really making global music."

The racing percussion line that underlies Graceland gave the tune a rockabilly feeling that put Simon in mind of Sun Studios in Memphis, where Johnny Cash and Elvis had recorded.

With no lyrics for the song, he started singing, "I'm going to Graceland, Graceland"—"but I thought, 'Well, I'm not using that, it makes no sense.' "  Until he returned to the States and actually took a trip to Graceland, his first.

"I was driving down the highway, and there was the first line of the song actually laid out before me: 'The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar.' "

Muldoon interrupted: "It should be said, not everyone would put it that way."

Simon is either modest or flatly realistic about his lyrical gift. Most of the time, he says, "I don't know where it comes from"—a sentiment echoed by Muldoon, who encouraged a budding poet in the audience to "go in ignorance."

But ignorance with your eyes open.

"When I was a kid, I was always looking at the sidewalk, because you might find a quarter," Paul Simon said. "One time I found a dollar. The thing is, you always have to be looking."

The evening ended with Paul Simon and his guitar and a simple, almost conversational version of The Sound of Silence. 

"Hear my words that I might teach you"?

We heard. We learned. He got a standing ovation.

A Made-Up Life

[I'm very pleased to have had this piece run on BetterAfter50.com on September 17, 2013.]

On the wall in my mom’s home office, there’s a plastic box frame that holds a yellowing page from McCall’s magazine. A 22-year-old has just been given a makeover, her waist-length hair cut into a fluffy mass of ’80s feathering, courtesy of cowboy-hatted superstar stylist Jose Eber. Her eyebrows have been groomed, her skin foundationed, her oversized glasses removed and her eyelashes mascara’d. She wears a strapless bodysuit, a plastic necklace that took its design cues from molten lava, and a big smile.

“I look in the mirror and I see this glamorous, sophisticated woman,” the caption reads. “I can’t believe it’s really me!”

I was misquoted.

What I actually said was, “I look like a hooker.”

Yes, that was me, wearing a smock and looking sheepishly at my reflection as Jose picked up my long hair in both hands and held it out to the sides, as if measuring my wingspan. (The master of disdain, Jose was unimpressed.) That was me, mortified by the yellow polka-dot outfit that made me look like a back-up singer for Shaun Cassidy. And that was me, driving away from the photo session and hoping the police didn’t pick me up on suspicion of solicitation at traffic lights.

I’ve always had a tense relationship with cosmetics. Mascara feels like I’ve drizzled my eyelashes with Elmer’s Glue. Foundation feels like a death mask. Lipstick wears me. Basically, I don’t like stuff on my face. (That feathery haircut, constantly wisping my forehead, ugh.)

Which was a perfectly plausible attitude from age 22 until about age 35, when I could get by with a 10-minute morning routine, including the shower.

But now I’m 52, and no chapter in Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck resonates more emphatically with me than “On Maintenance”:

“You know what maintenance is, I’m sure. Maintenance is what they mean when they say, ‘After a certain point, it’s just patch patch patch.’ Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food.”

By now, I’ve had to make cosmetic concessions. I won’t ride the elevator the six floors down to the lobby to get the mail without first applying my $1 eye pencil, for fear of running into someone I may or may not know.

I look at the unfamiliar landscape that used to be my skin, and try my best to smooth it over with a few drops of Clinique ‘Almost Makeup.’ I even bought a drugstore lipstick in a shade that most closely approximates the color I used to achieve by biting my lower lip.

The problem is, I’m an old dog now, and this new trick may be beyond me. I just don’t know what I’m doing. I once watched a young woman apply her makeup while holding on to the pole on a rattling subway train who did it better than I do.

I live in fear of ending up with that jittery trail of eyeliner that breaks my heart when I see it on an old woman—the kind of whom you think, “God bless ’er, she’s still trying.”

Today my getting-dressed routine lasts about 45 minutes and generally ends with my flipping off the bathroom light and making a little ucchh sound in the back of my throat. The cosmetic equivalent of, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

God bless me, I’m still trying. I’d even be open to another magazine makeover. But wouldn’t you know, McCall’s magazine is long gone. And so is that 22-year-old glamorous, sophisticated hooker in polka dots.

 

It's faded. It's been 30 years.

Surprise

I’ve lived in New York for 3 years and 235 days now, and still the city reaches out and surprises me every day.

This morning's greeting from the Hudson River.

It's partly a numbers game: With so much time spent on the street, you have a 90 percent chance at any moment of bumping up against the beautiful or the strange. 

I may be over-sentimental—my father once described us as "a family that cries at Stop signs"—but I find myself constantly moved by humanity. The old man in a white undershirt, bent at an almost 45-degree angle over his walker, his young female caregiver's hand hovering behind his back. The baby crawling on chubby knees over the grass at Hudson River Park. The owner guiding his three-legged dog through a crosswalk.

But even the city's inanimate features—the geometry of it alone—can yank me to a halt. 

Lower Manhattan

Ninth Avenue, from the Apple Store

East 32nd Street

And the art. It's frigging everywhere. It's in the places you expect it, of course; like MoMA, where Robert Rauschenberg's "combine," Bed—created from pencil, paint, pillow, sheet, and quilt—demonstrates his philosophy of "acting in the gap" between life and art.

But it's also in places you don't expect it. In fact, the amazing thing about New York is the amount of art that exists in the gap between life and Art. 

It's in subway stations.

It's on West 21st Street, where this fantastic creature greeted us from the side of P.S. 11.

How could a child not learn great things after walking through these doors each morning?

And clearly, they have.

There's also art in the middle of the lawn in the middle of Governor's Island in the middle of New York Harbor, where head in the clouds, made from 53,780 recycled plastic water and milk jugs, invites you to step inside and think awhile...

...and where antique French carousels carried children and parents into the past.

The past is a constant companion here. You can time-travel while standing still. 

Walk down a side street, and you may find yourself peering through bars at a tiny Jewish cemetery, sandwiched between brick buildings that loom on either side.  

This is the Third Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue Shearith Israel—the oldest Jewish congregation in North America, established in 1654, according to Tablet Magazine. (Also from Tablet: The Second Cemetery, tucked between brownstones on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, sits next to a building that once housed a Civil War tavern known as The Grapevine, where Southern spies would eavesdrop on Union soldiers—hence the expression "I heard it through The Grapevine.")

I think of these men and women who've slept here for hundreds of years while Sixth Avenue and condominiums and Trader Joe's have grown up around them. Wouldn't they be surprised, just as I'm surprised every single day, by what New York has to show. 

In August I dream of the sea

In August I dream of the sea.

I dream of Cape Cod

Where water like silk

Meets a Hopper shore.

I dream of Los Angeles

Where the cold and wild Pacific

Meets a manicured coast

And the highway bends toward Malibu.

I dream of Istanbul

Where ferries ply the Bosphorus

Where Europe meets Asia;

Where protest meets pepper spray,

Old men and their ways

Meet unvanquished youth.

I dream of Cape Town

Where a billowing cloth

Tumbles off Table Mountain,

And rolls toward the harbor,

Where boats carry the faithful

To rocky Robben Island

And Mandela’s tiny green cell.

I dream of the ocean in August

The sweet salt water of hope.