Look Up, Look Down

It’s important to look down in New York City. Cobblestone streets are waiting to break your ankle; sidewalks are cracked and uneven and too often smeared with dog poop or coated with ice. You literally have to watch your steps.

But you have to look up, too. Up to street level, to see who’s around you, who’s wearing what, whom you might be about to bump into, which bicycle messenger riding the wrong way down a one-way street is going to mow you down, which shaft of sunlight is turning the leaves a translucent yellow-green or setting an ordinary block on fire during the golden hour.

10th Street, West Village

Then look up further, to see the juxtapositions of water towers and capitalism…

Broadway and Houston Street, Soho

…and the intricate motifs carved into buildings all over this city, high above the street, where they can be enjoyed by—whom? Pigeons? I love that these exist, that so much care went into crafting ornamentation and detail nearly for its own sake.

14th floor, Central Park West

In answer to one of those ubiquitous what-makes-a-real-New-Yorker questionnaires that people here love so much, someone said, “Real New Yorkers never stop to look up at the tops of buildings.”

I thought, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. What a waste of a life.” But I realized recently that I, too, have been guilty of not looking up.

It’s been a complex few months, with two family health crises (one happily resolved; the other ongoing), The Child graduating from college and moving back to the West Coast, and a shifting work landscape that has left me, like one of My Beloved's cartoons, with question marks floating around my head.

Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies: "Fishy Story"

My response has been to keep my head down. I have a tendency, when things get emotionally complicated, to go inward; to let things roil around inside and to never speak of it for fear of letting the beast out of the cage. The problem with that is, the beast just gnaws away at the inside.

Then a young man with mental health issues and knives and semi-automatic weapons went on a rampage at UCSB, killing six people and himself, and I felt despair—again—at living in a society that places more value on an individual’s right to arm himself with weapons of mass destruction than on the right of first graders and college kids not to be shot to death.

So, what with internal forces meeting external forces, I spent more time than I cared to in a miasmic fog of negativity and self-doubt. I can’t swear that I’ve left it behind, but in the last few days, something changed. Spring sprung. There was a shift in the Force.

As my dear-friend-whom-I-haven’t-met-yet, J Clement Wall, said in a recent blog post, “I think it really may be just this simple: to get unstuck, say YES.”

Yesterday, My Beloved and I did some work together on a book project we’re cooking up. It’s a really, really good idea, and it’s on a topic close to my nerdy heart. We had fun with it. And then we went for a long walk up the river, from the West Village to our favorite riverside café at 70th Street.

Within the first five minutes of our walk, it started sprinkling. Then raining. Then hammering down like arrows against a medieval battlement. We hid under the eave of a warehouse to wait it out, and eventually the gray cracked open to reveal hope.

Hudson River Park bikeway, Chelsea

This is a trip we usually make by bike in 20 minutes. Walking it over the course of an hour and a half gave us the chance to see things in focus that are usually a peripheral blur—and gave me the opportunity to lurch to a stop every few feet to snap pictures. Of the aircraft carrier Intrepid:

The menace with an iPhone.

Of kayakers on the shimmering Hudson:

Hudson River Park, Chelsea

And, unexpectedly, of a giant wine bottle in Clinton—a sculpture by Malcolm Cochran called Private Passage, with portholes revealing an interior that looked like that of an Airstream trailer but is supposed to be a Queen Mary stateroom.

Private Passage, Pier 96, Clinton

We got to the café, mobbed with families and couples and bikers and dogs, many of whom—not the dogs—were threading their way among the tables with sloshing pitchers of beer and sangria. We scored seats under the shade of a sage-green umbrella and drank our beer while traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway overhead provided a vacuum-cleaner-in-the-apartment-upstairs ambience.

Pier i Café, Riverside Park, Upper West Side

Sitting and sipping, I thought to look up:

Umbrellas, Pier i Café 

Afterwards, we headed uphill away from the river, arriving in a forest of Trump towers:

Riverside Drive, Upper West Side

But by now, not even the garish hand of The Donald could spoil my mood. We walked east to the Lincoln Center subway stop…

66th Street/Lincoln Center stop, 1 train

…and rattled our way home. This morning, the first of June, before 7 a.m., I opened my eyes and looked up.

I whispered “Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,” with the hopeful little thought that it would bring me luck for the month. I think so. Things are looking up.

** Click any photo to enlarge and see slideshow.

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.

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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.