new york days

heart-stopping moment:

though, i don’t really EXPECT it’ll happen, at least not to any great degree, but—tis the season! yea!

a november walk through the botanical gardens and prospect park, after a morning of marvelous rain

once i started noticing the leaves on the ground, the shapes, the brilliant colors and the color combinations, i couldn’t stop. Even damp and matted leaves were not ugly, and so no combination, so they say, was left unturned. I also found that my eye changed over the course of the walk; the original intent was re-evaluated and the ‘rules’ of my project evolved as i was drawn to the irresistible graphic qualities of non-leaf elements and they were allowed to play significant if not equal roles in the photographs.

Needless to say, it took me a while to get to my favorite diner on the far corner of the park—and it took a while to get back.

i am tempted to title this “learning to see” after Eudora Welty, but it’s more like “excercise in seeing” or “remembering what it’s like to see” or “you should keep your eyes open and you’ll see cool things.” observe.

Heard on npr this morning (having a radio again is so wonderful!) that the tree was going up today. This was exciting, i’d see it as i walked through the plaza to work! And indeed i did, not too many crowded for the spectacle, but workers were busy harnessing the prone 8-ton evergreen for the lift. it appears to’ve just been cut down yesterday in Jersey. JP and i are off to check out the progress in another hour.

here’s mom and the tree 2 years ago. then it was from a farm in New York related to some Mississippians we know. i know, exciting fact huh?

JP introduced me to the dog park years (like 2) ago and i’ve been coming ever since, alone or with her. we watch the dogs and barges and the cars on the expressway go past. we gaze at the ruins of the smallpox hospital across the water and wish we were there in that grassy field rather than here in midtown on a weekday and having to go back to work. I like to sit in this quiet, anti-office spot, home of anti-office people, dog-walking, stroller-pushing, daily-constitutionalizing. and then, there’s not too many people to begin with.

In Mayor’s Plan, the Plastic Bag Will Carry a Fee—really?! oh please please please!!

my comment:
I am so excited, i DO hope this passes!! The plastic bag tax/fee obviously worked in Ireland with incredible results and i’ve wondered ever since why NYC couldn’t do it? or even smaller cities and towns in unlikely parts of the country, it’s such a simple, reasonable, and profitable solution to a real problem.

unlike banning plastic bags as they have done in SF, and forcing people to not use plastic—which does not target the crux of the problem—a fee encourages people to actually change their habits. passive encouragement through advertising and coaxing is of no use with most of the populace, particularly where plastic bag use and abuse is highest, and so, though a tax seems onerous it is an incentive to carry the canvas bag, or put the chips in your purse, or carry the jug of milk BY IT’S HANDLE! and realize that the world still turns without that plastic bag! it’s ok not to have one! it may be a pipe dream but i would hope this experience would eventually make people PREFER to carry their own bags.

the argument that “There are better ways to protect the environment, ... without making it harder for those who are already struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy.” and that this fee could “hurt poor residents and businesses” is pretty nebulous and i can’t think of a single reason for that unless, of course, you work for a plastic bag manufacturer.

tax ALL non-reusable bags for crying out loud. if i forget my bag one day and have to pay 25-50 cents (6 cents hardly seems significant, make it at least a dime), i will be all the more likely to remember it next time. double bag? double tax.

Eudora Welty symposium at the Museum of the City of New York.

This was last night, I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time, what with most of my favorite things being involved: Eudora, literature, writers and fellow lovers of Eudora, fellow Mississippians—all in New York—yum! as BJ would say. Suzanne Marrs moderated a panel discussion of Eudora which essentially boiled down to telling stories about her, exactly what she would’ve loved to be involved in, not necessarily hearing about herself, but the storytelling, reminiscing, chuckling. She was a great lover of social comedy and never failed to execute this love well in the telling and retelling. Reynolds Price told of what an awful driver she was, “you always knew you were driving behind Eudora in Jackson if they were going really slow and you couldn’t see the driver” (Richard Ford said that). Robert MacNeil talked about her in New York and his visits down to Pinehurst St. with a bottle of Makers. HH arrived toward the end and joined me on my bench against the wall. Every seat was taken. the time for questions came and i was appalled by the first woman who commented that “the Old South is obviously still alive and well based on this election”—what??! a vote for McCain=a vote for racism?? I get rather ticked at supposedly open-minded liberals being so close-minded as to not see multiple points of view. Another woman asked how a woman like Eudora came out of a place like Jackson Mississippi in the early 20th century, such a liberal in her time, sliding over racial barriers and (we like to think) an Obama supporter (: I think I know, it’s partly the same way this person here is a product of Jackson, and a lot of that has to do with who raised us. Granted, for us 1980s kids, we were surrounded by even larger communities of “open-minded Southern liberals” than Eudora, but I suspect similarities.

Afterwards it was Makers on the rocks and mingling with old high-school teachers, Suzanne, fellow New York Mississippians, Elizabeth Spencer and other Welty-related folk. It’s been a while since i’ve been “Cavett Taff’s daughter!” but that’s how it was (:

Mrs. Redhead informed me excitedly at the end of all this that they were getting the full New York treatment on their visit: a nice hotel, a dinner at the museum, this reception, and other such delights—New York will always be the same through Mississippi eyes, and I will always love it (:

this is not yet a memory.
voices are ringing through the streets of crown heights, even way over in this secluded corner. “OBAMA!” shouted at regular intervals surrounded by whoops and yells; a man sticks out his hand, a black man, everyone on the streets is black (except for one white guy i notice walking along with his phone to his ear), everyone is in the street and this guy sticks out his hand as i spin around the corner, grinning from ear to ear (me, that is) and i stick mine out a moment too late, oh whitey, whitey, whitey. another woman screams, “a black man is President!!” and yells erupt, everyone is coming outside, on the stoop, on the corner. the bars on Nostrand spill out and pedestrians salute honking cars which stream south. Taxis, stranded somehow in bklyn, honk their little yellow hearts out, and i’m not being racist.

I call home, this thing in my chest is heaving with excitment, physical joy, i don’t want it to end and i want to share. P answers and i share with him, mom and dad the furious honking, the yelling, the exuberence and they in turn inform me: McCain is giving is concession speech. Concession?! that’s what this is all about! only 11 o’clock and McCain is conceeding, he must be ready to go to bed. [i’d look at the time later and realize i called home at the exact time McCain’s speech began]—but the party in Crown Heights is just beginning, I’m to be called whitey and white girl and bike girl and hey lady! and i whoop in response and throw my arms in the air as i cruise down Franklin, down Nostrand, down Carroll and President. I think i want a beer at Franklin Park but the prospect of celebrating with “my people,” fellow white gentrifiers is significantly unappealing, the streets are so palpable, so real, the “black man is president!!” means so much more than another Obama-postered window, or a crowd around a tv with glasses of wine in hand. to me, to us, Obama is amazing, a hope-inspiring intellectual, but in Crown Heights Obama is different, he is a Black Man, and suddenly, tonight, i realize that—for maybe the first time.

and I wonder if we’ll notice a surge of births 9 months from now… (:

at Clara Barton this morning was uneventful. I am lucky enough to live in the shortest line, the machine was not broken, I took a few photos which i may post later, and the whole process took me 30 minutes tops which includes being in the wrong line to start with. Felt like i shouldn’t take a picture of someone in the booth but it would’ve been a good shot with the red/green lights on top, like a game at the fair or something.

I do like voting.

wish i’d seen this last night:

other people being funny:

The summer I worked at the Oyster Bar was the worst.

yesterday—sans working on a book until the wee hours of the morning because i’d not been at work—was fabulous.

#1 best part: riding my bike down the wet streets and a busy Flatbush Ave (tailed a fellow biker headed for the bridge). luckily it was not raining but i don’t think that would’ve hurt. riding in the morning was terribly exhilarating, it just felt so GOOD. when i plunked my helmet and backpack down on the scanner at the courthouse the guard started up a rapport that would carry throughout the day (at lunch: “see? i told you it was gonna rain all day!”) and made me smile. started me off on an excellent right foot.

#2 best part: oh, well, that would have to be the security guards who were also friendly about locking up my camera (which i got back for lunch and had to turn in again)

#3 best part: being in downtown bklyn for lunch. I walked down Court to a coffeeshop in Carroll Gardens and inventoried future lunchspots should i need them (and for this reason i wanted to serve!)

#4 best part: getting OUT of serving on the case i was called up for. how? one might ask, after all, i do consider myself a very impartial judge… i told them, and it’s true, that i have a problem with silly lawsuits, people sueing willy-nilly just because they can meet a court’s requirements. We are all humans here, living in this world, and if we sued for everything we could.. the more i think about it actually, the more biased i get! whew.