Dancing Egg Whites

Reading over a previous post about the 4th of July in the Bronx, I noticed an embarrassing spelling error: I meant to refer to merengue (Latin dance music) and instead wrote meringue (fluffy, peaked egg whites).

Funny, because both play auspicious roles in city and country life, respectively.

The history and origins of merengue are interesting; there are controversies about the dance's origins and evolution, directly related to the geopolitical histories of and relationships among the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba (and the colonial powers of Spain & France). Merengue is a type of music that I may never have encountered if it weren't for Latin immigration patterns and my living in urban areas populated by Dominicans. However, ironically, it appears that authentic merengue currently exists only in rural areas of the Dominican Republic.

Meringue has a kind of international (and debated) history as well. We know it is a French dessert, but, according to Wikipedia: "It is believed that meringue was invented in the Swiss town of Meiringen by an Italian chef named Gasparini (legend varies in regard to the date of invention, between 1600 and 1720)."

As I think of it, merengue and meringue connect for me in the universe of pleasure. That is, pleasure as opposed to entertainment, which is a kind of city-country theme I've stumbled upon in these posts. There is a sense - loosely, over-generalized - in which I associate suburban culture with American culture, and, I admit, the worst of stereotypical American culture: fast food, TV-addiction, processed/packaged/fabricated everything, and passive experiences of entertainment (American Idol, etc.). One of the things you encounter when you travel or meet people from other countries is a very different - healthier and more natural, I think - relationship with the body: the natural, untormented ability to experience physical pleasures which are neither addictions nor guilt-ridden; a more intuitive sense of what the body wants and needs; how to engage and address those needs deeply; and when it's enough.

I've always admired cultures in which dance is a regular, organic activity. In the (white) suburbs, little girls go to dance class, but rarely do folks go out dancing. (Maybe more so in the suburbs of the '60's and '70's?) I loved this about the American South; in New Orleans, in a regular ole family restaurant, people are eating crawfish etouffee, the Zydeco band is playing (France again! Haiti!), and couples, young and old, just get up to dance. Men just know how to dance, they grew up in it. You can see how far Americans have fallen away from the mind/soul/body connection when you look at the popularity of yoga these days. (I see yoga centers in many of the small towns in the country as often as I do throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.) I do yoga myself, and yes I find it pleasurable; but yoga is a very individual-focused practice, and for Americans at this particular cultural moment, I think it's a kind of corrective (managing stress, realigning from too much desk-sitting, etc.), as opposed to a pleasure. It doesn't get to this pleasure principle, i.e. movement as relationship and sensuality and community.

I'm not a big fan of meringue, frankly. I'll pick chocolate mud cake over key lime pie anyday. But here's an interesting exchange, from a Web page titled "Making Perfect Meringue":

QUESTION: I have tried many times over many years to make meringue. When I lived in Northern PA. I use [sic] to bake as a teenager and my meringues were beautiful and big. I now live in southern Pa. and my meringue stinks. It comes out of the oven, huge and nice, but give it 5 minutes out of the oven and its [sic] flat as a pancake. I've tried under beating, and over beating, and all types of recipes, but it's always th[e] same. I know it's always humid down here, but this is ridiculous. I've lived down here for 30 years now and it never changes. HELP.

ANSWER: Humidity affects a meringue's texture. Damp, humid days may cause it to be limp and sticky. Check the weather outside before you start. You can not make crisp meringue on a humid day. Meringue should be made on dry days. The cornstarch mixture helps them hold up under humid conditions, but to ensure success, plan to bake when it is less humid.

Sultry merengue, arid meringue. This "southern" baker should try some merengue.

How Is My Driving?

I have a flip-floppy relationship with cars. Growing up in the suburbs, yes, all car all the time. Mom chauffered us faithfully, in a series of Chevy station wagons (our family also has terrible luck with cars; due to thefts and accidents, we've gone through cars like most people go through shoes). But then, in the 9th grade, I was off to boarding school; so no car for me, no teenage joy rides or tailgate parties (in fact, although I grew up in the Washington, DC area, I know my way around about 5 other cities, including Paris and Joahnnesburg, better than DC, because I never lived there as a driving or adult being).

College and a few years extra in New York City. Again no car. Then, a move to Seattle, and I learned, at the ripe old age of 23, how to drive. I mean, I knew how to drive; but I really became a driving person, a person who finds her way around a place by car (and parallel parks in a stick-shift on steep inclines). And also learned about cars themselves, about repair costs and insurance, about all-wheel drive, and about gas prices and oil consumption.

Back to NYC. Back to the glorious bargain that is the NYC MTA unlimited metro pass, back to wonderful, dense, environmentally-friendly pedestrian life.

Then, the big life bust-up, i.e. city-country commuting. So now, me and my car, my '95 Saturn with manual everything and 177k miles on it, worth well-less than the insurance premium I pay and certainly much less than the repair work that's gone into it; we are like this.

Today, day two in the country, a quick overnighter, arrived yesterday about noon, heading back later this evening. I don't often do this - zip out for less than 48 hours - but my family trip displaced my normal stay, and it's hot and dry, and things need tending to out here. Plus, the truth is, the driving is not taxing, it is the opposite; long-distance driving is very restorative, it is peace time, it is quiet and thinking time, it is book-on-tape and music-fill-my-head (chasing out stressful and tangled thoughts and replacing them with rhythm and beat and movement) time. Weirdly - and I suppose this says something about me - I am never more at rest than when I am in transit.

And sometimes, like yesterday, the drive is particularly fruitful. I conducted some business by cell phone. I listened to the news to catch up on current events, and then to several chapters of a book I am enjoying. And then, because for whatever reason my mind felt open and rested and fertile, a feast - a veritable cornucopia of ideas related to the novel I am writing and another book which is germinating - came pouring forth. And now this is where the driving gets a little scary. These thoughts and words and gems needed to be jotted down. I am on the highway, I am reaching over to my bag and fishing for a piece of paper (WHY don't I carry a small notebook with me?), I fish and rummage and find a pen but no paper, I start writing cryptic acronyms on my hand, trusting that I will remember what they stand for; but my hand is kind of warm and sweaty, so this isn't really working. I reach over and fish around some more, I find a receipt which I flip over, to write on the back. I am also having to downshift, because now I am in a construction zone, and the lanes have narrowed, there are orange cones to one side of me and a concrete construction wall to the other, I am shifting and writing and breaking and this is really not such a good idea, but oh well... you do what you gotta do.

I am of course ambivalent about all this driving, all this fuel. But my Saturn gets 35 miles per gallon, which makes me quite happy; and a full tank costs me about $25 these days, gets me to the country and back just about twice. It could be worse. And, once I'm here, I'm here. The car pretty much sits, except for the occasional run to the General Store for sundries or the paper. At any rate, I drive now. And if my car were a person, I think it (she?) would be a pretty happy person, someone who feels stretched to her limits and fulfilling her purpose - responsibly, and with gusto.

It's a Dirty Life

Today was cleaning/organization day in the Bronx. J. came home last night with a truck-full of Ikea storage units. The piles of clutter had gotten out of hand, to the point where the pile-areas were beginning to outnumber the actual functional areas (bed, table, couch), and the place was beginning to resemble the sorting warehouse for a Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was one of those days where once you get started, you just keep going: we washed windows, scrubbed countertops, wiped down bookshelves, rearranged the contents of cabinets, vacuumed...

It's funny, this sudden dose of Northern European orderliness, especially on the heels of my suburban excursion. I wouldn't say that I am a particularly clean person, or adept at housekeeping - I am not one of those a-place-for-everything type of people (and have been known to grow hot with envy when I enter the abode, work space, or automobile, of someone who is - how do they do it?). But as a result of my suburban upbringing, a certain immaculate newness is more familiar to me than not - new homes, brightly-lit supermarkets with strictly-organized aisles of perfect produce, clean streets and well-manicured lawns, shiny new cars. The suburban life is rooted in this culture of well-maintainedness, and people spend their time and money to uphold it; it's second nature, and a kind of communal contract.

City life and country life, on the other hand, are both pretty dirty. In the Bronx especially, but also in Manhattan and Brooklyn where I've lived in the past, visitors from other places notice it immediately: the air is dirty, your hands are always dirty (the other reason I feel bad about my hands: I probably wash them four or five times/day), the subway stations, the streets, your apartment windowsill and pretty much every exposed surface. At some point, you relent, you accept the dirt, your relationship with it becomes more about health than appearance, i.e. you clean because you don't want to get sick, not because you want your wine glasses to sparkle.

In the country of course, dirt is where you are. We're in red shale land where I am, and the dust is everywhere. In warmer weather, you're in and out of the house constantly, tending to the yard or walking the dog, so dirt tracks in and out with you (I have become a dirt-under-your-fingernails kind of gal, and I've just sort of given in). And of course, there are the spiderwebs and insect carcasses. My pup came down out of the woods once with a deer hoof in his jaws.

Wow, you should see the place: we are orderly, we rock! The clutter is out of sight, things are folded and placed neatly on shelves. We can see the surface of the dining table! Who knew it was such nice wood. It's like something out of Real Simple, a before and after story.

Speaking of which, a friend of mine bought me a gift subscription last year. It's regular bathroom reading in the country (J. even reads it, cover to cover). I'd say it's one of those guilty pleasures, but in fact it's more like a guilty torture: it occurred to me one day that all those "helpful hints" and "problem solvers" are really more like reminders of things that I guess I am supposed to be worried about but that I would never think of in the first place. Oh my God, is that how you get stains out of the sink? Oh my God, am I supposed to be getting all the stains out of my sink?

Cleaning has always felt to me like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill. The minute you clean it, it's dirty again. Life is always unraveling, and we're always working to reorder it. Dirt accrues. Entropy. Glorious nature. I try to remember that dust is really my own skin. But cleaning is also in nature, I guess - cats, birds, etc. I wonder what the "standard" for cleanliness really should be, if there is a should? What would the cats and the birds tell us if they could? I sometimes think we should just do the best we can do with a broom, a dustpan, a rag, and a bucket of sudsy water - and leave it at that. If it's good enough for the farm wife or the pioneer woman, it's good enough for me (dysentery and cholera notwithstanding).

In the end, it's really about vantage point, isn't it? Up close vs. far away? From where I'm sitting, this place looks pretty clean; but if I get up into the nooks and crevices with my magnifying glass...

I am reminded now of a particularly affecting story of Mary Gordon's called "City Life," about a woman living in filth in her NYC apartment, a kind of exploration of the existential state of dirty-ness. Well worth the read.

The Suburbs & I Make Peace

Now that's an orchid. My mother has a knack for them, it seems.

We go on a mission to Target, to pick up a trunk-full of diapers for my sister. Most all the commerical areas nearby are different, but the same, from what I remember. "Did this used to be Wheaton Plaza?" I ask my mother. The answer is yes, now it goes by some other name, a corporate conglomerate that has bought and renamed most of the shopping malls in the area. The Target is new - newish. I guess it's all old now, I haven't lived here for over 20 years.

My mother tells me that this shopping mall is now a little "scary." Asian and Latino gangs, apparently. I am reminded about the other side of suburban communities: the immigrants, the poor. My mother has just told me that "anywhere there are still rental apartments" (everything has turned condo), you have new immigrants and the poor - and a prevalence of violence and crime. At least the sort of crime you hear about on the evening news. She lists off a few isolated neighborhoods here and there to illustrate, and a few recent incidents. I ask my mother why these groups settle in the area, especially given the increasing unavailability of affordable housing. "Jobs," she says. Right. There are so many amenities here for the wealthy, someone has to fill out the service sector: housekeepers and nannies, grocery stockers and baggers, landscapers, waiters and busboys and dishwashers. They come for the jobs, but there's nowhere for them to live.

My father is a physician. He came, too, as an immigrant, having pulled himself up by some pretty tattered bootstraps (in fact, as a child, his family sometimes did not have money for shoes), but he came with professional skills, at a time when doctors were in great need, so it was easy to get the necessary work visa. Because of some psychological and social skill issues, my father could never work well with others, so he set up a private practice (managed by mom, who has super-duper social skills). These same issues, along with an inherent racism (stronger back then than now) towards a foreign doctor with a thick accent, landed him practicing in one of these poor, apartment-full areas, almost exlusively African American (the immigrants came in waves later).

I share all this mostly to remind myself that the suburbs are a complicated environment, despite the neat-and-tidy surfaces, the sheen of perfection that sometimes suffocates me when I visit. The time I spend with my family - every few months, a few days at a time - is usually tense, fraught with the discomfort of my having made life decisions so far outside their scope of understanding, their world. To them, suburban life - the neatness, the put-togetherness, the stability and path-of-least-resistanceness - are everything a solid adult person should strive for. Why would anyone pursue - or claim to thrive in - difficulty, or messiness, of any kind? It troubles them. More and more, as I get older, and as my life evolves in a less and less conventional way. My father, I think, is even a little afraid of me. They are not sure how to speak to me, what to talk about, who this strange woman is who once was their comprehensible (if a bit moody) daughter; and I am not very good anymore at keeping smooth surfaces intact, at smiling pretty for the sake of it.

But something occurs to me as I am driving back to New York. The drive back is usually a time of decompression for me, a great relief, easier breathing, a kind of deep and wide happiness unfolding. I am returning now to my life. It's not that I dislike my family; on the contrary, I love them, and ultimately respect them, deeply. Still, there are people you love better from a distance, and for now, this is the case with me and my family. What I think about is how easy it would be to assume that what they want from me is capitulation and conformity; that they want me to be neat and tidy, stable and "normal," just for the sake of appearances. It would be easy to underestimate them in this way, and to grow defensive and angry.

But really, what they want, what I know in my heart they want, is for me to be truly, deeply well, in every way (and what I want for them, too, by the way). And because I want this too, because I know in my gut that I am pursuing deep wellness in the way that makes the most sense for me, for the way I'm wired; I take comfort. The tension may always be there, and the sense of dissonance may only increase when we spend time together. But in the end, we all really do recognize and desire health and beauty: we want the orchid to live, to bloom, to flourish.

That Thing We Don't Talk About

That would be money.

I am thinking about money more than ever these days; mostly because I have less of it than I've ever had. This is not a complaint, as my financial status is mostly a choice: I work freelance, and I work less than full-time, so that I can write and live part-time in the country and grow vegetables and be the mistress of my own hours. I consider thoroughly the distinction between need and want on an almost hourly basis, every time an urge or desire (which involves financial expense) arises. On a tight budget, the process by which an appetite or inclination churns through the need-or-want litmus test machinery becomes thorough, layered, and verging on existential. Why do I want this thing, and what is really essential to wellness, health, and goodness in this life?

[Case in point: I am here in the tidy, affluent suburbs visiting my sister (who has just had a baby). I am making coffee using her deluxe multi-function sleek black gold filter coffeemaker. I am thinking, This is cool, wow, this is a fun gadget. And then, I am thinking, Would I spend money on this? Would this make my life better than a $12 bare bones automatic? And the answer comes back clear and swift: nah.]

This may give the impression of an austere and white-knuckling existence of deprivation. Quite the contrary. In fact, I'd venture to say that while this is the least financially-bountiful time of my life, it is also the richest time of my life - in pleasure, challenge, and experience.

The draw to the city and the country for me I think are related to this - a particular relationship to material things, to the material world, which is different from the suburbs of my upbringing. Of course materialism is a global phenomonenon, not limited to any particular cultural environment these days. But in the city and the country, one is called upon to flex resourcefulness muscles in particularly intense ways: the farmer is the original DIY guy; and on a small income in a city like New York, you become a genius of creative survival and DIY pleasures.

In the country, we grow food from seed, we chop wood, we cut grass with used equipment, we do as much of our own house projects as possible (although as I've written, I am only slowly growing into all this), we walk, we swim, we browse yard sales, I bake, he grills, we hunt mushrooms, we sit on the porch and read or talk, I write, he thinks, we shovel snow and jog in the rain, we breathe into the backs of our lungs. Sometimes, we smoke a good cigar. We delve deeply into pleasure - a joy which comes from a certain measure of exertion - and minimally call upon entertainment, the sort of pleasure-like experience which is primarily passive (don't get me wrong, though; we do enjoy a good movie on DVD.) And we do it mostly without opening our wallets.

In the city, bargain-hunting and minimal living is truly life-as-art. Dumpster-diving (or "curbside recycling") is no joke, it is extreme interior design for the most ambitious beauty-lovers. Chinatown and the farmers' markets are complementary subsistence staples. Eating out on a regular basis is the middle-class NYer's financial Achilles Heel; we commit to the life of home-cooking, become intimate with the contents of the fridge (timely "repurposers" of that which is about to go south), and make serious use of the freezer (an $8 Puerto Rican breakfast out, thus, becomes an event, and a savored one). For the daily commuter, the unlimited 30-day metro pass is the World's Best Urban Bargain, and eco-friendly to boot.

I can't remember the last time I bought an article of clothing. And I can't remember the last time I missed it.

The rewards of the light footprint on the planet are indeed deep and wide; with less to spend, there is much to be gained. I realize that all this can smack of yuppie-crunchy hobby-tourism; with any luck, it's more than that, it's a real evolving life.

Yesterday, just before leaving the city for this visit to the suburbs, I found myself power-browsing the $1 book carts outside The Strand - that mecca of discount literature - on a somewhat strange mission. My sister had requested I bring a book or two, "something light" - literally, something she could hold in one hand while breastfeeding. The $1 book carts (throughout the city, not just Strand - let me recommend Housing Works Bookstore as well) are a beautiful, glorious thing. Some of my deepest, most lasting pleasures have been found on these carts - EL Doctorow's Ragtime, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses is a recent purchase awaiting me), and I left there with two promising, less-than-one-inch-wide paperbacks (Amy Bloom and Laurie Colwin), a $2.16 investment. The pleasure is in the exertion (if you are familiar with the claustrophobic chaos which is the Strand, you know my meaning) and in the discovery.

My sister and her husband are stressed about money. Between the two of them, they make what seems to me a goodly income. Sis and I do a pretty good job of letting one another live and let live, without judgment; although I suspect we each consider at times the impossibility of the other's true happiness. I can only say that this is my life now, waist-deep in the worlds of difficult pleasures, city and country, and thanks to any of you who take the time to read about it.

Cased in Clean Bark You Drift

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.

-Louis Gluck, "The Undertaking"

It was only a matter of time before I began invoking poetry into these posts. Hence, a new blog category. It was only a matter of time before I began invoking Louise Gluck. I am told she is the most popular poet among New Yorker magazine readers, young and old. Hmm... The excerpt in my last post was published recently in the New Yorker; "The Undertaking" is from her collection The House on Marshland, published in 1975. Her later poems are very much death/mortality-focused, (emotionally) spare to the point of near-desolation (it is the "near" that is significant here...). The above is brimming with the warm hope of a woman 30 years less worn, less lived.

Autumn is in the air here in the farm lands. It was chilly last night, and windy. Today, the chill remains. The second crop of cool-weather greens is starting to sprout (lettuce, spinach, snap peas). The tomatoes and squash are struggling to turn color. J. has gone fishin', I am here with my words.

Autumn and Louise Gluck - they go together for me. Perhaps because the first poem of hers which struck me, from her recent collection Averno, is called "October." These are the lines that somehow stopped me in my tracks:

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

Something about the artist's deep sense of uselessness, of ultimate incompetence, at the end of the day, amidst all the world's troubles. And yet, wanting to be useful, seeking those tiny opportunities, to make offerings. And now/all fear gives way... It's not much, it's not much. But it's something.

Gardener in da House

So here they are, urban greenery. In a couple of weeks I'll plant some fall-flowering annuals for color and cheer, along with arugula and spinach. The butterfly bush and lavendar are for year-round effects (scent and butterflies - are there butterflies in the Bronx? I guess we'll see).

I'm a little worried about the pots getting stolen from the stoop. J., the super, knows I've planted them and so hopefully he'll keep an eye out.

lettuces, lettuces

First signs of life on our stoop

lavendar "Grappenhall"

butterfly bush

Lettuces, Lettuces

K. from down the block (aka "The Bird Man") came by to look over the back yard here in the Bronx. Initially he was all "volunteer" about it; yesterday, it was clear he was hustling for paid work (and being skeazy about it). How silly of me - to think that someone would actually do something for nothing. But seriously, I understand, we all need to make ends meet, we all need to do what we need to do. It's the misleading part that bugs me.

So the backyard project may go slower than we thought. Which is fine... "slow and steady wins the race," as they say. In the meantime, I've gone ahead, with our landlord's approval (and funding) on a few plants for the stoop and fire escape: two butterfly bushes, a couple of lavenders (hardy Grappenhall), and wild lettuces. We did the supplies shopping last night (pots, trowel, potting soil) and picked up the plants from Trina at Union Square Market today. Trina's nursery is the one out in the country; my butterfly bushes were labeled and ready for me.

Lettuces, lettuces. From Louise Gluck's poem "A Village Life," recently published in The New Yorker:

I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,
as though I were already a factor in it.
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.

Yard Day Again: First-Year Harvest & Lessons Learned

It's a huge job - the lawn, that is - and J. and I are working together. If we had a weed whacker, it might go more quickly; but something in me resists. The noise pollution, the gas-power (I'm looking into cordless electric ones), it feels like high impact where lo-impact might be do-able. I pulled a lot of the taller weeds out by the roots; it will take the entire fall season probably to get them all.

It's late season now, so most of the veges have done all the work they're going to do. I harvested a row of beets - tiny 2-inch guys that were supposed to get to more like 3-4 inches - and made a yummy beet & goat cheese salad (boy, lots of investment for ONE salad). Am looking forward to sauteeing the greens. Also have a couple of tomatoes just about ready to drop, and a yellow squash that should be sizable by next week. No luck at all with eggplant. The green beans have done reasonably well, but not abundant by any means; the chili peppers don't seem to be turning red. The lettuces are finishing up, and I've planted a new crop of greens for fall, along with snap peas and spinach. Mostly, it's clear that my garden does not get enough sun, and that a lot of the plants needed to be staked or supported in some way. I'm scoping out alternate/additional sites for next year, and I guess I should get smarter about supports. (Structural engineer I am not.)

Driving around the area, I am amazed by the size and scope of people's gardens. Many of these are summer homes, and I can't help but wonder who does all the work, how they manage to plant and maintain so much. It can really be a full-time job. Do they have hired gardeners do it for them? Or, more likely, they've been building their gardens for many many years. Gardening is nothing if not a supreme exercise in patience, learning, and persistence.

Speaking of huge gardens, we stopped at a local CSA farm / nursery on the way back to the city. I had actually learned of it at the farmer's market, in Manhattan. So strange, meeting the woman who runs the nursery in the middle of an urban park, then visiting her farm in the country, then asking her to label two butterfly bushes to bring with her to the city so I can pick them up during the week. City and country are forging ties like this more and more, it seems.

The butterfly bushes are for the Bronx. Our landlord is working on the backyard fencing, and hopefully will clear out the concrete and lay down some mulch. K. from next door is going to have a look and make some recommendations, maybe even donate some end-of-year inventory from the garden center nearby where he works. In the meantime, I'm working on gathering up a few plants that might survive the industrial climate... better than Ella did.

Her roots seem to have dried out a bit (they were soggy and a little moldy), but I'm not sure if there's life left in there. I'll keep tending to her, though; you just never know.

An Orchid May Not Grow in the Bronx

I’m sad to report that Ella has really taken a turn for the worse. All her blooms and all her leaves have fallen. I found her in this state after a few days in the country. Her leaves were yellow and soggy, her branches dead at the tops.

I am not sure if she’ll come back. I cut back her branches and set her back on the window sill. I don’t think it’s either light or water – she seems to be getting the required amount of both. I do think it may be air circulation. It’s been so hot, so the windows are often closed and the a/c running. I also think that the air quality here in the Bronx may be poisonous to her.

If her roots have rotted, then that’s it for her. I can see that they are looking a little sodden but am not yet convinced she’s done for. We’ll see. Our windowsill herbs - basil, oregano, thyme - are doing great, as are The Little Men. The Cuban oregano is thriving as well.

Meantime, our landlord is going forth with fencing and groundcover in the back “yard.” So I’m hoping to do some container gardening back there. It’s late in the season, so maybe I can try a last crop of lettuce from seed, some hardy herbs, a shrub or two... I suppose it might seem strange, a little obsessive, all this micro-focus on the plants. I've thought about why it's so important, and I guess it's not so mysterious - the inquiry, that is: can living things thrive and blossom in this environment? Can beauty flourish? What does beauty and health look like in a community primarily characterized by poverty, blight, and neglect - or maybe I should say a community built around industry, not living beings?

We have a neighbor, K., who lives two doors down. We call him The Bird Man, because he walks around (always) with a parrot on his shoulder. (Last we heard, he was awaiting a second parrot, to keep the first one company.) K. works at a garden center down under the Third Avenue Bridge - Dmitri's, in a parking lot, kiddie corner to the Bar & Grill and the motorcycle shop. I've been meaning to check it out, will be sure to do so if/when the backyard garden comes to fruition.

It’s 100 degrees and all the subways are down from last night’s torrential rain. I look around at this city of crazies, sweating it out and late for our meetings – so many of us transplants, “paying the price” for urban living, culture, energy, whatever it is we came here for. The gloss definitely wears off, and you decide, at some point, whether to “naturalize” – to make your life here, a real life, a native-like life, regardless of ambition, shine, “juice.” Ambition is a funny thing – sure, it drives you for periods of time, but it also eats away at your soul, bit by bit. Ambition is often about comparison, at its root – it’s about competition, which means your success relative to the next guy. One of the most difficult things, in this city of lights and buzz, is to find one’s core motivations – what it is that makes you tick, makes you strive, cultivates real and deep creativity and intelligence and meaning and satisfaction – regardless of what other people are doing.

Me, I'm doing plants. Oh, and writing a novel.

Update on G. and the puppy: they're doing great, really bonding. The puppy, Fiona, is starting to get that G. is boss. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite get that the dog obedience teacher is boss, so she bit her last week in class; which prompted a phone call to G., recommending she detach emotionally and give the pup away - claiming that the pup will eventually bite someone for real and then it will be big trouble. Well, G. is not going to be so easily discouraged (on my last visit, I could see the two of them were really becoming family); she is going to try another obedience class, get a second opinion. G. didn't much like this teacher anyway, so maybe the pup picked up on that. It's tough out there, you know; maybe it's not such a bad thing to have a defender.

Ella, Meet Francie

It's sad, watching Ella suffer like this. Especially when the cause is likely too much of this, or too much of that (as opposed to too little of this, or too little of that) - which means there is nothing to do but wait and hope that her new location is a better one.

Other members of the "family" are doing better. J. re-potted the basil to make room for the rosemary and oregano - they were all squished in together. The cuban oregano is next for re-potting. One of the "Little Men" is now installed in the bathroom, which J. says is "so gay." I have no experience with this, so I have no comment.

So with nothing to do but wait and hope - with regards to Ella - I'm thinking about this blog's namesake, i.e. Betty Smith's 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it as a child - maybe 4th or 5th grade - so I remember it little, except that it's about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn facing hard times, coming of age as a romantic in lonely and difficult circumstances. I read that there is an excellent audio version, read by Bernadette Dunne. I'm all over it.