Gifts From the Cosmos: A Good Day in the City

Saturday in the city, a rarity for me these days. I'm here to help staff a giant sidewalk book sale, produced by and benefiting a charity org, for which I work part-time.

It's a perfect fall day, crisp and sunny. The sale is taking place on a cobblestone street in SoHo, a long city block, and it's packed. People lined up a good hour before the cash registers opened, and (amusingly) at the stroke of ten a.m., it was like an Olympic track & field relay: on your mark, get set, go! The crowds descended upon hundreds of boxes-full of used books & CDs in a graceful, synchronized swarm.

Urbanites, cultural materials, dirt-cheap bargains (everything for a dollah). This event epitomizes the adage, One man's garbage is another man's treasure. I am reminded today, here in the affluent and/or educated sector of the urban jungle, of a different kind of commerce: the commerce of old things, rare things - high-culture recycled junk. The event was in fact conceived as a way to get rid of the dregs, the books that do not sell in the store, nor on the Internet - the books that, literally, are stored in the sub-basement. Now in its third year, the event has developed a reputation as a place to discover gems. People mark it on their calendars, arrive early, psyche themselves up - this is not shopping in the passive, mind-numbing, guilty-pleasure sense. This is renegade urban exploration, a Saturday journey to nether-worlds - and an opportunity to be surprised and blessed by the cosmos. One does not arrive with a particular item in mind; rather, this is where the book you didn't even know you were looking for finds you.

And indeed, I was amazed by the seriousness of the endeavor, particularly with the morning crowd, before the food vendors started grilling and the jazz-blasting speakers came out. The tent areas were crowded with bodies, but there was no pushing or shoving; all were civilized, and focused. It was church-like - no kidding - a kind of religious hush prevailing. In planning meetings, the staff had talked about categorizing and labeling the book bins more specifically; but observing the scene this morning, I thought, No, let the people search, let them peruse and explore. This is what they came for.

I found some early editions of Rilke's letters, Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, and Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief (I hovered mostly around the classic hard covers). Ultimately I left them for other pilgrims, remembering the teetering tower of books-on-the-night-table (in both PA and the Bronx); but I did snag Gombrich's The Story of Art, which has been on my list for a couple years now.

And, at the end of the street, the bookstore's sister business, a popular thrift store, set up giant bins of second-hand clothing and shoes, filled with fashionable discards from the wealthy (oh fashion, I cannot escape thee!). It works like this: buy a paper shopping bag for $20, fill it with all you can stuff, and off you go. Holy moly! This is Extreme Street-Shopping at its most intense. I found a bin filled with things around my size, waited and watched as a tiny woman picked through (nearly dove in, full body, I swear) every last item, then stepped up and stuffed away. The booty: an Italian-made stretchy black cocktail dress, 5 sweaters, a CK silk blazer, a leather purse, 3 pairs of pants, two tank tops, and a fun stretchy-red blouse (I have no idea if any of this will fit me, so some of you gals out there may receive a care package). Likely $500+ worth of apparel for twenty freaking bucks.

It's a rather bizarre carousel of exhanges, but somehow it works: rich people giving their things away so that people from all walks can buy them cheaply and benefit - materially, intellectually, spiritually - so that a charity organization which serves homeless people can raise income, so that the poor can receive the ultimate benefits. It's win-win-win, trickle-down and entrepreneurialism in action; it's how the city, with its vastly rich and abjectly poor, makes peace with itself - at least for a day.

My Ambition

Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.
- Paul Morgan, screenwriter (THE QUEEN) & playwright ("Frost/Nixon")

I'm a little bit country. I'm a little bit rock 'n' roll.
-Donny & Marie

City=ambition. Country=retreat (I'm thinking here of the verb form, as in, to withdraw, to recede...an implication of ceding defeat).

The notion of ambition as an expression of damage - wow, that's something. That would make a place like New York City a kind of vat-full of ruined souls, manifesting their pain in high achievement, in fierce competition and freakish single-mindedness.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

In her gazillion-weeks-on-the-bestseller-list memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of her experience in Bali:

Everywhere in this town, you see the same kind of character: Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life, that they've dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely....where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it... but generally all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again... This is a very high grade of people - multi-national, talented, and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally married or employed) and now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say there's a lot of drinking... When I am around this scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz: be careful, don't fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life."

Ambition. There is something about it that is driven by brokenness, and a burning need to right something. Contentment of the happy-happy variety and ambition do not often go hand-in-hand, do they. And the city feeds off of it, this ambition, this energy, this urge to ascend, perhaps transcend, whatever demons plague us; and if you do not partake, you feel the sting. Are you someone? Are you no one? What do you have to show for yourself? For what are you striving? What creds can you flash, what contacts in your rolodex? What are you selling, and who's buying? It sounds so hackneyed, so trite, a caricature. But my experience is that it's real. Everyone's got an angle, people are out for themselves, they want to be someone, go somewhere. And they will do what needs to be done.

I was telling a friend recently about my experiences in seeking a literary agent, how frustrating and demoralizing it's been, how distracting from the work (and joy) of writing. How I feel caught in the middle, between wanting to publish a novel, and wanting to "doze away the rest of my life" in quiet contentment, in the country. How miserable I am when I am in ambition mode. In ambition mode, you must contend with The Market. As an artist in The Market, you must have more than creative talent, more than serious ideas or lyric genius; you must have something to sell, something that people will buy. And you must be willing to play the game. You must be willing to cede the power to determine the worth of art to people like agents, and editors, and publishing executives - people whose primary skill is not spiritual wisdom, or aesthetic vision, or crafting language. Their skill is understanding the mass market and centering all things around the behavior, the intelligence, the cravings of that market. I'm not one to think that the market is always bad, or that popular equals shoddy. But the market is the market; the market is where people are, it is anathema to reach, or vision, or difficult pleasure.

And the market is unforgiving. You cannot be a little ambitious; in fact, ambivalence about ambition is the worst place to be. If you want it, you must to be prepared to do whatever it takes to get it. If you wobble, if you waver, if you hem and haw, you will fail. And if you're going to fail, it's better to let it go completely, rather than torment yourself with your little bit of ambition, your mousy hope in partaking in The Arena of Recognition & Success.

Of course country life, in my (limited) experience, is not dozing. There is hard work to be done, living in retreat - physical, creative, intellectual, spiritual. But you are, more or less, working for the sake of beauty, for joy, for the light of day; you are a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear, to see, to affirm. There is a kind of purity to this life, yes; and a deep loneliness. A life in full-time retreat is, I think, a kind of calling. A vocation. Perhaps even a different breed of ambition, one focused solely on the inner life. I have always been interested in, drawn to, this vocation. But you can't really be a little monastic either.

Tales from the city and country. Tales of ambition and retreat. Maybe Donny & Marie could do it - a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll - but then again, there were two of them. I wonder and worry that my promiscuity, my bigamy, will be my downfall.

Fashion Again: Appropriation and the Morality of the Artificial

Back in the city, catching up on piles of periodicals, and thinking again about fashion. In the NY Times Mag Men's Fall Fashion issue, a Tommy Hilfiger ad speaks mountains (or oceans, as the case may be): two handsome young fellas with perfectly-wavy-perfectly-mussed-perfectly gelled hair (one fair/blonde, one dark/brunette), wearing tailored suits over preppy collar-shirts and thick-striped ties, on a rugged (New England) beach, the tide coming in, white water breaking, Hans and Giovanni (I'll call them) each in action stance, reeling in a catch on their tensed fishing rods (yes, fishing rods), and wearing, pulled up over their (wet) Italian-wool pant legs.... Wellies. Kelly green.

My observant friend L., reading my recent post on fashion, wrote to me: "My grandmother wouldn't have been caught dead in Wellies, however colorful. Those are for slopping hogs, child."

Of course, how could I miss it: the appropriation of country function for city fashion. Urban sophistication on a rugged coast, painstakingly styled by Mr. Hilfiger. Wellies and fishing rods as this year's fall fashion statement. Next year, what - orange reflective hunting vests? Bring back overalls? Re-purpose the quaintness of the rube for the urban sophisticate, et voila! High style. (Try the reciprocal, and you will only further rube-ify).

It's all artifice, of course. Not to get too pedantic here, but there is artifice which is art - the crafting of a fiction which is driven by idea, by moral vision, by spiritual truth, radiating out and resonating to depths - and there is artifice which is no more than its own referent. I am not trying (nor am I smart enough or qualified) to be the authenticity police here, but fashion does ring hollow on many counts. Something happens when you take all the function out of something. Function is integral to beauty, I think. In many cases, the function is the beauty. When you take something which was designed for a purpose - and well-designed for that purpose - and remove it from that purpose completely - for what? for commerce, for lifestyle - you've done something perhaps in the realm of homicide. You've killed the thing, its function, its beauty. Mr. Hilfiger (his ad designers anyway) even seems to be toying with the idea of fashion as God: "HILFIGER" in large, ghostly block letters across the background, stamping the skies.

Again, what's the relationship here? Do Hans and Giovanni have any real connection to fishing on a misty coastline, to hog-slopping, to the heritage of plaid or pinstripes even? I doubt it. I'm pretty sure neither of them is even holding the fishing rod correctly.

I'm sounding grouchy, I know. But while I'm on this rant: SUV's. Do soccer mom and dad really need that gigantic four-by-four to get little Johhny and Susie to the playfield? (Let's not even get started on drug-dealer Joe.) Have they ever in their lives gone off-road or into seriously inclement weather on steep inclines in that thing? Their Ford Excessive is clean & shiny; the planet, on the other hand... design and purpose go hand in hand, I think. Some things are, of course, designed purely for pleasure, for observance, for beholding (useless beauty, a la Kant, etc). Some things are created for work, not pleasure alone, and something really terrible - insidious and violating - begins to happen when you remove from a thing completely its best, intended purpose. Perhaps it's the difference between appropriation (mercenary, impersonal, profit-driven) and adaptation (innovative, humanist, purposeful).

It's 85-degrees and humid today, the urban hot-house indeed. My goal is to seek out the good today, or at least be receptive. I need some.

Let Evening Come

I'm in the city today, but it's one of those days... when I'm hating being here.

"Let Evening Come," fall poem, a country poem, by Jane Kenyon... about letting go of summer, letting go of daylight; fearing not the cold nor the dark, knowing that we are never without comfort.


Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes us her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.


Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

I Make Friends With the Postmistress

C. is a God-send. I think how it could have been different. I think how I may never have met C., how she may have never become a regular source of comfort, wisdom, practical help. I think how thankful I am it turned out this way.

When I bought the house in the country and was figuring out what to do for mail delivery, there was some confusion: all the residences in the county had just been re-addressed for emergency purposes, i.e. some homes previously had no numbers assigned to them, but now they all did, so that the 911 system could map every residence (I still don't think my house shows up on googlemaps, though). As a result, postal delivery was also re-assigned, but somehow I got lost in the shuffle. There are three post offices within a couple miles of my house, and I was told to "pick one." No matter which I chose, I would have to request special mail delivery, i.e. my house is on no particular postal route, the mail carrier would have to make a special trip; and I would have to install a mail box. I called around, and C. was the first postmistress to answer my call and be helpful; so I picked her post office. I decided not to install a mailbox but to keep a PO Box instead. I thought, it would not be a bad thing to have to make a trip out once in a while, to have a regular errand to run, regular human contact. Plus, C.'s post office shares space with the local general store, where we get the paper and other household staples.

C. has been the postmistress in M.town for about 6 years. Prior to that, she lived in the city. She went back and forth as a weekender for a year, then decided to make the move. She lives alone, in an old farm house with a lovely brook running right through her property. She has three dogs. She's about a half a mile from me and drives by my house on her way to the post office every day. On her lunch hour, she drives home to let the dogs run loose, and I'm often out for a walk at that time, so me and the pup will get out the way and wave as our friend drives by.

C. has been my go-to on everything from gardening tips (she dug her own large garden - no easy task for one person - and amended her soil every year with manure wheelbarrowed down from the farm up the hill, and now grows almost all her own produce), to snow-shoveling, to animal care, to river wisdom. She leaves her canoe out on her front lawn and has offered it for our use "whenever" (we've taken her up on it once). Last winter, when I was snowed in, she delivered my mail to my house for me and kept calling Mike the Snowplower until he actually did show up. She tells me that you can enclose your porch with heavy plastic and turn it into an instant February-March greenhouse. She made the city-to-country transition all alone, she taught herself everything she knows about house and yard maintenance, what do for frozen pipes, you name it. She tells me that her first year here, her staircase caved in and she literally googled "How to Replace a Staircase," went to Home Depot, and did it herself. She has also felled trees with a hand saw (and a friend). C. is my hero.

Today, I pick up my mail, and we chat about how quickly the summer goes, and all the chores facing us as fall and winter loom. We commiserate about how difficult it is, dealing with the relentless repair and maintenance work on a house, when you don't have the money to hire out, the weather is harsh and unforgiving, and you're alone. I am alone only part of the time, she is alone full-time. Did I mention that C. is my hero? "It's really hard," she says. "I love my house, I love my garden, my dogs are happy, but sometimes, don't you just think, What am I DOING here? One thing I realized is that you really have to rely on yourself; because no one else will do it for you."

Hard-earned words of wisdom from kind and generous C.

And then, of course, there's P. the Librarian. Last week she called, because one of the books I'd requested for reserve had arrived and had been waiting for me for over a week (I hadn't had a chance to get over there, I was marooned in the city because of some work appointments). The reserve request was about to expire, but she wanted to make sure I got it if I still wanted it. So she left a message saying she'd hold it another few days for me. And now, I have my Balthasar & Blimunda. Thanks, P. What would I do without you.

It can be harsh and lonely out here, but these one or two people looking out for you - it really just makes all the difference. Yes, we are alone and have to rely on ourselves, but we are relying on ourselves together.

Bronx Fresh

A few pix, Round 2 of the Bronx garden project:


A little bit o' cullah - pansies and begonia



Arugula and a few wild greens from Round 1



For the neighbors - all gobbled up

The Question Remains...

Green Market Day at Union Square today. It's a perfect autumn day, clear and cool, that quality of early autumn light... I can't do it justice (and I call myself a writer... pshhah). It's that bursting-with-the-wondrousness-of- health-and-life feeling that fills Union Square Park (and one's soul as you walk through) on market day in mid-September. I couldn't even find a good picture or description on the Web. Here's the best I could find (there's a panorama).

This is the time of full bounty. It's harvest time, the (literal) fruits of the summer's labor are all here to be enjoyed. This is commerce at its beautiful, local, environmentally-sound best. Warm-weather veges are at the tail end of peak (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, zucchini), and cool-weather veges and root crops are starting to show up too (lettuces and all kinds of greens, peas, potatoes, spinach, squash in a few weeks...). Plums and peaches are finishing up, apples are back. The bakers are the year-round soldiers (amazing breads, pies, cookies, muffins, scones - mostly organic), and today I bought rainbow trout from "The Trout Guy" (I'm going to have to get his info next time) - the scruffy guy with the pickup truck and beer coolers who raises fish up near Oneonta, and who tells me he's there every Wednesday, all year-round, except for a couple of weeks in February. "Love your city, but just once a week," he says. "Takes me 'til Saturday to recover."

I was there mostly for the plants, though. I've got the go-ahead to do a second round of container planting for the backyard up here in the Bronx. The first round of lettuces did great, and I'm getting ready to harvest and make plastic baggies-full for the tenants here.

(D. the landlord is taking the cheap route on fencing and ground cover in the back, which is unfortunate; hopefully it will turn out all right.) I picked up some arugula (spinach didn't look so good), pansies, and a begonia.

I also stopped to chat with the (sniffle sniffle) orchid folks. I told them about Ella (no, I did not actually admit that I had named her), and their diagnosis was (perhaps not surprisingly) that the vendor was not reputable (hey, those are my people!). Many florists sell orchids but don't grow them, the fella explained. So who knows who grew the orchid, how old it was when I got it, what climate it was most suited for (maybe it was grown in Hawaii and shipped over, for instance). This guys grows his in NJ and insists that all his customers are happy. I guess I felt a little better - that maybe it wasn't me, or, my other fear, the Bronx pollution (he seemed to think that the air couldn't be that bad... but then again, what does he know, he lives in NJ). I had also started to worry that maybe Ella wasn't really dead and I shouldn't have tossed her away; but the guy assured me that, when all the leaves are gone, the orchid is done for.

So maybe I'll try again. Maybe this is a lesson in "you get what you pay for." But NJ guy sells his for a pret-ty penny... I'll think on it. In the meantime, the question remains: does an orchid grow in the Bronx?

Roses, Late Summer

Here's one - a poem about the coming of autumn, that is. Which is a poem about many things, big and small, arrival and departure, the coming of going. By Mary Oliver, one of my favorites.

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley,
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

Autumn, How I Love Thee...

Autumn has arrived in the country. Temps are down to the low 40's/high 30's at night, the leaves are starting to turn. We fired up the wood-burning stove to usher in the new season (and burn piles of newspaper). Summer clothes have been put away, long underwear and sweaters and thick socks are all out. The last tomato has turned orangish, the last green beans have been picked, and no luck with either the eggplants or the red peppers this year. I pulled up the zucchini and squash plants - sprawling and sagging all over the place like a series of Andy Warhol medusas - and threw them on the compost pile. A new batch of lettuce and snap peas is coming up. Am going to go hunting the neighborhood for piles of manure to dig in for next spring - no, really: me, the truck, and a shovel - so I don't have to buy it in bags from Home Depot. I'm already thinking about what to do differently next year.

Speaking of orangish, hunting season will start up again. Men with guns in orange vests. Ahh, life in a red state (or I guess now PA is more in the pink). And speaking of guns, it has been suggested to me that I learn how to shoot. Not to kill poor Bambi or her mama, but to have some line of self-defense when the barn-burning ATV boys come hooting and hollering and I'm all by my lonesome. This may not be such a crazy idea. I'll think on it.

Spring and fall are the heavy-duty chore seasons in the country. In the next few weeks, we'll need to chop wood and rake leaves and plant any shrubs or trees we want to start blooming in the spring (lilac is my priority this year - although I'm gun shy, so to speak, after Ella's sad passing). Need to get the chimney cleaned out, the furnace serviced, and probably take a look at insulating the pipes that froze last winter. Maybe consider purchasing a snow-blower - not that I have any godly idea what a snow-blower IS or how it WORKS, but it's on my list-of-things-to-research. I also need a good pair of winter boots and probably a heavy-duty winter coat (my city-girl leather coat is not quite what the doctor ordered). Sigh. All the things I put off last winter because I wanted to get a better sense of what I really needed; and now I have to figure out how to afford all of it.

But it's all good. I love autumn so much, it's impossible to express in plain words. No wonder there are so many poems about autumn. Think I'll go dig some up - stay tuned.

On the Subway: The City's Magnificent Undoing

There's always one: someone on the subway who's shameless about loud-talking, happy for anyone and everyone to hear. Often it's tourists, but not always (local loud-talkers are often young women in pairs, venting about a boss or a boyfriend). Sometimes it's unbearable, this violation of public space, of one's right to a peaceful commute. But there are other times when it's irresistable - eavesdropping, that is.

I'm on the platform at Union Square boarding an uptown 6 train. There is a group of four standing next to me - an older couple, a young guy, and a young gal. The couple and the guy get on the train, the gal is heading off somewhere else. The older woman sits next to me, and the two men stand, forming a triangular conversation - although, it becomes clear that the older man is of few (if any) words.

The woman is the loud-talker. She is a cheerful out-of-towner, probably mid-Western based on the accent, probably from a small town or rural area, based on the dress. The guy is scruffy and skinny, wearing a ratty t-shirt, expensive-looking hipster jeans, and cool thrift store sneakers. I think these are his parents, but it's not clear; they speak to each other more like distant relatives than immediate ones. I learn that the gal and the guy used to work in the same restaurant, but the guy now works in a different restaurant, and the gal quit her job and is leaving the city, back to her hometown, because she was dating the chef and they broke up. The guy's new job is a better job than the one before, perhaps he was a waiter before; now he is something in the realm of a cook. The next part of the conversation goes something like this:

"Why don't you hire her at your restaurant? Poor thing."
"Well, it's not really my restaurant. I mean, if the head chef died or something, I wouldn't like be next in line or anything."
"Aren't you #3? I thought you said you were #3."
"Um, yeah, maybe. I don't know."
"Do you have paid vacation now?"
"Yeah."
"Well that must feel good. Do you know what you'll have off around Christmas?"
"Nah, we won't know until just before."

They go on to talk about an upcoming wedding in the family, which I think is the guy's brother, the couple's other son.

"So are you bringing a date?"
"Nah."
"There will be a lot of single girls there. [Fiancee whose name I didn't catch] has a lot of cousins."
"That would be weird. We'd be, like, related."
"No, not exactly."

The whole conversation was pretty upbeat, but something about it was squirmingly fascinating; I couldn't stop listening. This mother was so eager, so cheerfully eager for her son to be... fixed. #3? #2? #1?* Dating? Married? Planned vacation? The strain of their conversational tone was killing me - so close, and yet so far away. The guy was pleasant and a good city host, but I could just imagine him later, after they left, after their visit was over, lighting up a cigarette, breathing a sigh of relief, calling up a friend (or a therapist) to unload.

People come to the city, and stay, not to be fixed - in any sense of that word. People come, in a sense, for the wild ride of breaking everything open, milling about untethered, so that anything can happen always. It must be awful for all these mothers of lost children, after 18 or 20 years of doing everything to hold these kids together...watching them undo it all.


*I understand that in Bali, there are only four first names. They are not gender-specific, and translated, they are First, Second, Third, Fourth, referring to your birth order.

Fashion Week in the City

A headline yesterday in the Times read: Sept. 11, as a public occasion, has shrunk to life-size. In other words, the general public - distinct from those most directly affected - are beginning to move on. Case in point: this week is Fashion Week in NYC, and there seems to be no particular hesitancy or sense of incongruity about delving into fashion news and activities - something that may have seemed frivolous or offensive a few years ago.

The force of consumerism in the city is one of the most stark contrasts I experience going back and forth to the country. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the particular variety of consumerism which is the consumerism of urbanity (and urbaneness) is a far cry from what you might see in the country - a true cultural divide. My neighbor down the road on the dairy farm may have cable TV and browse InStyle at the grocery store. She may be well aware of what Kelly Clarkson is wearing these days and what sort of purse Angelina Jolie carries. But there is no way in heck she's actually going to attempt to buy or wear those items - unlike her big-city rising-professional counterpart.

I feel my alien-ness in this sense when I'm in the city. Maybe it's my nature, a certain tomboy-ness I inherited from my mother; maybe it's the boarding school influence; maybe it was those years in Seattle; maybe country life is actually starting to shape me. (Or, maybe I just can't afford it!) I wouldn't say I'm a slob or a crunchola; or that I don't have a very specific sense of what I like, or an aesthetic interest in appearances. But fashionista, in the NYC urban-girl sense, I am not.

Let me back up: a little over a year ago, my sister re-gifted to me a wedding present - a Calvin Klein linen throw pillow. She said: "Thought you might like the color, but if you don't want it, take it back to Bloomies." So take it back I did (not that I didn't like it, but hey, did I really need a Calvin Klein throw pillow?). I had an inkling that the exchange value would be pretty high for the little 15-inch-square sucker; and I was right. I pocketed the credit on a gift card and put it away for a rainy day.

So last week, the handbag that I left in the country was recovered. But before it was turned in, it was selectively combed through - they took the cash, my cell phone, two out of three credit cards, and my ATM card. My wallet was still in there, but torn. They left the Bloomies gift card.

So yesterday, I thought: That was close. I should use up this credit before I lose it again or it expires. I was in SoHo for work, a few blocks from the downtown Bloomies, so I made a mission out of it. Which turned out to be a truly other-worldy experience. First of all, I was wearing, ahem, clogs (what do you think this is, lady, Berkeley?). Second of all, do you know how much a pair of blue jeans costs these days? Third, apparently, I have the ugliest, most untended skin (blemishes, crow's feet, you name it) for 10 blocks square South of Houston. Fourth, what am I thinking walking around on a rainy day in anything but a fun pair of knee-high Welly boots (pink, polk-a-dot, animal patterns are good) and a short skirt?

Ok, clearly, I doth protest too much. Clearly, I was not one of the popular girls in high school.

The headline of Guy Trebay's Sunday Styles article, kicking off Fashion Week, reads: Admit It. You Love It. It Matters. "Depending on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts." He goes on to describe how nay-sayers dismiss fashion as "not an art form or a cultural form but a form of vanity & consumerism." And then of course goes on to make the case for fashion as substantive, as mattering.

Sure, ok, I buy it. Fashion as beauty, fashion as art, fashion as craft, fashion as the extravagance which is often the heart of pleasure. But let's make the distinction here, between clothing design and the fashion industry. Not unlike the distinction between art and the art world, literature and the publishing world, etc. Art is about making, art is about beauty, and innovation, the application of talent and passion and vision. What we wear is no more or less frivolous or useless than what we read, what we behold, what we listen to. Fashion can be experience, can take us away or break open our consciousness just as the other arts can. My personal take is that clothing matters when you, as its wearer, have some kind of authentic relationship with it. When there's a story, or an experience, or something true to you about the thing, its wearing, your attraction and connection with it; as opposed to just filling your closet with what everyone else is wearing, the more expensive the better. (In this conception of fashion, probably way liberal for Mr. Trebay, we could be talking about your Manolos or your Yankees t-shirt or your traditional sari or head wrap or Aloha shirt.)

It's when we get into the realm of commerce that all bets are off. Sales and profit are governed and driven by a completely different set of values. It's in the world of commerce and market competition that fashion (and any art form) can get particularly ugly, can devolve into appropriation and exploitation and vanity vanity vanity. And because fashion, as opposed to say, literature, is so fundamentally intertwined with appearances, bodies, vulgar wealth, it is probably the most susceptible. But then again, not necessarily. Every art industry has its dirt, its surfaces, its vanity.

Anyway, I was quite the rube yesterday at Bloomies. I ended up using the credit for a new wallet, my annual vow to be more organized and responsible with my essentials. It's a nice one, but as I inspected the tag and price, I saw that it was Made In China, and it was a bit less expensive than comparable wallets on the shelf. I asked the young salesgirl if it was real leather. "Oh, yes," she said. "This company is great, they're really good at keeping their prices low," she added enthusiastically. Yes, I thought. I'm sure they are.

Elegy for Ella

Ok, friends, it's official: Ella the Orchid is, sadly, expired. I hung on to her - cut down to the stubs of her stems - for probably much longer than any realistic person would. And I've waited to write about it, because, well, I suppose I've been mourning her loss. It pains me, it really does - in a way that makes me feel like I may be a serious freak.

Anyway, today is as good a day as any to write about mourning and loss. I'm in the city but haven't noticed anything particularly different or strange other than the "official" memorials and ceremonials. But then again, I've been inside for much of the day. My connection to the events of 9/11 are pretty abstract: I was living in Seattle at the time, and I didn't know anyone personally who died in the attacks. I called my friend S. and miraculously got through to her cell phone; she was walking uptown from the Federal Court Building, describing the scene to me in real time. But it definitely did not feel real.

I do not, generally, feel worried or unsafe in New York City. I do, on the other hand, feel nervous when I am in the country by myself, when there's nothing but me and a dirt road and 30 acres of farm land surrounding and two guys on ATVs driving by, slowly, eyeing my house. I wonder how many people actually, in their guts, walk around feeling afraid after 9/11. I wonder if there is a difference between the fear levels of city people and country people. People vote and take passionate political stances based on this, and so I wonder how conscious this fear really is, if at all. I wonder how much (and the nature of any) unconscious fear I myself carry with me when I'm in the city.

But back to mourning... I have thought about trying again, with a new orchid plant. But I think maybe I'm not ready yet. Not just yet.

On Vulnerability: Two Night Rides

I.
It is 9:30 in the evening, and I have just realized that I (stupidly) left my bag in a town 20 miles from home. 30 hours have elapsed since the leaving, and yet, I (stupidly) have it in my head that I should drive out there and see if it's still there, in the park where I left it. Wallet, phone, keys, checkbook, everything is in there. You're driving, J. says.

9:30 in the evening in farm country is late. If you are waking up at 3:30 or 4am, bedtime has long passed. 9:30 in the evening in farm country is also dark. Living in the city, you forget about dark. You forget about deserted. The roads are windy and narrow, I am worried about wildlife. I drive like an old lady (without a license, which is in the lost bag), leaning forward, hands on 3 and 9. Dark, windy roads, no docs, no money. J. is dozing off. You think: God, we are really wolf-bait out here in the universe. We are alone, it is dark, we are essentially unknown. I am an "undocumented" Oriental girl out here in the pitch black, I have no identity, nothing to verify my existence.

And then, running out into the middle of the road... a wolf. No, sorry, no, not a wolf. A fox. Shit. I break hard and swerve and semi-close my eyes. "Did I hit it? Did I hit it?" "No, he made it," J. says. Phew. My heart is beating hard. Then, "Wait, are you just saying that?" "Did you hear a thump under the tires?" No. No, I did not hear a thump under the tires.

In town, no bag. (No flashlight, either. Stupidly.) No one is around, nothing is open. The state trooper knows nothing about local police matters. We drive back.

II.
It is 9:30 in the evening, and we are coming out of the movie theatre downtown. We've just seen THE FRENCH CONNECTION, which I've never seen, and I'm a sucker for a good late '60's car chase (although this one made me, literally, nauseous). It's been a while since I've been "out" in the city at night, among the urban throng, the young and viviacious and stylish. It is anything but dark out, it is bright and busy and noisy. Feels sort of weird.

We get on the bike. The motorbike, that is. Forgetting that we'd be commuting back this way, I am wearing (stupidly) slip-on sandals and a skirt. Oh, well. I put on my helmet, hike it up and get on. It's crazy out for a Wednesday night, we think it's because of the cabbies strike; they're protesting the installation of GPS in all NYC taxis - invasion of privacy, etc., they want to be able to be off the books, off the charts. The streets are full of taxis with fares, they're taking people (off the books) and likely charging high flat rates. Everyone's ornery. It's a little scary.

We speed up 6th Ave then head east at Columbus Circle to Central Park West. I'm holding on tight, tighter than usual. I wonder if J. will cut across the park at 96th, or go through Harlem. He decides on the latter.

The phone rings. I reach into the backpack pocket and pull it out, I see that it's the # of the local PA police I've been calling about my lost bag. J. asks do I want to answer it (do I want him to pull over). We're in East Harlem, on a side street, so I'm thinking nah, um, that's ok.

"Nah, that's ok."

Back in the Bronx, the phone rings again, same number. Kindly Officer P. informs me that they've recovered my bag, the cash is gone but everything else seems to be there. Could he fed-ex it to me, I can't really drive out there without a driver's license, and I'm kind of marooned here without any docs? Yes, he says, he can fed-ex it, it's not standard procedure, but it seems clear it's my bag, and he's got a friend who can do the fed-exing off the books, so yeah, no problem m'am, you have a good night now.

I sleep better tonight, not realizing until morning how poorly I've been sleeping the last few.

Monday with the Sunday Times

Kind of like Tuesdays With Morrie?

There is no delivery on my road (mail, newspaper, etc.), so the acquisition of print media requires a 3-mile excursion to the general store. During the summer months, we are advised to call ahead on Saturday (weekenders buy 'em up fast) and reserve one. Rocky kindly obliges.

It's the quintessential city-people ritual out here, no one else is buying it (no City section, however; we get the Westchester Edition up here). What can I say. I have pangs about it, especially as it takes me a good 2-3 days to get through it, and it's my primary source of news; surely I am missing something, missing everything, in terms of the gamut of valid media perspectives. I have the sort of brain that has a small hard-drive, i.e. I cannot, like some I know, accumulate mounds upon tons of information (J. reads a million different newspapers and periodicals, plus TV news and morning shows and news blogs and Charlie Rose and...). I just can't. Media stresses me out, frankly, the sheer volume. I used to read 3-4 different print sources (plus a couple online sources), but it all just piled up and I couldn't keep up. So now: the Sunday Times it is (and radio; radio I can do).

Anyway, here's a gem from the Book Review: Jim Lewis reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke. I will be reading Tree of Smoke, without a doubt, as I have been a DJ fan since his early books of poetry. But read the review: it's one of the most compelling, invested book reviews I've read in a long time. It tells us as much about the reviewer as the reviewed, but not in a solipsistic way, not in that I'm-writing-about-someone-else-but-really-I-want-to-point-the- attention-on-myself kind of way. Lewis's enthusiasm is an enthusiasm for the deep pleasure, the wonder, of strange, original, "inescapable" writing - major works that matter.

Race, Racism, & Racialism

I recently made a confession of a racist attitude to some folks at a gathering. Korean D. and Cuban R. (married couple), and Chinese C. and Filipino S. (another married couple) and I were talking about a raucous sidewalk BBQ that occurred outside D. and R.'s apartment building in a Dominican neighborhood uptown. They were pissed, because it was floor-shaking, head-banging loud (salsa music and sub-woofers) and it was clearly not a permit-ted event. R. called the PO-lice, who came and broke it up.

We were talking about racial groups, and racial-group habits. Loudness is something we often attribute, consciously or unconsciously, to certain racial groups. Of course, there are generalizations and there are specifics, and the damage is most severe when we lapse into generalizations-only thinking, which then manifests in our behavior; and depending on the context and our reach of influence (if you are, say, the Presidenet of the United States, or a Supreme Court Justice; or even a corporate executive or a community leader), these behaviors can be globally catastrophic.

(There is no talking or thinking about city and country and suburb without talking about race. The lens of race is second-nature to most people of color, I dare say; typically a more conscious effort for White folk. This is what I mean by racialism. In this country, you know that you are not White, and that White is a category of power (or at least "centrality"), before you know your ABCs.)

I had had a couple of drinks by this time in the evening, so my discretion was apparently compromised. I guess I'd been thinking about my dirty life, and I confessed that I was most bothered by people who throw their garbage around. And, I added, I am convinced that this is not a social class thing - poor does not equal dirty - this is a cultural thing.

I recently read that there are steep fines in Singapore for littering (and chewing gum).* Japan is of course known for its immaculate subway system and urban sanitation in general. I have also been very struck by my experiences in Korea over the years.

The local Korean bath house is one of my favorite outings when I visit. There are hot spring mineral baths and saunas and steam rooms and jet therapy and shower areas where men and women and children of all ages (grandparents and grandchildren together are a common sight) take the time to relax and thoroughly self-care. The shower areas include stools for sitting, abrasive washcloths, and hand-held shower heads (showering is a sit-down affair for Koreans, time to scrub and rinse and massage with care). The bath house ritual is good for the skin, the circulation, the heart, and the soul. There is also, at the end of your wet-and-moist therapy, an opportunity to visit the sleep rooms - big, dry open spaces with heated floors, pillows, and complementary cotton pajamas (the bath areas are single-sex, and all are naked).

A day at the bath house costs about six American dollars and is a once or twice weekly habit for many Koreans. The sleep rooms are open all night, and the poor and homeless will sometimes sleep here (men with night jobs, for example, will come for a few hours rest). They do not take advantage, i.e. somehow it is understood that one night of recuperation at a time is the limit. But it's also understood that everyone is entitled to be clean - deeply, thoroughly clean and rested. The old women who clean the subways and station areas do so with incredible industriousness; there is no question about whether the working-class and poor who rely on public transportation "deserve" a clean ride or not.

It's an opinion I seem to hold pretty firmly in my mind somewhere - that black and brown people have messier, dirtier cultural habits. It's a half-baked, un-evolved thought, of which I am partially ashamed and yet partially feel is a reasonable question to pose - i.e. why this seems to be the case, how the perception is formed in the first place, and how it might be corrected; because I don't think I am the only one to think it (my passionately anti-racist black pastor back in Seattle told the story of his father referring to Mexicans as Messi-kins), and perhaps current immigration controversies would look differently if these perceptions did not exist.

I think about my lack of exposure to the home countries of Latin and Central Americans, my sketchy understanding of immigration patterns and the way racism eats away at people, generation-by-generation (I think of K., an African American matriarch who keeps an immaculate household and herself complains about young black people's lack of self-respect and sense of civic duty), the overall limitations of a middle-class viewpoint. In the Philippines, poor children forage in garbage dumps regularly. In India, lack of sewage and clean water systems is a persistent national crisis. This morning, an article in The NY Times about Palestinian children trolling trash piles for items they can sell in order to eke out "a living," and an article in the Times Mag about environmental injustice, i.e. high pollution levels in poor communities: "...disproportionately high pollution levels continue to plague poor communities, and race often correlates with which populations are hit the hardest: African-Americans, for instance, are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in areas where air-pollution levels pose health risks..." These are clearly not "cultural" habits. And yet even with these bits of knowledge, my under-the-skin reaction to garbagy streets is still there, i.e. my people would never live like this.

Clean and dirty are complicated. Don't elect me to office (maybe don't even be my friend), at least until I can get my head on right about this. Ironic, isn't it, that a large portion of the house-cleaning workforce in the tidy suburbs are Latin and Central American immigrants. Maybe some cultures simply do have different standards when it comes to cleanliness, maybe they simply have different priorities, perfectly valid ones, which other people need to understand and accept. J. is Chinese American; my mother seems to think that the Chinese (among the East Asians) are kinda "dirty." J. gives me a hard time about showering every day. "Why d'ya gotta shower every day? What's wrong with smelling your own smell once in a while, letting the body's natural oils do their job. Soap is not even good for your skin, and shampoo will make your hair fall out eventually. Shower when you're actually dirty." Hmm...how European.


*an article today about Singapore reveals a complex social-economic history and environment which led to the no-littering policies. There are some cultures, or sub-cultures, which seem to embrace the notion of "look the part," i.e. if you want to be lifted out of poverty and third-class citizen status, then look like you do, clean up. Very Booker T. Washington, I guess.