Direction Unclear

I lack direction.

Well, in addition to that, I mean I lack a sense of direction. I have been known to make four right turns and be utterly mystified that I came back to where I was. So negotiating a new place takes practice.

In New York, this is how I leave a subway or a building: I walk outside and strain to see the next street sign over. If I’m at 15th Street, and I can see 16th, I know that way is uptown. I am oriented! If I’m looking for an avenue, that’s harder because they’re longer and you can’t see the next one. So you look for the next street, aim yourself uptown, and then you know the avenues on your right and left. Unless you’re at Broadway, which runs diagonally. Or the avenues which suddenly give up numbers and become Madison, Park, and Lexington. Or Lexington, Madison, then Park? I scramble them every single time.

Invariably, I end up walking the wrong way and asking a stranger which way is Fifth.

Ah, but on the subway, I know my connections! I see a map in my head. That’s ON the subway. IN the subway station is a whole other story. Getting out of a station or transferring to another subway line within a station is a true challenge. Yes, after a while, you get the routine movements down, but a new station is always a new puzzle.

I couldn’t get from the F train to the 6 train until I found a man at an elevator with a little sign on it that said “To 6 platform.” When I got to the platform, other people were arriving, but I have no idea how they got there. I’ve looked and looked, but as far as I know, the elevator is the only way. But that can’t be true.

Some station arrows make it easy. Go up the stairs to the left or right.

But there are arrows that make it confusing. Does this mean you should turn around for the elevator? Or straight ahead and turn right? (Or jump up and down?)

Arrows combined with environmental cues (like stairs) are easier.

I think this one means “go around the big elevator box in the middle of the platform.” But that may explain why I could never find the 6 without the elevator.

Arrows without environmental cues are confusing. This next is the Big One, the source of much subway misdirection: Does this arrow mean up or straight ahead?

I have come across tourists looking for the stairs up where there are none. I have missed going up because I was aiming for straight ahead. The problem is the “up” and “straight ahead” arrows are identical. I propose a solution:

The longer ones mean “Go far ahead, into the distance.” They could even be grayed out as they stretch further ahead. What do you think? Will this work?

City Sidewalks, Busy Sidewalks

New York City’s sidewalks aren’t made for klutzes or space cadets. My daughter is waiting for me to fall into a gaping, cellar access door. I’M waiting to fall into a gaping, cellar access door. They start out innocuously enough: they’re just iron plates lying flat on the sidewalk except for their large padlocks.

But when they open, storekeepers can load their stock from the truck and put it right on a ramp or conveyor belt or plain old stairs to get down to the basement. Unfortunately, if you’re looking around, you may wind up in the basement, too. I wonder how many people on smart phones have done that. (I hear they fall off subway platforms in Japan.)

New York City sidewalks are remarkably free of dog poop, but there are plenty of other obstructions. The food carts – the hot dogs, the pretzels, the halal dishes – and the cannoli, gelato, vegetables, depending on the neighborhood – are everywhere. In Chinatown, merchants and their roots and remedies + 7-T-shirts-for-$10 have taken over the sidewalks; in my neighborhood, it’s the fresh flower guys.

The rows of bright blue CitiBikes take up a lot of space, too. I don’t mind any of them; pretzels satisfy the hunger of too much looking around and not enough sitting down and eating, and the CitiBikes come with map posts. Besides, they’re above ground and obvious so I’m less likely to fall over them.

It’s just that the available sidewalk space is getting squished. It’s incredibly clever for businesses to construct arctic entries in front of their doors. It keeps customers warm and saves energy. But they look like dark, soft-sided phone booths – big boxy things – sitting in front of many restaurants. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to walk in, but they’re just like tent vestibules in front of the building, with doors.

I also don’t mind the huge masses of garbage bags and recycling at the curbs. They’re neat, and all their recycling is separated meticulously. New York’s garbage is organized … and it gets picked up.

 

So organized that wherever you see a trash can, you see a recycling container next to it.

The Mayor of New York’s Vision Zero program is working to reduce street injuries and fatalities to pedestrians with enforcement, speed limits, etc. But the plan also includes changes in street design with things like posts and bollards and … obstructions amenities. So you can be walking along and then suddenly, there are trees. Or benches. Or tables and chairs. Don’t get me wrong – I like to sit; I like benches. It just means I have to pay attention to where I’m walking.

I have to pay attention to where I’m walking because everyone loves a parade. When streets are closed and everyone is kept safely corralled on St. Patrick’s Day or during the March for Our Lives, parade detritus left hundreds of police barricades gathered on sidewalks. I only walked into one batch.

I have to pay attention to where I’m walking because there are interesting things down there! Look down at your feet along lower Broadway, and there are granite commemorations of all the ticker-tape parades held along the route to City Hall.

In SoHo, artist Francoise Schein has created a subway map “articulating the message of the ‘universal declaration of human rights.’” I don’t get it. It doesn’t even look like a subway map to me, but it’s there, on the sidewalk. Where I’m looking. Where there are also subway grates (and my map points out Marilyn Monroe’s famous subway grate).

Another reason to look down and see where your feet are going is to avoid looking up. Looking up is a vertigo experience, a tip-over-and-feel-dizzy experience because there is an awful lot of “up” to look at. I can’t look at all those tall buildings and not think, “What if there were a fire?” Or “Yikes, they’re surrounded by concrete and steel.” So I’m not really looking up when I’m gaping at New York: I’m looking at all the things right there at human scale: shops and food and posters and art and buses.

But every now and then, there’s something up there that truly startles.

What is Lenin doing there on the roof at my corner? It’s a story, a New York story. No matter where I look – at my feet, on the sidewalks, on the rooftops – this place is full of stories.

Living Standard ... or Substandard

When I first arrived at my Airbnb apartment, I freaked out. It wasn’t just the mass of battered trashcans in front or the banged-up front door which couldn’t close securely.

No, it was the row of mailboxes – smashed, broken, and rusted – how could anyone get any mail? The torn-up linoleum and the elevator door opening and shutting at random was just the icing on the cake. What had I done?!? I had paid in advance for a hellhole!

The apartment didn’t reassure me. The bathroom door didn’t open all the way because it crashed into the toilet. Everything was clean – kitchen up-to-date and newish – but there was nothing on the walls except for the nails where something hung once. And one of the lamps – the only lamp, actually – had a burnt-out bulb.

I even phoned Tim to tell him I was freaking out (which is not a thing to do when someone is 4,000 miles away).

I went around the corner to the grocery store. Its doors were a little wonky, too, but wow, their prices were way cheaper than Anchorage! I got a fresh fruit salad, a big Snapple, some organic soups. The people in the store were regular people, New-York-style (an entire subway train can go by without a single blond person on it!).

The man in front of me on the checkout line asked, “How much was your fruit salad?”

“$3. It’s a great deal!”

He showed me what he had in his cart: a jar of not-fresh fruit salad. “$3.99,” he said. “Not as good a deal.”

By the time we got to the check-out machines, he had told me to only shop the sales, they change on Fridays, pick up the circular. When we parted, he called out, “Make sure you get the frequent shopper card.” I did.

Oh, I love New Yorkers! I love how they’ll talk to anyone, ask them anything, offer any advice. Once again, I’m swimming in my own DNA.

Once I unpacked and found places for my things, the apartment didn’t seem so shabby or frightening. My friend Steve mentioned in his blog how he had to get serious about fixing up his home, that “It's easy to get used to a water stain on the ceiling, old worn rugs, cracks in the cement, and other minor problems. …that visitors [must] wonder how we live in such a well worn space.” It’s all about familiarity. When things become part of our lives, we don’t notice their shabbiness any more. Before Tim and I replaced our carpeting, I began to think that visitors might look at our floors and not want to walk around in socks.

And now, here it is just a few days later, and I’m sitting on the couch in the apartment and feeling quite comfortable and homey. It’s snowing outside, and I’m relishing feeling cozy inside. I don’t notice the things that bothered me at first. And mostly, I actually appreciate them.

I appreciate that I am living in an affordable neighborhood. Last time I took my month in New York City, I was in Midtown, on the East Side. I couldn’t afford groceries there and the stores were uninteresting because their merchandise was out of my price range. $800 shoes! I wrote wondering why class warfare hadn’t broken out.

But here, in the Lower East Side, I can get my $3 fresh fruit salad, my 99¢ slice of pizza, and 64 ounces of Snapple for $1.67. The stores are useful for living: hardware and shoe repair, laundromats and school supplies. Yesterday, a man was out power-washing the sidewalk in front of his building. Regular people live here, and I like being among them.

Philosophy on the NY Subway

As I prepared for my month in Manhattan, I discovered that I could get a personalized MetroCard – with a photo! – that would get me half-price on the subways and buses.

You have to know the transit lover in me to know the ecstasy that overtook me. I phoned them up right away: yes, I could come in with two photo IDs even before my birthday and I could get it right then and there. Hooray for turning 65!

So, of course, I took my sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, excited self down to 3 Stone Street as soon as I arrived. First, I had to find Stone Street, then I had to find how to travel there. I’m renting in a less-than-familiar part of Manhattan so I’m in the midst of direction-confusion and am back to writing little cheat sheets to myself after I examine all the permutations and combinations of MTA Trip Planner and my maps. Plus, I still have to learn how to lock the doors to where I’m staying.

I waited for my number to be called and headed to Window #1, and I received a gorgeous, yellow, Reduced-Fare MetroCard with my photo on it!

I can’t paint an exact picture of it here because I no longer have it. (Sob!)

After getting my gorgeous, yellow, Reduced-Fare MetroCard with my photo on it, I calculated which was the best deal for purchase. I could pay for a trip costing $1.35/trip; I could get a 7-day Unlimited Ride Reduced-Fare MetroCard for $16 or 11.8 rides in a week, or $2.29/day; or I could get a 30-day Unlimited Ride Reduced-Fare MetroCard for $60.50 which was the best deal in the whole wide world!

So off I went to the nearest subway station, to the fare machine. Nothing about it was intuitively obvious, but I came to the big existential question of the day: Was I going to “Add Value” or “Add Time”?

What would you say?

What would you say if you’d saved the attached quote in your journal for many years?

I can’t add hours to the day. I can’t add more days to a week or a month, but value? I can add value to my card (by putting money on it), value to my ride (by going for the 30-day option), and value to my whole life and the planet!

So I added value. Something didn’t look right. I went back to 3 Stone Street, got a new number and window #5: “You weren’t supposed to Add Value. You were supposed to Add Time. Nothing we can do about that now. We’ll take back your gorgeous, yellow, Reduced-Fare MetroCard with your photo on it and get you a refund in six weeks. Here’s a temporary, boring, plain old card you can go put another $60.50 on.”

Which I did.

Back to the station, I swiped my card in the swiper. It said "expired." I tried again. It said, “Just Used.” I tried another gate: “Just Used.” I’ll spare you all the back and forth trips for remedies. Eventually, a station agent let me in, and I boarded a train, slightly dreading that I wouldn’t be able to get back because my brand-new boring and untested MetroCard wouldn’t work.

But as I swiped it for the return, I saw that the message said, “Pass Expires 4/12/18.” Oh, it wasn’t expired! It was giving me handy consumer information! Bless those tiny little LED-ish messages that can’t be read in dimly lit stations! I just pressed the turnstile and was through.

This was a Big Day in my Third Third:

• Turning 65 comes with unanticipated thrills! I have unlimited reduced fares on subways, buses, even the Long Island Rail Road. If I’m never heard from again, check with the MTA.

• I still think I was adding value, not time. In the universe, I’m right. In the MTA, they’re right, and I’m finished arguing even though I did tell them they should have the capability to over-ride the magnetic strip.

• They say we have to do really difficult things to keep our brains active, and plunging myself into a new environment, negotiating bureaucracies, figuring out how they could have done it better if I were in charge – all while panicking that I’d never get home – are just exercises to avoid cognitive decline. I’m not getting older, I’m getting IQ points.

• It’s always about the adventure. I took four train trips today. I saw a parking lot with cars on elevators, I went to the Museum of Math on Pi Day, heard the author of Caesar’s Last Breath talk about air, had a 99¢ slice of New York pizza, got a New York Public Library card, and walked more than 70 New York blocks. All possible because I had a temporary, boring, plain old Reduced-Fare MetroCard.

Choosing Oomph

Sometimes it’s a push to find New Things in your life. It’s Friday and you didn’t sleep well and it’s been a long week; how about we just veg out? Or you got yourself out, and it’s First Friday and the block party on D Street is fun and sunny so why would you leave to hear a lecture? A music lecture no less. Indoors.

But you’ve already “made plans” and so you’re stuck. You have to go hear John Luther Adams at the Anchorage Museum, and you know he’s really, really highly regarded, but still. It’s a lecture. Maybe it will be short. You plod on over to the Museum.

Sometimes, it takes a lot of oomph to keep yourself growing and exploring in your Third Third, but the plus side is you make incredible discoveries. John Luther Adams is my discovery of the week. Maybe of the month. (Hmmm, there was QuickSplit….)

It’s not my usual music. It’s not the Rolling Stones; there’s no regular beat. Not even lyrics. But the electrifying thing is his reasons, the why of his music and how that’s changed the how. I think – just like I discovered with the Defiant Requiem – that I appreciate the art, the artist, and their why more than music itself. I like what music can do.

Adams’ music is inspired by the landscape of Alaska; I knew that before. But I didn’t know he’d realized that while his music began outdoors, it was almost always heard indoors. So now, he was taking his music outside, having it performed in new and different ways outdoors. That means a different experience for the listener.

Adams wants the listener to be a partner in the creation of the musical experience so he invites “the listener to find their way into the music. … Few things make me happier than when a listener hears something, experiences something, discovers something in the music that the composer didn’t know was there. It’s only through the presence, awareness, and creative engagement of the listener that the music is complete.”

How many communication workshops have I given where I emphasize that the ideal of communication – of interaction, period – is dialog, the active participation of both parties, where both people co-create the conversation? Where both people actively listen. And it can happen with music?

Adams showed video of his outdoor performances. For Inuksuit, 99 percussionists played while dispersed throughout Morningside Park in New York City. There was no conductor, but each musician had a score and followed the cues of music they could hear. The audience just sort of wandered around, some actively listening, some doing what you do outside in parks. “You may choose to root yourself in one specific location and let the music move all around you or you may choose to wander freely throughout the performance, following your own ears, actively shaping your own experience, creating your own mix of the music.”

And because it’s happening outside, there are sounds from the world, too. For Adams, “every point … is a potential point of interest, a call to listen.”

Does this sound as startling, as revolutionary, to you as it did to me? When afterwards, in conversation, Adams described how he creates his music from natural harmonic series because the piano keyboard isn’t a requirement in nature, that clinched it. I’d thought composers had to sit down in front of pianos and work out their pieces. I’d really thought that. Like it was a rule.

This was just mind-blowing.

Adams gave this same lecture – with the same video – at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity so you can see it on YouTube. Near the end, the video shows a performance of Sila: The Breath of the World outdoors at Lincoln Center. For me, that was the knock-your-socks-off part.

Okay, even sock-less, I may not become a music person. I’m probably not going to start going to concerts – my stereo broke and I can’t figure out how to get it fixed – I don’t have an iPod or other listening doodad – but I now have “music awe.”

Lesson for my Third Third: it takes oomph to find awe.

Culture Clash

I just finished reading a novel about Russian/Polish Jewish mathematicians who came to America. It’s an odd book – The Mathematician’s Shiva – because families are odd, Russian/Polish Jews are odd, and mathematicians are really, really odd. At one point, the narrator comments on how different his family is from Americans. But I kind of know his family – my birth family and relatives – and it felt familiar and sweet and I’ll even say it, heartwarming.

When I was in New York City, waiting on line for discount theater tickets, everyone talked to everyone. That’s what New Yorkers do, but my sister told me an over-the-top even for New Yorkers story. She and my other sister were waiting on line in terrible humidity and heat. They were quietly talking to each other about the rash one had gotten under her breasts from all the heat. The woman behind them interrupted, “I couldn’t help overhearing, but I know just what to do for that rash. Y’know Monistat cream, the stuff you get for yeast infections? Just rub that on your breast rash and it’ll clear right up!”

#!*X%! TMI? Huh, what’s that?

So there I was in Katz’s Deli, waiting on line to order my gigantic pastrami sandwich. Sophie was going to meet me there. The people in front of me were chatting with the carver, saying how her father used to come there for years, he liked it thin, whatever. Sophie arrived, and I waved her over. Then it was my turn to place my order. I told the carver I’d come all the way from Alaska for this pastrami sandwich, and we chatted. Sophie glowered at me, may have even told me to shush. Pretty sure she told me to shush.

Possible interpretations:

1. This is a mother-daughter thing, and the mother was yet again doing something embarrassing in front of the daughter. The mother is clueless; the daughter is upholding social standards.


2. The daughter wisely thought the mother was interfering with the carver’s ability to do his work.


3. The mother realizes that the daughter was raised in Alaska.

Yes, of course I know my daughter was raised in Alaska. Yes, I know she laughs uproariously at the craziness of my relatives. But suddenly, I had the realization that she was raised in a different world. As different a world as the immigrants who looked at the “Americans.”

I married a calm, genial Midwestern guy. Things don’t fluster him. Mostly, I realize that two of me would be a little too … volatile. I am glad that our daughter had the evenness of his temperament and background in her upbringing. And we raised her in Alaska.

On a kayak trip here in Alaska with friends, Sophie, and my friend Janet from San Francisco, I had some trouble getting the kayak on the roof of the car. Sophie and her friend jumped on the car, lifted the kayak, threw the ropes around, tied them off, secured the whole thing. Janet looked at them and said, “They don’t make them like that in San Francisco.”

In my Third Third, I’ve known that things I experienced as part of defining me – Howdy Doody, terrible assassinations, Vietnam, drive-in movies – have come and gone. They would never be part of any next generation’s formative years. Those were events, bits and pieces, time-sensitive occurrences. Our kids have their own, more current influences.

But this is what just hit me: a whole culture that I still participate in, that still exists, that created a whole personality type – my personality type – is not my daughter’s. It’s too far away, too infrequent, too inaccessible to transmit. Many Alaska kids only experience grandparents on an annual basis, not every weekend. They couldn’t know from overbearing relatives, nosy New Yorkers, old-fashioned delis. You can’t inherit a culture outside that culture. Culture isn’t a trait. It takes a community to transmit it, not an individual. Alaska Native families know this.

At a certain point, my parents must have looked at me – this girl who didn’t know the Depression, Brooklyn, or the seltzer delivery guy – this girl who didn’t speak Yiddish to immigrant parents – and realized I would never know those things either.

Culture isn’t inherited; it can only be absorbed.

Emerging from total immersion

I’m home. New York City is now reflection, not possibility. (Oh, no! I’m missing The Crucible!) It did SO MUCH, but what was that exactly? What does it mean for my Third Third?

I absorbed A LOT of culture: art, theater, and the simple culture of being around humans making lives. I was awash with creativity – I had IDEAS and oomph and motivation and plans and energy.

I kept a calendar of my plans for the month. If I heard about an author talk or a free day at one of the museums, a special event in Central Park or a comedy show, it went on the calendar. Sometimes I had three things for the same time period, and then I had to choose. New York is boundless and limitless!

And if, by chance, there wasn’t anything on the calendar, I’d say to myself, “You haven’t explored 23rd Street. Today, walk 23rd Street.” So there I was, walking down 23rd Street and a woman handed me a card and explained it was Holi day and an Indian feast in her restaurant was only $2 today so would I like to eat? So I looked inside, stayed, and had a great meal for $2. Little surprises popped up all over New York, and I had the flexibility and curiosity to follow up.

Just before I chalked Yetta Goldstein’s name on the sidewalk to honor the victims of the Triangle Factory Fire, I got a call from Michele, Yetta’s grandniece, so we did it together. Turns out Yetta was from Bialystok, the same village my grandmother emigrated from! Here I was, an anonymous visitor from Alaska, and I managed to find connections to the inside stories of New York. With 8 million people, there are stories to connect everyone with everyone.

But I have to tell you some of the astonishing artistic creations I discovered. I like museums, but if you give me my choice, my preferred art moves, it performs. So I sort of stumbled into New York’s art museums – mostly because they all have free days so what could I lose?

I saw things that were direct infusions of creativity into my brain! I saw things I couldn’t have imagined, but they were windows into a way of perceiving the world that simply blew my mind. Here is Barbara before – here is Barbara after.

I entered the world of Peter Fischli and David Weiss at the Guggenheim (which I’d never been to before; it’s the round one with ramps). In Suddenly this Overview, they displayed hundreds of funny little clay sculptures – with hilarious titles – that freed my mind.

Anna O. dreaming the first dream interpreted by Freud.

 

How different the world is when you see it this way! Everything is so comical, so full of alternative reactions. Later, sitting on the airplane looking through the Safety Information pamphlet at all the graphic instructions for water landing emergencies, I thought, “What if I told a different story with the same graphics?”

Inexpensive cruise line delivers your luggage.

Okay, maybe it’s not art, but it’s a mental shift. I like mental shifts. They’re interesting.

I went to youarenowhere (meant to be confusing: is it “now here” or “nowhere”?) Andrew Schneider’s one-man show. Later in the play, the light shifted on the curtain, making it reflective. Andrew did a batch of gymnastic moves and we saw the audience behind. Eventually I realized I wasn’t in that audience: it was another audience behind the curtain! With another guy mimicking Andrew! Finally, the curtain dropped and a confrontation ensued between the two guys, and we had to stand up and change places with the other audience. I’m still not sure what it says about simultaneity, perspective, or who’s right (I am sort of shallow that way); but I had never seen anything like it before! The reviews – which thankfully kept the secret – said it was “brilliant,” and it was. When I got home, I had an email asking if I wanted to come back, to be in the “other” audience.

I learned the word bricolage, building something from just regular old stuff you gather. Tom Sachs, in his A Space Program film, built a whole space center and Mars landing expedition from junk: cut up FedEx envelopes yielded the Tyvek to make astronaut space suits. It all looked so real-ish, and now I’m looking at my junk differently.

Oh, I can’t even describe Laura Poitras’ installation on surveillance. (She made Snowden’s documentary.) She fueled both my outrage and my awe – how she moved us through an immersion in surveillance and what it feels like.

So many creative people. Hundreds of creative people. Writing about them is so stale compared to the experience of them. For a month – a whole month – I got to steep myself in the worlds they created. I was changed.

Now the question: can I hold onto this “Barbara after”? Can she survive removed from that environment?

Natural woman?

Saved! Saved by a miraculous infusion of fresh air and green space! Today I took a walk with Bonny, another Alaskan-in-New-York. Her apartment is right near a cemetery.

“Oh, wow, you’re near a cemetery! That’s terrific! You have air space, sunlight, real weather!” Then we walked along the Hudson River where the trail was asphalt and dirt, not concrete or fancy pavers. Oh, will the glories never cease?

We have discovered how un-urban we really are.

I marvel at the wonders of Central Park. On the free tours, I’ve gotten to know the docents who point out the brilliant planning of Frederick Law Olmsted. He designed the stone arches so the paths curve away on the other side so you always have a sense you’re entering another world. Roads are masked by the terrain, landscaping, and foliage. There are automobile-free areas and days, and the bird sounds are so sweet and varied. It’s quiet, peaceful, restorative. Central Park is truly a masterpiece.

But every single piece of that park is man-made. Ditto for the beautiful Lower Manhattan Waterfront Esplanade. Ditto for the glorious New York Botanical Garden (although it has an area of natural forest). Ditto for the thousands of children’s playgrounds everywhere. Ditto for the millions of buildings with people living on top of each other, looking out windows at each other, shielded from sunlight and weather.

Is it obvious that I’ve spent a month in Manhattan?

I hadn’t expected this to happen. I hadn’t expected that I’d develop King Kong fantasies of knocking down buildings. As I rode the subway through the Bronx – where the subway is really an elevated – I made it to all five boroughs! – I saw acres and acres of high-rise apartment buildings. Acres and acres! I felt like Edvard Munch’s The Scream (temporarily in the Neue Galerie!). I couldn’t breathe because – as my sister puts it – all those people are breathing the same air!

What I love about camping: all the air is unconfined air, air that isn’t inside four walls and a roof. It just … circulates. But here in New York, even the outside air is still confined. It’s confined by buildings, shade, scaffolding (not to mention all the people breathing in and out). Compound that with inside air that’s over-heated because you can’t turn off radiators so you open the windows to let in the air from outside, but it’s not really “outside” air as we know it. It’s not fresh.

One day it rained, and I never felt it. There is so much construction going on with so much scaffolding everywhere that rain never reached the ground. Besides, it’s so hard to wash the windows on these tall, tall buildings that most windows are dirty. How do people ever see the “real” outside or the “real” weather?

I was never a “city kid.” I grew up in the wooded areas of Long Island. New York City was a rare expedition by train. But in Alaska, by Alaska standards, I’m not a wilderness-aholic. I have friends who hike every day; I can pass on it. Mostly I can even be ho-hum about it.

But now I’m suffering Nature deprivation. I yearn – yes, I YEARN – for rawness, wildness, decomposition, rotting trees, decay, real dirty dirt. Anything that isn’t manicured.

I’d been so gung-ho for my urban experience that I wrung every drop out of it, and it’s exceeded all expectations. I have been enriched beyond measure. But I also learned something about myself because I take it for granted in Alaska: in Alaska, I have outdoors, wilderness, and Nature on her own, in her natural state.

You don’t get to be a big, incredible city in the middle of a wilderness or national park. New York is a big, incredible city, and I needed an injection of what it offers. Now I need a little recovery, I guess. Perfect timing!

Going solo

When I first wrote about this idea of a month in New York, even people who travel a lot said they were jealous, and that surprised me. I narrowed it down to three reactions: (1) it was New York City, (2) it was long-term, as a “resident,” not a tourist, and (3) it was on my own, without Tim.

Some married women were startled; some thought it was “brave.” Some said they’d miss their husband. One friend who took a solo trip said she didn’t miss her husband till after Day 11. My friend Helen wrote that a “solo adventure could really open up the time and space to think through all those other big questions” we have about life.

Well, I’m not sure I’m figuring out any Big Questions, but I have thought about marriage. Do I miss Tim? I’m not sure what “missing” means. With technology, it changes. We talk on the phone, we send each other emails, we make plans. (I still send him on errands.) We’re still connected.

But when I decide to go to a collage class at Materials for the Arts in Queens, I don’t have to compromise because Tim’s not interested. I don’t have to compromise on a daily basis AT ALL. Marriage is a steady dose of compromise, from not having the light on late at night to whose turn is it to cook dinner.

I plot out my activities on a calendar, and it’s heavy on the arts, literary events, theater, political and Jewish stuff. I am pretty confident that those things would never show up on Tim’s wish list of how to spend a solid month. I can imagine his groaning from 3,500 miles away. That’s why this trip is my special event and vacation, not his.

When I created my space in the apartment – clothes go here, reading material goes there – I didn’t have to confer. I didn’t even have to leave any room for Tim’s stuff. My very specific, anal-retentive organizational tendencies could just Impose Order. And when they break down and junk accumulates, it’s only My Junk.

So do I miss Tim in my space? No. Do I miss him in this life? No. I wanted this experience of solitude. I have not experienced real solitude for 27+ years, and even here, I still have conversational and emotional access to Tim. But what I have now are 24 hours in every day that I have to fill or not fill on my own. Where I have not been successful at home in finding a new rhythm and giving myself the freedom to move slowly – or not at all – I have begun to do that here. It began with just needing to recover from wearing myself out, but it morphed into just letting myself Be.

My cousin Larry and his wife Kathy are both retired, and I asked how they spend their days. Larry said he fills his day with less, does everything slower, takes more time. Kathy said her days are still filled with to-dos because they still eat dinner and require clean clothes. I thought about how I left my to-dos in Anchorage. Yes, I still make dinner and do my laundry, but it’s just me, and it’s easier. There’s just so much less.

I’m trying to understand why things are simpler. I had fish, asparagus, and a salad tonight, but I only had to make exactly how much I was going to eat. When Tim and I eat dinner, it feels like a bigger production. It feels like it takes time, requires more clean-up, invades my day. Here, it was a short respite between my afternoon adventure and my evening one. I was happy when I realized the timing would work and enjoyed preparing it; it felt like a break instead of a chore. Afterwards, I pretty much had two bowls to wash and a pan. It’s like camping, kind of bare bones.

I never forget that I am here because Tim is back home working, and I marvel at how generous and gracious he is. (I think I would be a lot crabbier.) I also know this is temporary. This is not my life; it’s a very distinct departure from my life. From the life we share. If at any moment I felt permanently alone – as if there were no Tim to return to – this would be a challenging, frightening, unpleasant experience. I wouldn’t even do it.

So, no, I don’t miss him, but it’s because I know he’s there.

I don't get it.

Every now and then, I encounter a New Yorker thing that I just don’t get. Sometimes it just seems odd; other times, it’s a way of living that I don’t (wouldn’t?) participate in. Take, for example, the concept of “books by the foot.”

At the Strand Bookstore:

We can assemble a great book by the foot collection for you that will satisfy the mind and please the eye. Book by the foot collections can be made to order based on color, binding, material, size, and height to match your specific style and home decor.

Who picks their reading lists by color, size, and height? Oh, I see, they’re not to be read. And Steven Spielberg is one of their clients? Oh, I see, maybe he’s doing it for movie sets. I hope so.

I also don’t think New Yorkers cook meals, but that just may be New Yorkers who live in apartments. Or maybe that’s just New Yorkers who live in Manhattan in studio apartments. I’m still trying to get to the bottom of this one.

My apartment has a dishwasher. As my cousin pointed out, there’s not enough room in the cabinets to have enough dishes to even make a load. There’s not enough room in the cabinets to stock any staples. A friend of mine’s fully-equipped, high-end kitchen still has only two burners. I was in a delicatessen one evening around 5:30. Suddenly, I was swamped by people ordering a half-pound of this, a pound of that. They don’t cook, they “heat up.”

New Yorkers and their kids ride scooters, not skateboards. Kick scooters, like Razors, the ones Sophie and the Alaska kids had when they were little and which are now clearly an old, dead fad. Not in New York. That’s what they ride here. My guess: in a crowd, it’s easier to pick it up and over a curb than bending down to retrieve your skateboard with your head in everyone’s butt. But that’s only a guess.

Runners. Runners here run in thick crowds, on concrete, around obstacles, on horrible paver stones. I am a spoiled runner. The idea of running in and around LOTS of people who are not running, who are strolling or just waiting for a bus – who are wearing suits! – is beyond unappealing. I can’t even believe these runners attempt what they do – why? They’ll ruin their feet on the concrete, and what kind of meditative experience is it? But that gets to Nature and wilderness and Alaska and me, and that’s a subject for another day.

I don’t get what the trucks are doing between 2 and 5 a.m. that can possibly make THAT MUCH NOISE right in front of the apartment building. The doorman thinks they’re unloading and reloading office furniture … every night of the week. I checked … and that’s what they’re doing!

Sometimes, the thing I don’t “get” is more profound. I spent one afternoon at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn. They had an exhibition on operating in crises: 9/11, the power blackout of 2003, Superstorm Sandy, etc. Going through the 9/11 photos and video testimonials was powerful. Regular subway operators described how they encountered terrified people in the Cortlandt Street Station and stopped to jam them on the train because they were so frightened. Bus drivers ferried as many people as they could out and home. Photos of New Yorkers – more than you could ever imagine – walking across the bridges trying to get home.

I was in San Francisco on 9/11 for a week’s run of my one-woman show. Flight 93 was headed to San Francisco; it was full of locals. The City was put on lockdown, the Golden Gate Bridge was closed. 9/11 felt very immediate. We all know where we were when it happened.

But I wasn’t in New York City. Ground Zero was GROUND ZERO here. Regular old people in their regular old jobs had to take on emergency duties, had to take on life-saving duties, had to conquer their own fears and step up. Had to live with what happened that day.

9/11 wasn’t TV coverage for New Yorkers. It was right here, and they had to deal with it, go to sleep to it, wake up to it, live with it. We all know the “you had to be there” feeling, the way you just can’t describe something to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The New Yorkers who lived through 9/11 were touched in a way that I was not. I have a new and profound respect for their ability to get up, get moving, help out, face grief. I imagine they look at each other and know, in their souls, “We were here.”

I wasn’t.

A tale of two cities

Every day I’m in New York City, I’m astonished that class warfare hasn’t broken out. This city is filled with places, stores, restaurants, activities – you name it – that I can’t afford. There are plenty of free things – free night at a museum, pay what you can at an event – so I am having a great old time, but the expensive things are WAY OUT OF RANGE.

Sophie, whose New York is a world I’d never find or know existed except she tells me, happened upon a trendy gathering and they took her along to a club. The cost to sit at a table was $2,000, and that was before drinks! I walked into a store and won’t even tell you what the shoes cost.

The thing about New York is that you see EVIDENCE of rich people. Somehow in Alaska, it doesn’t feel so in-my-face as it does here. I move in my own circle back home (which, granted, doesn’t mean I encounter poverty on a daily basis). Sure, there are restaurants I don’t frequent, gear I don’t own, but we all shop at Fred Meyer. Here I’m wandering around, crossing economic boundary lines every day and popping my eyes at the prices. Popping my eyes!

The Village Voice had an article about the gardeners, plumbers, and service people in Long Island’s Hamptons. How they’ve been waiting 40 years for Reagan’s trickle down, how their lives have changed over the years. One income used to support a family; now two are required. They’re fed up and see the people who hire them – and treat them poorly – getting richer and richer.

So they’re supporting Donald Trump. That confuses me. I see the things they do, and Bernie Sanders speaks to me. Like a billionaire is going to revamp the economic system that has lead to this wider and wider divergence of incomes?

But this is what worries me: the Leo Frank exhibit tied his lynching and the resurgence of the KKK to how the South felt after Civil War reconstruction. Everyone ties Hitler to the deprivation of Germany after World War I penalties. When people feel excluded from prosperity – excluded, not just passed by – they get angry. And demagogues can channel that anger better than calm explainers.

The people who are angry are not stupid. The stupid, stupid people are the ones who thought they could get away with this indefinitely, that they could keep impoverishing people while they lived higher and higher on the hog. Did they think the waitress wouldn’t notice that they were throwing down $2,000 to sit at a table? I can see why the Occupy movement began in New York. I’d be camping in a tent on Wall Street, too.

Friday is the 105th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire where 146 mostly young women garment workers died. 62 of them jumped to their deaths and splattered on the pavement. The owners had locked certain doors to make sure the workers didn’t take unauthorized breaks, and they made more money from insurance than they were forced to pay in compensation. No one went to jail. Banker bonuses anyone?

On Friday, I will chalk Yetta Goldstein’s name in front of the building she lived in when she died in the fire at age 20. We have to remember the price regular people pay when they’re taken advantage of, treated poorly, and seen as the means to someone else’s prosperity. I’ve met wonderful people in New York who remember this, who organize those regular people to make productive change for health, safety, and wellbeing. Who draw the community together with those goals.

There are two New York Cities, one for the Haves and one for the Have Nots. I’m worried this isn’t going to end well.

Is "New Yorker" a DNA thing?

Am I like a little duckling that was imprinted at birth? I was born in Brooklyn but while I have no memory of it, does it somehow reside in my DNA? How else can I explain this overwhelming feeling that I am surrounded by “my people”?

I never even had a thick New York accent (except when angry, under the influence, or on the phone with my mother), but I understand every word that’s said to me. I can even understand the public announcements on the subway when they’re made by the operator with marbles in his mouth and static in the system.

I walk down the street and everyone is so gloriously, unabashedly ETHNIC. All colors, all kinds of clothes, but they are somehow all New Yorkers, and I fit right in. I dress a little differently than they do, but there’s something in me that feels like I’m swimming in the same school of fish. Something in me feels like I’m not sticking out. The Italians here are REALLY Italian, the Greeks are REALLY Greek, the Puerto Ricans REALLY Puerto Rican.

I walk down the street positive that my hair is frizzy, the way it was when I was younger and when my self-image must have been stabilizing. I feel like I look like the other people around me, big boobs and all, and not just the Jewish people. When I talk to a burly Italian guy in the Hayden Planetarium, I feel like we’re related. When I joke with the African American woman in the elevator, I feel like we’re sisters.

This is such a bizarre feeling. It’s like feeling part of a majority culture that includes me, a New Yorker culture.

I went to a comedy show tonight, and the woman was riffing about rude strangers. When a stranger tells her to “Move!” she wants to move to another state. But I seem to find smiling people, people at the same event who start conversations, store employees who engage me. I wonder if it’s because I’m not in any rush and am just so observant of everything around me? Still, I used to say New Yorkers were the kind of people who, if you sat next to one on the Long Island Railroad, you had their life story by the time you got to Penn Station. They don’t just like my hair; they want to know the name of the dye I use. Their boundaries are just so deliciously fluid.

Okay, there IS one big qualifier here, and it has to do with class. (In my world view, everything has to do with class….) I don’t share any DNA with rich New Yorkers, and this trip is the first time I’ve seen where they live. I’ve passed stores named after the clothes I’ve only heard about from the Oscar’s red carpet. The friendliest thing about those people are their nannies.

Yes, it’s true, there are still New Yorkers walking around the streets talking to themselves, but this time, they have wires dangling from their ears….

Yesterday, I went to a second program at the Library. As I walked in, the woman at the information desk looked up and said, “Oh, it’s our visiting library lover. How is it going for you?” I felt remembered! In a city of eight million, I wasn’t even anonymous.

LOTS of food for thought

When my daughter started school and when she went to college, there was always just one thing I was watching out for: was her curiosity still intact? Was she still finding the world interesting and was that interest still motivating?

I ask the same of myself, but especially now in my Third Third. The idea of stagnation is anathema to me, and now it’s compounded by believing that curiosity fights off cognitive decline (and seeing my mother in New York leaves me especially worried about that).

Mostly, I’ve always been curious. My brain is like a garbage disposal that can’t turn off. With no food in it, it just whirls and grinds away relentlessly but pointlessly. But with food – and New York City provides SO MUCH food – it’s useful and productive. It processes.

Here are some of the things I’m wondering about now. I haven’t been able to sleep until I Google some of them, but I’ll probably need to check some books out of the library.

• In the Hayden Planetarium show “Dark Universe,” Neil deGrasse Tyson (one of my heroes), said that when things move away from us, their light waves “redshift,” that from our position in the universe, everything is moving away from us. He distinctly said that from ANY point in the universe, everything is moving away from it. How can that be? Something has to be in front of something. In fact, one of the panels mentioned the galaxy “in the foreground,” so wouldn’t it be chased by the galaxies in the background? This bothers me.

   
• During World War II, book publishers turned out 123 MILLION Armed Services Editions of little, skinny (but complete) versions of titles so soldiers could fit them in their pockets. The author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn received 10,000 letters from grateful GIs (according to the New York Public Library program by the author of When Books Went to War). I want to find a skinny book!

• From the American Museum of Natural History “The Secret World Inside You,” I discovered that a baby’s passage through the mother’s birth canal is crucially important to bathe it in valuable bacteria. Doctors are now looking at swabbing babies born through Caesarean section with the bacteria to prevent things like asthma and food allergies. I am SO GLAD I gave my daughter bacteria!


• In the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, I saw Jenny E. Sabin’s gorgeous, knitted pavilion. She made it of solar active yarns so it lights itself up at night. It is truly spectacular and my drawing wouldn’t do it justice so you can click through for more photos here. Just imagine being under it.

• I learned about Voronoi polygons at the Museum of Mathematics on Pi Day (3/14/16). If you have a few points and you divide them up so a region (shaped like a polygon) is closest to one point than any neighboring one, they’re Voronoi polygons. A bazillion kids on a field trip danced on a floor that changed shapes and colors every time a kid moved. John Snow, who identified the water pump that spread cholera in London (another hero of mine), used these to find the pump. He must have plotted all the deaths and saw they were closest to that one pump.

• A Jewish man in Georgia, Leo Frank, was sentenced to death for murdering a young girl. When evidence showed it couldn’t be him, the governor commuted the sentence, but a group kidnapped him from prison and lynched him. The group included the former governor, mayors, and state legislators. They were never punished, and they subsequently revived the KKK. I learned this at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

I realize this is all pretty boring, listed out like this. I learned from brilliantly designed exhibits, with things you could touch and see, bright graphics and clear visuals. My New York experience is mostly real life and real culture, and I pick up most of what I learn through osmosis (although I manage to forget that the D train is an express and I keep ending up on my way to the Bronx with no way to get off).

But these museums, these programs, these institutions are smoldering hubs for curiosity. I am really, really good at unearthing every program, talk, exhibit, tour, or event I can; the table is littered with flyers, newspapers, programs, and handouts.

I am a glutton and curiosity hog, New York is a never empty banquet, and I only have a month to feast.