Week in Seven Words #543

This covers the week of 6/14/20 - 6/20/20.

badgering

The ducklings snap at dragonflies.

cheep

The perpetual cheeping of two chicks, one of them cupped in the careful hands of a preschooler.

distortion

I share one of my fears with them. Spoken aloud, it sounds ridiculous, overblown. There's a small chance of it becoming real, but I've taken those small odds and distorted them in my mental house of mirrors.

guarded
Fewer shops are boarded up, but Times Square is still barricaded. We stop to drink water near a couple of stone lions. They're guarding a library that admits no visitors now.

rerouted

A distraught older woman tries to squeeze past a police barricade. Her doctor's office is on this street, and she has an appointment. The police don't let her pass. They give her convoluted directions for getting into the building from another street.

summery

He looks like a poster for California tourism. Wearing swim shorts, a Hawaiian t-shirt, and reflective shades, he's sprawled out on a pool float shaped like an ice cream cone.

uncovered

We've walked past this part of the park multiple times, and it's only now that we spot a small memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. The heart of the memorial is a plaque flat on the ground.

Week in Seven Words #436

awry
"It's a little shortcut," the hike leader says. "I think it should be ok." This is our introduction to a narrow, unused cross-country skiing trail bordered by trees covered in poison ivy that we'll eventually have to hang on to in order to haul ourselves up a long muddy slope leading back to the main path.

brushstrokes
The delicate flowers look like they were dabbed onto the greenery by Monet's paintbrush.

sarcophagi
I confirm that no one is buried in Grant's Tomb.

service
She doesn't have big expectations for her volunteer work. Just a little more light, a little more hope, in her own small way picking away at apathy and callousness.

stalling
While figuring out how to work my way into a party where I don't know anybody, I buy time by pouring a fizzy drink into a large plastic cup and slowly peeling off my jacket.

unsteady
She's made so much slime on this patch of wood floor that it's become completely slippery. Even weeks later, I skid on it, startled.

whimsy
High Line Park has a picture book quality. You look out on a jumble of different architecture, colorful billboards, and murals. The route resembles, in turns, a railway track, a forest path, and a city sidewalk.

Week in Seven Words #431

droning
She writes a song parody and sings it in a bored voice that's even funnier than the altered lyrics.

heaviness
The WWII memorial looks impressive in the sunlight, but I wonder what it's like at night, somber and shadowed in the deserted plaza.

long-winded
He's directed to a dull site on statistics for further explanations. I help him hack away at some of the paragraphs on box plots and IQR.

refueling
Beneath the tents in the parking lot, the volunteers bag yellow squashes and other vegetables of varying condition. Of the people lined up to receive an allotment of produce, many are elderly. One man pretends his collapsible shopping cart is a motorcycle.

self-satisfied
About a dozen people are gathered by the arch to sing a protest song with clever rhymes. They look satisfied with their gesture of defiance, but I wonder if they could have spent their afternoon (and the time set aside for rehearsals) more usefully by taking concrete actions to further their cause.

sweaty
On a rainy day, the subway station is a rank armpit. Puddles form around the metro card machines, which look like leaking nodules. Water sluices through cracks in the platform and meets a stagnant end in shallow depressions.

tendrils
The bridge is the focal point, but around it have sprung lawns and paths, piers where ice cream is served and people play sports or lean over the water.

Earth Day walk

It started at Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn, where there's a memorial for WWII.


Then south to Borough Hall, where I joined a walking group. We headed west into Brooklyn Heights to look out over the East River.

Van Cortlandt Park and a Laura Mvula song

This past Sunday, I went on a hike through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The hike leader also gave a talk on the role the park plays in the city's water supply, and the challenges of supplying water to a city of millions.

This is a memorial on Katonah Avenue, right outside the northeast corner of the park, for tunnel workers who lost their lives building Tunnel #3, a major piece of city water infrastructure.



Some photos from the hike:







Also, because it's summer - and Laura Mvula's "Green Garden" (and its music video) is full of what I like best about summer - I'm sharing it here.

Week in Seven Words #293

bay
Foam churns in the wake of the ferry. The city recedes to the size of Legos. I lean back and feel the wind coast over me. The water is deep and glistening.

murmur
From between the rocks, the water whispers.

peering
Sunflowers, leaning out of buckets, press their faces to a bright window.

sheltered
Most of the homes have porches half-screened by flowers and leafy branches.

soft-hued
I'm walking in a world of pastel colors: pink doors, seashells, light blue skies, flowers enfolding fences and homes.

tending
In a dimly lit room with dusky, rose-colored walls and no TV, I press bandaids onto my blisters and settle back in bed with a novel.

vicinity
The famine memorial is spread out in the foreground. Behind it, a glass-fronted convenience store displays large cutouts of a spoon and fork.

9/11/12

Worth Watching: Still Walking (2008)

Title: Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo)
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Language: Japanese
Rating: Not rated

From Wikipedia, Fair use

An elderly wife and husband host their children and grandchildren for the day; the reason behind the family gathering isn't obvious at first, and at least one of the children, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), wishes he didn't have to come at all, to be reminded that his parents consider him a big disappointment because of his career choice and because he married a widowed mother, Yukari (Yui Natsukawa).

But the movie isn't a stormy drama. The members of the Yokoyama family are polite, for the most part; they try not to be confrontational. They mill around the house, cooking together, talking about this and that, teasing each other into laughter and wounding each other with oblique remarks. There are beautiful close-ups of food simmering in pans, of the hands of young children reaching for pink blossoms in sunlit air. But the movie is never self-conscious about its beauty, just as it isn't self-conscious about the quiet moments of pettiness and cruelty that maintain the tension in the film, even if there's nothing earth-shaking going on on the surface.

The director likes to arrive at things sidelong. One of my favorite techniques that he uses is to have a character stand alone listening to other characters talk in a different room. There's a strange feeling of both connection and isolation, of listening in on people who are closer to you than anyone else but in some ways are still strangers.

An eerie moment in the film is when you hear the talk and laughter of the family posing for a photo off-screen, while on screen the camera lingers on a room where the photo of a deceased family member, Junpei, is displayed. Junpei has been dead for a dozen years, but now it feels like he's alive and listening. Memories of the dead are evoked to hold people together or to drive a wedge between them.

Week in Seven Words #101

anamnesis
This past fall I visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York City; where each tower stood, water spills for thirty feet into a pool and then descends into a dark square hole that looks like the mouth of an abyss. I think of the memorial as I walk in Times Square, where the city doesn't seem to have a past, but exists only in the colorful flashy present.

bird's-eye
High Line Park in NYC was built on a long section of elevated train tracks, now half-buried in long yellow grasses and shrubs. There are many interesting perspectives from the park: streets flowing across the city, the Hudson River bearing its freight, a view of slanting roofs, balconies and elevated patios, the Empire State Building peeking over a swarm of apartment buildings.

coasting
New Year's Eve: a fun movie, some intense video games, and a couple of hours of noise music made more bearable by the vodka cranberry I've been nursing since half past eight.

daredevils
Balloons tumble down East Houston Street between the wheels of buses and cars.

glaciate
A cold unyielding wind that numbs my jaw.

shifting
The street is full of bright signs with Chinese characters and tiny restaurants accessed via basement stairs, a center for Buddhism and red banners everywhere, and then suddenly you find an old splendid synagogue rising into a blue sky.

splashy
It's a day for walking and peeking into shop windows along the way. Mannequins in glittering dresses are on display, flowers entwined around reflections of the street outside, earrings and brooches in neat rows, stacked cups in different rainbow colors.

Week in Seven Words #87

circuit
I visit DC on Day 2 of the National Book Fair. Tents, crowds and long lines spill over the flattened grass of the Mall. In each tent presides a writer, installed behind a microphone. The books are pricey. It isn't what I imagined it would be, and find that the best parts of the day surround the fair: the Botanic Gardens, the sculpture gardens with fountains, the reflecting pool by the Capitol, the Holocaust Museum, beautiful Union Station, and beyond the Washington Monument the World War II Memorial where the water mirrors stars and powerful quotes are inscribed in stone.

multiplex
I think of two people I know who, more often than not, are humored by others. I also think of how much they know, and how they sometimes reveal a surprising hidden talent or unsuspected well of knowledge.

orchidology
At the US Botanic Garden you know you've arrived at the orchid room because nearly everyone has a camera out with the zoom on. People hover before each flower and curl their bodies towards it; they purse their lips in concentration and tilt their heads, making minute adjustments to their cameras.

strengthening
During services the shofar sounds quietly mournful, pitiful even, except for the longest notes, which are sure and strong and seem to have no end.

Tashlich (תשליך‎)
The trees fold the cool air around us, and the air has lost its city smell. We stand by the water tossing in pieces of bread to symbolize the casting away of our sins. The water simmers and churns with hungry fish that slide open-mouthed against each other. Soon a turtle joins in, bobbing among the fish like a gray balloon.

thoughtful
Teenagers from DC wander through the Holocaust Museum unsupervised. They're quiet and respectful. They light memorial candles in silence and pause before names and passages of text.

unlooked-for
A mass evacuation from Union Station; apparently there's a fire in some part of the building. The first thing people do when they get outside is take out their cell phones, either to snap photos or to inform someone that they'll be delayed. A pearly pink sunset follows, as the fire engines scream their arrival and lights flash. I get the feeling that, even as they're frustrated or anxious, most people are enjoying this turn of events to some extent; it's not a catastrophe, and it makes for an interesting story to dramatize at work or at home the next day. Even muttering about the delay brings a kind of pleasure.

Across the street from the WTC

Across the street from the World Trade Center site is St. Paul's Chapel.



The church dates from the American colonial era and is the oldest continuously used public building in NYC. It didn't sustain structural damage on 9/11/01; trees in the churchyard took the brunt of the falling debris as the twin towers collapsed.



On his inauguration day in 1789, George Washington prayed there (NYC was the U.S. capital then) with members of Congress.



Two hundred and twelve years later, St. Paul's Chapel became a base for workers involved in rescue, recovery and clean-up following the attacks on the World Trade Center. In between shifts they could come to the church for food, foot rubs, back massages, conversation, counseling, prayers, comfort, a shoulder to cry on, soothing music, a place to sleep. The church was packed with volunteers, helping out 24/7.

Messages of support also came in from around the U.S. and the world.





If you visit the church these days you'll find 9/11 exhibits and memorials. They're often personal and very moving. The deceased are remembered (including those who died in the act of saving other people or trying to); the exhibits also recount the many acts of love, healing, assistance and selflessness that followed, along with the nightmarish work undertaken by the first responders, recovery and clean-up workers.





I was in Manhattan on 9/11; thankfully many blocks away from Ground Zero. My first sight of the attacks was an enormous mass of smoke against an otherwise lovely blue sky. I have just fragments of memory from the rest of the day: hearing on an elevator that the second tower had collapsed, and spending most of the day going from one place to another looking at TV screens for updates. Also calling and IM'ing family and friends. Thinking back on it I remember how people didn't want to be alone, but were leaving apartments, offices, dorms to gather into groups and try to make sense of what was going on.

My first bus ride down there felt like an approach towards a large, open wound. Last time I was there in late December '09 the feeling wasn't as strong but it was still present.


View of the WTC site from the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel, December '09.

No matter how extensive the rebuilding and restoration, the place will always feel raw.

I've had many discussions with people about the attacks, their evil and their global and political ramifications. I was a teenager at the time. The attacks, and the discourse surrounding them, markedly shaped my thoughts about the world and how I evaluated other people's worldview.


WTC site, August '08.

What I've kept returning to are memories of how people rose to the occasion in the aftermath, in large and small ways. Thinking about this doesn't solve the bigger problems, it doesn't erase the horror, but it's an antidote to unhealthy pessimism and a reminder of how people can continue to be decent, brave, and unselfish even in an inferno.


WTC site, December '09.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. - Viktor Frankl

In Memoriam

From the Korean War Memorial in Philadelphia.

More from Washington Square Park

A flame that burns constantly -



(But where there might have been another powerful quote or passage on that little plaque, there are instead some exasperating words of caution - a reminder of some people's diminished common sense and how litigious our society is.)



A procession with flags marks the start of a memorial ceremony.



Those assembled recite the Pledge of Allegiance, sing the National Anthem, and talk about never forgetting the sacrifices of those who serve in the military.



And during other times in the afternoon -



People seem to be gathered to hear Washington speak. And some of his words are on the memorial wall:

"The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts of common dangers, suffering and success" (Washington Farewell Address, Sept. 17, 1796)





Some observe the monument intently.

Others warn their toddlers away from the flames.



Or they're off to the side, on their laptops.



The day is clear, burning and bright.