Look Back at Summer in NYC 2015

A sunset over the Hudson


A walk through University Heights in the Bronx



and across the High Bridge from the Bronx to High Bridge Park in Manhattan



A hike through Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx



A stroll through Fort Tryon Park in Northern Manhattan



with a stop at the Cloisters



Sunshine by the East River at Carl Schurz Park



Green shadows at the Pond in the southeast corner of Central Park

Week in Seven Words #262

bedazzle
The sun's out, and the sand looks like snow, white and glittering.

commitment
She gives me her trust like she would her child. I cradle it with awkward care, feeling its quiet hammering pulse and knowing I must never lose hold of it.

deceptive
On the playground, she encounters children who lie charmingly and convincingly, who are friendly one day and insulting the next. She doesn't know what to make of them; they confuse her. Beyond what they do, it's the why - the why is at the heart of the bewildered hurt.

greased
Sleek men attend to their ale and steak.

raring
The dog, at the end of her leash, recognizes my scent, whines, leaps and strains to get close, to be petted and present her belly for a rub.

sundering
Between me and him - a window pane, the twisted branches of a tree.

wrestlers
In their academic gowns, they circle the stage and size each other up, as if their battle of wits will be a physical brawl.

Short Story Recs: Back to School Edition

Title: After Rosa Parks
Author: Janet Desaulniers
Where I Read It: Breaking Into Print
Since her divorce, Ellie has become more cautious about making mistakes. Throughout the story, there's the feel of her treading carefully around places where land mines are buried (but can her anxiousness and caution help her sidestep them?). Her young son, Cody, has just started school and tries avoiding it, with its strange rules and people; he gets sent home ill. Her brother, Frank, a veteran who has traveled aimlessly, has come to stay with her; perhaps he'll be a father figure to her son.

There's little sense of permanence or promise in this story. Frank could disappear at any time. Cody perhaps intuits that school is the start of an initiation into a life full of small aggressions and other senseless acts that chip away at you, making you a small burrowing creature who can only face the scary world with your nose to the ground and your eyes downcast. To what extent does laying low and doing what you're supposed to do help you live?

Title: The Composition
Author: Antonio Skármeta
Translators: Donald L. Schmidt and Federico Cordovez
Where I Read It: A Walk in My World
Pedro, a soccer-obsessed boy growing up in Pinochet's Chile, is vaguely aware that his parents are anti-fascist, but when he asks what an anti-fascist is, his mom tells him he's just a child, and children aren't anti-anything.

"Children are simply children. Children your age have to go to school, study a lot, play hard, and be kind to their parents."

His life is a fairly happy child's life, except for jolting events, like when his friend Daniel's father gets taken away by the police. Then one day at school, he can't avoid politics any more. An army officer shows up and tells the kids to write an entry for an essay contest. He asks them to describe exactly what their parents do and talk about in the evenings. Will Pedro mention that his parents secretly listen to the radio? Will he write about their conversations? Continuing to be an innocent child will require some political savvy.

Week in Seven Words #261

backgrounded
On stage, there's a doctor, silent for the most part, who hangs in the background of every scene reminding people of impending death. For the actor who plays him, it must be a fun if not challenging role - he gets to look grave and silent while listening to grand music, night after night.

fibrous
Mango in ropy slices on a blue china plate.

gutless
What he tells her is a cop-out. "Heaven will reward you," he says. It's a consolation that's easy for him to offer, as he gently insists - at no cost to himself - that she give up what's important to her in this life.

inching
They're all careful in the dim, carpeted room. Their shoes are off. They speak quietly, even about things that devastate them. On a table to the side, there's seltzer and cookies.

operatic
She sings her way to an early death.

rejection
When she hugs him, he keeps his arms by his sides and turns his face away.

threadbare
She takes the view that people are motivated either by fear or by love in anything they do. Love and fear are battling all the time in her, and she's exhausted with both.

The Sheer Prettiness of Provincetown

I recently visited Boston for a few days and made a day trip to Provincetown with a ferry (the Boston Harbor Cruises one). I'd never been to Provincetown (or any other part of Cape Cod), and it was a treat. Even the parts of town that were most blatantly a tourist trap were still lovely.

I stuck to Commercial Street, first walking all the way west to where it begins near the spot where the Pilgrims first landed in the 1600s (it wasn't at Plymouth, but Provincetown - they moved on to Plymouth a little later). At the spot historians determined is likely the one where they made their stop, there's a plaque and a small park (Pilgrims' First Landing Park). Off the park, a small beach and a jetty made of large rocks.



I walked out onto the jetty for a while. I loved listening to the water rushing under the rocks (where I also found some smashed shells, probably from sea gulls dropping them on the rocks to get at the meat inside).



And I loved the smell of the salt marsh all around.

Week in Seven Words #260

digested
He admits to getting most of his news from The Daily Show as a way to relieve anxiety about the awfulness of current events. When the news is delivered in humorous form, he's better able to accept it.

entrapped
In the subway station, a toddler is shrieking. She's stuck in one of the vertical turnstiles. The bars pin her into a small dark space. They shiver when she pushes against them, but they don't swing around to let her out.

hints
There are signs of life on the stairwell - cigarette butts, a candy wrapper, a bookmark with a black kitten.

lushly
A wine-colored taffeta gown swaying at the ankles.

productive
Anxiety often stifles creativity, but sometimes it's a source of new ideas - a solution I hadn't thought of before, a twist to a plot that hadn't occurred to me until the problem began to eat its way through my mind.

stormy
The eye of the media is on them, and with it comes the windy noise of commentary. It will pass soon.

swapped
Instead of trains, he pushes trucks onto the tracks; dump trucks linked to cement mixers that are hooked up to tractor-trailers.

Four Short Stories Where an Animal's Misfortune Shows Something Toxic About People

Title: Everything in This Country Must
Author: Colum McCann
Where I Read It: The Art of the Story

Katie, the narrator, is a teenager who lives with her father on a farm in Northern Ireland. At the start of the story, their draft horse is stuck in a river and will likely drown. Salvation for the horse might come from a group of British soldiers passing by, but what will Katie's father choose - the horse's life or a burden of bitter gratitude to the despised soldiers? From the beginning of the story, all hope seems to have drowned. Katie's father can't imagine a world without grief, a world where even an inadequate reparation or artless act of kindness is possible.

Title: In the Zoo
Author: Jean Stafford
Where I Read It: The Granta Book of the American Short Story

Two orphaned sisters come to live with their grandmother's friend, Mrs. Placer, who runs a boarding house. The atmosphere in the house is poisonous, full of suspicion and malice. Mrs. Placer and the boarders talk about everyone in town in the worst light. They don't see good in other people; they like to puncture people's happiness and go out of their way to find petty motives even in kinder acts. The story shows the children marinating in this toxic environment.

Some escape might come from Mr. Murphy, a man who spends his days drinking and looking after a small menagerie. He gives the sisters a puppy one day, a bit of innocence and warmth in Mrs. Placer's house. The girls call the dog Laddy, and he becomes their companion. However, Mrs. Placer gets the idea that Laddy could be retrained as a fierce guard dog. With harsh tactics, she turns the dog violent and calls him Caesar.

What the dog eventually does, and what happens to him, is the most obvious example of the kind of corruption and deformation that Mrs. Placer brings about. What she does to the girls is more subtle. Hers is a steady drip of poison.

Title: Puppy
Author: George Saunders
Where I Read It: The Book of Other People

There's a puppy at the heart of this story, and his survival depends on two people understanding each other. One is the puppy's current owner, a woman living in a mess of poverty, ignorance, good intentions and violence. The other is a prospective buyer, a woman who currently has a more stable, dignified life and wants to give her children a pet. The puppy is a mute character, sidelined. Though he's the one whose life hangs in the balance, he takes second place to the human drama - the quick judgments, the incomprehension and horror.

Title: The Silent Traders
Author: Yūko Tsushima
Translator: Geraldine Harcourt
Where I Read It: Mothers & Daughters

With her two young children, a woman has returned to the neighborhood where she grew up. Near her home there's an overgrown park, pleasant to visit, but also a source of mystery and unease. Cats have proliferated there. The woman remembers how, during her childhood, people would abandon pets in that park. All those unwanted animals dumped among the trees.

The park's a place where people get rid of what's messy in their life. But they can still imagine their pets thriving, leading fantasy lives in a magical wood. (Or maybe facing horrors in the dark.) The park is full of possibility. And the animals in it, cast aside, resonate with the woman in the story - as she and her children are also a mess in someone's life, a complication that needs to be put out of sight.