Sunsets and Short Stories

A lovely evening to linger outside on the terrace (fn1), stare at the sunset-lit skies, put myself on mute (fn2), and join a small, private videoconference featuring a friend (fn3) reading aloud some of her short stories.  For all its ills (literally), this pandemic has played host to some moments of beauty.

Her selections of late have been quarantine inspired, or tinged with post-apocalyptic threads.  Some grim and sobering themes.  Interestingly enough, on this particular evening, this particular day, one selection, "The Parade," had all of the children disappear into thin air.

Resonant.  Art imitating my life this Friday.

But as the sun sets, so it rises on a new day.  Here's hoping that for everyone that knowledge stays top of mind and ever present, even when outside it seems dark.

Fn1: (after harvesting herbs to accent dinner)
Fn2: (to tune out the occasional background sirens and helicopters and building mechanicals, and avoid their interrupting the reading)
Fn3: (who will be heading off in the Fall to earn her masters in creative writing)

Nurturing What I Can

Not everything is within my control to nurture and care for, much as I might want it to be otherwise.  So, then, I will focus on nurturing what I can.

And accept that The Project will take a little longer than I had hoped.

Juneteenth 2020

155 years ago the news of emancipation reached the enslaved of Galveston, Texas, slowly, months after the Civil War had formally ended - but it did reach them - the last ones to taste freedom.

Some events unfold as if they're barely even happening, like a snail making its way across a planter - how slowly only becomes clear in full context; a snail’s pace is even more glacial when the snail is itty bitty, teeny tiny.  Though up close, the pace of progress might appear just fine - only from afar does it become clear that something that should have been a no brainer, should have been accomplished long before, has languished too long.

And so, 155 years after legal emancipation of all, there is STILL work being done, still more to be done.  Juneteenth marked only the beginning date.  And the Black Lives Matter movement is only the latest incarnation of reformers trying to move the ball farther down the field.

The photos and video were compiled over the last couple of weeks, including on a rare very early morning foray into the park.  We still have COVID in this city; I am not yet ready to join the crowds for any Juneteenth observances today.  But two years ago I visited the African Burial Ground National Monument downtown for the first time, with its monument meant to evoke the Middle Passage - a compact site, but well designed.

Tale of Two Foods

Warning ⚠️- what follows may be a bit controversial, maybe unintentionally triggering for some.

First, the after: Tasty brown rice bowl of soft boiled egg, carrots, tender pumpkin shoots, dressed with an improvised garlicky nuoc mam.  Yummy, healthy, non-controversial. 

Then, the before: Where does one get pumpkin shoots in NYC, you ask? Um, yes - I had noticed some unfamiliar looking, but quite vigorous and very juicy sprouts emerging from ... the compost bin.

Yes, I ate from the compost bin (not sure whether that is better or worse than eating from the garbage can - and I apologize to folks who have had to do it, not by choice). 

On digging to investigate, turns out they were emerging from last Halloween’s decorative pumpkin - originally destined for a Thanksgiving pie, but never made it with the busyness of the holiday season, and it went bad, and was relegated in whole to the compost bin...

So, a Google search later, apparently all parts of a pumpkin plant are edible; indeed, the leaves and shoots are delicacies in some cultures. I tried a little leaf tip, and it was mild and nice, and sooo ... rice bowl.  And, and - I don't actually LIKE eating roasted squash seeds in their shells, and it's such a pain in the butt to shell them - so now, maybe I will just save the seeds and sprout them for shoots to eat! Lightbulb moment!

Contrast the little pumpkin shoots with the “Compost Cookie” from Milk Bar ...

...in this period of work from home, Zoom snack hours have become the way to maintain office morale, and that little individually wrapped cookie arrived with its comrades by messenger in its pretty hot pink trimmed tin box, as perfectly corporate as corporate could be - all sweetness and sugar and empty carbs, devoid of nutritional value, fluffiness and emptiness and lightness, like nothing is amiss at all in the world. 

The two ends of the spectrum of my current diet.

Mind Over Matter and Metaphorical Carrots

Some actions must be done even in spite of a deep aversion, a visceral dislike, maybe even a passionate hate.  Then there are actions that, in addition, provoke a physical revulsion, a physiological reaction that might manifest as illness - like triggering the involuntary vomit reflex upon just the thought of the act.  Completing the hated tasks in the former category is just mind over matter.  The hated tasks that trigger a physiological reaction of the latter category might require assistance from another person, so as to squelch the defensive bodily response brought on by the mere thought of the thing to come - the other person helps by introducing the element of surprise; no time to have an adverse reaction because you didn’t know it was coming.  But a dilemma arises when dreaded tasks involving your own physical self that should be simply mind over matter must be self performed, and cannot be outsourced to anyone else (or the someone else - won’t throw said person under the bus with an identification - is unwilling to help) - then the self resists physically, the limbs and appendages refuse to execute the task, and must be rendered into submission with all manner of pep talks and self-bargaining, with appeasement, with incentives, with engineering and body positioning, self trickery, self bribery....

Seeing skin break has never not made me squeamish - others' skin, most definitely my own skin.  This deep aversion has affected my life.  It is one of the reasons I never became a doctor, in spite of my parents' deepest hopes and the opportunity to attend one of the best science-focused high schools in the country.   It is why I cannot watch probably half of the movies that have come out over the past three decades - too much violence and gore and inevitable breakage of skin, and limbs, and skulls.

So learning to self administer injections for The Project has been a process and journey.  And I just cleared another hurdle - victory over a long, large diameter, intramuscular needle - yay me!  Okay, so the needle was not as long as it might have been - a bit of internet research and self advocacy and persuasion over some kind nurses yielded a prescription for 1 inch needles rather than 1 1/2 inch ones.  They were smaller gauge, though, and a larger diameter than any I have used before.  And the intramuscular rather than subcutaneous application - at an awkward angle to boot - still lots of psychological hurdles to overcome.  It took a long time to psych myself up, and lots of repeat YouTube video viewings.  I blew past the midnight deadline and finally managed near 5am.  But I did it!  And it wasn't nearly as painful as I feared.  The anxiety was worse than the deed.  Something to draw back on when next I think I "can't" do something.  People have been through far worse and survived and conquered (Aron Ralston, the hiker who self amputated his forearm and hiked back out to civilization is the epitome of that).

Anyway, since I was already awake at that ungodly early hour, I rewarded myself by making a visit to my beloved park, where I hadn't been since about mid-March, right before the stay at home mandate.  The park was just lovely.

Dogwood, I think.  Somehow in all these years, I never noticed it’s leaves are variegated.

After missing practically all of Spring, it was so nice to walk leisurely through, with lots of space for physical distancing, and see what’s growing.  A nice prize for overcoming that mental block.

Let the Feasting Begin!

The shiso is coming up gangbusters.  So the culling and consuming begins in earnest, lest there be another forest of shiso this year.

And despite the cull, this barely made a dent - much, much more eating to be done.

Trickle Down

Glimpses from the 2020 Park Avenue Tulip Dig.

Made it just in time this year to catch the tail end, on the last day right before Memorial Day weekend.  The pickings were a bit slim.  Though, truth be told, procrastinator that I am, I never have arrived "early" or even midway through (work impeded that this year), so I don't know what the bulb selection is like when the pickings aren't slim - for all I know, it's exactly like this.  Beggars can't be choosers.

The fearless, not at all shy American robin that hopped around watching me dig up bulbs at one of the median beds.  I think it was waiting to see if any bugs would come up in the process - easy lunch, smart fellow.

It is sort of mind boggling that every year the Fund for Park Avenue just gets rid of these high quality bulbs, pulls them up for the compost pile (and then replaces them with brand new annuals every year).  Granted, the blooms weaken each year, and the tulip medians ARE a visual calling card for Park Avenue, but still, it seems such a waste.  That they have the means to just put in new bulbs each year, while elsewhere in the city there is just concrete or empty, compacted dirt pits - very much a metaphor for the wealth disparity in New York City these days.  Sigh.

That said, thankful the fancy folks of Park Avenue provide an opportunity for sharing and for the bulbs to live on.  The paradigmatic Reaganomic trickle down.  I suppose there's some economic and social balancing in that - when it works properly.  The bulb redistribution sort mostly lives up to the theory.  This year, my goal was to gather enough for the adopted tree pits in my neighborhood, Yorkville.  One of the pits is on York Avenue.  Maybe with some beautification, there will be more foot traffic, and some economic benefit to the shops on that block.  The other sidewalk tree pits are on residential streets - maybe home values will trickle down from Park Avenue to York Avenue too - ha! I shouldn't be so dismissive; there may be some minimal effect.

The process.  Bulbs didn't seem to be dug in so deep this year.  No need for the shovel that I brought along.  Though I did damage the handle of a trowel trying to lever out a bulb.  Oh well.

The haul.  Not yet counted.  I had wanted to try for more, but hadn't had lunch, and all the digging and looking down, up, down, up started to make me lightheaded.  Plus, I had a Zoom call scheduled to catch up with high school acquaintances that late afternoon.  Turns out it got postponed... ups and downs of trying to fit in gardening and socializing into an off Friday.

When I am asked where I live, I have become careful to specify Yorkville, rather than the broader "Upper Eastside."  The latter encompasses Lenox Hill and Carnegie Hill and Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue.  Those are very different addresses from the more middle class Yorkville, which back in the day was a German and Hungarian immigrant working class area, with breweries and some of the first tenement alternatives for the laboring masses.

Two personal anecdotes: First, from seventh grade.  I was fortunate enough to test into Hunter College High School, which was my and my family's introduction to the New York City system of selective schools - the ticket out of the workable, but not stellar, schools we would have been zoned for in our working and middle class central Queens neighborhood.  To get to Hunter, back in the rough and tumble 80s, I commuted by car with my dad in the mornings to his job in East Harlem.  And in the afternoons, not wanting their firstborn daughter on the big, scary subways, my parents had me on a private student van to Queens.  The only other girl on it was AS.  The first day of school, she was the last to get on, and eyeing the boys, plopped down next to me.  Her first words were a brag apology, "Sorry I was late getting on.  I was talking to JS over there.  HE lives on Park Avenue, so he's walking home."  Now, I had had a pretty typical, sheltered childhood, revolving around my family and my central Queens community, where we were probably squarely in the middle of the pack economically by the time I was in sixth grade - we had a used car, took maybe a "big" vacation once a year or every other year that required flying and hotels, sometimes got name brand clothing (Reeboks) that we wore to death; I knew of an outside world because we had been refugees, but had not traveled internationally other than car trips to Canada to see Niagara Falls.  I had a sense of where I stacked relative to the kids in elementary school - the little fish pond.  I didn't know about Manhattan lifestyles at all in that pre-internet existence.  But as soon as AS got on that van that first day of seventh grade and talked about JS, her tone told me everything I needed to know about what it meant to have a Park Avenue address.

Second: With my middle school introduction to Manhattan neighborhoods, when it came time to choose my first post law school abode, convenience and safety were key.  My first BigLaw employer was in midtown east, so the Upper Eastside was a natural choice - safe and a single subway line away, and affordable around Lexington and to the east (when Madonna bought her adjoining townhouses east of Lexington, some society person or other made a reference to her moving to the "Far Eastside").  And when it came to buy, having been bamboozled by a broker to reach for the upper end of our price range with the first post law school apartment - but gaining a terrace in the city for the first time - I insisted upon outdoor space, and moved farther east to be able to afford that.

So, the tale of two worlds of the larger UES, and how I "downgraded" across decades from Park to York.