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Moscow Subway Bombings Reverberate In New York

March 29, 2010

The headlines today about the bombings in the Moscow subway system held a double whammy for New Yorkers.  First, there was tremendous sadness and horror at the loss of life in Moscow.   Secondly, there was the guiltily, self-centered fear, not of whether it could happen here, but whether it will.

Even so, there was no new tension on the New York City subway system;  this may be because it is the first day of Passover, which means that the subways were less crowded than usual, and that many observant Jews (who unfortunately may be particular targets in New York) were not on the trains.

On top of this, New Yorkers are a bit fatalistic;  to get on the train day after day, particularly after 9/11, you have to just hope/assume/pray that if something happens on one train, you (and everyone you know) will be on the next one, or the one before it, or the one stopped in the tunnel way way down the line.

Then there’s the New Yorker bravura, the gritty sense of invulnerability that makes us all feel a bit like the Yankees–that we will somehow make it to the play-offs no matter what.  (Of course, many of us also feel like the Mets, that no matter how much we try, we won’t really win, but that’s mainly a feeling about our economic status, not our basic survival.)

Many New Yorkers have little tricks.  Avoiding rush hour trains;  getting on less crowded cars; even occasionally getting off the train if someone who looks suspicious (unfortunately, this may be someone simply in foreign dress) with several large square-cut, plaid, plastic bags.   But most New Yorkers don’t follow these tricks very much–with transportation cuts, almost any hour is rush hour (i.e. crowded); more importantly, if you avoided people who looked suspicious or foreign in New York, you’d probably have to stay in your own apartment (and even then, you’d most likely have to avoid mirrors.)

The Russian bombings seem particularly troubling because of the participation of female suicide bombers.  There is a history of female suicide bombings in Russia and around the world, with some groups such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam using women bombers in 30-40% of their attacks.  (From a 2004 study of suicide bombers by Debra D. Zedalis for the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College.)  Females have not figured largely among the images of terrorists in the U.S. however.  As someone with an instinctive trust of most of my fellow women, I find this perhaps the most shocking part of these terrible bombings.

My grandmother used to always ask my mother if she thought that her “life was laid out” for her;  meaning pre-destined.   My mother said no; she believed that people had some choice in their fate.  But my grandmother, an old lady by that time, had suffered much more loss than my mother–one young brother to the Spanish Flu, later, her parents, a child, her husband.   I don’t think I believe in pre-destination, and yet I can certainly understand the comfort of it on a day like today, and one like tomorrow, and the next day too;  how do you get to work each morning if you have to worry whether you are making the right choice of train, car, seat, city, life?

So sorry for the suffering in Moscow.

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Subway Blog – St. Patrick’s Day/Ground Zero

March 17, 2010

Tassled Boot

St. Patrick’s Day.  Spring.  (Crocuses in the small park in front of my Battery Park City building.)

I work at home in the morning, so miss the main parade rush (usually bright green with hats), and go into the office late.   A small group of teenage girls stand beside me  on the platform with tight jeans tucked into knee-high boots, slightly wavy hair swooping across broad foreheads. Vague green (a dark shade on a shirt, or just eye shadow on a lid) is worn by the ones who look Irish, a brighter viridian on the girl who looks Italian.  “Like” is said frequently, and large slouchy purses are held protectively.

Their smiles slacken in the subway car as they become quickly aware that all seats are taken, mainly by very large men who are not giving them up.  They are not small girls, and there is only one small channel of grey plastic bench, which, after a minute or so (and a nod from one of the men),  I nab.

It’s amazing to me how men can take up so much space on the subway.  Even men who are not particularly large take up huge spans, their legs spread wide as a matter of course.  They never ever cross these legs, or even press them together.  (It may be a physical thing, but I always think it’s ego, ego stretching wide.)

The girls congregate by one of the poles, looking young, pale, and a bit subdued, under the fluorescents.   I want to shout out “Robert Pattinson”, to see if that would perk them up again.  But there is something about the way they hold their large purses which makes me think that they probably wouldn’t react (except to think I was nuts.  Hmmm….)

A friend at my office, male, who is completely immune to, and somewhat obtuse about, Pattinson’s charms assures me that the poor showing of Pattinson’s new film Remember Me is a sign that (i) Rob doesn’t really have it; and (ii) that the celebrity fixation of our culture is exaggerated.  (“People may look at little blogs about Pattinson,” he says contemptuously, “but they won’t shell out ten bucks.)

$12.75 in Manhattan.

Maybe he’s right.  I still think that the emphasis on 9/11 may have something to do with the poor showing of Remember Me. I walked by Ground Zero on the way to the subway today, before encountering the Irish/Italian girls on the subway.  I walk by Ground Zero every day, but today for the first time (perhaps because of the suddenly blue sky),  I realized that the site has turned into “Above Ground Zero”, or really “Above-Ground-By-A-Couple-Of-Stories-Zero.”

Big rust-colored girders are now extending into the air.  I know enough to recognize that the girders do not stand on the “footprint” of the old towers, but they are close enough.

My heart caught in my throat, my breath in my chest.  I was amazed, and embarrassed, that the sight of the girders almost brought on an asthma attack.  (I’m not someone who commonly has asthma attacks, but I was genuinely panting.)

I called my husband as I crossed Church Street.  He said something about pollen in the air.

“It’s not pollen; it started right here,” I insisted.

I told him finally the terrible feelings came because I didn’t like to feel like a target.  (As a non-New York City person, he doesn’t fully understand.)  I didn’t talk about the sadness that encompassed me.

But all of that was before the subway, before the Irish-looking, wavy-haired girls, and their Italian looking friend, before the possibly pregnant Hispanic woman just across from me on the train, who crooks her arm in her man’s arm, whose sweet smile is punctuated by braces and quick laughs.

Before too, the little girls on the platform as I get out, who wear green shamrock vests, and black and white polka-dotted dirndls, and white much-tassled cowboy boots.  They hold hands as they wait, behind their parents, for the next train, one of them tap dancing.

Categories: New York City, Robert Pattinson
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Chopin at Financial Center – Clarification

March 3, 2010

I’ve been feeling a little guilty about my March 1 post about the Chopin Festival at the World Financial Center.  That post was definitely written from the sour side.  (Sorry.)  The problem was that at the free concert on the first night of the five day festival (March 1 – March 5), I found it hard to get the din of the Financial Center’s diners and bar revelers out of my ears enough to fully enjoy the music.  

So, here’s my clarification.  Yes, there is a lot of background noise in the evening concerts at the Financial Center; the acoustics are terrible, and, yes, if you are an imaginative person, you may well feel barraged by brutish and uncaring-for-Chopin commerce.  Nonetheless, the festival is magical, what with (i) well, the Chopin, (ii) the unflappable pianists, and (iii) the fact that free live music is going on all day long from 9 a.m. to about 8:30 p.m. every single day this week.  Perhaps the nicest part, in fact, is not the highlighted evening Chopin concert (which has increasingly famous pianists performing as the week progresses) but the pianists scattered about the different parts and buildings of the Financial Center’s public spaces.  Several grand pianos at once, each next to six or seven dark folding chairs, each playing different unamplified Chopin piece, Nocturne, Etude, Mazurka. 

Passers-by, primarily workers in the Center, residents from the neighborhood, tourists from Ground Zero, are really pretty considerate;  a hush that only slightly buzzes attends the running brooklike notes.  It’s sort of the opposite of elevator music, and though there is sometimes no one sitting in the folding chairs, the entire space seems to be uplifted.

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Chopin at the World Financial Center–Heavy Hands Were Needed

March 1, 2010

Chopin at World Financial Center (Heavy Hands Were Needed)

Today is the official 200th anniversary of Frederic Chopin’s birth date.   (This is based upon Chopin’s dating of his birth at March 1, rather than baptismal records that stated his date of birth as February 22nd).

I celebrated Chopin’s birthday by realizing,  by chance, that there was a free concert going on next door to my lower Manhattan apartment at the World Financial Center, and (after hurrying my dog through her evening circuit) rushing over there to listen.  (Anxious not to be too late, I considered dragging my dog along too, but figured that the Financial Center’s security guards would not understand either Pearl’s affection for Chopin or her incredibly quiet nature.)

The celebration at the World Financial Center is quite remarkable;  they have set up grand pianos throughout the public spaces upon which preludes, etudes, scherzos, and fantasias are being played all day long (by student pianists.)   This evening, more student pianists, from NYU’s Steinhardt’s Music School, played in the Palm Court under huge cloth awnings that seem to have been set up to try to harness the space’s execrable acoustics.   Heavy amplification of the main concert piano was also used.

The student pianists were wonderful, but heavy amplification does not work well for Chopin—the runs of notes tend to run together, the swirls of arpeggio to become eddies, the little fillips at the end of lines to muddy into ponderous fillips.  Heavy amplification was required, however, because of the constant din of very loud talk.   I don’t mean just from people sitting in the audience, or the occasional child in stroller who would try to sing Happy Birthday in response to a maternal explanation of Chopin’s special day;  I don’t even mean people walking through.  (The concert I went to was “after hours” so there weren’t that many passers-by).  The talk seemed mainly to come from the very few restaurants and bars in the Financial Center, particularly, the Grill Room, that sits up above the Palm Court.

It’s really hard to understand how people’s talking (even when punctuated by the occasional hoot) can be so loud; it couldn’t be called a hum, even a buzz.   Din–the din of a busy market, the barrage of commerce.

The market/commerce aspect arises because it is hard to imagine that there are many people eating at the Financial Center’s few restaurants  other than employees of tenants, i.e. Merrill Lynch, Amex, Cadwallader, Wickersham and Taft, the Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal.  (Lehman Brothers used to be a tenant; don’t quite know what happened to that one.)

It really is wonderful that such tenants arrange for Chopin to be played; too bad they won’t shut up for it.

Okay, okay, I’m being unfair, snobby, hypocritical.   I make my living from commerce too, as does New York City.  I really am grateful.  The Center sponsors all kinds of strange and wonderful free events–parades of tubas, kayak races, outdoor movies, dance performances, avant garde music, non-avant garde music.   (The Chopin festival, for example, is to continue for five days.)   In our culture, such cultural events rarely happen  without corporate largesse.

But even as I am truly grateful, I am also conscious that every evening, there are also lines of limos and private cars waiting outside the Financial Center, blocks and blocks of big black cars.

It’s very possible that the people who will get into those big cars are not the same ones making so much noise.  Who knows?  Still, I  can’t help but feel that the financial world would spin in a slightly different way if everyone working in it took the subway every day (or at least some days.)  And was a bit quieter while Chopin was being played, live.

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Snow Today – Villanelle to Aging Brain

February 26, 2010

Aging Brain in Snow Drift

Snow today.  A ton of it.  Many tons.

Snow is pretty great in Manhattan–there’s most of the magic, little of the mess.  No, that’s not right.  How about ‘there’s most of the incandescence, little of the inconvenience’?

What I’m really trying to say here is that most of us here don’t have to shovel our driveways, or clean off our cars.  (We just don’t have ’em.)

And the City is clean!  At least, looks clean.  For a few hours anyway.  (Before the dogs have had their day.)

In a really big snow storm, like today, all the things that you thought were so important, the deadlines, the bustle, go on hold for a little while.   Nature takes over, unusual in itself in the City.

Of course, Nature took over in kind of shocking way this snowstorm when a man from Brooklyn man was killed by a falling tree limb in Central Park.

Although I truly think New Yorkers were shocked and saddened by the incident, many still ventured into Central Park today to enjoy its heavy blanket of snow.   With the typical New Yorker’s can-do attitude, one woman commented that, after yesterday’s accident,  she’d decided not to stay long under any tall trees.  (Good thinking.)   (It reminded me of my far less careful planning,  when I bought a used inflatable rubber dinghy on the street sometime after 9/11 with the thought that if terrorism hit again, I could float my children and myself across the Hudson.  Unfortunately, because I bought the very heavy raft in a little shopping cart (the area had no taxi cabs), I abraded several holes in the rubber by the time I dragged it home.)

Today, I tried to use the quiet aftermath of the snow storm to write a Petrarchan sonnet.  I managed the form, but not a very good poem, which immediately sent me into a tailspin about brain deterioration.  (Although thinking about the incident with the rubber dinghy, I’m not sure that my brain really has deteriorated in the last several years.)  At any rate, as a result, I’m posting instead an older villanelle (already posted some months ago, but without illustration):

Villanelle to Wandering Brain

Sometimes my mind feels like it’s lost its way
and must make do with words that are in reach
as pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day,

when what it craves is crimson, noon in May,
the unscathed verb or complex forms of speech.
But sometimes my mind feels like it’s lost its way

and calls the egg a lightbulb, plan a tray,
and no matter how it search or how beseech
is pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day.

I try to make a joke of my decay
or say that busy-ness acts as the leech
that makes my mind feel like it’s lost its way,

but whole years seem as spent as last month’s pay,
lost in unmet dares to eat a peach
as pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day.

There is so much I think I still should say,
so press poor words like linens to heart’s breach,
but find my mind has somehow lost its way
as pink as dusk (not dawn), the half-light of the day.

All rights reserved.

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Morning Snow In Lower Manhattan

February 25, 2010

Thick Morning Snow on Lower Broadway

This morning approaching Lower Broadway, the snowflakes were thick and feathery, almost warm.

The last ticker tape parade I went to, people just threw reams of paper out of the upper windows.   That was after they’d emptied their shredders.

The shredded paper worked pretty well; though it was not exactly confetti-like.  Still, it at least fell in fine (if long) jigsaw-edged strips, like big strings of miniature paper dolls, the occasional paper arms clinging to a cornice or window ledge.

The reams of  loose paper that were thrown once the shredded paper ran out was thick, heavy, and fell in gushing slants, the pages looking as if they might decapitate one of us jammed down upon the crowded sidewalk, the papers descending like a kind of divine (or at least bureaucratic) vengeance.   A snow of writs.

But today’s snow, thick, clean, feathery, makes for a sky of redemption.

The people on the sidewalk, where the snow disappears even as it lands, don’t seem to notice it much.  We trudge ahead, faces grim with Thursday.

But what I imagine inside every single snow-frosted head is that there is some part of the brain whose tongue, (brain-tongue, even pinker than the pink lobes of the cortex), or, among the squeamish, whose hands (brain-hands) is/are sticking out towards the thick flakes, anxious to taste, capture, hold, some of this soft white light, this proof of something other–something to fête, something to cheer, something as big as sky.

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Buddhist Talks, Vampire Books, The IRT

February 23, 2010

Possibly Vampire Elephant Meditating on IRT

Litstening in the mornings lately to Buddhist meditation talks instead of vampire books on tape.  Although the vampire books are a great diversion when you feel down, I keep thinking that the Buddhist talks must provide a better path to long-term contentment.  (Vampires are typically not big on enlightenment.)

Today, my tape focused on Buddha’s list of ten “unwholesome” actions, which, in a peanutshell, are (i) killing, (ii) stealing, (iii) sexual misconduct, (iv) lying, (v) slander (gossip), (vi) harsh speech, (vii) useless speech, (viii) covetousness or greed, (ix) anger, (x) delusion.

These seem to me both remarkably like, and unlike, the Bible’s Ten Commandments; like, in that they proscribe killing, stealing, lying and coveting; unlike, in that they do not emphasize particular deference to authority.   There are no specific rules about God, no prohibition against idolatry, no special honors reserved for parents.  (Though, presumably, if one avoids harsh, useless, or angry speech, one will also be nice to one’s parents.)   The “not killing” is not even limited to human beings.

This lack of emphasis on a personal authority also shows up in their characterization as  ten “unwholesome actions”  rather than “commandments.”

I realize, as I sit on the IRT, that this is one reason that I kind of like Buddhism, at least my Western dabbler’s form of Buddhism.

It’s not that I resent authority.  (And, btw, Karma is certainly its own kind of authoritative force.)

But there’s something appealing to the (self-centered) babyboomer mind about having no-no’s called “unwholesome” rather than “sins.”

The list of “unwholesome actions” warns against certain conduct not so much because it is offensive to a higher power (remember, there is Karma), but because it is harmful; unwholesome conduct keeps you from being your whole self, and from connecting to the larger self, which, in Buddhism, is the greater world, all beings, loving kindness.  Unwholesome actions will, in other words, inevitably make both you and the world unhappy.

It’s such an interesting juxtaposition to me, sitting here on one of those small bottle blue seats of the subway:  being whole vs. being holy.  Maybe a better way to put it is being whole in order to be holy.    Being whole so as not to be “hole-y” (as in having great big cigarette burns all over the soul/self/spirit).

But even as I write that (we are whizzing through the tunnel), I worry that everything I am thinking smacks of semantics, philosophy too (which I’ve never much liked)  It also sounds pretty PC.   Shallowly exotic.  (After years of doing yoga around many Westerners who eagerly adopted bindis, Indian dress, and Sanskrit chanting, I know that there is a great attraction in the exotic.)

And then I look up from my notebook, returning suddenly to the here and now.  (This is another thing Buddhism urges.)  There is a sign across from me which reads “This Poster Can Make You Happier Than Any Other On The Subway”.   Below that statement is a lot of small print in two columns; a woman stands between them, facing away, her ponytail down the center of her back.  It advertises “The School of Practical Philosophy.”

The next sign over reads “Single Incision Weight Loss Surgery,” and the next “Bed Bugs Are Back.”

So, the Practical Philosophy sign may be right, I think (despite my personal dislike for philosophy.)

Except that then I notice two signs just below the philosophical one.  They are mounted on the top half and lower half of the subway door.  “Do Not Hold Door.”  “Do Not Lean On Door.”   A whole bunch of metaphors jump to mind—doors, gateways, doctrine (as in over-dependence upon), personal experience (as in examining, learning from),  non-clinging, openness….

Like a typical New Yorker, I think: whatever works for you.  (Even, sometimes, maybe,vampire books.)

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Fear and Loathing on the Number 4 (The NYC Subway Not Much Of A Tea Party)

February 17, 2010

Boy on Number 4 Train

“The people here are f—ing animals,” said the slightly hard-faced young woman to her ten or eleven year old son as they scooted onto my express.

The train was full, but not jammed; there was space not only to breathe, but even to move around a bit.  The boy, wide-eyed and buzz-cut (his mom was holding his Yankees cap), stepped towards one of the center poles, reaching in between passengers, to hold on—his mom quickly pulled him back towards the door.

“These people push you,” she said, draping an arm around him, “I’ll push them back.”

At their side, I kept thinking how unfair this was.   Saying that people push on the train is a bit like saying that a bunch of clementines slung into a bag, clothes crushed into a hamper, or lemmings urged into the sea, push. Okay, maybe we and the lemmings do.  Some.  Still, in my experience, most New York City subway riders, especially the ones whose faces are almost grazed by my forearm as I reach for something to hold onto are pretty forbearing.  (A very different f-word.)

I’m kind of a busybody, I guess, in the sense that I pay attention to strangers.  (As noted in my previous posts, I believe in a “ripple effect” of trying to be peaceful, pleasant, on the subway.)  So now I tried to smile discreetly at the boy to reassure him that he wasn’t really surrounded by f—ing animals.

But it was hard to smile at the boy.  First, because I was afraid his mom would slug me;  secondly, because I was worrying about the fact that his mother had thrust him into a spot (by the door) where there was nothing at all to hang onto.   (I envisaged lurches, collisions, a huge altercation.)

But as the train pushed from the station, the mom grabbed him again, folding her arm around his neck.

After a minute or so, as the ride stabilized, she loosened her grip, and the boy turned himself around so that he faced the door itself and leaned right into it.   This worried me even more.  GERMS.   (I’m a mother too.)

Then I realized that he was (probably) not pressing his mouth into the rubberized seam of the door, but into the collar of his jacket. And then, that the little boy was gently but firmly hitting his buzz-cut head against the door itself.  Again and again and again.

He did not look autistic.  (Who knows?)   But he did not look like he had any “organic” type of problem that might lead to headbanging.   He just looked, well, down, as he softly banged his head.

The mother gently put her hand on the back of his head to try to stop him.  When that didn’t work, she put her hand on his forehead to shield the place that was banging.  That didn’t stop him either.

Finally, we got to Union Square where she put her arm around his neck again and told him they had to get out—

“This our stop?”

“No, to let the people get off.”

As they stepped back into the train, there was one emptied seat left, which I pointed out quickly to the woman.  I felt a little guilty as there was a little old lady right behind them, but the old lady probably wouldn’t have swooped down on the seat in time in any case, and the boy, with his mom pushing him, was a pretty good swooper.

The mother nodded at me once her son was situated,  half-smiling for just a moment.  Then she leaned heavily against the center pole, her face tired, stressed.

The incident somehow made me think of the Tea Partyers again.  I don’t think I quite said what I wanted to yesterday in my post about sneering.  And I don’t mean to imply that the woman on the train was a Tea Partyer.  Only that she seemed frustrated and fearful, and I’m guessing (with really no clear evidence) that she doesn’t much like or trust government, and probably not Obama.

A big part of me wanted to say to her:  ‘Hey!  Don’t spout the f-word to your kid.  Don’t teach pushing on the train!  Enough with automatic retribution!’

But I was able to stop myself.  Besides the fact that she really might have hit me, that kind of speech would simply not have been very useful.  As it was, I was lucky enough to be able to help her get a seat for a tired boy.  And to get a smile from her.  And for both of us to feel that strangers in our society could, in fact, have a kind of connection.

I don’t mean to pat myself on the back here.   Just to say that it felt good.

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Meditation on the Subway – Ripple Effect – Not Quite Tulipomania

February 8, 2010



Subway Stillness

This morning as I sat on the subway I shut my eyes and focused on my breath.  I listened to the inhalation, then the exhalation; I felt the air creep up and down my nostrils.

I did not read; I did not write in my notebook; I did not check my Blackberry.

I felt my forehead loosen, my brain relax.  It was a bit like a too-tight ponytail gently being untied.  I felt too, or at least imagined, my newly-acquired peace radiating out to the entire train car.  (Miraculously, I did not check to see if this feeling was accurate.)

When I walked from my subway to my office, I kept quiet, still not checking my Blackberry, not talking on my cell, smiling in the cold February sunlight, conscious of the lines of granite against sky, the lines of spindly trees against sky, sky.   When I got to my building, I greeted people with genuine attention, catching the eye of the security guards I know without groaning about Monday, joking with my co-workers.  Later in the day, that same joking mood came back my way again.

I did all this because my eldest daughter has recently returned from her first meditation retreat.  Although I believe, at least on a theoretical level, in the benefits of meditation, I have not actually put these beliefs into practice for some time.

(Relaxation?  A glass of wine in the evening in so much easier.  Self-awareness?  Multi-tasking is so much less painful.)

But my daughter recently returned from her first meditation retreat with face fresh, eyes glowing, and an extended radius of appreciative awareness.  And so I went “hmmm…” (if not “om”), and tried for some stillness.

This is called the ripple effect.  Granted in my case, it was a pretty small ripple, still the water shifted.

We all know about word-of-month, trends, Tulipomania.   The transformation of ripples into waves is faster than ever in our computer age (although frankly some of the virtual waves are a bit on the shallow side.)  Word of mouth used to require one person to talk to another and then another and then another in a combination that was exponential but still essentially sequential; but the internet allows for word of mouth times ten.  Click, click, click, and soon thousands of people may be reached.  (Hopefully, not in one of those chain letters.)

At the same time, one’s voice can feel dwarfed by all the chatter.  And if one’s voice is dwarfed, one’s silence is absolutely crushed.  All that buzz makes what’s beneath the buzz both unheard and unhearable.  You can literally not hear yourself think; or worse, all you can hear is yourself think; and all you can think about amounts to so much twittering, so many pip-tweets.

And in the midst of the clicking, the thinking, the tweeting, one can also forget the power of the personal ripple effect; the wonderful contagion of face-to-face quiet, listening, smiles.

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Eyes Wide Shut – A Concert

January 31, 2010

Listening To Music

What a wonderful thing it is to close one eyes and listen to music.  This was made very clear to me this afternoon as I attended a friend’s choral concert in which truly sublime music (Brahms and a combination of folk songs and spirituals from Israel, Japan, the United States and England) was sung sublimely.

There is something innately thrilling about listening to live voices raised in song.  I  have to confess though, that because of my ever-wandering and little-disciplined mind, it is sometimes difficult for me to give myself over to it, to simply listen, without doing more (or rather something else) at the same time.  I am habituated to a certain narrative flow, the storyline of thoughts, worries, busy-ness, which is hard to turn off.

At this concert, however, I was blessed by the company, in the next aisle, of a woman in older middle age, with a pale braid in a loop that stuck out at the back.  She came in late, with several large, full, paper bags, a small black backpack and a heavy coat, which she took off, despite the chill, and laid across the empty seats in front of me.

I have to say that I was a bit suspicious of the woman the moment the coat came off, because she was pretty clearly braless under her grey jump suit.  This, perhaps unfairly, combined with the bags made me wonder for a moment whether she wasn’t homeless, except that the admission for the concert seemed a bit high for someone who only wanted a warm place to sit.

As the Brahms lieder progressed, she quickly unbraided the convex loop of braid, spreading the wavy hair over her shoulders.  She took her jump suit jacket off (yes, she really was braless) —there was some decal on her long-sleeve t-shirt.  It may have been a bird (as in Tweety), or I may only think that it was a bird because one of the Brahms lieder was about a “pretty bird”.  She rustled quietly among the bags and took out a tupperware container of pink yogurt and carefully spooned a few bites into her mouth, then closed it again.  After wiping her lips with her finger, she opened up her little black backpack, rummaged among its array of contents for a tube of skin lotion which she spread over her face.  After she put that tube back, she got another little bottle of lotion, which she rubbed into her hands.   I couldn’t help noticing, as I listened to another darting bit of Brahms, that the hands she rubbed with skin lotion looked well-manicured.

At this point, maybe, actually, some time before this point, I realized that I really did have to close my eyes if I was going to be able to hear the music at all.

This really did work.  With eyes closed, I could just be a beat, an ear, my mind amazingly blank.  Blank, that is, until I wondered what that woman was doing, and I’d just have to open my eyes for a second or two in order to check.

During a beautiful “Oh Shanandoah,” she flossed her teeth.  I turned away quickly.

During a beautiful spiritual “I been ‘buked”, she reviewed post cards on her lap

This is New York.  (Brooklyn actually, still New York.)

On the whole, I felt grateful.  I kept my eyes closed, more or less, anxious not to be distracted by the poor woman, anxious perhaps not to be like her.

Did I mention the second helping of pink yogurt?

Categories: elephants, New York City
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