SJ Rozan

Bright yellow flashes

Light up bare branches, brown grass.

Goldfinches are back.

Crimson cardinal

Announces this whole yard’s his.

Sparrows ignore him.

Bluejay at feeder

Makes a mess, knocks seeds to ground.

Squirrels are his friends.

Alas, poor Bella! The mourning doves started early this year — well, really, spring’s so late they must have decided not to wait — and have already produced two chubby young, who fledged this morning. A short maiden flight from the nest landed them on the nearest protected spot: my fire escape. The mother just joined them. These giant plump bird babies will be too dazed to do anything for the next hour or so except what they’re doing now: waddling back and forth, taking pecking lessons from their mother. Three birds right under Bella’s nose. Bella is squeaking and pawing the window. If she doesn’t explode from excitement before they fly away I’ll be impressed.

They ran the 118th Boston Marathon yesterday on a perfect sunny day. Trees, late this year, were just bursting into flower; the weather was warmer than the runners ideally hoped for but it wasn’t actually hot, and for the spectators it was perfect. I was watching with my nephew Dan’s wife, kids, in-laws, cousins, and a million other spectators, twice the normal number. Last year a few weeks after the bombings Dan wondered if he should train to run the 2014 marathon. The “god damn it” was unspoken but loud. In the same tone I said if he did, I’d come cheer. So did thousands of more runners than usual and hundreds of thousands of spectators. The Boston Athletic Association offered the chance to run the marathon to anyone injured in the bombings; a number of them did, and one of those, who’d considered leaving town for the weekend, said this for all of us: “It seemed cool to run toward the city instead of away.”

It was glorious, but it wasn’t the same as it used to be. The air had an edge it never had before and everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the day was safely over. People commented sadly on that, thrilled to have taken the race back but feeling something had been irretrievably lost. I thought about that on the train back last night — a train packed with sleeping runners — and as a New Yorker I want to say this to Boston: that won’t always be true. After Sept. 11 we felt that way about stunning autumn days. That’s when NY is at its best but so many of us felt our autumn had been destroyed forever. But the glory and the darkness of humans is our ability to forget. As individuals, it’s harder. People who were there will always live with it. What will happen in Boston as a city, though, is what happened here: as the disaster recedes in time, new people will weave themselves into the fabric of the city, people without those memories. People just arriving from other places, and people who are younger, growing up. The horror will get diluted both by time and by the number of people sharing your communal life. You’ll get your race back, as we got our autumn.

This, of course, is both the good news and the bad news. We’re sliding down the slope toward environmental catastrophe because of our talent for rising to a crisis and then moving on once the crisis is over. It’s in our DNA, a reasonable response to the world where we evolved, when almost all crises were short-term. The tiger stalked you, you ran away, then you went back to your everyday life. No point in using your energy making plans to avoid being stalked by tigers, except maybe changing your path to the waterhole to skirt the tiger’s lair. Now, however, we’re being stalked by a huge and long-term tiger; and even if we manage to vanquish it in the coming decades — a big if — we’ll have to permanently change our behavior and our understanding of our position on the earth in order to avoid it coming back for us again. Can we do it? I don’t know. For now, I’m hopeful that the individual and communal determination, courage, and compassion I saw in Boston yesterday means that we can.

Sitting at the river-side window on the NY-Montreal train. Not that I’m going to Montreal; I’m on a family junket, first to Saratoga to see the oldest of the Four Fabulous Nephews and his family, then on to Boston where his younger brother will run the Boston Marathon on Monday. (And yours truly will be at the goddamn finish line, yes I will.)

Rolling through midtown, looked down on a scraggly, potholed parking lot. Chain link and razor wire surrounded a dozen broke-down cars, and a car-sized white Chinese lion. He had a parking spot of his own.

Where the tracks pass under the roadway it’s dark except for occasional spills of light from cut-outs above. Each of these is graffitied, like art in a spotlight. Three are good, one is spectacular.

In northern Manhattan, between the train right-of-way and the river — serious no-man’s land — we just passed three lean-tos made of branches, old lumber, and blue tarp. One has a barbecue grill outside it. This is the area where Pete Hamill set his cave in FOREVER. If you love NYC or love good writing or both, and you haven’t read FOREVER, you’re in for a treat.

Farther: two fishermen with five fishing poles among them. Doesn’t look to be any action, though. A rack of bright kayaks in all sorts of colors, and a duck chasing a loon from his breakfast spot. Across the river, evidence of a recent big landslide on the Palisades: a cone-shaped treeless cliffside covered in scree. How recent? I think, the last few years, but not this year. I could see the green of small new trees leafing out here and there in the gray of the rocks.

In the general way of things I’m grumpy, cynical, pessimistic, and depressed. (And no, I won’t give up my Oxford comma.) But give me a cup of tea and a window seat on a train, and contentment reigns.

Unique, and a giant. I’m a huge fan, met him once or twice. One of a kind as a political thinker and as an artist. Gone way too soon. Mahalo for the music, Fred, and peace.

After days of 60’s and 70’s, 30 this morning, 25 with windchill, snow on the ground! What fresh hell is this?

Grass, rosebush, and daffodils wondering WTF?

Lots of people use the river walkway in good weather to get to work. Some get an early start by making work-related calls as they stroll. From behind me on my bench I’m always hearing snippets of the conversations of men and women in business suits hoofing it to Wall Street. Today I heard, “…and I guarantee I can put a business plan like that into play. I have the people, I have…” Usually I hear more than that; this guy went past quickly, so I turned around to check him out. Turned out to be a young black guy in a porkpie hat, hoodie, and statement eyeglasses, speaking into an over-ear mike like on stage, smooth as silk gliding by on his skateboard. If I had a business plan, I’m telling you right now I’d call him to put it into play. He was, by the way, heading away from Wall Street. I love New York.

Square-shouldered towers

Transformed by river’s ripples

Into smudged pastels.

Male mallard glides down,

Lands near second by seawall.

Bros go to breakfast.

On wide calm river,

Lifted, lowered on slow swells,

Geese float lazily.

For those of you not yet on my mailing list (what’s keeping you?) here’s the latest Rozan Report.

Bright sunshine, thin mist.

Birds chirp, trill, cackle, whirr, sing

From trees’ bare branches.

Joggers crowd pathway.

Orange, purple, yellow, green —

Sweatshirts bloom in sun.

White helicopter

Roaring north across blank sky.

Geese float, undisturbed.