Yes, folks, the 2023 SJ Rozan Calendars are now available for your date-keeping pleasure. This year we have four: Bella the Cat, Colors, Plants, and New York City. All money raised goes to The Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Get one for your home, one for your office (even if they’re the same), one for a friend, and one to put above your cat’s water dish!
Neither of these guys is the baby, who comes as soon as I fill the feeder, before the bigger squirrels and the birds get here. I think he sits and waits. These two are siblings, two of the four born in the tree this year. Things were not this amicable for long. They kept whacking each other over the head and diving for the best seeds. They did share the feeder without actually chasing each other off, though. A big crow came to watch, but he clearly decided the whole thing was just going to be trouble, so he left. Bella practically lost her mind over the two squirrels, but she was a little intimidated by the size of the crow. So was I.
A couple of people have asked if I’d write about what it’s like here in NYC these days. First, thanks for your concern, those of you who’ve asked if I and mine are okay. We are; I know what it looks like on the TV news, but this is not a war zone. I went to the Greenmarket this morning, on the north side of Union Square; the south side has been the staging area for the Manhattan protests. The farmers were selling produce and bread, people were shopping, folks were wearing masks and being orderly. Nevertheless, when I asked one of the farmers whether there’d been extra thought given to whether to come in today, she said no but they expected the market would shut down early as it had on Saturday to give people a chance to clear out before the protests started.
I’ve been hearing helicopters since Friday, sirens occasionally. I’m in the West Village, about a mile from Union Square itself and a mile from Soho, where a lot of luxury shops were hit hard. Near Union Square I saw three broken windows — a restaurant, where the bar had been looted, a Verizon store, and a sneaker store. Nothing else, though some stores are boarding up in anticipation of more to come tonight.
Will there be more tonight? I suspect so, but I also think the intensity will taper off. In normal times it would taper way off as people went back to work, but of course part of the problem is everyone’s been out of work for nearly three months.
I’ve seen videos of the looting at Gucci, at Dolce & Gabbana, and I’ve seen a lot of posts asking, “How does this help?” Also, photos of destruction with “I’ve never seen NYC like this!” captions.
First, for the NYC-has-hit-the-apocalypse crowd, I refer you to the 1970’s fiscal crisis, to AIDS, to 9/11 — oh, go look it up: the history of NYC. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here when this is over.
Second, and more important, for the “How does this help?” people, I suggest that’s the wrong question. For the record, nobody’s saying looting Gucci “helps.” But I’ll bet a lot of good upright citizens in 1773 asked, “How does this help?” when rioters seized 342 chests of tea from ships of the British East India Company — a private company — and dumped it overboard to protest government action. The rationale then was the same as now, and can be encapsulated into this: when Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police killing black men, he was called a son of a bitch by the sitting President and he lost his job. Or this: the Tulsa Race Massacre, 99 years ago to the day today, when white Tulsa rose up and, burning, murdering, and rampaging, destroyed the most prosperous black community in the country. (Did you learn about that riot in school?) Or this: the NYC Draft Riots of 1863, when a group of white men, angry at being drafted into the Army by a white President to fight other white men, lynched black men and burned buildings, including the Colored Orphan Asylum, to the ground. (Did you learn about that riot in school?)
I suggest that instead of uttering a rhetorical gasp, people might read Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Colson Whitehead, Attica Locke, Ta-Nehisi Coates; to listen to measured voices, which are speaking even now; and to ask the only question that can even begin to stop this endless repetition, which is: “How can I help?”
For some reason unknown to me — as the reasons for most things are — yesterday morning’s walk to the basketball gym was rife with discarded items that practically wrote their own captions. Here are mine; you’re welcome to send yours.
Honey… About the dog…
Whee! First-class flatbed from now on!
It should’ve set off warning bells when he insisted on hanging that stupid self-portrait in the living room.
Take this messenger job and shove it!
Do you think he’ll get it if I leave TWO behind?
It’s not uncommon here to see plastic bottles and aluminum cans left beside trash containers, for street people to collect and redeem for the nickel or dime. People often place them carefully so they won’t blow away. This, however, was new to me: a pile, worth a couple of bucks, with its own handy carrying bag. I love New York.
…of two or three thousands miles may experience, at the moment of departure, a variety of emotions. He may feel excited, sentimental, anxious, carefree, heroic, roistering, picaresque, introspective, or practically anything else: but above all he must and will feel a fool.”
— Peter Fleming
She will, too. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time you’ll recognize the quote. I use it whenever I take a big trip because it’s always accurate. I’m leaving in half an hour for the airport to go to Budapest and points east, circling back around to end in Prague. The cat, plants, and apartment have a great sitter; all my work is done; even the weather’s beautiful. And what a fool I feel!
But I’m going to the land of my people — not quite, we’re from Ukraine, but on this trip I’ll spend a lot of time walking the streets walked for centuries, until WWII, by Ashkenazi Jews, who are my extended people — and I’m going with some of my favorite traveling buddies, the gang I’ve been to western China and to Mongolia with. I expect once I really get there the whole fool/jitters/travel anxiety thing will melt away, and the trip will be great. Right now, I just want to stay home in my comfort zone, but that’s why you travel, isn’t it? When the comfort zone gets to comfortable, then you gotta go.
Try to stay out of trouble while I’m gone. Or, if you insist on getting into trouble, try to enjoy it.
I leave you, and NYC, with a river photo. The next river I sit beside, if all goes well, will be the Danube.
Haven’t done one of these in awhile, but NYC, my home place, just keeps coming. A few recent wonderfulnesses:
In Queens, right outside the gates to a large cemetery, stand two commercial enterprises. One, unsurprisingly, sells gravestones. The other sells construction supplies: hard hats, safety cones, warning flags. This strikes me as an excellent choice of location on the part of the construction business. The subliminal message is so clear as to hardly be subliminal: If you don’t buy OUR products, you might have to buy THEIR products.
Also in Queens, a psychic has a storefront office next to the We Buy Gold store. This is for your convenience, in case the psychic gives you bad news?
And, finally: the guy in the shoe repair/keymaking shop on 44th St. has a plastic jug into which runs a flexible piece of hose containing the overflow from his air conditioning unit. I’m thinking, how courteous, to keep people’s shoes dry, preventing what would otherwise be a small but steady stream on the sidewalk. That may have been the original impulse; but I was there when he opened the shop yesterday morning. He took the hose out of the jug, crossed the sidewalk, and carefully watered the street tree in front of his shop.
I love New York.
Meanwhile, with all the appallingness going on in the world, New York continues to come through. On the serious side, there’s now free college tuition throughout the state for kids of middle-class families, and a serious look being taken in Albany at single-payer health care. And on the who’d-a-thunk-it side, there’s this. It’s the NYPD Out and Proud Mobile, parked across the street from the Stonewall Inn, where what was then called the Gay Liberation movement really took off in 1969 in response to a, yes, NYPD raid. What you can hardly see unless you look closely is that the lights in the light bar on top are rainbow-colored. What you don’t see is that I had to wait to shoot this photo until a car pulled away — it was driven by a black-dressed Hasidic Jew who stopped beside the cops, gave them a thumbs-up, and said in a heavy Yiddish accent, “You guys are beautiful!”
Pouring in NYC this afternoon, so I ducked into one of those specialty coffee places. I waited behind two other wet people ordering from a barista so sprightly I could only assume he’d been hitting the product. When it was my turn I asked for a cup of tea. He pirouetted, grabbed a teabag, pulled the hot water, and said, “I can tell you how tea started. I mean, if you have time.”
“It’s raining, go ahead.”
“Well, a couple of thousand years ago the emperor of China used to drink hot water three times a day and then one day he was sitting in the garden and a leaf fell into his water and when his servants tried to take it away and give him another he said no because it was fate so he’d drink it and see what happened so they all watched and they were scared but afterwards he felt so great he wanted more of those leaves in his water the next day. And that’s how tea started.”
He grinned, gave me my tea, looked past me at the wet young man behind me and said, “What can I get you?”
I love New York.
