JOURNAL      9 . 15 . 2002

un rêve dans le zoo du parc central


friday, september 13

One thing I've learned in three weeks of skating: nothing is funnier, to a teenaged boy on a bicycle, than the sight of a 30-year-old man stumbling off his skateboard.

wednesday, september 11

8:46 a.m., Rivington Street.

9:06 a.m., Spring and West Broadway.

monday, september 9

I drink more water than anyone you know. Some days more than 2 gallons, I'd guess. I've done this for years, and I'll continue doing it no matter what the cranks at Dartmouth say.

As an aquaphile, I've loved living in New York, which has the best water in the world, by all accounts: it's clean, it's pure, and when it comes out of the tap in our bathroom, it's cold as a creek. Sometime last week, however, the water suddenly and inexplicably changed flavor. It tastes organic now, like the kind of water I'm used to tasting at the beach. I suspect it has something to do with the drought, though I haven't heard anyone say so. I haven't even heard anyone complain about it. But I know I'm not making it up.

Otherwise? I've felt for a week like we were all being fed into a tunnel. I want to get it over with.

Pictures from the weekend. I'll see you soon

sunday, september 1

My cousin Rick, who taught me how to play tennis 20 years ago, took me to the US Open yesterday. When he was my tennis camp counselor, I pestered him endlessly: I was homesick and unhappy, and he was stuck trying to make me feel better. This kept him from his primary responsibility, which was to try to make the girls' counselors feel better.

I felt guilty about this for years: what an annoying little responsibility I must have been! Poor guy! In the prime of youth, when he should have been dancing to A Flock of Seagulls with some tennis-skirted blond from Groton, he was stuck trying to persuade his big-headed, perpetually blue-jeaned (even on court!) cousin — too young even to play with a full-sized racket — that the ghost stories the other counselors were telling him weren't true. Only today did it occur to me that nothing made him look more attractive to the girls' counselors than the tenderness he appeared to show toward his little cousin. Which must have been why he always suggested we have our talks on the porch, where they could see us.

Pictures from the Open and following.

monday, august 26

Progress:

Don't worry, Mum. I'm not really that pale.

saturday, august 24

I said to Jennifer, “I think I'll get a .”

“No you won't. You'll end up as before you even get a chance to have a .”

Time passed. “O.k., then, I think I'm just going to get an , all right?”

“No you aren't. You'll end up a stuck in front of the all day, fantasizing you're some sports hero.”

For some reason, it then dawned on me that what I really wanted was a . I'd never skated before, but it seemed like a good way to pass the time until snow fell and we could go snowboarding. Also, it wasn't a major enough purchase to require a committee hearing. In any case, Jennifer seemed happy about it.

Everyone else I've mentioned it to, however, has had the same reaction: “Um...aren't you a little, uh, for that?”

I put it to the skaters on Bolt: Is 30 too old to start skating?

Feeling encouraged, like I was ok even if I couldn't ollie an anthill, I checked out the boards on skateboarding.com.

thursday, august 22

For an island, Manhattan feels deeply land-locked. Jennifer and I sometimes walk to the promenade on the East River, which is just a block from our apartment, and look down toward the harbor, listening to the water sucking against the seawall. But it doesn't feel like water, exactly: water is something you want the option of jumping into, and you'd no sooner jump into the East River than make a meal from the leftover fast food that floats on its surface.

It's been especially frustrating lately. Until yesterday, August has been one boring, mind-numbing heat wave, weather in which you don't so much sweat and pant as congeal. We've craved the scouring a bracing dip in saltwater gives you, or a splash of cold river to get the film off our skin. More resourceful people climb onto the train with their coolers and beach chairs and head to Jones Beach, or congratulate themselves for planning ahead as they cruise to their shares on the Jersey shore. Saturday, at our wits' ends, we settled for Blue Crush. If you know of a movie that's got a more reverent and rapturous attitude toward water, I'd like to hear it.

We came out of the theater dying for water, and it was raining. It was a far cry from Wrightsville's ego-crushing waves, or the cold tank of Walden Pond, but it was something. We stood under an awning, and I held my hand out under a drain spout, swimming by synecdoche.

sunday, august 18

This morning, a couple about our age is walking east down Rivington Street, headed for the brunch places on Ludlow and Orchard Streets. They're holding hands, but she sounds incredulous as she says, “I tried to kiss you?”

“Ah,” he says. “You did, in fact, kiss me.”

Some pictures

wednesday, august 7

Insomnia: your indictment, your conviction, your sentence. The light meant to ward off the murderers and let us sleep secure in our beds malfunctions, its motion detector so sensitive the waving of the grass sets it off, makes it shine all night.

It's no wonder children are afraid of the dark.

saturday, august 3

Last night, we finished a bottle of wine and went sleepily out into the rain. The wind had been gusting all evening, kicking up clouds of dust as I walked home from work. There'd been hail, and lightning that killed a man who'd gone to his roof to watch the storm with his girlfriend. It was calmer now, but the rain sputtered on, lightning occasionally blanked out the sky, thunder cracked and growled.

The neighborhood looked strange in this weather. In front of the guitar store on Rivington Street, a discount beer truck sat idle. Its driver sat in his seat, lit up by reflected street lights, looking exhausted and slack, nowhere to go. In a boarded-up building, newly made into a Pentecostal church, a preacher was bellowing in Spanish; from the sidewalk he sounded like a radio. Down the street, in front of a half-finished building, an old man washed out buckets in the gutter, tying them together under scraps of cardboard for safekeeping.

We wandered over to Tonic. A singer was about to begin her second set, so we paid and went in. It was a small crowd, people hiding from the weather. The singer wasn't on yet, but her son, probably 7, was leaning against a man's knee. “Doesn't your mom sound great tonight?” the man asked. We sat on a low bench behind a cluster of people and drank our drinks, waiting.

We couldn't see her when she took the stage, but we knew she was there. The crowd fell quiet; someone shushed a couple laughing at the bar. The rain chattered on the roof and skylight. The woman started. She sang in French, unaccompanied at first. Her voice was beautiful: deep and nimble, skittering up scales, catching on some guttural syllable, then opening out into a pure, clear, high note. When lightning hit outside, it flashed through the skylight, illuminated the beams of the ceiling, caught the silent crowd in its strobe. It washed all the color out of the room except for the yellow stage light, the red curtain, the musicians, the flush of the singer's face. She sang with her eyes wide open, her hand lightly touching her face, her body almost completely still.

for 9.11, begin here or use the archives.

thank you, blogger