live from New York

I.

Another evening spent along the Hudson River.  My forced deceleration is an opportunity to listen to the end-of-summer crickets, which I love the way I love the smell of other people's fireplaces on a late autumn night; the way I love to sniff the air before a storm and say, "It smells like rain"; the way the elderly (and the not-so-old) like to talk about their ailments: because it reminds me that I am alive, walking along the Hudson on a late-summer evening in A.E. 34.  From across the river, I watched planes land and take off, passing one another casually and unremarkably, like cars on the freeway, without any hint whatsoever of the holy terror I feel in flight.  Below, Mallards bobbed, quiet and modest.  No duck islands for them: at night, they must sleep on the wooden piers of the boat basin, just as I watched an avian family settle down at my parents' club a few weeks back.  They squawked at the late arrivals before carefully tucking their heads backwards into their breasts.  ...A low growl from the water, and a dinghy pulled in the marina.

I walked north, the bridge crisply elegant when seen from afar, until most of the path and its guardrails fell away.  This was always my favorite spot along the trail when I lived in Manhattan: a bony strip of dirt and grass where the cars hurtle by at ear-level, river at my left, bridge in my sights, wind in my face, home (waiting) at my back.  The trail was studded with men and women, usually alone, sometimes in pairs, sitting on the rocks, waiting for sunset - as though they came every night, as though there might never be another.  When I reached the cathedral, I turned south, and continued past the marina, down to the enclave where the Trump buildings stiffly overlook midtown east, along the curving path to the garbage pier* from which, for decades, my late grandfather set off on his daily rounds.  Back then, this whole area was a dump, in ways literal and metaphorical - all the waterfront from here down to the Village given up to fallen sailors and drug users and hookers.  Of all the transformations that gentrification has brought, the one that I can whole-heartedly embrace is this one: that New York no longer turns its back on the water, and that it has expanded its parks system so democratically and creatively to include places once so marginal.  The tall grasses, planted in drifts, appeared new - the originals were probably washed away during Sandy - but I remembered the weeping willows draped along the paths.

II.

Like the crickets, we humans know that our summer is nearly gone.  The parks have been full every night: the joggers and the runners and the bikers, of course, but also many people just out for a stroll, or out with a stroller.  It feels like some European Promenade of the last century - from, perhaps, exactly one hundred years ago.  Certainly, as I walked past crowds swelling the cafes along the water, the phrase "before the war" came to mind, unexpectedly, then settled in, feeling appropriate.  The inconceivable can always repeat; in the meantime, we all hope for the good weather to last.  The planes ignored the northwest sky, which flashed oddly pink; meanwhile, the swollen, grape color north of the bridge slowly slid south.  I turned back.  

III.

Just now, the thunder begins to crumple overhead.  As if in response, a siren begins its high-pitched whine.  I expect that the cat, who otherwise detests me, will skulk in here soon enough.  As I look out toward the strobe-lit river, the buildings collapse into two dimensions, each outlined briefly in platinum.

The gathering storm. A pause, like an intake of breath, and the rain begins.

*Now it is lit up a lurid, defiant bright pink.  It would not surprise me in the least should it actually be home to New York's newest underground club.