[The Troll Family Scrapbook] My One Day in New York
Days before I was to leave, I took a good look at the far end of my
itinerary and finally fully realized that I was looking at a 15-hour
layover in New York City!
Well, fifteen hours, minus two hours for getting through customs on
arriving and minus two hours for check-in and security before departing
and minus double the two to two and a half hours Google told me it
would take for me to get pretty much anywhere from JFK by public
transit.
Leaving a jet-lagged six hours in which to "Do" New York City.
Immediately I began asking my laid-back Seattle resources what One
Thing I should do with a few hours in New York City. I got laid-back
Seattle answers. "Have a real bagel." "Look around Times Square."
Seattle does this to people. I began my own investigations. Bronx Zoo?
Second only to the one in San Diego... that I grew up with. Jewish
Theological Seminary? Closes down in August. Chabad's historical tour
of Lubavitcher Brooklyn? Might not have its intended impact after six
week breathing Jerusalem, ya think?
Time progressed; New York plans did not. I had great hopes of meeting
with Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, the master Jewish story-teller, but our
final emails just missed one another. Brain-storming with Israelis
proved invaluable for the insights into Israelis, not so much for the
insights into New York City, despite the fact that every other house
knows somewhere there.
But I had no fear.
I had a hidden lynch pin.
And on my last day in Jerusalem, I turned to that lynch pin:
I asked a New Yorker.
Who just happened to be my chavurtah and the mortal soul who knew me
best in all Jerusalem.
Actually, come to think of it, I didn't have to ask her.
What I said was, "Tomorrow I have a long layover in New York City."
"And what do you want to do with your one day in Manhattan?"
"I-- well, apparently I want to spend the day in Manhattan."
"Yes, yes, you do. When, exactly, is your plane arriving? Hang on, I'm
going to need some paper."
So I arrived in New York City with INSTRUCTIONS:
And before you ask, no, my chavrutah is not a professional teacher.
When a teacher gives inadequate directions, odds are good that the next
teacher will have to straighten things out, so each teacher learns best
how to correct the mistakes of the teacher ahead of them rather than
how to correct their own mistakes.
My chavrutah is a professional LIBRARIAN.
A librarian stays stuck in one place with the same fools coming back
with the same questions until that librarian masters the art of giving
fool-proof directions to get rid of them for a few hours and get some
work done.
Now, in order to get on to the topic at hand, it's best that I turn
aside for the moment from the things that should be said about the
public transit obstacle course and psychological stress test known
as "busing to Ben Gurion Airport".
For the moment, we shall also pass by the idiosyncrasies of
transversing the date-line at night while wedged in between an ingénue
clutching a three-foot stuffed animal elephant to her
bronchitis-wracked chest and a writhing fourteen year old Israeli girl
who dealt with her plane seat about as well as a cat deals with being
wrapped in a towel, and half the passengers families, half of the
families Chassidic, and all of the Chassidic families averaging two
anxious toddlers and one crying baby.
This brings me up to stumbling along towards customs trying to swallow
the concept that I had left Jerusalem. Immediately I discovered I was
having a terrible time transitioning back to the idea of a world around
me that spoke my language. Living somewhere and speaking very little of
the language is like having a chastity belt on your tongue: full range
of imagination but you learn real fast what not to try with strangers--
and those patterns of what not to try, like lessons learned in muscle
memory, do not wear off very quickly. I was highly conscious that I was
still struggling to think in Hebrew, and I could not turn it off. I was
holding my breath waiting for an immersive English environment to break
the spell and free me.
New York City was not that environment.
Helen Hanff wrote that London presents itself as whatever London you
have in your heart before you arrive. New York City, The City of the
modern world, is not so malleable. I could not have expected that my
first vision of New York City as an adult would be the immaculate grace
of a shining white egret pulling itself from the mud to fly with lazy
majesty under the high tracks of my train. My parents are lucky that I
settled in Seattle.
I rode the A Train with a black woman whose face matched the form of
the green African goddess my grandfather brought home from his travels
the year after my grandmother died. She slept with a midnight shall
wrapped around her, and I watched over her sleeping like that goddess
watched over my nights curled on the couch in my grandfather's home. I
watched a rosary come out of a pocket and move through fingers bead by
bead, trusted plastic more beautiful than its polished brothers hanging
for sale in the Christian quarters. I watched men and women who did not
know one another sitting down in seats side by side without fear or
alarm.
Up to 79th and Broadway, up one block and across the street to H & H
Bagels. Join the line as it passes in front of the fridge and grab
something if you want it; there's no toast-and-schmear service here, no
house-recipe blends of toppings, just the goods from a grocery store
dairy and at the front of the line hot just-baked bagels tossed fast
into a paper bag and go. Go try to find an empty park bench on Broadway
at 7:30am in the morning. I walked around the block for the sake of the
dignity of the helpful young madman who assured me there were wild
animals in the direction I was headed and I needed to go the other way
unless I was carrying a gun. I wasn't carrying a gun, I was carrying
a)the most precious part of Jerusalem, a photo print picked up in the
Old City in honor of my father's recent birthday (I'd kept that print
flat and protected through manic Israeli bus drivers and flailing teen
feet on the plane, and one look into the crowded shelves of baggage
storage convinced me, in my infinite experience as a traveler, that it
would be safer staying in my hands through my virgin solo encounter
with New York's subways, streets, weather, and populace.), and b) my
first Real Bagels, cooling by the moment.
This is how I ended up eating breakfast in New York sitting on the
bottom steps of some unknown brownstone with a furtive eye out for
passing cops and my hunched back turned to the business-people
periodically popping out of their secured door and half-hurdling over
me.
The Bagels were so worth it.
A Real Bagel pops like a grape when you bite into it.
A Real Bagel has a crust as thin and taut as the skin of a grape, and
flesh as firmly packed as steak.
A Real Bagel is a totally textural nourishing experience, as profoundly
its own thing as sinking your toes into sun-warmed mud.
Bagels are Good.
New York City has a capacity altogether previously unknown to me to be
hot and cold at the same time. H & H Bagels was throbbing, open-oven
heat. The street had a heat that made it tight to breathe. At the same
time, a breeze cut through like a dervish spinning by with knives of
ice. Acclimated to keeping early morning company with Jerusalem's
cisterns and sprinklers, I received the first random drop, the second,
and a handful more, and would never have realized this hesitant
precipitation was falling from the sky had it not been for a passer-by
muttering the once-familiar word "rain."
That word sent me scrambling through a much-abbreviated Birkat HaMazon
on the hoof with a thin millimeter of plastic bag folded over the top
of the precious print.
This trip I learned that I don't follow directions well, so despite the
effort I'd gone through to procure a knowledgeable itinerary for New
York City, my deep gratitude for the careful detail of that itinerary,
and my pains to memorize the itinerary in addition to taking it out to
double-check it about every ten minutes, this is where I went off to do
my own thing. See, the next step was to get on a bus, and from what I
could divine with my poor map-reading skills that main purpose of that
bus was to save me from walking across Central Park, an intention as
well-meaning and ill-starred as any effort to save a pig from dirt.
So I found Central Park. I found huge rocks stretched out like children
of time itself taking in the sun and ignoring the city. I found an
Irish Wolfhound and half a hundred other dogs as distinct in their
breeds as roses labeled in a collectors garden. I saw the fantasy form
of a castle rising from the tall green at the edge of a playing field.
And in no time at all I was walking along the side of the Met, curling
around the entrance of the Met half an hour early, taking my place
among-- what was this?! A tour group that had missed its timing? The
convocation for some special pre-opening reception?
No, there were no buses, no media vans, no coherence within the
humanity.
There were simply dozens on dozens of people lining up from the doors
to cascade down the stairs to split like the Reed Sea at Sgt. David
Gonzales USMC Hot Dog Stand and stream in long rivers down either
direction of the sidewalk, people vibrating with excitement, chattering
with strangers and fidgeting and crying out at each hopeful sign of
movement from within, people lined up three thick and once, twice,
three times a hundred long waiting as if the Met were a soup kitchen
for the soul, waiting...
to see Art.
Nothing I have read could give me such hope for humanity.
We came in, and paying my student donation felt like an honor. In my
only other visit to New York, tucked under the wing of my father's
older brother. I was taken inside the Met in what may have been a spare
hour, time to be ambushed by the Temple of Dendur and then rushed along
a single wall of tiny Egyptian antiquities, trying desperately to
memorize that particular shade of bluer than blue, before our time was
up and we were out without even a moment for the glories of the painted
picture or the treasures of my beloved Medieval Europe. Until that day,
I had not understood that the Cloisters were not part of the Met
proper, not even in New York proper, and I was in such agony at having
come so close to the Unicorn Tapestries without seeing them that I've
never since been able to look at Egyptian art without feeling the edge
of the sulk, the more beautiful the art, the keener the sulk.
So the last thing I expected of the Met was to find myself sucked right
back to the one place I had been before. Within moments of clipping the
donor button to the collar of my shirt, I found myself alone in a
little room of a reconstructed tomb, peering through a narrow window at
a small squat statue who returned my look of wistful irony, neither of
us quite where we expected to be or doing what we should have been
doing.
I saw a figurine I'd seen a picture of in a book at the Bible Lands
Museum, and loved at once, of one woman tending to another's hair while
the other woman tends to her child, a rare concrete evocation of
non-sexual tenderness so not-quite-like anything else that its possible
age spans half a millennium.
I took the long way through, carrying my weeks in Jerusalem with me, my
path an echo of my time among the Egyptian antiquities of the Israel
Museum and the Bible Lands Museum even as the painted and carved rock
around me echoed the ochre to white Jerusalem stone that had gilded my
mornings. I paused especially at the indigo headscarf, narrowly dated
to 1336-1327 B.C.E. whose careful mends indicate its great value, and I
thought of the value of blue in the making of the mishkan and the long
rabbinic debate rejecting indigo as a source of tekhelet, the holy
blue. I looked at the miniatures with their scenes of daily life with
the special love I have for such things, and wondered if these
straight-horned cattle, black and spotted and sometimes red, were the
same strain as the cattle driven through the wilderness with the
wandering children of Israel.
The Temple of Dendur remains as breath-taking as when I was girl.
I made my own escape from Egypt to flounder up the stairs crash about
the glories of European art, arrested here and there to scribble down a
frantic note in the hope of not only seeing, but remembering.
Viller's "Young Woman Drawing"
I plowed my way through the huge, multi-room special exhibit on Picasso
that captures, painting by painting, his transformative shift in seeing.
I was particularly stunned by this self-portrait --
-- because I have one almost identical, sketched out after a vision in
which Raven plucked out my eye. While I do not have Picasso's technical
skill and Picasso did not end up with a tiny tree-frog riding around in
the empty socket, the similarities are so startling that I was left
staring around the rule at the sharp transition where Picasso field
of "real" came completely apart, opus by opus, year by year, then back
together to a new whole. Conventional wisdom is that Picasso left the
Western way of seeing through his study of Oceanic art, but I was
seeing not an external imitation but an internal shift, and I could not
avoid the obvious-to-me thought, what if he simply had a vision? What
if he left off depicting reality through a Western lens because he had
an experience of reality outside a Western lens?
To my delight, they had "The Dreamer":
Then they had the special exhibition gift shop, where they had The
Dreamer as a square silk scarf.
And I had too much taste and not enough money to buy The Dreamer as a
married woman's modest head-covering.
They also had a long, rectangular silk scarf of La Joie de Vivre, even
though this most glorious of all Picasso's works was not part of the
exhibit itself.
I succeeded in convincing myself that La Joie de Vivre would NOT Be
Appropriate as a tallit, but I'm going to admit, it was a great battle.
I saw -
- Quentin Massys 1520 "Portrait of a Woman", far out of its time for
the sheer power of personality captured:
- Beloved Bruegel's "The Harvesters", which seem to come in a kind of
call and response dialogue across the ages with Van Gogh's "Corn
Harvest in Provence" so fresh in my memory.
- Arcimboldo's "The Four Seasons"
- Moroni's "Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova", a woman I would trust
with my life just from her face-- did she know she was dying?
- and Velazquez's noble rendering of "Juan de Pareja", painted at the
time of his slavery and in and of itself an argument for the liberty
and dignity of all humans.
itinerary and finally fully realized that I was looking at a 15-hour
layover in New York City!
Well, fifteen hours, minus two hours for getting through customs on
arriving and minus two hours for check-in and security before departing
and minus double the two to two and a half hours Google told me it
would take for me to get pretty much anywhere from JFK by public
transit.
Leaving a jet-lagged six hours in which to "Do" New York City.
Immediately I began asking my laid-back Seattle resources what One
Thing I should do with a few hours in New York City. I got laid-back
Seattle answers. "Have a real bagel." "Look around Times Square."
Seattle does this to people. I began my own investigations. Bronx Zoo?
Second only to the one in San Diego... that I grew up with. Jewish
Theological Seminary? Closes down in August. Chabad's historical tour
of Lubavitcher Brooklyn? Might not have its intended impact after six
week breathing Jerusalem, ya think?
Time progressed; New York plans did not. I had great hopes of meeting
with Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, the master Jewish story-teller, but our
final emails just missed one another. Brain-storming with Israelis
proved invaluable for the insights into Israelis, not so much for the
insights into New York City, despite the fact that every other house
knows somewhere there.
But I had no fear.
I had a hidden lynch pin.
And on my last day in Jerusalem, I turned to that lynch pin:
I asked a New Yorker.
Who just happened to be my chavurtah and the mortal soul who knew me
best in all Jerusalem.
Actually, come to think of it, I didn't have to ask her.
What I said was, "Tomorrow I have a long layover in New York City."
"And what do you want to do with your one day in Manhattan?"
"I-- well, apparently I want to spend the day in Manhattan."
"Yes, yes, you do. When, exactly, is your plane arriving? Hang on, I'm
going to need some paper."
So I arrived in New York City with INSTRUCTIONS:
And before you ask, no, my chavrutah is not a professional teacher.
When a teacher gives inadequate directions, odds are good that the next
teacher will have to straighten things out, so each teacher learns best
how to correct the mistakes of the teacher ahead of them rather than
how to correct their own mistakes.
My chavrutah is a professional LIBRARIAN.
A librarian stays stuck in one place with the same fools coming back
with the same questions until that librarian masters the art of giving
fool-proof directions to get rid of them for a few hours and get some
work done.
Now, in order to get on to the topic at hand, it's best that I turn
aside for the moment from the things that should be said about the
public transit obstacle course and psychological stress test known
as "busing to Ben Gurion Airport".
For the moment, we shall also pass by the idiosyncrasies of
transversing the date-line at night while wedged in between an ingénue
clutching a three-foot stuffed animal elephant to her
bronchitis-wracked chest and a writhing fourteen year old Israeli girl
who dealt with her plane seat about as well as a cat deals with being
wrapped in a towel, and half the passengers families, half of the
families Chassidic, and all of the Chassidic families averaging two
anxious toddlers and one crying baby.
This brings me up to stumbling along towards customs trying to swallow
the concept that I had left Jerusalem. Immediately I discovered I was
having a terrible time transitioning back to the idea of a world around
me that spoke my language. Living somewhere and speaking very little of
the language is like having a chastity belt on your tongue: full range
of imagination but you learn real fast what not to try with strangers--
and those patterns of what not to try, like lessons learned in muscle
memory, do not wear off very quickly. I was highly conscious that I was
still struggling to think in Hebrew, and I could not turn it off. I was
holding my breath waiting for an immersive English environment to break
the spell and free me.
New York City was not that environment.
Helen Hanff wrote that London presents itself as whatever London you
have in your heart before you arrive. New York City, The City of the
modern world, is not so malleable. I could not have expected that my
first vision of New York City as an adult would be the immaculate grace
of a shining white egret pulling itself from the mud to fly with lazy
majesty under the high tracks of my train. My parents are lucky that I
settled in Seattle.
I rode the A Train with a black woman whose face matched the form of
the green African goddess my grandfather brought home from his travels
the year after my grandmother died. She slept with a midnight shall
wrapped around her, and I watched over her sleeping like that goddess
watched over my nights curled on the couch in my grandfather's home. I
watched a rosary come out of a pocket and move through fingers bead by
bead, trusted plastic more beautiful than its polished brothers hanging
for sale in the Christian quarters. I watched men and women who did not
know one another sitting down in seats side by side without fear or
alarm.
Up to 79th and Broadway, up one block and across the street to H & H
Bagels. Join the line as it passes in front of the fridge and grab
something if you want it; there's no toast-and-schmear service here, no
house-recipe blends of toppings, just the goods from a grocery store
dairy and at the front of the line hot just-baked bagels tossed fast
into a paper bag and go. Go try to find an empty park bench on Broadway
at 7:30am in the morning. I walked around the block for the sake of the
dignity of the helpful young madman who assured me there were wild
animals in the direction I was headed and I needed to go the other way
unless I was carrying a gun. I wasn't carrying a gun, I was carrying
a)the most precious part of Jerusalem, a photo print picked up in the
Old City in honor of my father's recent birthday (I'd kept that print
flat and protected through manic Israeli bus drivers and flailing teen
feet on the plane, and one look into the crowded shelves of baggage
storage convinced me, in my infinite experience as a traveler, that it
would be safer staying in my hands through my virgin solo encounter
with New York's subways, streets, weather, and populace.), and b) my
first Real Bagels, cooling by the moment.
This is how I ended up eating breakfast in New York sitting on the
bottom steps of some unknown brownstone with a furtive eye out for
passing cops and my hunched back turned to the business-people
periodically popping out of their secured door and half-hurdling over
me.
The Bagels were so worth it.
A Real Bagel pops like a grape when you bite into it.
A Real Bagel has a crust as thin and taut as the skin of a grape, and
flesh as firmly packed as steak.
A Real Bagel is a totally textural nourishing experience, as profoundly
its own thing as sinking your toes into sun-warmed mud.
Bagels are Good.
New York City has a capacity altogether previously unknown to me to be
hot and cold at the same time. H & H Bagels was throbbing, open-oven
heat. The street had a heat that made it tight to breathe. At the same
time, a breeze cut through like a dervish spinning by with knives of
ice. Acclimated to keeping early morning company with Jerusalem's
cisterns and sprinklers, I received the first random drop, the second,
and a handful more, and would never have realized this hesitant
precipitation was falling from the sky had it not been for a passer-by
muttering the once-familiar word "rain."
That word sent me scrambling through a much-abbreviated Birkat HaMazon
on the hoof with a thin millimeter of plastic bag folded over the top
of the precious print.
This trip I learned that I don't follow directions well, so despite the
effort I'd gone through to procure a knowledgeable itinerary for New
York City, my deep gratitude for the careful detail of that itinerary,
and my pains to memorize the itinerary in addition to taking it out to
double-check it about every ten minutes, this is where I went off to do
my own thing. See, the next step was to get on a bus, and from what I
could divine with my poor map-reading skills that main purpose of that
bus was to save me from walking across Central Park, an intention as
well-meaning and ill-starred as any effort to save a pig from dirt.
So I found Central Park. I found huge rocks stretched out like children
of time itself taking in the sun and ignoring the city. I found an
Irish Wolfhound and half a hundred other dogs as distinct in their
breeds as roses labeled in a collectors garden. I saw the fantasy form
of a castle rising from the tall green at the edge of a playing field.
And in no time at all I was walking along the side of the Met, curling
around the entrance of the Met half an hour early, taking my place
among-- what was this?! A tour group that had missed its timing? The
convocation for some special pre-opening reception?
No, there were no buses, no media vans, no coherence within the
humanity.
There were simply dozens on dozens of people lining up from the doors
to cascade down the stairs to split like the Reed Sea at Sgt. David
Gonzales USMC Hot Dog Stand and stream in long rivers down either
direction of the sidewalk, people vibrating with excitement, chattering
with strangers and fidgeting and crying out at each hopeful sign of
movement from within, people lined up three thick and once, twice,
three times a hundred long waiting as if the Met were a soup kitchen
for the soul, waiting...
to see Art.
Nothing I have read could give me such hope for humanity.
We came in, and paying my student donation felt like an honor. In my
only other visit to New York, tucked under the wing of my father's
older brother. I was taken inside the Met in what may have been a spare
hour, time to be ambushed by the Temple of Dendur and then rushed along
a single wall of tiny Egyptian antiquities, trying desperately to
memorize that particular shade of bluer than blue, before our time was
up and we were out without even a moment for the glories of the painted
picture or the treasures of my beloved Medieval Europe. Until that day,
I had not understood that the Cloisters were not part of the Met
proper, not even in New York proper, and I was in such agony at having
come so close to the Unicorn Tapestries without seeing them that I've
never since been able to look at Egyptian art without feeling the edge
of the sulk, the more beautiful the art, the keener the sulk.
So the last thing I expected of the Met was to find myself sucked right
back to the one place I had been before. Within moments of clipping the
donor button to the collar of my shirt, I found myself alone in a
little room of a reconstructed tomb, peering through a narrow window at
a small squat statue who returned my look of wistful irony, neither of
us quite where we expected to be or doing what we should have been
doing.
I saw a figurine I'd seen a picture of in a book at the Bible Lands
Museum, and loved at once, of one woman tending to another's hair while
the other woman tends to her child, a rare concrete evocation of
non-sexual tenderness so not-quite-like anything else that its possible
age spans half a millennium.
I took the long way through, carrying my weeks in Jerusalem with me, my
path an echo of my time among the Egyptian antiquities of the Israel
Museum and the Bible Lands Museum even as the painted and carved rock
around me echoed the ochre to white Jerusalem stone that had gilded my
mornings. I paused especially at the indigo headscarf, narrowly dated
to 1336-1327 B.C.E. whose careful mends indicate its great value, and I
thought of the value of blue in the making of the mishkan and the long
rabbinic debate rejecting indigo as a source of tekhelet, the holy
blue. I looked at the miniatures with their scenes of daily life with
the special love I have for such things, and wondered if these
straight-horned cattle, black and spotted and sometimes red, were the
same strain as the cattle driven through the wilderness with the
wandering children of Israel.
The Temple of Dendur remains as breath-taking as when I was girl.
I made my own escape from Egypt to flounder up the stairs crash about
the glories of European art, arrested here and there to scribble down a
frantic note in the hope of not only seeing, but remembering.
Viller's "Young Woman Drawing"
I plowed my way through the huge, multi-room special exhibit on Picasso
that captures, painting by painting, his transformative shift in seeing.
I was particularly stunned by this self-portrait --
-- because I have one almost identical, sketched out after a vision in
which Raven plucked out my eye. While I do not have Picasso's technical
skill and Picasso did not end up with a tiny tree-frog riding around in
the empty socket, the similarities are so startling that I was left
staring around the rule at the sharp transition where Picasso field
of "real" came completely apart, opus by opus, year by year, then back
together to a new whole. Conventional wisdom is that Picasso left the
Western way of seeing through his study of Oceanic art, but I was
seeing not an external imitation but an internal shift, and I could not
avoid the obvious-to-me thought, what if he simply had a vision? What
if he left off depicting reality through a Western lens because he had
an experience of reality outside a Western lens?
To my delight, they had "The Dreamer":
Then they had the special exhibition gift shop, where they had The
Dreamer as a square silk scarf.
And I had too much taste and not enough money to buy The Dreamer as a
married woman's modest head-covering.
They also had a long, rectangular silk scarf of La Joie de Vivre, even
though this most glorious of all Picasso's works was not part of the
exhibit itself.
I succeeded in convincing myself that La Joie de Vivre would NOT Be
Appropriate as a tallit, but I'm going to admit, it was a great battle.
I saw -
- Quentin Massys 1520 "Portrait of a Woman", far out of its time for
the sheer power of personality captured:
- Beloved Bruegel's "The Harvesters", which seem to come in a kind of
call and response dialogue across the ages with Van Gogh's "Corn
Harvest in Provence" so fresh in my memory.
- Arcimboldo's "The Four Seasons"
- Moroni's "Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova", a woman I would trust
with my life just from her face-- did she know she was dying?
- and Velazquez's noble rendering of "Juan de Pareja", painted at the
time of his slavery and in and of itself an argument for the liberty
and dignity of all humans.