comings, goings, lizards, bridges.

New York for September 11th. In and out of JFK on Delta. Hiked down an empty West side highway for the memorial at Stuyvesant High School. Downtown Manhattan was mobbed that afternoon, with police barricade, cameras, unscheduled public art displays. Frenetic, emotional, even political energies.  Taxi to Park Slope for a musical memorial at Congregation Beth Elohim. As always, Brooklyn was an oasis of calm and tranquility.

Poughkeepsie by way of White Plains. Setting sun, Hudson River, mid-September.

Twenty-four hours in Pittsburgh. Rainy, quiet, right-wing taxi drivers. Had an awesome sandwich downtown, and saw old family friends recently relocated from New York. They don't miss the subway.

Bonita Springs, Florida. Somewhere between Naples and Fort Myers, on the Southwestern coast of Florida. Lizards, humidity, golf courses, everglades. Quick thunderstorms, a warm sun above.

Jacksonsville, Florida. Bridges. Ran two of them on an early morning jog with a colleague, getting lost in between. Delicious chocolate-covered popcorn. Passed a luxury building on the riverfront advertising a two bedroom for $1400 a month.   Escargot for dinner at a French Restaurant in San Marco, which seems to be the cool neighborhood, or one of them.

Scattering

The Stuyvesant Spectator (my high school newspaper), asked me for reflections for the 10-year anniversary of September 11th.   Reprinted without permission. 

***

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

-John Updike

WASHINGTON, D.C. 

I’m not kidding. Like many of my classmates, I no longer live in New York. We’ve traded in our metrocards, discovered wider boulevards, and learned to stop casually ordering Pizza or Bagels. It’s a different world down here. The pace is slower, the buildings lower, and Stuyvesant is a half-street in Upper Chevy Chase. 

I run into other alumni frequently, randomly, and purposefully. They stand on line in the old Marine Terminal at LaGuardia the Saturday after Thanksgiving, hurry outside a law library in Foggy Bottom, even meander on my rooftop. When I find myself in San Francisco or Raleigh-Durham I seek them out as if they were prelates of a secret order.  We examine our expatriate existences, trade updates on our classmates with a combination of pride and competitive interest, and mutter about quality of life.

Sometimes we talk about that day and how it impacted, impacts, might still impact us. Often it hangs perceptibly in the air and we inhale silent, unseen particles of the past. While we have no scientific basis for comparison, there is a theory that our class is special, somehow chosen. We are sown, we scatter. We re-root, we return.

I keep a metrocard in my nightstand

After the Rain

It rained. Torrents. Buckets. A white storm. I saw a flock of small brown birds floating in the wind like leaves on a fall day. A taste of the apocalypse, remarks a older and wiser colleague.

Attended a dinner in Georgetown with a Middle Eastern diplomat. When I emerged, the rain had stopped.

Walked up Wisconsin Avenue, which was ablaze for a DC fashion night. An artist asked me to engage one of the models in a shop window dressed as a boxer.

Got a ride home in one of the event pedicabs driven by a young Turk from Istanbul planning to study minerological engineering at Virginia Tech. 

DC is not without a certain charm.