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Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Vita Nova 1 Vita Nova
The magic of classrooms. In loving what I do, what I do loves me back. Rain falls fat and cold and Korean food combats it, all spice at night. I do not understand when people insist they find November depressing. November has brought me many fine things and people. And those at home with melancholy tend to love rain so of course this is not a month minded by those of the fourth humour.
Surreality and irony: Observing the Moment of Silence on Remembrance Day in the cushy lounge of Porter Airlines at the just-renamed Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island. No poppies confiscated as weapons of mass reverence. Nail scissors still verboten. Hydration in sanctioned areas; tears and latte and newspapers snapped in the returning tides of babble. Who fought and lost their lives so that people might whine about a minor delay some decades later. But not all whine.
Later, mid-journey, flight attendants in pill-box hats and pumps poured hot coffee with a personal warmth long lost on Air Canada staffers. Joy in work if not in pumps that burn between quick turnarounds between Newark and Toronto City. When said flight was late, it wasn’t our fault as customers: this was an amazing paradigm shift, an extra-special birthday present. Soft laughter; Coleman Hawkins in the background: the miracle that is flight: Clouds, free snacks and touchdowns.
At suppertime, in the now-dark evening, we crossed the Bridge and saw the streamers of lights across the water and deep into the city. Buffeted by wind we marched and snapped photos and dreamt of dreams nursed here by many on birthdays and on plainer evenings. How eyes turned star-ways up and out, hopeful of a shift in the year ahead. Following a family through Cadman Square Park to find the restaurant path and changing shoes where Cadman turns to Court, so as to be ready for the ambience awaiting at Frankie’s. Our server Lauren also from a lost time or world. Walking through Brooklyn night past low-rise buildings so lit from within as to be magical. Or it was just your birthday and all the world felt like a giant gift of a Wednesday. Away in the world with you.
We glided past Liberty and wandered slowly round Ellis Island’s moving chambers. Imagine, insisted the audio guide. Shut up and let me write, I kept thinking, moving from portrait to portrait. For reasons that do not surprise me at all, I found myself lingering over the menus of what was eaten there where people waited to begin new lives. And the young Polish woman who, subjected to a test to see if she was of sound mind, was asked whether you washed stairs from top to bottom or bottom to top and she said, bless her firebrand soul: “I did not come to America to wash stairs.” If you could kiss the ghost of someone, I’d have kissed her.
Uptown on the train: Robert Frank understood the largeness of moments. Georgia O’Keefe, the colour and shape of them. The rightness of true-to-thine-own-self wrongness and the wrongness of what we are told is right. In photographs and paint. A quote from Kerouac on the gallery wall at the Frank stopped me in my tracks. Never having been a worshipper of Kerouac I was delighted. Never assume a thing about life’s unfolding.
In Williamsburg [I’m jumping, but you know me, I’ll go back and around again, a reliable carousel of anecdotes and snapshots] a bookshop and a coffee shop. The most perfect most needed book in both our hands and we looked up and laughed, unsurprised. And then the most-needed coffee and then the most-hunted-down tacos outside of Mexico at Superior Restaurant up the loveable less-camera-tracked Berry Street. Rain insistent, mild wind, tiny whisper-blast of Smashing Pumpkins in my right ear as the aging hipsters passed with strollers, eyes of rebellion averted. Coffee at Oslo because the bookman knew where we needed to have the most perfect Americano off a beaten path. Book in bag, all of life unfolding across the Williamsburg Bridge. A dream of deeper into Green Point sometime, when time permits: will we be back, with so many other spots on the list? I think so.
Foraging along dark and neon dark and neon Be First Avenue in the held-back rain, swinging my dinner bag like someone who might once have lived off East Sixth some other once upon a time. Watching the streetside arguments through the rain-streaked windows, sipping coffee and reading this most-needed book, everything right and all that has been wrong away across a mythical bridge in the brain.
New York is a dear old friend, one you daydream about visiting and then, finally again across the table from her you wonder if you still have anything to say to one another and you do in some moments and then you don’t at 3 a.m. anymore and you will when you’re sixty or seventy and hobbling toward her in a dream in which feet or hips don’t hurt and the screaming and honking are music, sweet music, flat on your back in the park July-symphonic again as they were once yet the old love is still like sweet timpanic espresso in the heart, before coffee betrayed you and was dropping in thick at the back of the throat whenever the plane lands and you think, “This language I know. Come, I will help you speak it, too.” Hold out your arm. Beckon or dare: join me in this love, which is a river of words in the veins. A reason to write some more. Just a little more, just to see if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.
Reading: The Gift, by Lewis Hyde
Listening to: I Cover The Waterfront, John Lee Hooker
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