Today’s service is the blessing of the animals, and the congregation is clustered on the lawn with designer dogs on extendable leashes and mysterious scuttling boxes lined with hand towels and one leopard gecko that, waiting for its blessing, relieves itself on its young owner’s father. He scrubs at his shirt at the sink in the church basement, where J and I are helping to set up for the post-service coffee hour, halving banana bread and quartering bagels and decimating cantaloupe. The man blessed by his son’s gecko may need to be reminded of the copy on the service’s tri-fold program: We do not bless animals to make them holy; we bless them because they are already holy. The program asks us to save animals like Noah, to care for them like Francis. It reminds us of upcoming youth group events.
All posts tagged: New York
Nighthawks at the Dennis
We were staying on the Upper West Side, 15th floor, view of the Hudson. Two hawks nested on the fire escape outside our bedroom window, their baby hawk’s head popping out of its shell. The male was wary. Very. One day, X ray vision on, he stormed the window from afar, a bolt from the blue looming larger, nearer, yeeks! Shot skywards just shy of crashing into the window.
Another Autumn
New York wraps itself
in pea coats.
The trees match the colors
of the taxis,
and the ramblings
of cell phones
Manhattan Love
the stars are dust on gray carpet
unvacuumed
and a man with a newspaper beret
makes a wish on a rat
On the Subway: the Comfort of Fingers Entwined
My mother’s last remaining sibling is dying, and quickly, it now seems. I received the call last night from my mom and exchanged emails this morning with my cousin but didn’t really have time to think about it until the subway ride in from Brooklyn to Grand Central this morning.She is walking, still, and planning a trip to the San Diego beach in June (it keeps Eros alive, my uncle once told me with a wink, and in a case of too-much-information to share with a niece) but one eye won’t quite open and her speech isn’t coming out correctly and the body of my aunt Stana seems to be collapsing, her skin folding over itself, in response to the cancer.
Without
When I was seven years old, we moved from Cleveland to New York City. I remember when my parents announced the decision to me and my two sisters. We were eating dinner at the aluminum kitchen table of our suburban home. Their tone was excitingly conspiratorial. They told us not to tell anyone just yet, not until plans were settled. The aspects of the move that might have troubled me—leaving relatives, friends, my bedroom, and my school—paled in comparison to the fact that I had been entrusted with a secret.
The Short Summer
I knew enough from Facebook to recognize the muddy maroon Jeep with the top off when it ran the long red light at North and Main. I was about to turn right when zoom, straight through with a lead foot. I honked loudly and repeatedly until a freckled arm raised a middle finger through the open roof, so I broke New York’s latest traffic law and thumb-punched a text: “Its me u idiot pull over.”
The Obstinate Image
Seen on a topographic map, the town of Port Jervis, New York, appears to be guaranteed some drama. It is situated at the point where New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania come together at the banks of the Delaware River, where the riverbed takes a radical turn to the southwest (as if it had suddenly decided to avoid New Jersey), deepens to eighty feet, and begins to take on the grandeur that will come to it fully in the Water Gap some ten miles farther south. But whatever Port Jervis once was—a railroad and logging hub, a transport center for the produce from local farms—it no longer is. The town center seems exhausted and weakened to such a point that no expectation or promise could safely settle on it again.
Buckminster: Profiles of Available Buildings, Governors Island
In the Upper Bay of New York’s harbor, there is a new urban island under construction. Technically, this project is a work of rejuvenation or, as professionals say, adaptive re-use. A military installation since colonial times, Governors Island hosted a U.S. Army base until the mid-1960s. Then the Coast Guard took over, operating there until 1997, when the federal government deeded the island to the City and State of New York. Good timing. The subsequent fifteen years saw New York City’s most radical re-invention since the invention of the elevator.
Gas Lines
By JUNE GERVAIS
We see the first one in Bellport, eight o’clock at night, and we don’t know what it is. We’re driving along a two-lane highway on the south shore when we come upon it: a caravan of cars idling in the shoulder, taillights scarlet in the dark. “Should I be driving in that lane?” my husband says. Seeing no construction signs, we drive on. We pass a mile of cars. Then we see the gas station at the head of the line. It’s been three days since Sandy hit.