The Most Tasteless Photo Ever?

I realize the competition is very, very stiff. But here's my nominee. This evening, about an hour before dark, on the Hudson River Bike Path around 50th St., a young woman squats -- fully dressed, thank God -- above a large pile of horse poop left recently by one of NYPD's equine finest. Her boyfriend snaps.

The Hardest of Hospice

I get a lot from visiting patients at the hospice, but one thing I didn't count on was forming friendships with dying people. It seemed a recipe for making what can be hard also painful. But it has happened and it's a good thing. So now the hardest part is when people I feel an instant or growing bond with die sooner than I'd expected. It's happened three times now, once with a crossword solver who was so happy when I printed the Times Tuesday puzzle and left it with her and three days later when I went back she was gone. And now yesterday a man of humor and wide-ranging past who was there for only a month and getting comfortable with having me show up, even on his bad days. A connection had started, value on both sides, and just like that it's done for good.

Home

Summer 2008 winds down. The Red Sox make their last visit to The House That Ruth Built. This summer, thanks to friends, family, time and savings, we've been to Alaska, San Francisco, Seattle, Calaveras Country, Tuolumne Meadows, Central California, Myrtle Beach, Richmond, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland for the 40th anniversary of our Peace Corps group. Many of these places -- Alaska, for example, with the temperate rain forests of Sitka spruce and hemlock, the legends of Raven returning the sun to man, Alaskan Amber free at the brewery in Juneau, and the blue calves floating near Mendenhall Glacier, or Tuolumne where I was happy to trip in the dark over the same rocks in the same places as I did more than forty years ago and to think those rocks will be there for thousands of years ahead, or seeing the people now who were the people then from the PC years -- many of these places could not have been finer, but I landed at LaGuardia this morning, the Empire State Building away in the distance as we taxied, and what could I think but "home"? And to drive the point, as it were, home, we're getting ourselves a dog and thinking of redoing the kitchen.

Summer Outdoor Concert Season

It's been a so-so summer for outdoor concerts and Shakespeare in the Park. Hamlet was undistinguised and I didn't care about seeing Hair 40 years ago, so what does a revival matter? And while I'm at it, why is it that the greatest city in the world has no resident world-caliber Shakespeare venue? And why does the current director of Shakespeare in the Park, one Oskar Eustis, figure we need less of the greatest dramatist in the English language -- and perhaps any language, as an op-ed piece in the NYT noted a few weeks ago -- and more of everything else? As the song in Kiss Me, Kate goes he needs to brush up on his Shakespeare, both in doing more of it and, since he was the director of the Hamlet, staging it.

But for music, I've either missed (Flogging Molly), been out of town (Beth Orton) for some, or not much interested in most concerts. But I did catch The National and Bob Dylan on consecutive weeks at Central Park and Prospect Park. It took a while for The National to hit its stride, perhaps because -- as one band member said -- they woke up that morning in Cincinnati and would be in Norway the next day. On Abel, they missed the fine line between controlled pandemonium and over the top and a couple of the quieter songs seemed tossed off but once they did sync in, they sold me all over again, especially on Karen, Apartment Story, and Start A War. The songs all promise that a life gone askew ("You haven't seen my good side yet.") will get back on track ("I'll quit drinking/I'll be fun again.") It probably won't but the faith, however misplaced is what matters. In Central Park it was the kind of summer night that one dreams of in the middle of winter, warm, clear, low humidity, and even a few stars.

And at Prospect Park, the first time I can remember being there, another Olmstead and (I think) Vaux creation, I walked forever to find the Bandstand. After dark, the place feels as huge as Central Park, remote, and ill-served by the main subway lines. But I eventually got there just as Bob was kicking off with Rainy Day Women. Couldn't scrounge a ticket to get inside, so could only hear and, by standing on tiptoe and screwing my head about 165 degrees to the right, sometimes see Bob or some other band member on stage. Bob was Bob. Without the visual stimulus of seeing him, it sounded as if I'd heard better through the years (and I would just once like to be spared Masters of War and It's Alright, Ma) but the NYT review a couple days later raved and Bob was apparently more animated to the crowd than usual, using his fingers as six-shooters during the encore. He remains an applause slut, milking it forever before coming out for the encore and then, after leaving the stage for the last time, letting people cheer some more for an extended time in hopes of luring him back on, before finally after a couple minutes the house lights come up and we all go home.

Not getting a ticket did have its plusses, enabling me to see in the huge overflow crowd a three-legged dog, a guy dashing around waving his purple light saber, and a guy, saying "Coming through" or "hot coals," or "watch yourself," walking through the crowd -- and we are talking people nearly shoulder to shoulder -- with a lit Weber hoisted high over his head, the coals aflame. He walked right by a cop, who said nothing. Perhaps this is not unusual in the wilds of Brooklyn. Prospect Park had both more mosquitoes and more dogs than CP.

Daze at the Museum

Summer is madness at the Museum. Waves of day camp kids, more numerous it feels than the school groups during the other nine months of the year. And, of course, the weak, though strengthening, dollar brings many tourists from abroad. They are invariably polite, enthusiastic about AMNH and -- for Spanish speakers -- delighted to see my "Yo Hablo Espanol" tag. But on Wednesday it was a young woman from, to judge by the way she spoke English, the Scandanavian countries or Germany who walked up to information lectern and said, "Please, I want to see the human organs." Instead of sending her to 14th and Broadway (previous post) I pointed her straight on to the Hall of Human Origins.

It reminded me of when our Peace Corps group was recently arrived in Chile, still learning Spanish and more eagerly learning the joys of pisco sours. At a reception the PC director had to welcome us one of our group, needing a refill and a greater knowledge of Chilean slang (Spanish being a language where a perfectly innocent phrase in one country becomes a gross expression in another), asked the young woman server for "mas pico," which in Chile translates colloquially as "more prick."

Also recently at the Museum a little boy of seven or so and wearing a Red Sox cap approached me and asked, "Which way to the blue whale, please?" I said, smiling, "You don't get to ask that question wearing a cap like that." He snatched it off and solemnly repeated his question. His parents enjoyed it, part of the vacation fun, what the Museum is supposed to be and almost always is.

You've Never Seen It All in NYC

I was about five minutes late for a dr. appt and crossing 14th St. at Union Square when in mid-intersection a woman was standing with unbottoned blouse open on her substantial, but unattractive breasts while her greasy boyfriend (presumably) photographed the moment. Amidst some murmuring tourists, I went into the building where the dr. office had recently moved only to find her premises in a complete construction uproar, with no worker who spoke English (or Spanish) for that matter and no dr. or staff in sight. It was clearly time to go home and regroup. So I have, with a glass of Chilean chardonnay.

Goodbye, Poetry in Motion; Hello, Train of Thought,

This spring, after 15 years, the MTA ended "Poetry in Motion," its excerpts or full versions of poems displayed in subway car and bus placards right along with the ubiquitous "If You See Something, Say Something" and community college messages. They were always a brain oasis and with O Tell Me the Truth About Love and A Little Tooth gave Chris and I material for B & C's 7/7/07 wedding.

The replacement, Train of Thought, intended, per the MTA, to "broaden the scope and content of the areas and authors we bring to subway and bus riders" sounded more lecturing than promising, but they got the first one exactly right, with E.B. White on the three New Yorks:

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion."

And this, from John Stuart Mill from On Liberty, is not bad either:

"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by sufering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

Train may not be as grand a fifteen years as Poetry, but it's left the station well.