A Hospice Death

Deaths in hospice are an expected outcome, no surprise. But that does not mean you are unaffected. Sometimes it is very hard to accept, as this past week with F. for we had a friendship that grew as we spent more time together and he gradually became comfortable enough with me to open up and express himself more expansively in Spanish, the language he preferred and used when he wanted to be precise in his conversation, although he could more than just get by in English. I always thought but never told him that in his struggle with and acceptance of his ALS, he was probably the bravest man I've recently -- and perhaps ever -- known. Had I ever told him that, he would -- in a modesty based on his faith -- surely have rejected that characterization. I will certainly miss him, but one part of me is not unhappy that he went rather unexpectedly while he still had some motor function, and before the disease robbed him of all that.

Day of Rapture....Oops!

Damn, are we still here?? Who knew!?

This cloudy, cool Sunday is the last day it will be legal to smoke in any of the public parks in NYC. Good luck with enforcing that one. Very high marks to the Bloomberg administration for its unremitting efforts to discourage smoking. The health dividends for the society are likely to be mostly in the distant future, but that doesn't make them any less real. Still, about once a month I walk through a bit of smoke and get hit with a pleasant blast of nostalgia, especially if it is a cigar or the very rare nowadays pipe. I don't want the smell assaulting me, and permeating everything animate and inanimate, but once in a great while, it is not unpleasant to the senses.

We Begin to Walk

Pretty much since we moved to New York, I'd had the idea of walking the length of Manhattan, but I always thought of doing it in one day and never seemed to block out enough time to get it done. And then Dana Dee said, "Let's do it in segments." Of course, so obvious. And thus it started on a wonderful early spring Mother's Day Sunday. We went from the Harlem River Bridge, linking Manhattan to the Bronx, down to our apartment, just under four miles if you were a crow, near six as we meandered. Food consumed on the way, a doughnut by me, an apple apiece, and toward the end we each had a Mr. Softee -- the truck parked and obeying the law by not playing the inane Softee jingle, second only to "It's a Small World" at Disney World on the Annoyance Factor scale. While we mostly walked Broadway or Amsterdam Aves, we also wandered alone through Highbridge Park, named for the bridge spanning the Harlem River that carried fresh water from the Croton Aqueduct into New York, but we somehow missed seeing the bridge itself. Interrupting the almost entirely Hispanic neighborhoods, we passed by Yeshiva University and, among other students, saw a young man wearing a yarmulke and an Alice in Chains tee shirt, not, I suspect, a common pairing. It took until nearly 135th Street before we heard English spoken around us with any frequency and that only after we saw a quintessential American thing -- a Hispanic man in his forties, dressed in a Chicago Blackhawks hockey jersey and calling out to passersby in English, "Happy Mother's Day." The melting pot, you gotta love it! The beautiful day had everyone out on the street, a prelude of summer days, and more walks down to Battery Park, to come.

Some pictures from the route, including classic Mothers Day gifts.

Getting It Right

Thirty-five years or so before anyone had heard of Osama Bin Laden, the Byrds had it exactly right: "I'll probably feel a whole lot better when you're gone." Personally, nationally and globally, we are all better off than we have been at any time since the brilliant blue morning of September 11, 2001.

New York Film Academy and Common People

Feeling a bit cranky on a spectacular spring Sunday, but that's what blogs are for, right, to vent when you feel a bit or more than a bit cranky. So, it seems like about 95 percent of the bus stop kiosks now are advertising the New York Film Academy where, to judge by the poster, the student body diversity runs the gamut from pale white all the way to light brown. This in the arguably most racially diverse city in the world. And in front of all the depicted crew, a white boy, hair tousled just so, the requisite amount of stubble on his chin, standing next to his cinematographer and squinting at the scene he is about to shoot. A scene, no doubt, of his life story because you can just tell by looking at him, that he is an auteur and like all white boys he has a story to tell. And you know what, having been a white boy myself and having recently conducted a scientific survey, 97.23 percent of those white boy stories are exactly the same.

And then there's Common People, a different story entirely, about which I may have written at some other point in the last four years or so, but worth another post even if I have. One of the finest poseur putdowns (see above para if in doubt about a poseur) ever that launches right from the start with "She came from Greece/She had a thirst for knowledge." Jarvis Cocker has never matched those five or so raucous minutes, but hey, he had them once.