Little Victories

The Bob Seger version is the one I know and enjoy. Matt Nathanson? Not on my radar and a quick listen to his LV on e music suggests no interest in putting him on my radar.

As for my own version of LV -- before I got sick last year I would jog or bike at least five times a week in good seasons and maybe two or three in the cold and wintry times. I've long since been biking as part of the recovery, but avoided riding up to Riverdale in the Bronx where I go to hospice volunteering. Riverdale is along NYC's version of the Palisades across the Hudson in New Jersey, and it is a serious uphill for several stretches from where I live. But yesterday, another perfect post-hurricane day, I made it, with only one small bit of walking just past the GWB and that mostly because I got distracted and managed to drive the bike off the pathway and into the dirt alongside. Then this morning, after returning some stuff to the PetCo at 92nd, I jogged back home, a mile and a half, not much and not fast -- like I went fast anyway before -- and with some serious heaviness in the legs, but I made it. And that made me mighty happy.

After Irene

Everyone expected to be hunkered down, lashed by winds and rain today. Instead, Irene weakened from hurricane to tropical storm and seemed to pick up speed as it passed over New York early this morning. By noon, but for gusts of wind and spare drops of rain, it was over, leaving less damage than widely feared and leaving us here in the city with a different Sunday. Walkers emerged to sidestep the fallen small branches and to figure out what to do with their suddenly uncooped up day. With the threatening forecast Saturday, most restaurants posted closed signs on their doors and -- apparently -- told employees not to come in. No place, for the most part, to brunch, no Starbucks either yesterday or today, little traffic, no public transportation. People wandered, the city that never sleeps looking to wake up; I wandered, down to the West Harlem Pier thinking I'd see if Fairway might be open for we'd told the kids that Sunday dinner was back on. In the Hudson, as choppy and white-capped today as it was flat and placid yesterday in the hours before Irene arrived, a blue Recycle receptacle floated amidst the flotsam and plastic bottles. Fairway was closed; the West Side Highway was closed at the 125st southbound entrance. I decided to check Westside Market on Broadway and 110th and to go there along the Hudson to see if there was a reason for the closure. The river had clearly breached its usual bank some time earlier; debris -- more damned plastics mostly -- littered the west side of the pathway from about the level 110th south for four or five blocks toward 106th, and it was in that stretch that city workers were siphoning water off the highway, looked to be six or eight inches deep. I went through the underpass into Riverside Park a little further on, a trench of standing water a couple blocks long pretty much right above where the railroad tunnel cuts through the park. A few dogs in the dog run. And then up on to Riverside Drive, where I studied the statue of Shinran Shonin (that now has survived Irene as well as Hiroshima) at the Buddhist Center at 331 RSD. For the first time, I noticed that RSD from 104th to 106th is a short historical district, based on the Beaux Arts townhouses there built in the last years on the 19th and early 20th centuries. 331, it turns out, once housed William Randolph Hearst's main squeeze, the perennial starlet Marian Davies. Finally over to Broadway where Absolute Bagels was closed and Westside officially was too, except they were letting people in four or five at a time because some staff had reported for work. And so dinner supplies were laid in. Chili and corn bread.

As the Hurricane Bears Down on New York...

It is a beautiful if humid Friday morning. Walking Sam, we passed a small van parked on Lasalle that, on its side panel, advertised "Humane Wildlife Removal." If you want to avail yourself of the company's services, you simply dial, the panel also adds in larger lettering, 1-888-ALLDEAD. Sure sounds humane to me.

Kind of a Special Day

Gorgeous and cool this morning, approaching 9:30 and today is the first day since my illness hit 20 months ago that I woke up and thought I could again do my old job well -- not that I want to, but what matters is that I felt at last like I could.

Even in NYC There Are Things You Don't See Every Day

Like riding in Central Park to do the tour this morning and passing a guy jogging at a good pace in the opposite direction, pulling a skateboard tied with a rope and on the board, looking positively regal and as if he belonged no place else, a fine specimen of English bulldog like Moose down the hall.

He's Back!

Sighted Scabby yesterday while biking. No camera to record the moment. He was facing in toward the campus instead of onto the Broadway traffic flow.

Missing: One Giant Rat

A labor dispute tool seen now and again around town is "Scabby" the giant inflatable rat. He's found a home for the last month or so in front of the Broadway and 116th Street entrance to Columbia, alongside a banner casting Shame on the Trustees of Columbia University. I haven't looked into the particulars of the dispute, but Scabby went missing this morning. There were a couple guys loitering around the banner and I asked them, "Where's the rat?" (Didn't know his name at the time.) Got a shoulder shrug and "don't know" in reply. Perhaps it's a Rent-a-Rat and the anti-Columbia contract has run out. Or maybe he just sprang a leak and had to be patched. We'll see whether he returns in days to come. In the meantime, here's a photo gleaned from the web and we can all be happy the subway tunnel denizens and street corner scavengers don't grow quite this big.