Maybe dogs are right

New York is filled with funny dogs in all shapes and sizes, most of them a weird mini-me version of their owners. Little yip-yip dogs with Gucci collars and sitting in Louis Vuitton carriers, giant dogs like camels, undulating down the street as if there really wasn't anything at all strange about that. It's New York after all. There is always someone around who is way weirder than you are.

In the late afternoon, I sat out in the little park with my friend who has brain cancer. I'd bundled her up with her cane, signed the paper that said I was checking her out and was, by implication, responsible for her life. We crossed the street into the wrought-iron enclosure wedged into the triangle where Hudson Street diverged from Eighth Avenue in the West Village. There was a big iron statue of something heroic in the center, which, oddly, I cannot recall at all now. Was it a person? Some winged creature? An angel surrounded by doves? I have absolutely no memory of this thing, though I'm quite sure it wasn't a war general on horseback, that much I can be sure of.

We installed ourselves on a bench facing Hudson Street. It was 4:30, and the sun was starting its quick descent into the river, just on the other side of the Village Nursing Home. We looked at people and their dogs. A giant white poodle-ly thing sitting on a woman's lap as though it were a giant cat, a series of little dogs scurrying through the small park on their way to something far more important. A rush of children on scooters, and a father and young daughter in a pink hat and tiny knee-height boots, nursing a hot cocoa in a paper cup. My friend, a painter, looked up at the waning sun on the buildings and said, "I love this light."

It had been unseasonably warm today, 65 degrees in November. Now that the sun was slipping away, it was getting a little nippy. "Are you cold?" I asked. No, she was fine. It was the latest she's been out since Labor Day weekend, when all of this started, and she lost all control of her own time and movements. The lights were starting to twinkle in the dark.

Earlier, volunteers had brought dogs to the nursing home; they do it twice a month. Nice people come and visit, and they bring their dogs, and all the old and the sick who are into that sort of thing can go down to the common room and, for a few moments, feel the unbiased love of a creature who makes no judgment, especially when they are being adored. There was a black and white French bulldog who seemed without personality but submitted to the petting and cooing without comment. There was another little scamp of a dog, probably a happy mutt, who rushed up to my friend and seemed delighted to see her. He darted around, bright eyes like coal. The generosity of these people to take time to come to this public nursing home so that the residents could enjoy the healing presence of these animals was deeply moving.

But those dogs had gone home, and people were packing up their newspapers and books in the park. There were no more children, with or without scooters or hot cocoa. In the autumn, it's amazing how quickly the sun sets. There's little ceremony, no lingering periods of rapture. There is that lovely golden light--and then it's pitch dark. We got ourselves up and walked across the street into the shabby Thai restaurant and got an order of shrimp pad thai for my friend to take back to her a room, a single decision she gets to make in daily routine that is virtually without choice.

Inside the boiling hot nursing home, there was a pile up at the elevator lobby, two wheelchairs and ten people going up; the elevators move at a glacial rate. [The last time, I realize the doors open and close so slowly so that the old people are not crushed to death as they gradually maneuver themselves on and off.] My friend said she would see herself up; there was no need to wait for all this slow traffic. The door glided open as though on tranquilizers, and the white-haired wave was absorbed in.

I stepped out into the sudden night, where, quite suddenly, there seemed to be not a dog in sight. The air was crisp, and the traffic sounded like the sea. Light flooded from the tiny delis and from the closed shop windows, illuminating their displays of precious objects for all to covet. It all felt like a gift.

Waste Not

When I saw this show, "Waste Not," by Song Dong at the Museum of Modern Art in early September, I was overwhelmed by the obvious love that went into its creation: the love of a son who wanted to help his mother, whose dilapidated home was going to be bulldozed by the Chinese government; the love of the two together to sort and save the objects; the love of the volunteers around the world who carefully laid out each plastic bottle and old toothpaste tube as an object to be as worthy of contemplation and regard as any priceless work of art. The rows of tattered shoes, the tower of brown-gray soap dried in the sun and saved from the 1960s, the pieces of Styrofoam from electronic equipment, the bundles of chopsticks and old crayons, the paper shopping bags--it was seemingly endless. This was a woman's life, as well as her security against another period of want, and, perhaps most movingly, her physical scrapbook of a family's life.

The exhibition, which has been shown in Asia and Europe, was received well. Song Dong's mother, Zhao Ziangyuan, was happy to be a part of the show, taking visitors on tours through the space, explaining different objects. But she died in early 2009, after finally relocating to an apartment complex. Always a lover of living creatures, she saw a wounded bird in a tree and climbed up in a step ladder to free it--and then fell. In the New York Times review of the show, critic Holland Cotter intimated that perhaps, released of her worldly possessions and of her past, Zhao Ziangyuan was able to release herself as well.

The whole experience of making my way through the show was like a walking meditation, a kind of waking remembrance of my own family's habits and valuation of objects. The everyday item--the stub of a pencil, the chopstick without a mate--somehow is a potent symbol of potential and salvation. Lost in a flood? That chopstick could be the crucial item in lashing together a raft to safety. A flint of soap, a length of satin ribbon, a plastic lidded container once filled with yogurt--these were things you had for free that could save your life on a really bad day. Car break down? Roof leaking? Pipe burst? Toaster oven explode? You could have in your possession already the very thing that could put everything all right again.

There are special words for this kind of activity now. "Re-purposing" is probably my favorite. It may just be a nice way of saying that is one is choosing to re-use old crap. In our sudden awareness of our environment and the dim effects of climate change, it's suddenly trendy to practice this type of thrift, embraced with the thrill of extreme sports. But the reverence with which Song Dong chose to honor his mother's lifelong personal practice of conservation--a survivalist's response to deprivation--is more poignant and resonant.

The ambulance chaser

A week ago, Conde Nast announced that it is closing Gourmet magazine.

I am really, really not ok with this. Granted, in the last year, I have been a poor reader of the magazine, which arrived each month in its plastic wrap, a single luscious object on its cover, beautifully photographed: a green quince, a toasted cheese sandwich, a candied apple. I don't even like candied applies, but on the cover of Gourmet, the glistening red-lacquered sphere was spectacle of desire. Still, feeling overcommitted and overwhelmed, sometimes it felt like too much to boil a packet of ramen, let alone singe poblano peppers over a gas flame and peel. Reading Gourmet was no longer a refuge of culinary dreams but a reinforcing hammer blow to the skull: You are just too damned tired to do anything but watch another episode of Clean House on HGTV. At least at the end of that, someone's house is clean. After reading Gourmet, I was just hungry.

So now Gourmet is dead, and I have all these pristine issues in neat stacks all over the apartment, along with glossy shelter magazines [another mental oasis where the carpets are always white, there's never any dirty laundry, and the gardens are lushly immaculate], and my favorite Cheetos of all monthly periodicals--women's fashion magazines, which are purely and sublimely junk food for the brain. [I never worry how many pythons died so those clutch purses could live.] After I'm done with all the other magazines, I put stacks of them down in the laundry room, hoping someone else will read them. But I have all my Gourmets. When I lived in Williamsburg, I kept all ten years of them in cardboard folios and only under the panicked ruthlessness of moving was able to pitch them into the freight elevator and take them to the curb for recycling. Suddenly, the Gourmets are like museum objects, precious in their scarcity. I can go back and read the last two years, cycling through the seasons and pretending a new issue is arriving each month because I never read any of these to begin with.

Foodies everywhere mourned the end of an indulgent, often elitist practice. Julia Child had showed America how to love its food and take pleasure in the length and strenuousness of its preparation. We remembered how to value the raw ingredient; we wanted to read not only about how the flour was milled but also how the wheat was grown. Gourmet celebrated that love each month. It was the discipline and joy of performing a daily mundane act [cooking and eating] and discovering how it could be both art and worship.

***

The death of Gourmet only reinforces that a certain kind of journalistic craft and life is over as well. It's shocking to realize that moment when one has actually become the peevish whiner in the room: "Well, I remember when . . . "

Only now do I realize how privileged I was to have studied journalism when it was still considered an honorable profession. Each day, we labored over ethical decisions. When I was just starting out in the '80s, the newsroom still was populated by men and women in their sixties and even seventies--people who had worked on newspapers during World War II and who had started out as copy boys. The back composing room of the Akron Beacon Journal was staffed almost entirely by men who were deaf; it was the kind of work that a man with a handicap could get in those days with no impact on their ability to do a proper job, unaided. When I'd walk back there, you could see them bent over the composing table, smoothing down waxed sheets of type with little rollers and then signing to one another.

When, as a college student, I got my first tour of the press room running at full speed, it was a thrill I have to this day: the adrenaline rush of watching the miles of newsprint--fragile in your hands--flying through the rollers at incredible speeds. Even at that velocity, the print would be crisp and each photo had to be a perfect register. If you were lucky, you'd happen to pass by when they replaced one giant roll of paper with another, all without stopping the press at all, a feat of levers and sheer wonder.

I love the newsroom and that way of doing journalism, even though I left it. I know I will miss it as a fixture, like a beloved city building torn down in the name of progress or field of wheat that is paved over for a subdivision. It becomes part of a historical past that we can never quite believe is not with us anymore.

Hogs and heifers

Completely without irony, the pork loin sandwich stand at the Wayne County Fair in Ohio was next to the 4-H Swine barn. [Although I grew up in Wayne County, I never quite understood the difference between "pigs," "hogs," and "swine." There must be some technical differentiation that escapes me.] In any case, the Swine barn was filled with immaculately groomed pink pigs, rapturously sleeping in their pens. It was around 9 p.m., and the fair was still going strong; along the fairway, the kids were being swung around in hurl-inducing rides, the blue-pink cotton candy was still spinning, and the food carts were still pumping out sausage sandwiches, deep-fried onion flowers, and something called a walking taco, which involved putting toppings into a bag of Doritos sliced open on its side. [Sadly, I'm not making that up.]

In three days, all those market hogs, aged six months, would be sold at auction and most likely slaughtered. For the eight days they lived at the fair, they lived like the castrated young kings they were: lovingly bathed an brushed, sleeping on beds of sawdust, eating buckets of special feed that packed on the pounds. Most of them were four feet long and around 300 pounds, which is a lot of pig: about fifty pounds every six months. But this has never been the Manhattan-imagined version of organic eating, which magically occurs in a bloodless, dirtless world in which no one ever breaks a sweat or gets any shit on their Louboutins. I once wrote in an essay that the simple country life factored out always ends in death, and that's pretty much the truth. The grilled pork loin sandwiches served at the stand right outside the Swine barn were sublime: fresh, tender, juicy, and mighty tasty. And it was completely without irony that all of us admired those nice pigs and then would chow down on their brethren not twenty steps away, topped with bright red rounds of beefsteak tomatoes and a little salt and pepper. Praise the lord and pass the BBQ sauce.

Unlike a lot of things, the Wayne County Fair of my childhood has not changed. If anything, it's bigger, more vivid, and more amazing. The tractors have only grown in size, cost a quarter of a million dollars or more, and have mp3 player docks; they already had air conditioning twenty-five years ago. The rides weren't the rinky-dink merry-go-rounds like the kind set up in parking lots, but the real McCoy--with flashing colored lights and contraptions with no foot rests that flung people up and around through the air right over the propane gas vendor booth. If anything, this was the vigorous, prosperous heartland of America beloved by politicians nearly everywhere: white, Christian, hard-working, and carnivorous. This is the land of the giant pumpkin and the prize-winning stallion standing at stud.

It's also about as different as can possibly be from my current daily routine: packed subways, city grit, and vendors in greenmarkets selling wheatgrass. I work literally across the street from the United Nations and all its attendant bureaucrats, many in native dress, and actually occasionally buying a precious yellow heirloom tomato at peak season for five dollars a pound.

And yet, somehow, it all makes sense.

Once neighbors in Williamsburg

When I lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I had a loft space on the top floor of a white concrete warehouse building. The view of the Manhattan skyline was spectacular; my roommate and I could see the weather changing, coming in from Jersey--so that even though we were in the city, it felt like we were in the wilderness somewhere. Someplace where one's relationship to sun and rain and storms was far more intimate than might be expected for urban life. For the first six years or so, we didn't have heat during non-business hours. 

The building was filled with different kind of factories: on one floor, the Hasidic guys made belts; one day, they loaded too much leather into the freight elevator and broke it. On another floor, different guys made picture frames. Puerto Ricans sorted used clothing and shipped out bales from the basement and ground floor. Across the street, Chinese guys ran a kitchen fabricating company, making stainless steel tables and sinks and stoves. I never let on that I understood what they were saying, even if it wasn't that interesting.

During my last year in Williamsburg, I became friends with a woman who was in treatment for ovarian cancer. She had survived breast cancer about six years previously. I knew her from the meditation center in the city where we both volunteered. When I found out she only lived ten blocks from me or so, I figured I could help out. I picked up her lemon-lime Gatorade, bottled water, and some cole slaw from the deli at the supermarket. Her ability to eat was limited on chemo. I did her laundry and helped change her sheets. I read to her from my novel. When she got stronger, we talked. About art, books, her family. Mine. I moved to Queens, but we stayed in touch, mostly by phone.

She left a message the other day. She's back in the hospital, perhaps with brain cancer. They did a biopsy on Labor Day, removing a section of her skull and taking a sample of brain tissue; there is a mass 4 cm in size in the lower left portion, an unwelcome intruder whatever its exact composition. The doctors are going to begin radiation treatment anyway, before the test results are finalized. When I spoke to her on the phone today, she seemed surprised that the doctors were going to release her any day now. But an email exchange with a mutual friend indicated something different, about a long stay in "acute rehab," which is kind of funny and ironic for a recovering alcoholic. She complains about Williamsburg a lot--its annoying hipster quality, the faux hardships of the privileged young. But I wonder what she's thinking about Williamsburg now that she's not there. The quality of place changes when we're away, and even more so if we can't go back.

Glass house

When you live across from a glass house, you know far less than you think you do. And when you're in the glass house next door, you probably let on far more than you realize. Crumbs on your face. Rubbing your nose. Staring out at the pink-lavendar sun sinking into New Jersey like a smelter on fire.

I don't live in a glass house. I just have a side job for someone who does, at 165 Charles Street. Once a week I come here to pay bills in the evening. When you're inside the apartment, it's rather an optical illusion; you feel like you're cantilevered right over the West Side Highway and that, if you stepped out onto the balcony, you could walk right into the river.

So it's a strange sensation. To be in a house where I can see everyone around me through their floor-to-ceiling windows [though it usually seems that people who can afford to live in glass houses are seldom actually there]. To be so utterly revealed and, simultaneously, be under the complete illusion that I am utterly alone. Just me and the yellow lab at my feet. I can look across the street and see right into someone's kitchen. Watch the whole family walk around, setting a table for dinner, corraling a series of children, and chatting away. After the dishes are cleared away, the dad--always in a white T-shirt and black running pants--goes to sit at a desk and tap away at a computer, his face lit in the glow of a lamp just like mine. Though, chances are, he owns his lamp. I am merely the interloper. The hired help. If I were carrying anything heavier than my handbag, I'd be using the service entrance.

But today, after night has fallen, there's no light around except for the one I'm standing in; no one else is indoors. There's a twinkling of lights across the Hudson, the moving glow of a vessle gliding on the water, the hot-white-holy pillar of the Empire State Building that looks so close I could touch it. Maybe when you're in a glass house, it's easiest to think that you're the only person at all in the city--and that it's all for you.

The Paris of our dreams

Quite sheepishly, I found myself crying through most of "Julie & Julia" in the theatre, grateful for the projection-glow darkness, wadding up lumps of damp old napkins in my purse. So much of it was sob-worthy: the brilliant Meryl Streep [about which there is really nothing more to say]; the joyous reverence for food and its loving preparation; the familiarity of a girl writer [living in Queens, no less!] trekking to a bleak day job; the spectacular patience of wonderful men; and, of course, the cheerful Paris of our dreams. 

I came home, smug in my disdain of blogs and finding, already on my bookshelf, a first-edition copy of My Life in France co-written by Julia--whom we all really feel comfortable calling by her given name by film's end--and her grand-nephew, Alex Prud'homme. And then everything was conflated: I read Julia with a mental voiceover by Meryl, and, in my mind's eye, could see so clearly the marvelous Parisian flat of the film--though I've just been told by the Real Julia that their apartment had no heat and had a kitchen on the third floor. The book included photos taken by the Real Paul: And there was a gray and white image of the Real Julia leaning out a window of the Real Flat . . . all which seemed vaguely Unreal. The narrative was breathless and thrilled; everything in Paris was wonderful despite the winters hunched over a coal-burning stove installed in the sitting room with both of them bundled in layers of long underwear typing with stiff, numb fingers.

And yet, it was hard to reconcile that it was only three years after the end of WWII. Yes, there were still ration cards and passing mentions of France still regaining her footing after the war. But it was impossible to imagine that the Europe of Julia's rapture was the Europe that Władysław Szpilman had just survived in Warsaw. [I still haven't recovered from "The Pianist," which I could only watch while periodically stepping out to do laundry in the basement.] But I guess that's just the point: It wasn't the same Europe.

*

My own memory [deeply unreliable] of my three days in Paris is rosy, fashioned from too many sentimental films. My vision of Paris is the same as that for any other city that becomes a vessel for all aspiration--London, New York, Shanghai, Casablanca--which means it's all entirely impossible. It was March, gray, and cold, yet I remember being beside myself with happiness. There is a photo of me smiling while standing in a horrid green hooded coat on what I remember being the Champs-Élysées [but probably wasn't]. I was staying with my old journalism school friend, Todd, his wife, and their three children; the bed was in the laundry room, and I recall feeling very grateful for their kindness [that part is true for sure]. I raced through the usual suspects: the Notre Dame, the Louvre [I had such low expectations of the Mona Lisa--expecting it to be the size of stamp--that I was actually pleasantly surprised that I could actually see it from the back of the crowd], the Sacré-Cœur, Montmartre, and the Shakespeare & Company bookshop. I remember nothing of what I ate except for the croissant at Orly airport [the best ever!], and an incredible pot of pasta that Todd's wife, Jenny, made for lunch with astonishing carelessness from a plastic tub of crème fraîche that she just picked up down the street. 

The Paris of Julia Child's experience seems to have passed through a parallel time; it is city completely devoid of grief. Perhaps it's a testament to her own love of life that she saw only abundance and reasons for happiness. By the time I was there, in 2000, that Paris was long gone. There were already the roiling tensions and resentments over North African immigrants and its accompanying Islamic traditions. It was late winter, and the city possessed none of the legendary light about which so many had written. But I wanted to believe it was still there and that, if I went back again, the wintry clouds would shift, revealing all I had imagined.

"The Pianist"

Watched "The Pianist" this evening, which only makes one question one's own fortitude: morally, physically, and spiritually. Would one have what it takes to survive? And, if so fortunate, what would be the quality of that survival?

Under construction

Smell the sawdust?!

I have just started here, feeling strange. Like it's the first day of school, and I have just arrived with my newly sharpened pencils. You can still smell the wood shavings.

I like pencils. In the end, I am just a girl with a pencil--so it feels strange to be here in the virtual ether, tapping into a square box that blinks back me. When I was still living with my parents, I wrote at an old roll-top desk that had belonged to my grandfather. At one point, its dark brown stain was green with age and cigarette smoke, but my father and I refinished it after we moved to the farm on Back Orrville Road in Wayne County, Ohio. The finish has held up, and my father uses this desk now. But when I was in high school, the newly refurbished desk sat in my room, and I did my homework on it. I wrote in a series of journals, on loose-leaf notebook paper held in folders with metal fasteners. On the desk I was a pencil cup covered with red fabric and tiny white dots; the seat cushion I'd made for the chair was in matching fabric. I wrote entirely in pen, and still do now. But I love pencils--precise German drafting pencils and mechanical ones with the ever-consistent tips. They never disappoint.

My uncle helped build the bomb.

My uncle helped build the atomic bomb. 

I have it right here, a photocopy of a certificate from the United States War Department:

 “This is to Certify that Warren Lowe, University of California, has participated in work essential to the production of the Atomic Bomb, thereby contributing to the successful conclusion of World War II.” It is signed by Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, 6 August 1945.

 Beneath the text is a seal the size of a hockey puck: “Manhattan Project,” it reads. “A Bomb.”

 My uncle, a chemical engineer, sent me this inside a Thanksgiving card when I was a junior in college. He also included two photos of himself, one a grainy photocopy of him in a graduation mortarboard, and a second clipped from a Chevron employee magazine.

I was self-absorbed with upcoming finals and more than vaguely creeped out—both by the contents and the fact that he referred to himself in the third person, as if talking about someone else. “Eventually you will appreciate your education later (sic),” he wrote. “Although Uncle Warren received scholarship, he worked 8 hours daily throughout college in order to help support his family.” The letter was dated Saturday, November 22, 1986.

Nine days later, Uncle Warren was dead. He was 64 and had just ordered a bright white Cadillac, which my Aunt Caroline drove until her death this summer.

I filed all this away, both physically and mentally. It was disturbing to consider that my uncle was prescient enough to post these testimonies before dropping dead a week later; it was too much to dwell on the reality that a family member had helped create the atomic bomb.

My uncle was born in 1922. He was a research assistant in the Manhattan Project Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley from 1943-45; perhaps it was thrilling to work on a top secret project as a young man. Obviously, he was proud of his contribution.

But he was proud of his work even as 110,000 of his fellow Asian Americans were imprisoned at internment camps throughout the West Coast and Hawaii, labeled a security risk. He was proud even though some of his Chinese American neighbors in the Bay Area wore buttons proclaiming, “I am Chinese,” to differentiate themselves.

He was proud even after he knew that hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He was still proud to have done his part in the war effort—forty-one years after the Allies accepted the Japanese surrender—to mail his niece proof of his role in that bloody victory.

It was not a conscious act of expiation that I, a writer, ended up becoming communications manager at a non-profit called Religions for Peace, the world’s largest and most representative multi-religious coalition for peace. It was not because of my uncle that I’d co-edited an anthology called Topography of War: Asian American Essays, which tells stories of how conflict can last long after the bombings have ceased.

In fact, I’d really managed to thoroughly not remember my uncle’s work until last month, when my family learned that Aunt Caroline, Warren’s widow, had died. Paranoid and reclusive, Aunt Caroline lived alone in a house engulfed by trees; inside, there was paper strewn around the house up to her knees. Authorities were finally able to contact my father because they found a letter from him, postmarked 1997.

Only in looking into Aunt Caroline’s death did I come across the mention of the Manhattan Project, which led to tearing through a closet late one recent humid night. There, in those treacherous bundles—letters from high school suitors, notes from a classmate who later committed suicide—was a card with “best wishes” from Uncle Warren.

“Help us to remember that the key to life and living,” the card’s inscription read, “is to make each prayer a prayer of thanks, and every day Thanksgiving.”

I last saw Aunt Caroline three years ago, when my parents and I visited the Bay Area. We took Caroline to lunch; for decades, she had dressed completely in white, with wide white sun hats and large tinted eyeglasses.

Afterwards, when she found out I wanted to visit a See’s Chocolate shop for some souvenirs, she exclaimed, “Wait! I have a gift certificate!” Quite astonishingly, she quickly located a voucher for a one-pound box; it was in the trunk of the by-then faded white Cadillac, which had yard-long scrape on the passenger side from an ill-gauged defensive driving maneuver.

“Uncle Warren knew I loved chocolates, so he bought me twenty” coupons! she beamed. She took my arm as we went into the store to pick out the chocolates; the cashier, even more amazingly, accepted the voucher without a blink, even though it had to be more than twenty-five years old. As I took the box from the cashier, Caroline giggled, “It’s from Uncle Warren!”

 Nothing is black and white in war—or love. We can only try to love with honesty, even if our minds and hearts are conflicted.