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.
