My Bonus Life at Doe Branch Ink: 2

Next to the last full day of the writers' retreat at Doe Branch Ink in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I've fallen into the peaceful and richly interesting routine of this extra tucked-in life.

We are six writers on these 50 acres with three rustic houses and lots of desks with views. We're all getting work done. I know because the daily reading of revisions is at four p.m.
One of our number has set up shop in the little bunkhouse where no one is sleeping this week. There's enough room for everyone to have a bedroom and a work spot elsewhere. Note Cat writing in her corner of the second floor sunroom.


This is the first time I've ever led/facilitated a group that it hasn't felt for a moment like work. It has been fun and interesting many times before; still I've always felt that I was "on" at least part of the time.

Please note: this is a bold step for me, this not-being-on. I really like it.

Also, I've plunged back into work on my own novel in progress, which I've been avoiding since I got back from New York. I'm happy with what I've gotten done, and I've liked doing it. See view from my writing table.

To top it all off -- and who would have predicted this -- I've come to a slightly different and very exciting religious understanding since I've been here. Credit that to Mahan, who left just the right book on the coffee table and then talked with me about it later.
What changed for me was not so much new experience or new information, but seeing how my own beliefs fit together and fall into a long tradition. Makes me feel less out on a limb. Though I've always claimed to like being out on a limb, it's nice to be able to scamper back up to a central trunk.

And did I say that the food is excellent? Last night's pasta and pesto (catered by Zuma in the wee metropolis of Marshall) dazzled us all. I should have taken a picture.

Bold Bonus Life Tip # 7: Expect unexpected outcomes.




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One-Week Bonus Life at Doe Branch Ink

This is the kind of extra life that is like a surprise package. I agreed to run a writing group at a house deep in the North Carolina mountains. Miles from a paved road. I showed up.


And now I'm three days into an eight-day experience far from my regular world. It will be a chunk of time with distinct edges that allows me to operate a little differently than I might otherwise.

Doe Branch Ink is a brand-new writers' retreat center not too far from Hot Springs in the Blue Ridge. The main house holds all of us this time. Meals are catered. There's a stream ten minutes down the steep mountainside that joins with another stream and runs into the French Broad River. After lunch today, one of the other writers and I took an hour-plus hike downstream to a series of waterfalls with a 30 foot drop. It was a sturdy climb coming back to the house.

We all have been writing on and off all day, and then had a reading and critiquing session in the living room at four. Food report: Dinner was pork loin with apples, cheese grits, salad, and a dessert of walnut brownies with vanilla ice cream. And wine.

The company is excellent. The writers are extremely varied in style and interest, and all experienced at giving useful feedback, an interestingly convivial group: a woman who grew up French who's writing a memoir (and who was very curious about the naming of the nearby French Broad River), an academic/former reporter with a rather startling nonfiction interest, a business owner writing women's fiction, a well-known retired liberal minister who is writing articles. And the on-site manager is also a novelist.

The house has writing stations on the porch, the deck, the sunroom, the loft, the bunkhouse near the main house. Lots of good views. And people have been productive. Most of them more so than I have been.

But I have started a new chapter on a novel I'm working on. Haven't proceeded far into it, but I needed to get it underway.

Bold Bonus Life Tip #6: A radical shift of place and routine, even brief, can get stuck projects get moving. Especially when one is surrounded by like-minded supportive folks.



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Busy, Busy

I'm working so hard this week getting ready to go away for a week to a Doe Branch Ink writers' retreat that I haven't had time post.

Bold Bonus Life Tip #5: Building in extra lives, even only week long, takes a lot of tying up of loose ends in advance.

Back to you soon -- from the North Carolina mountains.





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A Bonus Life of Song?

It takes a bit of chutzpah to keep a sense of humor in some professions.

Take anesthesiology, for one example. Unless you're one of the 5.3 million people who have already heard this, then you must click and listen, for the smile value.



These guys demonstrate Bonus Life Tip #4: one can have an extra life even while the main one is still going on.

Another example: I talked with a successful lawyer this past week who's also in three -- or was it four? -- bands. Probably makes him much better at his work.


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An Extra Life After Ninety

Think you're too old to get a whole new life?

Have a look at this week's New York magazine, which honors nine current high achievers who are in their nineties or over a hundred. (In their hundreds?)



For example, composer Elliott Carter has published 14 new pieces of music since he turned 100.

Turning through the portraits in New York, I was wowed and inspired by what it's possible to do (as long as you're breathing.)

Though maybe it helps to breathe Manhattan air (the location of my most recent and delightful "bonus life" adventure.)

Bold Bonus Life Tip #3: Age is no deterrent. You can get an extra life at any age.





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The Hardest Thing on Earth

Here's a provocative and bracing quote sent by Mamie of Can I Do It?

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
- Katherine Mansfield


Now, taking this literally, the hardest thing on earth for me would be doing one of several things that I don't want done.

But the hardest thing that needs doing? That I'm in favor of. I almost always save answering the most complicated email until last -- and then maybe waiting a day. And I'd love to stop doing that. So why don't I? It's not exactly saber-toothed tigers I'm fighting here.


Bold Bonus Life Tip #2: An "extra life" could simply be a period of sticking to a resolution. This never occurred to me until now. One could decide to get a personal trainer for three months...or volunteer an afternoon a week for x period ... or meet all deadlines early for a set period. Or, what the hell, have red wine and dark chocolate daily for a while. This kind of bonus life could spill over into the regular one, which could (maybe) be a good thing.


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How to Get a Bold Bonus Life

My own most recent "extra life" was, as regular readers here know, the 18 days I spent in August as a New Yorker. I was apartment-sitting on the Upper West Side. For a year and a half, I'd had in mind the goal of enjoying a spell as a Manhattanite. It was a 60th birthday present to myself and I'm now veering dangerously close to 62.

So it took me a little while to get there, but I did and it was marvelously satisfying. I do feel as if I had an extra life. And it was my third one. The first was a month at Berkeley when I was 29, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study fiction. The second, three months in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi when I was 42, was when I did my research for my novel Sister India.

I'm now a permanent fan of the idea of fitting in extra lives: abridged immersions in other places, cultures, or jobs. Experiences so different from the usual, and so concentrated and intense, that they truly feel like a different life.

I mean to keep a running list of tips and thoughts and experiments here on the subject. Starting now.

Bonus Life Tip #One: Try out a bonus life with a different career. There are companies that offer the opportunity. Example: Vocation Vacations. Here's a chance to try out (very briefly) the experience of being, say, a chocolatier, a music producer, a horse trainer, a wedding planner, a bed and breakfast owner. This is one way to go get a tiny extra life in a different career.





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Nina Vida's Bonus Life

I was just Friended by a writer in California I haven't met, Nina Vida. (We have lots of friends in common.) I looked at her page and was inspired.

It begins: "When I'm tempted to look at life as a series of successes and failures I remind myself that the journey is all."

Note: she became a writer at 50 and now has seven books out from major publishers, most recently The Texicans from Soho Press (with a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly. And she looks about 51, maybe.

Also on her page: "Don't let anyone tell you you're too old to do something you want to do."

This is a woman who is packing in an extra life or two.


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Some After-Effects of My Bonus Life

It's almost a week now since I returned from my 18-day bonus extra life as a New Yorker.

I've noticed a couple of significant after-effects of having tucked in this Plan B Life.

1. I feel very optimistic, as if almost any good thing is possible (and I'm capable of making it happen.)

2. I've been ordering different items for lunch (stuffed pepper!?) at the cafeteria, not my old "regulars."

3. I've had to go off of the dessert-and-pasta binge that I enjoyed so much as a New Yorker.

Number One is a very nice feeling, and likely to be more productive than the rather worn-down feeling I had at the time I got the welcome invitation to apartment-sit on the Upper West Side.

I've had this sudden attitude change happen once before, immediately after my first extra life: when I spent a month as "a Berkeley student" when I was twenty-nine and had received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to attend a fiction seminar on the California campus.

Shortly after I returned, I passed an acquaintance in the grocery store who abruptly said: "You changed. It changed you."

I didn't feel any different except in one way. My thought was: if I can get the federal government to send me to the Bay area for a month to read good novels and listen to jazz and hang out with a major literary critic and interesting writers from all over the country, there's just no telling what I can do.

And that's when I started publishing fairly frequently in national magazines.

Number Two? Changing my lunch menu? Well, that's not a huge deal, but does indicate that I'm making conscious decisions rather than staying in a rut.

Number Three: What a mistake it was to schedule my annual physical a few days after a major prolonged sugar experience. I flunked triglycerides, and now must eat virtuously.

At least for a while.








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Back in the Saddle

First day back in the office after my 18 day Extra Life in NY.

I arrived with the bold resolve to: "not be a workaholic drudge with eyestrain."

The day has been no shorter than usual. But I've certainly been more relaxed. Not once all day have I thought while doing one piece of work that I really should be doing another.

However, I find that I'm the only person working today in my five-person office building. Very quiet. Do you suppose they've all run off to have extra lives? (I do know that one is taking her son off to school, which is certainly the start of a new life.)



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A Bold Confession or Observation or Something.

You'll have to admit, it takes some cheek to say this:

My focus is shifting from accomplishing things to having fun.

I noticed this during my recent 18-day extra life in New York. I did accomplish a few things, both for clients and myself. But I didn't drive myself crazy over it. And it's entirely possible that the results were, as a result, better.

But whether they were or not, I feel my devotion to self-discipline fading.

I meant to lose three pounds in all that walking in New York. But did I? No, I ate ice cream at some point on probably every hike. On the morning of my return, I weighed exactly the same amount, to the tenth of a pound as I did the day I left. And didn't berate myself about it. (I used to have an eating disorder, so this is significant.)

And I didn't go straight to my office after my overnight bus ride home from Manhattan. In fact, I haven't been there yet. Instead I've been hanging out with Husband Bob and catching up on a few things at home. After all, it's the weekend. And the Emmies are on tonight.

This hedonism may fade; I've seen it happen before. Or it may hang around, and then we'll just see what happens....

In the meantime, it's a good thing that on most days I love doing most of my work.





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My Bold Bonus Life: 18

Friday was the final day of my 18-day extra life as a New Yorker. As Audrey Hepburn at 28.

This two-weeks-and-four-days experience was a tremendous success for me. I loved it. I do feel satisfied now that I've had a Manhattan life. Just as I feel satisfied that I had a life in India, in the three months I spent there researching my novel Sister India.

These were not mere trips. They felt entirely different. They included laundry, and ups and downs, and seasonal change, and neighbors. And enough time to dabble, and get lost, and have second chances.

I feel so lucky and grateful to have gotten to do this. And I'd had my mind set on it for almost two years, so I'd really built up an appetite.

My last day was, as usual, a long long walk. Some of it in circles. I decided to "do" a large chunk of the East Side, especially the area sometimes known as Spanish Harlem. I began by setting out to walk from the West Side apartment across Central Park. I decided I knew the place well enough by now that I could take a path instead of following the road.

After 30 or 40 minutes of walking, I saw traffic and buildings ahead. Success! I walked a few blocks into what I took to be the East Side. Then came upon Broadway. But that's on the West Side!! I'd made a great loop through the park and come back close to where I'd started.

So I headed back into the park and this time came out on the other side. Took a subway north to begin my walk back.

Then I got off the train too soon and saw only a few blocks of Mexican restaurants, and a Dominican one (harking back to the Dominican Day parade on my arrival day) and was soon into the cushiest neighborhood of New York, browsing designer windows. On an earlier day I might have gotten back on the subway and started again. But I was running down. I decided to settle for luxe window shopping, with an emphasis on shoes.

Food report: prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich.

Photo report: random things that caught my eye, including moss between stones on a wall in Central Park (a visual metaphor?).


That night, my overnight, amazing-bargain-for-$30, express bus was to leave Chinatown at 10 p.m. For about twenty tense minutes, I thought I was going to miss it. Once again on this last day, Manhattan took the opportunity to show me that I didn't exactly have a grip on the place.

First, the subway ride was longer than I thought. Then, for the second time in the day, I confusedly got off a stop too soon. Then got bad directions and ran in the wrong direction with computer and heavy, heavy suitcase. Realized I'd gone wrong, and picked up speed in the other direction. Then thought: Get a cab, you idiot! (My sweet shrink husband Bob says to me at such moments: Don't talk that way to my wife.)

Cabs passed me by. With luggage, I looked as if I were heading for the airport at a time when it would be hard to get a fare back.

Finally, a nice driver stopped for me. He hadn't heard the name of the cross street before, but we figured it out. Got there only about 30 seconds after the supposed deadline.

The bus was then delayed a full half hour, waiting for three people who were running late.

The ride back wasn't as easy as the straight-through bus ride that had brought me to New York. This time, we stopped twice. Each time the bus driver turned on the lights and announced a ten minute break. Thus waking everyone who'd gone to sleep. Twice that happened.

In the morning, we rolled back onto my home turf. Exhausted, I went home and went to bed.

Didn't even blog.

Now, a day later, I'm recovered. I'm back in the regular life I most want: living with Bob out in the country, driving most days to my little office in Raleigh. I also have the full feeling of just having had a whole extra life-- in Manhattan.

I so love this idea of tucking in a bonus life.

I mean to keep writing on the subject here -- different kinds of extra lives, and how to make them happen. What could be bolder?

I'd love to hear your story about your own such experiences, and the one you're planning.




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My Bold Bonus Life: 17

On my penultimate day as a 28 year-old New Yorker (my mini-life on the Upper West Side ends tomorrow), I took a bus to the Bronx.

It was the borough I hadn't yet hit. And I wanted to see it slowly and aboveground instead of popping up out of a subway. The part I saw around 145th, not far across the river, was jammed with fast food and bargain stores and sidewalk merchandise. Lots of narrow and crammed-full stores. One heavily devoted to voodoo. I chose one devoted to ice cream as my turn-around point for heading back to Manhattan. Food report: pralines and cream.

Earlier in the day, I'd had the best bagel of my life (this 18-day one at least) at Hot & Crusty, a bakery/deli a few blocks from the apartment. Twice before I'd been there and not been able to find a table. This told me to keep trying. I was glad I did.



Then for dinner tonight: pasta at Bella Luna, also nearby: cappellini with broccoli that was neither too raw nor too cooked and sun-dried tomatoes and warm goat cheese, etc.

I'm slowing down in the amount of New York I cover in a day, definitely on a trajectory toward my regular life.

At the same time, I feel as if I have all the time in the world. No need to cram anything in, which is a relief, because I'd never be able to cram it all in, even if I had two more days.

I like this feeling about time. I hope it follows me back into my Main Menu life.


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My Bold Bonus Life: 16

I revisited some of my New York past yesterday. That's probably an important piece of an extra bonus life like my 18 days as a Manhattanite.

First, I had a very pleasant coffee and re-connect with the literary agent who sold my first novel, Revelation and The Healing Power of Doing Good, and with one of her colleagues.

Then, by chance, I wandered past the famously artsy hotel, the Chelsea (in photo), where I spent a week in the mid-70s at $11 a night. My room included a dead refrigerator, an appliance that was landfill-ready. There were and are much more splendid rooms available.

But the aura of the place was fabulous. From the website:

"...The hotel has an ornate history, both as a birth place of creative modern art and home of bad behavior. Bob Dylan composed songs while staying at the Chelsea, and poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso chose it as a place for philosophical and intellectual exchange. It is also known as the place where the writer Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning on in 1953, and where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols may have stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death on October 12, 1978.

Famous visitors and residents of the Chelsea Hotel include Eugene O'Neil, Thomas Wolfe, and Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote 2001: A Space Oddyssey while in residence). Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead passed through the hotels doors in the 1960s.

Virgil Thompson, Larry Rivers, William Burroughs, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Patti Smith, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Quentin Crisp, and many, many others stayed here too."


As usual, I walked and walked, in the West Village and Chelsea areas, the Meatpacking district (boutiques and nightclubs), and along a section of the new High Line, an elevated train track turned into a garden walkway with views of city and Hudson River. A quick turn through the design museum at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Then attended another good play in the NYC Fringe Festival. This one, Miss Magnolia Beaumont Goes to Provincetown. It's about an antebellum belle who takes up residence in the body of a 33 year old gay man. She helps him with his emotional problems and his interpersonal skills during a trip to the beach. Funny and good.

I took exception to the critical review in The New York Times yesterday of the festival. The writer bashed the whole series based on a handful of plays out of the roughly 200 staged. Okay, I guess if I'd hit four duds, I'd be mad. But three out of the four I've seen have been very engaging.

Food Report: cheese blintzes for lunch and a milkshake and sweet potato French fries for dinner. A shake at the sleek burger joint had won top billing in New York magazine. I plan to eat lots of leafy green vegetables when I return to my regular life where I don't walk all day. As a hiker fitting a lot into a short-term life, I really do need to load carbs.



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My Bold Bonus Life: 15

Audrey Hepburn came home.

For new arrivals here, this is the way I think of the New Yorker whose apartment I'm "sitting" in for my extra mini-life as a Manhattanite. Her glamorous job called her back a few days earlier than she'd planned; she's now staying with a friend so that I can finish out my life here.

It was a happy meeting. (She's the daughter of a friend of a friend and we'd never set eyes on each other before; though, after two weeks in her sunlit studio, I felt I knew her pretty well.)

Well, she's everything you'd expect of Audrey, plus outgoing and at ease. And totally unworried about the health of her plants in my charge. (see plant crisis)

Yesterday turned out differently than I'd planned. This is not a new phenomenon in any of my lives. It was chilly and raining pretty vigorously when I went out. By the time I'd walked a few blocks, my shoes were soaked through as were my jeans to a level up above my knees. No museums or long hikes.

I came back to the apartment and worked most of the day, except for a break for my first-ever bowl of matzoh ball soup at a nearby deli and my late-afternoon meeting with Audrey.

Then last night, dinner at a little place I stumbled upon near the little theater where I was going to see another of the Fringe NYC festival's plays. Mission Cafe is what I think of as a shotgun restaurant: one narrow room with a bar on one side and a single line of tables on the other. (see photo above)

I ordered one of the dinner specials: a deep bowl of penne with shrimp and salmon, with bread plus olive oil to sop it in, and a glass of pinot grigio, all for $10.95. And it was all good!

The evening's Fringe play was Faye Lane's Beauty Shop Stories: a one-woman musical about her growing up in Texas in her mom's beauty parlor. I didn't realize that comedian Joan Rivers had attended the play the night before and the word of this had spread as a sort of endorsement. On this last night of the run a crowd was waiting outside the door.

I got in line. There were eight tickets left. I was number eleven in the queue. The two guys in front of me left. I was number nine. Waiting, I chatted with the Dutch theater studies student in front of me who was reviewing the festival for a Dutch online publication. (I'd find the idea of reviewing a string of plays in Dutch a little daunting.)

The line started to move. The student reviewer in front of me apologetically got the last available ticket. I was told to wait; maybe some of the press seats wouldn't fill. I leaned against the box office window and chatted with the woman who sold tickets.

The line of admirable people who had planned well and bought their tickets in advance filed past us into the La Ma Ma theater. We waited. Then: two more tickets. One for me and one for the tall texting fellow behind me. I didn't even have to be the one to smile ruefully at whoever was first to be turned away.

The show itself was a delight. "Volumptious" Faye Lane told and sang her story of being a fat little girl doing song and dance before the captive audience of women under hair dryers. And then as a young woman selling everything she had and lighting out of Texas with $1100 and a ticket to London.

Spoiler Alert: In her first three days in London she met and moved in with actor Anthony Hopkins' daughter and had a director ask to do a movie of her life. Six months later flying back into England after a trip to Cannes, she was given 24 hours to leave the country because she didn't have a work or student visa.

The next day she was back in Texas. Two days after that she answered the pay phone in the beauty parlor where she was again at work: "Casa Vale Beauty Shop." It was the director. He asked her to marry him. They rendezvoused at the Chelsea Hotel in NY, and "never checked out."

Their twentieth anniversary is next week. Faye Lane gave a warmly emotional performance that felt fresh and genuine. I got the strong impression that "the director" was in the audience up near the front on the left side last night.

Guests leaving the show were each given a banana Moon Pie, an important item in the life of the young beauty shop star. Faye Lane stood out on the sidewalk (see photo) greeting people at the end of the show.

I never expected to end the day walking through the East Village eating a banana Moon Pie. But you never know how things are going to go.


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My Bold Bonus Life: 14

Audrey Hepburn is coming back to town today. That's how I think of the young woman who is letting me use her apartment for my 18 day bonus life in Manhattan. l

Audrey is a few days early and is graciously staying with a friend so that I can finish my extra life here.

Her terrace plants are doing well (see above)-- except for the one I 90% killed, then replaced.

Interesting note on the outcome of that hectic crisis: Audrey said don't worry about it, that all the plants would be gone in a couple of months anyway.

So I didn't need to ransack the field of horticulture and tote the crispy plant around Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. On the other hand, that little maelstrom led to some shoe-leather plant detective work that became a mini-adventure (except for the hand-wringing.) And it put me back in touch with a guy I knew in high school and hadn't talked with since. Now an agricultural extension agent, he said it might well recover, but in the meantime to hope it hadn't come from a now-deceased child.

Rainy and marvelously cool here. Have plans for a museum and another of the Fringe NYC plays.




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My Bold Bonus Life: 13

A cool rainy Sunday in my extra life in Manhattan: a rousingly good church service, a three-hour brunch-with-live-jazz with good friends who'd driven up from Philadelphia, then an excellent late-afternoon play in a small theater with audience discussion with the playwright and composer afterwards. Then, of course, the long walk and the frozen dairy product, this time a roasted almond fro-yo in a sugar cone.

It has been decades since I was a regular church-goer: roughly since I moved in with my husband in our house out in the country 40 minutes from the church I used to attend.

Today's service makes me want to go back. From the website: "Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village defines itself as 'a church in the Christian tradition' and 'a sanctuary for progressive activism and artistic expression.'"

The congregation endorses and works for peace without asking everybody to hug the person to their right, which always annoys me. Here people introduced themselves to me afterwards without even being prompted, which I did like.

Wonderful lunch and conversation nearby at Cafe Loup with friends Anne and Al. Anne and I met 32 years ago at Berkeley when we'd both won NEH grants for nonfiction writers to spend a month there studying fiction. (That was another bonus life I lived once. In fact, this is probably my third extra life.) Food report: eggs Benedict -- very good -- and chardonnay.

The 4:30 play was Dear Harvey, about San Francisco gay politician and human rights advocate Harvey Milk, who, with the city's mayor, was assassinated by a fellow city council member. This was part of the ongoing Fringe NYC festival.

I almost gave up on this festival because I didn't like the first play I saw. Glad I changed my mind. This one was the perfect bookend to the morning's church service. Heart-stirring and inspiring to action. Milk showed that if one person takes a stand and sticks by it, he/she can accomplish remarkable things.

Or, as Cleve Jones, the creator of the AIDS quilt, says in the play: "You can be this totally ordinary person with this really fucked up life but if you have courage and speak the truth and are willing to stick it out, it's amazing what you can do."





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My Bold Bonus Life: 12

This splendid orb was created for the 100th dropping of a Times Square New Year's Eve ball. The New York Times started the practice in 1907. This piece was made by Waterford Crystal and a lighting company in 2007 to commemorate the century of these celebrations.

This ball now sits in the Times Square Visitors Center, with an inspiring commentary:"The ball has always been a physical symbol of second chances, new starts, powerful memories, and the promise of the future...."

I've watched the ball fall on TV many a time, but never thought of it that way. Now I will. Another legacy-to-be of my extra life-within-a-life in New York.


Today's explorations took me to the downtown tip of the island of Manhattan and across to Staten Island, then up to 125th Street and Harlem.

Some of the best adventures of the day, and of this "life," have come from taking the wrong train, or direction. I have a lot less patience with my wrong turns at home; it will take effort to bring that attitude back home.

Today was one of the "Summer Streets" Saturdays when about 7 miles of Park Avenue were closed to cars, and given over to walkers and bikers and bladers, etc. I walked about 30 blocks of that distance, and it was an interesting sensation to stroll down the middle of Park Avenue. Also noted, I became used to it surprisingly quickly.

An interesting bit of re-purpose transformation was part of this summery occasion: "dumpster pools." Clean, unused shipping containers were transformed into swimming pools, three of them open for splashing at 40th and Park. Very imaginative, though the idea of trash still floated in my head.


After a bit of lunch (food report: granola, with fresh raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, etc.) I decided on a boat ride. I'd never taken the ferry over to Staten Island at the bottom of Manhattan. Felt a welcome swell of patriotism, and pro-freedom fervor, as we cruised past the Statue of Liberty with her lighted torch.

Like a lot of passengers, I took the ferry for the boat ride. But then I decided to stay, walked around for a while in the historic part of Staten Island, old dark-shingle houses along such quiet streets. And hills! I hadn't expected such steep climbs.

Landing again in Manhattan, I was set to come back to the apartment, but decided to linger long enough to find a scoop of ice cream. By the time I'd found it, I'd visited Wall Street and the site of the World Trade Center, which I wrote here just yesterday that I didn't want to see. I'd feared it was asking for unnecessary pain to go there. But the familiar images of the attack were not there, nor did I see the visitor's center and thought there wasn't one there. I found myself instead looking at cranes, at a construction site that I didn't recognize at all.

Once again an effort to head "home," but: wrong train. I took an express rather than a local and thus overshot by about forty blocks. Which landed me on a wide commercial street of Harlem at dusk on a Saturday night. I emerged from the subway onto such a crowded festive-feeling sidewalk, I decided to wander a while before finding the "right" train.

Happening upon the famous Apollo Theater, where Billie Holliday, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and so many others launched their careers. I peered in, admired the chandeliers. A poster outside said that Tracy Morgan, who is on the short list of comedians I find really funny, would be taping a show there for HBO. But the place was locked up, and I didn't know how long I'd have to wait, and so moved on. (Turns out I'd have had to wait until a Friday in September, guess I didn't read that poster too carefully.)

Then I got a bit lost; asked a woman which direction Central Park was, as a way of getting oriented. She said, "Central Park? You're a long way from there. You have to go to Manhattan for that. You're in Harlem."

But Harlem is part of Manhattan and Central Park was only a couple of dozen blocks to the south; it was as if she was in a different world. That I find troubling.

The next train ride was the last of the day, took me back to the apartment. I'd like to be able to pack this much into a Saturday at home.





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