the cassandra pages

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

 

--Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

I've always wanted to enter New York harbor by boat. Crossing the beautiful Verrazano Narrows bridge by car for the first time, a couple of years ago, accentuated that desire. I gazed over the railing at the barges and merchant ships, the sailboats and tugs, and the busy ferries leaving white wakes as they sped toward their destinations across the magnificent harbor, toward the blue towers of Manhattan in the distance, and felt filled with a longing I didn't even understand.

Recently we were in Brooklyn visiting a dear friend. She suggested that we walk down to the Bush Terminal Pier, no longer used for shipping, but recently developed into a low-key waterfront park. We walked down the slanting Brooklyn streets toward the water, along the abandoned warehouses and railroad sidings, and finally out onto the pier.

There, at water-level, we were much closer to Manhattan than from the bridge, but with a similar view: the Statue of Liberty at far left, the new Freedom Tower of lower Manhattan at the right. We were nearly alone; a couple lay on the rocks listening to soft music, and a hooded man sat leaning on his bicycle and gazing across the water at the New Jersey docks.

I looked at the city, and thought about the few times I had been in a boat on this water. I had taken ferries across the Hudson from New Jersey, but had never been in the greater harbor beyond Manhattan. "When I was five, the first time I ever came to the city, my grandparents took me on a boat that went around the island of Manhattan," I told K.

"Yes, the Circle Line," she answered. "It's still running."

"I've always wanted to enter the harbor by boat," I said. "Maybe it's because of my ancestors who came to Brooklyn in the late 1800s -- I think I've always wanted to feel what it might have felt like for them, as much as that's possible now."

She thought for a moment and then said: "There's a ferry from here to Far Rockaway - it goes under the Verrazano and back - we can do it tomorrow!"

 

And so, we did. We left early the next morning and rode the commuter ferry -- a fast catamaran that, astoundingly, costs the same as a subway ticket -- out of the harbor, through the Narrows, and then east along Coney Island to dock at Far Rockaway, a narrow island that faces the open ocean.

From the pier, we walked across the island -- barely a ten minute affair -- stopping to buy a coffee and a bagel with lox to eat on the ocean-side beach, also barely-populated at that hour on a weekday.

After our breakfast on the sand, we walked barefoot on the water's edge for a while, foamy waves lapping at our ankles, as gulls flew overhead and sandpipers scampered with the incoming and outgoing water, and then headed back to the pier for the return journey and my long-awaited entry into the harbor under dramatic clouds heavy with rain.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,

Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,

Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow...

 

When I posted some pictures of this trip on Instagram, my friend Lorianne of Hoarded Ordinaries pointed me to Walt Whitman's poem, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which was included in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. As I read, I was moved, and felt the distance between the poet and myself collapse, just as he had written a century and a half ago.

I thought about my great-grandfather, who had come from England around the time Whitman wrote his poem, and had become a jeweler in Brooklyn -- the maker of a gold ring that was passed down to me, that I always wear now on the little finger of my right hand.

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

 

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me...

But my thoughts were also personal. I occurred to me that New York has functioned as a kind of touchstone, with my experiences here forming a series that mirrors different stages of my life, and growth; how the intensity and excitement I've always felt in this, my favorite of all cities, used to be accompanied by the insecurities of the small-town country girl that I once was, unsure of how to dress, positive that my inexperience and trepidation were obvious to anyone who saw me.

So many memories! Peering into the magical animated windows of Fifth Avenue shops when I was five, matched by the enchantment of seeing My Fair Lady and Camelot. Walking through scary dark streets near Times Square with a long-haired college boyfriend, now dead, during the gritty days of the 1970s, on our way to see "Fritz the Cat." The seductive energy of walking down Fifth Avenue many years later, on the day I received an offer from a New York publisher -- and how I had turned that offer down and driven out of the city, knowing I'd down the right thing, that the strings attached weren't worth it, or right for me. Marching through the streets in anti-war demonstrations, and looking down at them from the Empire State Building, as a little girl, or the World Trade Center in my forties; going back on a somber day to pay my respects after 9/11.

I thought of some of my closest friends, who've always lived here, and all the things we've done together: the art that fills the museums; the music that fills the theaters and clubs; the food from every corner of the world; the stores where you can buy, or at least look at, just about anything. There have been parties and weddings and funerals, countless meals in ethnic restaurants and New York delis, countless slices of pizza bought on the street. And even though I've become a city person myself, and live in a quite-different large city in a quite-different country, New York (where I've never lived) is still home, in the sense of a place to which I'll always return, a place I hope will remain, not just throughout my own lifetime  but, like Whitman, hundreds of years from now, for those who will come after me, because the anonymity and shelter of the great city are also major parts of its identity, just as they shape ours.

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?

River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?

The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?

 

Will New York last? I looked at lower Manhattan, where a single tower has replaced the fallen twins. The waters of the harbor, too, will rise -- K. pointed out places that were devastated by Hurricane Sandy, which is unlikely to be an isolated freak event now that the oceans and land are in the grip of global warming. 

I don't know. As the ferry passed under the Verrazano and we entered the harbor, I wasn't thinking about any of that anymore; I was just feeling the wind in my hair, looking at the happy faces of the other passengers on the upper deck, none of whom seemed jaded by what was probably a much more routine journey. We overtook a tall white sailboat, and the impossibly dense skyline of the city came closer and closer: a fifty-dollar experience for the price of a subway ticket. Because that's New York, too, where some of the best memories have come to me free and unexpected, and through the hands of people I've loved.

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

Spring Inklings

Last week's Nor'easter didn't reach Montreal, but I wasn't here -- we were in rural central New York State, and we got snowed in. For an entire day, no one moved. At the lake where we were staying, no cars passed, no snowplow broke a path. The entire world outside the windows was muffled and white, as if we were wrapped in a feather duvet.

As I dried the breakfast dishes, a dark shape crossed my peripheral vision. I turned and saw a deer walking down the driveway, a path it probably takes often because there are few people around. It stopped under the hemlock trees at the top of the bank and dug under the deep snow to eat some of the evergreen groundcover it obviously knew was there.

The light is higher and brighter, though; the days are longer, and we're clearly on our way toward spring. Back in Montreal I've banished the last dried branches of pine and holly from Christmas, and we've enjoyed an orchid and an amaryllis and a pot of hyacinths brought by a thoughtful dinner guest. My bougainvillea, overwintering in the studio windows, is trying to bloom.

Friends on the west coast, others considerably further south, and in England, are already posting pictures of snowdrops and daffodils, but it's going to be another six weeks here before we see many flowers. No wonder I've been staring at my plants, and fixing them in time and ink.

 

Earth Day

Today I've been thinking back to the very first Earth Day in 1970. I was a senior in high school, and on that day we went over for a program at the new Rogers Environmental Education Center that was being built in my rural central New York town. It was an entirely new concept: an "environmental education center" under the auspices of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, built on property that had once been a state "game farm" raising pheasants, quail, turkeys and other game birds for release on state lands for hunting. During my childhood, this was a place we went for picnics and to see the enormous native trout in the concrete ponds, feed the wild ducks, keeping a safe distance from mated pairs of Canada geese protecting their offspring, and wander around the cages that housed displays of "fancy" pheasants, game birds, and screeching peacocks.

On Earth Day, our class heard about concepts like recycling, sustainability, organic gardening, environmental pollution, and ecology, that were actually relatively terms at that time. The presenter was a charismatic state field biologist named Herm Weiskotten who had been hired as the center's first environmental educator. I loved everything I heard, and admired him, and that summer and for all the summers and some vacations through university I worked at the center as an intern. For two years after graduating I worked full-time as a naturalist and artist/exhibit and graphic designer under the CETA program, sharing an office with Herm, who had become my mentor, teacher, and friend. I was incredibly fortunate to know him and work so closely with him; he taught me a great deal, gave me confidence, and steadfastly encouraged me in my art and my love of the natural world. We went all over New York State together, laying out nature trails -- another new thing at the time -- and talking. I was responsible for sketching and drawing the illustrations for trail guides and exhibits, but Herm and I also shared a great love for native plants, especially the so-called primitive plants like ferns, mosses, horsetails, lichens and liverworts, and we searched together for rare species. During those years I'd work all day, come home, cook dinner for myself, and spend the evening in solitude practicing drawing and teaching myself how to paint detailed watercolors.

The field guide in the top picture was his. He gave it to me after it fell into a stream once when we were down in some gorge looking for limestone-loving ferns. The fern I've laid on the cover has always been pressed between its pages - it's an ebony spleenwort from one of those excursions. I took the book off the shelf today to see if it had Herm's name in it -- it doesn't -- but that's his handwriting inside the back cover: a note about where the species on pg 112 -- the silvery spleenwort, Athyrium thelypteroides -- was to be found.

He was born in England in 1922, orphaned, and adopted by American parents. He died in 1977 of a sudden, massive heart attack in his sleep; we had spoken by phone the night before with no hint of any serious problem, though he had had heart issues for a number of years. Now, almost ten years older than he was when he died, I still think of him nearly every day, and when I'm in the woods I feel his presence; I've sometimes wondered if his was a soul that didn't depart but has always stayed here, whether as a protective spirit or simply because he loved the earth too much to leave. I should write more about him someday -- there are hundreds of stories -- but I'm not sure I will, or really want to.

This warped and water-stained book is precious to me because it's one of the very few mementos I have. I have only a couple of photographs, none particularly good. The first gift he ever gave me was a paperback copy of Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac; he also gave me a large book of American Wildflowers. But mostly we constantly brought each other interesting things we'd found: fossils, rocks, bones, wildflowers, feathers. Not long before he died, he showed up at my parents' home at the lake -- I had moved to New England -- with a couple of Iroquois arrowheads that he said he wanted to give my mother and me - he loved to roam the freshly-plowed fields by the Chenango River after work, and often participated in archaeological digs in the area, looking for artifacts. But that's it. The most important things were the intangible ways he helped me discover and be myself.

How would Herm feel about our earth today? I hate to even think about that question. He'd be happy for the strides we've made in sustainability, recycling, organic farming and local food, waste disposal, and certain resources that have been protected and cleaned up. He'd be sick about the decline of species, blatant disregard for biodiversity, about genetic engineering, continued pesticide overuse, and all the abuses of creationism and non-science -- but most of all about climate change. He would despise the politicians and their wars, deplore religious fundamentalism of all kinds, and be dismayed about the refugees. He'd also be sad to see that New York State has closed all their popular and well-attended environmental centers, which educated two generations of students and teachers, for lack of funds and, frankly, lack of political will and commitment.

So much of my art and spirit spring from nature, my first and purest love. In much of my work, I realize I'm simply trying to say "Look!" with the same wonder and appreciation I did when leading people on nature walks, years ago. I was in love with the natural world even when I was a little girl; my mother and grandmother and aunts loved the outdoors and knew a lot about it. But it was Herm who gave me greater knowledge, a voice, and new ways to communicate what was inside me, and what was important. I thought I wanted to be a field biologist myself, for a long time, but my creative side won out; that's fine. But there's so much work to do, and so little time left; I feel the urgency, and the call to try harder -- those of us who are still here.

 

Peak: A Fall Trek up Noonmark

We had intended to climb Noonmark Mountain, in the Adirondacks, on our anniversary (August 1), following our tradition of going out somewhere in nature for an adventure on that day. But circumstances got in the way and we ended up putting it off...until yesterday. And what a glorious day it was to be in the mountains: the autumn foliage at its peak, the air cool but not freezing, the sky absolutely blue. (The only problem was that my camera battery was dead, so I had to forget about taking photos -- all these pictures are by Jonathan.)

 

We hadn't bargained on quite such a challenging climb. Noonmark is not one of the highest peaks in the Adirondack Park, but it has one of the best 360-degree views from its bare summit. Still, it's 3,556 feet (1,084 metres) high, and the Stimson Trail to the summit, which we took, is steep, especially in the last couple hundred metres, and includes high rock steps and sections of exposed, bare rock.

We were glad we'd brought trekking poles and had worn hiking boots with good ankle support. Although we shed progressive layers of clothing, there was frost in shadowed places on the ground as we approached the summit, and ice in the little pools on the rock.

On the way up, we met another couple about our age coming down, who said they had stopped short of the summit and decided to just enjoy the views from there. "You know, it gets pretty dicey -- a couple of ladders, and a lot of scrambling over bare rock," the man said, shaking his head. "Yes - these are pretty old knees!" said the woman, with a sweet, resigned smile. I'm pretty stubborn, and I'm afraid this exchange just stiffened my determination to make it all the way up. As we climbed, the trail did get steeper and harder, but it was also beautiful and well-maintained: narrow ridgelines along rock walls, bare rock ledged without handholds that required some thought to scale, decisions between going straight up the difficult rocky steps or the edges filled with branches and roots, and enticing lookouts on Giant Mountain to the east, and the high peaks to the northwest that gave a hint of what we'd see from the summit. Meanwhile we observed the progression from a climax northern forest of beech-hemlock-maple to hemlocks and cedars, with more tundra vegetation like lichens, and finally krummholz, the stunted,wind-pruned pines of high altitude.

After climbing over some tall boulders, we emerged from the trees onto bare rock: we had made it!

We'd brought a lunch, and sat to eat it on the sun-warmed, worn, pinkish granite, sparkling with mica chips and adorned with round green and white lichens.

When we arrived, a high school group from Ontario was also on the top, talking excitedly, but soon their teacher sent them to each find a spot by themselves, and they sat for fifteen or twenty minutes in complete silence, so we did too, looking out over the high peaks of the Adirondack range and the vivid array of trees below us.

 

In spite of growing up in central New York State, my family never came up to the mountains in the north, and then I spent my adulthood in the broad valley between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Whites of New Hampshire, visiting both often. I've only started to get to know the Adirondacks, mountains of quite different character, in the past few years. Since I stopped downhill skiing, due to a knee injury twenty years ago, I've deeply missed being on the tops of mountains, especially in the winter: the solitude; the raw beauty; that particular, crystalline quality of air.

Jonathan attended the North Country School in Lake Placid for several years, and he had climbed a number of these peaks as a child, ridden through them on horseback, gone apple-picking and hauled sap out of the woods for maple sugaring. At his request, I photographed him with Cascade Mountain and its dramatic rock slides behind him: a favorite of those early days. He told me that when you hit the rock on the top of Cascade, it sounds hollow.

The father of a close friend (who we visited in the previous post) was the author of the Time-Life book on the Adirondack Park; reading it a couple years ago reminded J. of his early love for these mountains, and piqued my interest in exploring more. A while ago, we met our close friends Dave, Rachel and Lucy near Lake Placid, and went for a much less demanding but beautiful hike across the valley from Noonmark. With our other friends we had done easier hikes, and swum in the ice-cold Cascade Lakes, but this was the first time Jonathan and I had climbed one of the big peaks together.

Soon the school group departed and for an hour we had the summit to ourselves.

And then it was mid-afternoon, and time to start our descent. Going up, you have the challenge of climbing and all its aerobic demands, but in the other direction, you have the slowness of picking your way down steep ledges and stone steps, and rocky, rooty ground that's covered with fallen leaves, but the worst is the ever-increasing pain in your knees. Poles help, but this descent was steep and long, and by halfway my skiing-damaged knees were really yelling at me; meanwhile there was less and less light on the trail so we needed to keep moving. We were glad when we finally came out of the woods and reached the parking area. Soon the full moon rose over the Ausable River, and kept us company all the way back to Montreal.

This morning, I was less stiff than I thought I'd be, with minor blisters on both big toes, and the knee, which hadn't swollen, had stopped complaining. Maybe we're not too old for this sort of craziness, after all.

All photographs (c) 2016 Jonathan Sa'adah

Lyre, Lake

When I was a young girl, my grandfather, who had a real estate and auction business and was also a skilled woodworker, gave me a pair of antique Hitchcock chairs. They were small, with low, caned seats suitable for a child, and traditional stenciled decoration, but instead of fruit or flowers, my chairs had a lyre in the center: I was the musical child. For almost sixty years, those chairs have been with me, too small and delicate to be practical, but impossible to part with because they were such an early affirmation from someone who didn't need words to tell me he loved and knew me. The cane seats have been replaced once, but the stencils are in remarkably good condition. I ate my lunch today, as I usually do, seated on one of those chairs, with its golden lyre pressed against my back.

---

We slept in that bedstead with the carved lyre last week, while visiting friends on Lake Champlain, in a small old town that used to be the summer home of affluent families from New York City, as well as longtime local families. The town has the mansions and summer hotel one might expect, but the storefronts along the one main street are mostly empty now, the hotels and inns turned into rental apartments, or even torn down. So, the town and the lakeshore were quiet except for migrating flocks of Canada geese and smaller groups of ducks, or the occasional hawk or vulture or heron overhead, and the lake itself was calm, with long ripples instead of waves that caught the light and slowly progressed from the opposite shore towards us, as if a long knife had sliced the water at an angle from below.

Our hosts took us for a short but steep climb up a nearby mountain, to a rock outcrop that gave a panoramic view of the high peaks, the lake, and Vermont's Green Mountains beyond it; we lounged on the warm rock, eating apples and almonds, while their basset hound crunched acorns with his strong teeth. My knees were grateful for collapsible hiking poles, especially on the descent, but we were happy to find we were in pretty good shape for hiking.

 

Later, we sat on the porch in sweaters, drinking vodka and eating homemade gravlax, watching the lake until the sun set, and then ate dinner at the kitchen table, and talked into the night.

Camel's Hump, in Vermont, seen from the New York side of the lake.

In the morning, a long breakfast of eggs and Montreal bagels with labneh and grilled peppers, another walk, and then a slow drive back to the city, along the lake for a while. We stopped at a farmstand where workers -- there to dig potatoes? pick cabbages? apples? -- were sleeping in the grass under the trees, and again for lunch at a diner in a deserted village, bought some apples at an orchard, and made it back to Montreal in time for choir rehearsal, feeling like we had been away far longer than we actually had.

 

At the Whitney

Looking northeast from the rooftop terrace of the Whitney.

The new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art stands in what's left of the meatpacking district, looking out over Greenwich Village, to the east, and the Hudson River, to the west. The grassy aerial greenway known as the High Line, built on an elevated former train track, begins here, three blocks south of 14th Street at Gansevoort, and runs north all the way to 34th. Last spring, we walked south on the High Line from that northern end, and noticed the new museum building in the distance, its rooftop terrace dotted with tiny people leaning out over the railings to look at the city: we wanted to be there too.

So, on an extremely hot day three months later, we took the subway from Brooklyn to 14th Street and walked toward this new urban landmark. We entered the cool air of the museum, bought our admission tickets, and immediately took the elevator to the top floor; there was just enough time to take some photographs before the rain began falling hard enough to drive us back inside.

We had come to see the new building and the views it affords, but also for a retrospective show of photographs by Danny Lyon, an early practitioner of street photography who has steadfastly maintained his 60s politics and counter-culture philosophies, right down to his refusal to use a digital camera.

At the entrance to the exhibition, J. and I drifted apart; we both like to see exhibitions at our own pace. My first impression was that this was a strangely-hung show, lightly-curated (always OK with me) and somewhat difficult to follow (rather less OK.) Gradually I understood the loosely-chronological groupings of work, and spent time with certain periods and photographs I liked the most, such as the portrait below.

Leslie, Downtown Knoxville, 1967

Lyon is perhaps best known for his photographs of Hell's Angels bikers, and for the series of images he took of the Texas prison system, where he became friendly with several inmates and was able to make intimate pictures that eventually became collected into a book. He has never been an excellent printer, and the silver prints in this exhibition were of uneven quality; his focus is on the content and what he is trying to say. Some of the prints from his personal archive include borders on which he has written commentary in black and red ink, going all the way around the central image. I found myself reading all of these, because they gave me insight into his thoughts and emotions, his humor, and his sense of the absurd and tragic. Always documenting in order to preserve something he cares about - as in a series of images of a part of lower Manhattan that was demolished - or to show the humanity of his subjects, what came through most strongly in the show was Lyons' sympathy to the poor and disregarded, and unwavering commitment to his own values over a lifetime of work.

The image below was one that I found particularly arresting. The use of white against dark, and the repetitive postures reminded me of the work of Diego Rivera, though Rivera was trying to glorify the labor of the common worker, while Lyons was showing us the labor of Texas convicts. Next to this image was a photograph of an inmate unconscious in the back of a truck, a victim of heat stroke after hours spent picking cotton under the relentless, indifferent sun.

The Cotton Pickers, Ferguson Unit, Texas, 1968.

Jonathan and I found each other, talked, floated apart again. He was having a similar reaction to the exhibition, but for him it was more personal. Lyon was both an icon of a particular type of photography that they shared, and a rough contemporary. His was a different life, based on different choices, but there were similarities too. If we hadn't married, I mused, J. might have had a career much more like this; the raw edges and grit and obsessive dedication were what he gave up in order to build a life with me. He was a better technical photographer and printer than Lyon, and he had had a clear vision and style at a very young age; in fact one of his own best photographs had been taken close to here in his early twenties, on the abandoned West Side Drive after part of it had collapsed, the new World Trade Center towers in the background.

J.'s first invitation to me, almost forty years ago, had been to come up to his place and look at some photography. As we got to know each other, much of our conversation revolved around that subject. He showed me the work of contemporary photographers he admired - Gary Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Emmet Gowin, Danny Lyon - as well as older masters like Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Disfarmer, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, and taught me how to look at images. I talked to him about design and art; our eyes developed along with our relationship, and we became each other's most trusted critic. Over the years we have gone to many exhibitions together, and even though I was more of a talker and commenter, and he was more the quiet observer whose astute comments would usually emerge later, we developed a pattern of looking and discussing that suited us both, and fed us and our work together and as individuals. We built a communication and design business, and set our own artistic practices aside for a time, while other people -- like Lyon -- struggled to sell prints and make books.

I thought of all of this as I finished looking at the last group of pictures, and went to sit in a quiet white room overlooking the river. Jonathan came and found me there, and we walked together through the museum toward the roof, where the sun was again shining on an even steamier city.

---

Photography has changed, and people too.

At one pole you have this older tradition of photography-as-high-art, in which photographers who have passed through certain critical filters are exhibited and collected; even those who were once on the fringes like Lyons are now the subject of museum retrospectives. At another pole, photographers are pushing the art forward on new platforms like Instagram, where we view hundreds of images each day, and where our eyes continue to develop into new ways of seeing. The photobook, once the province of specialized gate-keeper publishers, is now possible for anyone to create. Meanwhile, photography and the masses have become welded together in an often-narcissistic symbiosis, through digital technology that is available to nearly everyone.

"Shall we eat on the terrace, or what would you like to do?" he asked.

"No, too precious, and I'm really hungry," I said. "Let's go get something at one of the Arab food trucks in front."

The sleek elevator whooshed down to the ground floor, and we walked outside, where we ordered two hamburgers and a banana-mango smoothie, and stood on the sidewalk to wait for our food. I slipped my arm around J.'s waist. "Do you have regrets?" I asked, after a few minutes.

"No," he said. "It was more important to me to have what we've had."

"But we have some more time now."

"Yes." He smiled, and after we ate, we stopped at a cafe for a coffee, and then walked all the way to West 4th, taking pictures.

A Brooklyn Evening

I've just returned from five days in Brooklyn, celebrating the launch of the latest book by my friend Teju Cole, a collection of essays called Known and Strange Things. When you read it, which I certainly hope you will, along with essays from the New Yorker and New York Times you'll see some words that appeared first here at The Cassandra Pages -- a tribute both to Teju's generosity and our long friendship, which has at times allowed him to freely publish work here that didn't fit in more mainstream journals.

That generosity was also manifest on Monday night, when, during the course of a party in honor of his own book, Teju invited me and two other contributors to Documentum 2: Pictures and Words, Wah-Ming Chang and Emily Johnson, to hold a New York mini-launch of the issue, presenting our work along with his, as one of the guest-curators of the issue. Our photography was projected on a large screen in the garden as we each read from our pages, and the guests formed an attentive and appreciative audience. It was a special pleasure for me to read my own work, because as a publisher I'm usually the one organizing events, or encouraging and promoting other people's writing -- probably I should do it more often.

Jonathan and I had helped during the day to get the venue ready for the party, and one of our tasks - most happily accepted - was to do the flower arrangements. Fortunately the food was catered, and it was an extremely delicious Palestinian feast. As it turned out, there was a small group of Middle Easterners present, who sort of "found" each other during the course of the evening - people from Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, along with Africans and African-Americans, Indians, and a few boring white Americans like myself -- it was great, and so was the music, selected by D.J. Teju himself.

I'll have more to say about the trip and about Teju's book later, but for now, I wanted to share these photographs with you. It was wonderful to be in Brooklyn, and in New York City, and -- most of all -- to be with dear friends.

Recent Sketches

 

Last week while we were visiting my father, I had some time to do some sketching -- and wished for more. Maybe later this summer. I was inspired by the wildflowers  -- wild phlox and daisies and Indian paintbrush -- and some of the ceramics my mother enjoyed, and it was great to sit by the lake and draw.

And back at home, there were peonies and lupine in my garden - faded now, but committed to paper and scanned for posterity, in all their busy elegance!

Midnight Pizza

Making pizza for friends in our Vermont kitchen, 1986.

Is it possible that in all these years of blogging I've never gone into much detail about our obsession with pizza? I married someone who had lived for several years in New Haven, and hated everything about it except one thing. Need I say more? I think J.'s love of pizza started long before that, but my guess is that it was the extraordinary pizza he ate in New Haven and New York City during his teenage years that got him started on making pizza at home. By the time we met, when he was 28 and I was 26, he was already a masterful and obsessive pizza-maker, while I was merely an appreciative occasional pizza-eater whose only experience of making it at home had been boxes of Chef Boyardee. That changed pretty quickly! Together, we sought out and ate great traditional pizzas all over the northeast - not at fancy shops, but at the great small pizzerias run by single chefs and families in small towns and cities. Then J. tried to recreate their best qualities: the perfect crust, most flavorful tomato sauce, finest cheeses, best toppings - which, for us, tended toward simplicity. Our benchmark was a classic Margarita: just crust, tomato sauce, basil, and mozzarella cheese.

One of our favorites was Springfield Pizza, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where we stopped - often late at night - on nearly every trip we took from Vermont to Connecticut, where his parents lived, or New York. I remember how, each time we'd leave the highway, we'd drive down the deserted main street and turn left, hoping to spot the lights in the little storefront with its small neon sign bearing two blue stars and the word "pizza" in red -- it was open! Inside, often on a cold winter night, we'd sit at one of the two or three tables and patiently wait while an elderly man named Georgio made rectangular pizzas with the best crust I've ever eaten.

In New Haven, of course, there was the unending debate whether Sal's or Frank Pepe's made the best Napoletana pizza. We preferred the latter, probably because Pepe's had the most amazing coal-fired oven. Their white clam pizza was to die for, and probably still is; but now I see that Pepe's has a fancy website and several locations, which makes me glad we enjoyed the original - it had long lines even then.

At home, the pizza experimentation and refinement has continued throughout the years, in spite of the fact that a home oven cannot reproduce the extreme heat, rapid explosion of the crust, and charring effect of a wood or coal-fired pizza oven. We've always modified our stoves for pizza-baking with a layer of quarry tiles on the bottom rack (excellent for bread, too); the pizza is slid off the peel onto the tiles for the first minutes of baking, then moved to the regular top rack to finish. J. makes his own tomato sauce, either from fresh plum tomatoes or from cans of San Marzanos. Since moving to Montreal, we've been able to get even better ingredients than before, which is especially noticeable in the quality of the cheeses: buffalo mozzarella, creamy goat cheeses, excellent Parmesan. Lately he's been trying different flours; King Arthur used to be his standard, then he used Montreal's own Five Roses for a while, and recently we bought some Italian hard-wheat flours specially for pizza.

Last night, already in bed, we happened upon a YouTube video about Brooklyn pizzerias. We've eaten a lot of Brooklyn pizza, even doing a pizza marathon in that borough a while back where we ate, I think, a record of three in one day. Anyway, the pizzas in the video looked so fantastic that there was no choice but to get up and make one.

There was already risen dough in the fridge, and some homemade tomato sauce, so all that had to be done was to pre-heat the oven, roll out the dough, sauté some mushrooms, slice some hard salami, slice and grate some cheese, and go out on the terrace and pick a handful of fresh basil. While the pizza was cooking we poured a glass of wine, and reminisced about our favorite pizzas of the past.

And then, close to midnight, we ate. I'm sorry you weren't there to taste this, but all I can say is: please do try this at home.

Ten Years Ago

Text from this blog, ten years and a lifetime ago; images from this week in Montreal.

We drove to central New York to visit my parents. Spring is just coming to the fields and farms, and the land was tender and beautiful: the first velvety green on the hayfields, the yellow tresses of the willows in the swampy hollows between hills, the cows slowly walking out from the barnyards, chickens roaming happily behind houses. Tractors plowed wide dark brown swaths across the valleys, and the entire landscape smelled sweetly of manure. Behind one barn, a middle-aged man followed his aged father out to the field, the latter in a cap and dungarees, walking strongly but bent, holding a long green stem of something in his hand.

Crows and geese and blackbirds and hawks were everywhere, and letting you know it; deer grazed - the occasional alert ears raised to face the road - in the edges of fields and turkeys brazenly pecked close to the road. A heron flew low over our house, on its way to some morning hunting of the spring peepers, maybe, who had been so vocal the night before, and just beneath the slightly rippled surface of the lake, four carp swam lazily, their backs to the sunlight. I dug a few worms and fished a little with my mother, in the same sun, and -- other than the jet trails in the blue sky far overhead -- it felt like we could have been in just about any century of the last four or five.

--

My mother died a month later. I've been thinking about her a lot lately: good thoughts, but I'm incredulous that it's been ten years without her.