Today I walked to Greenwich Village. The picture of me outside illustrates how cold it was. The picture of me with the hat hair is me back in my room in the warmth. It was so cold and the wind was so fierce that it made my eyes water.
I am STILL cold.
I ate dinner with Kelly Martin, a friend from PLU who is getting her masters in Social Work from Columbia University. The pizza guy is from Brooklyn and took very good care of us. He knew we were from out of town because it took us a while to decide what we wanted.
Tonight we went to "Bebop Lives" at the Rose Theater. It was interesting to see professional musicians from the back. We had box seats behind the stage. The singer had a very nice butt. The vocalist had perfect pitch and is nominated for a Grammy, the trumpet player had a sweet sound, the tenor sax player is a jazz legend named Moody with a lisp and a great sense of humor, and the rest was unmemorable.
Today was not a "waxing poetic" day. It was just as it was and so now I'm going to wax poetic on the other days for a bit.
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Coney Island.
Warm. Blue. The Atlantic Ocean at last. It was so quiet. The entire neighborhood on pause. Empty carnival rides, closed up refreshment stands. Soft wind blew paper and sand gently across the Boardwalk. Old men and women strolled comfortably along—so unlike the streets of Manhattan. So quiet. I followed Jason to walk away from the rest of the class. He and I, in the quiet, captured little moments in the sand, in the pier, in the sky. For the first time here I breathed deep the scent of salt and felt at home.
It all reminded me of how Orcas Island makes me feel in the fall: open, free, and at peace.
Little Odessa.
We ate lunch at a hotdog and random nasty food restaurant named Nathan’s. That’s where they have the international hotdog-eating contest. All of the students but Kristin and I were ready to go back to the hotel because they were “cold.” This was the warmest day we had experienced in a week. But Bea wanted to walk to Little Odessa, or Brighton Beach, a neighborhood full of Russian immigrants so Kristin and I decided to tag along.
[A little background before we go on. The streets of Manhattan are disgusting: dirt, grime, rust, litter. Restaurants throw dirty water on the sidewalks and it freezes in a nasty brown splash. Subways are shiny with the millions of hands and bottoms that touch them every day and the concrete floors of the platforms are black with grime. Litter gathers between the tracks in puddles of mysterious liquid. There are a variety of stenches that float through the city and catch you unawares—smack! And suddenly you decide to forget about lunch.]
Kristin, Bea, and I walked to Little Odessa on the Boardwalk among cute grandmothers crowned with hoods of fur and with beautiful bright orange lips and grandfathers in fedoras chatting in Russian. Little toddlers dressed just like their mammas in quilted coats and fancy trim and bicycles gliding by. Everything seemed so clean in soft light under the blue sky.
The life of Little Odessa is bustling under the elevated train (I suppose “subway” would be the wrong word for it), shaded by the tracks. Signs in Russian and English announce discount clothes or high fashion and street vendors sell scarves and trinkets just like Chinatown only with a completely different accent. And the smell! It was like nothing I’d smelled before. The smell of Russian pastries and absolute wonderfulness….I could hardly believe that I was in New York.
We poked our heads in shops and followed Bea as she hassled shop owners, monologued, and looked for a suitable restroom—which in New York means a restaurant worth eating the food and therefore earning the right to visit the john. We had apple blintz with a sweet-tart sauce and I had an amazing cup of coffee. The waiter was GRUMPY but cute in an arrogant Russian way. It was a classy restaurant but for the cat shaped pillow and the TVs playing a Russian pop concert.
The Public Theater.
After coming back from Coney Island on the train we went to the play that I had arranged. It was a monologue by Mike Daisy, a man from Brooklyn who once lived in Seattle. His words were honest, beautiful, and sometimes crass. He made us laugh so hard with his view of New York and his description of his first impressions of the City—the heat, the shit-hole of the subway, and getting lost. He made me hold my breath with his description of his wedding and the gravity of loving someone you’ll never know completely. He stopped my heart with his words describing his walk across the Brooklyn Bridge as the second tower fell and the image of a man sobbing into a stoic boy’s shoulder. He’s coming to Seattle on February 4th and I hope I can see him again—he was the best storyteller I’ve ever seen.
So. That was Wednesday. I’ll have Thursday tomorrow.
Thanks, you know, for reading.
