New York, December 2014 with Max and Sonia

At the pool in early morning there is a time between night and day when the view fades from reflections of the interior and gradually cede to the trees and countours of the buildings outside; and during that time there is reflection and transmission showing both views as they shift in strength.The reflections of the white metal ceiling girders appear just at the top half of the ginkgo trees outsied and appear as mechanical branches.

Jerry and Millie both took me to the slightly seedy sodium-lit alley behind the Kmart to wait for the Starlight Express to New York.”Any time, Mary!” Got there in good time, so I stood there in the cold and dark with my raggedy suitcase from Morocco by myself: it was cold! Eventually other passengers arrived, and the bus. Not a very jolly, social group: or was it me, going somewhere to see someone, not in explorer mode? Starlight Express did have coffee and snax as advertised, but it was still a bus ride through the dark highway corridor to New York. There was an interesting rest stop somewhere in Delaware with quite a variety of novel junkfood outlets. Eventually we were disgorged in lower Manhattan among bars and staggering drunks. Everyone else hustled off somewhere immediately but I was alone, with a mild mismeet with Max. On the way to his place, I was within inches of being hit by a taxi, but it somehow never raised my adrenalin. Strange, being so elevated in one way, and not in another.

Max is a New York person now! I see him heft suitcases, dash for trains, up flights of stairs, ride a city bike to his job in Brooklyn, and so on . . . and he has other worlds I don't know: his band, DJ work, writing and making music. He has a plan to produce songs from rough drafts clients send him, as a possible job. I am so glad he is having, and banking, all these interesting experiences. His tiny Chinatown apartment: his room just about big enough for a bed: that's ok, he only nominally lives there.

Chinatown at night is draped with festive lights spanning the street at intervals, like Christmas lights but all year round. The streets are busy at all hours, and fragrant with food, garbage, buses, city. At night, the noises are fewer and so easier to parse: partiers howling, old ladies cawing at each other in Cantonese, helicopters overhead. In the morning, the markets are set up: lobsters that are the most enormous I've ever seen, unknown fruits and veg, dried molluscs and bialves that look like wads of old chewing gum, various strips of dried fish, and: white-shelled green almonts, dessicated hazelnuts and chestnuts, a widevariety of unfamiliar dried beans, and more familiar and beautiful produce: how the rest of the world shops for food. Nearby in Little Italy, hordes of NJ tourists taking family selfies in front of restaurants. Lots of hustle and bustle, and general feeling of cheer.

In the morning, Max and I went to a nice place he chose for breakfast: a salad with lox, poached egg, avocado. His job was imminently disappearing, and he already had a new one lined up, curating and assembling samples for a company that supplies materials for architects and designers. With an inhouse Starbucks, weekly manicures, and twice the salary...good connections!

This day turned out to be a day of tech problems, all soluble of course in NY. Dead watch battery, dead camera battery, missing camera memory chip: the watch battery was replaced by a guy with a tiny booth who might have been in China itself! And some funkiness with the phone (no ring or buzz). Curiously, it was impossible to get a map of New York. Eventually, I got a subway map which did the job.

We walked the High Line, a narrow elevated garden walkway built on the site of elevated rails, a new public park which is marvelous, with views of all of lower Manhattan, various art installations, benches, play spaces, and a really thoughtful and terrific selection of plantings with year-round interest and not so ordinary. And high tech drainage and watering systems, walkways, and so on. The pavement bleeds into the plant beds and in places, into benches, in a very interesting and attractive way, that unified the whole project gracefully while allowing for functional and esthetic variations. It was amazing how a tiny ribbon of garden changed everything, made a calm space in the middle of the city, even as the city was inches away. It would have been the best place to draw, had it not been so cold: landscape, cityscape including skylines and seaports, all kinds of people doing peoply things. In the spring, or summer, I will be back, for sure! At one point we descended to a market and found a wonderland of lights and decorations; this year the trend seemed to be great wads of tiny lights as thick as a goodsized tree trunk framing doorways and windows. Lavish displays of fruit, kilims, books, for the delectation of those for whom money is no object, and tourists. There was a photo booth that took 3d photos: not clear whether it printed in 3d? Considerable space for serious and shocking abuse! Didn't check it out, maybe was just the red/blue 3d effect.

along the High Line

Max gave me something wonderful-- a strand beeste, a model of one of those wooden creatures that moves along the beach by windpower. It comes with a book; the inventor made several different kinds with different basic ideas of structure and power. I think a photocell + remote control to move it if there's no wind, to harass cats, or dance to music via bluetooth/ . Some versions look larva-like, it would be good to make one that could transform itself into another form with big glider wings and soar off. Sadly, I failed to finish his book, better get to it. So much going on. But his birthday is right around the corner.

Saturday night, we all (Max, Sonia, and I) ate at a dim sum place and had wonderful, warming, tasty stuff including shrimp dumplings, soup, and . . . I don't remember! But had a great time also. We talked about going to Beacon to the DIA and to see Sonia's shop, Colorant and all kinds of other things.

The next day, we took the train to Beacon. There was a large family of about four kids and their parents, kids peering over the seats, father talking/explaining sights out the window in the most heartwarming way, and the view changed from city to exurbs to train tracks along the slatey river, with chilly naked tree branches rattling in the wind and last years' tall grass along the tracks. Max and I went to the DIA, and Sonia to her shop.

The DIA is wholly unlike anything else about Beacon. Beacon is a small town of wooden houses, maybe early 1900s, small and cozy, all laid along the main street with some excursions along side streets. Now, it seems to be largely arty boutiques and the like, catering to tourists. But DIA visitors don't seem like the type to go for arts and crafts kind of stuff. There were a few real galleries, glass blowing, etc: cute town. DIA is haute and chilly, poured concrete with conceptual art, some of it wonderful. The field of lightning rods of course appealed to me: I only saw a picture. Mirrors cunningly set in a sandpile to reflect the surroundings in seemingly impossible ways. Constructions of 4x4 lumber, stairs to nowhere. Cars lightly crushed or twisted and then painted or otherwise changed. So recent, but I have forgotten so much of it already!

Sonia is a social genius: her shop is modest but has a variety of interesting things, mostly naturally dyed clothes, but also little arty objects, maybe products of friends. I saw my pics hanging, and saw how unthematic they were. Better next time. I should be a little more serious about this I guess. She is unbelievable sweet but must be also smart and energetic to keep things going. She has the key to mysteries of networking that I can't fathom, and seems to be able to fix anything and know everyone. After a shower at the her place in Beacon (where she is a permanent house-and cat-sitter) we ate at a local fancy restaurant and had a great time. Arriving back in the city, it was snowing lightly, and leaving Grand Central Station, had a gorgeous view of Grand Central Station ornamentation, the Empire State Building, and a streetlit glowing circle filled with snowflakes against the black sky.

Then next day, I was on my own and went to the Met.At 8:30, Chinatown was still asleep. Of course, I got lost immediately but stumbled into a diner, and stepped in for coffee: so cold outside! It was a timewarpy place surrounded by tall buildings, and started hearing a patois of Chinese and Arabic-- the owner Egyptian and her friend Chinese. My ears pricked at the word, “Malista!”: they were talking about the Chinese woman's aching shoulder and other ailments. It was then I realized I was traveling, experiencing, discovering new and interesting things, not visiting, and joined the conversation. Hard to define the difference, since I had seen and done many things new to me already, but it is different when you are by yourself.

I planned to go to the Met and got off a couple of miles farther south than I should have. But that was lucky, it meant I got to walk through Central Park, lovely in the blueskied winter. I passed some of the big stores all decked out and the branches of trees I had last seen in the beginnings of green, in April. The Met was, of course, overwhelming. I looked and looked and did not scratch the surface, only got to a few galleries. In one gallery with windowed ceiling and glass wall overlooking the garden, there were two Greek statues fifty yards apart, flirting with each other.

Lunch-- spicy Mongolian lamb with pulled noodles with Sonia. Just the ticket, and Sonia is SO nice.

I did get to Newark, Orly, and finally Madrid without incident. 

In the Transportation-Industrial Complex

Atocha Station, Madrid

One enters the portal to the wormhole at Atocha Station: the train to Barajas airport. The station is modern and efficient but also has a feeling of realness, with its windows and jungle: not the plastic synthetic feel I get once I am trapped for good in the air travel machine. (Remember the time sitting at a Starbucks at Detroit airport: a plastic tree that somehow had a real brown sparrow in it? The delight and the shock?) Zip, swish, through the city to emerge at Barajas with its undulating wooden ceiling, every trivial part engineered just for this airport.

Barajas 

Relaxed, empty chatting staving off the inevitable on an improbably placed bench with an untidy bunch of backpacks near our feet that turns out to be a sleeping person. Then, diving in for real: bootless through security, trekking though endless vast atria, squeezing onto the shuttle to the next terminal, herded through duty free shops with perfume samples waving like tendrils in a jungle of consumer overload. More long runs past gates without number, part of the entertainment offered to passengers. And then the seats at the proper gate, confirmed by the lighted sign: my flight flashes through a rota of three different carriers, three flights for the same plane.And the Muzak: a perky tune in English, "Let's give thanks to the Lord above that Santa is on his way." !!This time, I didn't talk with anyone in the terminal, too dulled and not really wanting to reanimate.I am thinking about all the people I love, travelling among them all around the world, and being waited for or gently goodbyed by them. I do feel beloved. But still sad. Enough time for a quick drawing and we clamber with our baggage on board.

Did we have a snack? I don't remember. Heathrow was truly awful. We were a little late and everyone was anxious about making their connections. At first, as we unloaded, there was something like a line, but then it became anendless scrum: a space that seemed as big as a football field, shoulder to shoulder with people. If someone had fallen, they would not be able to fall, but propped up by the surrounding mass. There was nothing like a line. People ducked under ropes around the perimeter but then found themselves wallowing in a sea of bodies, with no order and no information and no visible end. But somehow I eventually came into another space and hustled to the shuttle etc, barely making the connection, wouldn't have if it hadn't been delayed. I thought a four-hour layover would be plenty, and it was enough: my flight was boarding as I arrived. Once settled in, the nice hostesses brought wine and snacks around and things seemed more ok--I seemed to somehow have landed in business class. A dramatic sunset followed us for hours as we flew west.

I watched a movie but was still numbish and didn't speak at all to the person next to me, even though he seemed perfectly nice. An American. On this flight to Chicago, many passengers started to look somehow American, though I couldn't say exactly what it was. An openness of the visage, a lack of wariness. Maybe I am also guilty of this.

We arrived a little late in Chicago, a big, ripe, full moon hanging in the sky, and I girded for a mad dash. Customs. Shuttle. Terminal hike. Wait, wait, wait, run, run, run, and worry powerlessly as the minutes tick by with no movement in the lines. Long hallways three feet wide and a hundred yards long, like in some lost dream. Made the gate about two minutes after boarding was scheduled to close-- was it possible I'd make the flight after all? Only to find the flight had been cancelled. I had suspected Chicago would be the point I'd get hung up on this flight, but it wasn't weather, but that the clock ran out on the crew. It was zero degrees, but the free motel and its shower beckoned, so I waited for the shuttle. The motel was 30 minutes from the airport, and the bed was wider than long. A nap, then watery coffee with other disconsolate travelers who had found themselves cast into this motel breakfast room: someone who had missed a flight to somewhere in Iowa for a pipefitting class, a chinese exchange student who had befriended a retired guy: “so proud of you, here all by yourself”, a Chinese American faced with the prospect of waiting ten hours at the motel or at the airport for his rescheduled flight.

Back into the van. The airport parking lot lights  high created the effect of a low sky of starts with dead empty space stretching far above.The airport, the security dance, and another takeoff. Because of the dusting of snow, the town, its rooftops, looked like an elaborate, extensive arcihtectural model, all pristine white angles and dramatic sidelit shadows in the early morning light, complete with spiky conical trees.. On to La Guardia. And after another few hours, a bumpy flight on a little plane to Charlottesville, seventeen hours late. But-- I got to look out the window leaving New York and see the lower halves of clouds rainbowed as we passed over them, a magical sight. A cab ride home, and release from the transportation wormhole to a completely different world. Had I ever really been in Spain? Gone to those places, seen and done those things? Various bits of evidence said yes, but it felt like another life. Two days later I ate the forgotten mandarina in the bottom of my bag and the market, the air, the sounds all came back to me.