Browsed by
Category: place

A School

A School

Comments 0 Comment

To visit a hometown is to walk with ghosts. To look at streets and see what used to be. To peer in windows and imagine life on the other side of time.

A church, a house, a park, a store.

And here, a school. My first. Here in this hallway we waited for a drink at the fountain on the first warm days of May. We lit the Advent candle in December. We scuttled in with our new penny loafers and pencils and school bags the first week of September.

All so long ago now as to have been a dream. But it wasn’t a dream. I have the evidence right here.

March Sadness

March Sadness

Comments 0 Comment

This isn’t my headline. I purloined it from an article about how March Madness isn’t what it used to be, how a combination of big money, “one and done,” the glamor of television and its preference for the slam-dunk over the mid-range shot — most of all the steady encroachment of the spectacle that is football — how all of this is changing the sport.

But that’s not why it’s March Sadness for me.

It’s March Sadness for me because the University of Kentucky isn’t in the NCAA tournament.

How’s that for entitlement? But it’s worse than that. Not only do Kentucky fans expect to be in the “big dance” — they expect to be in the Final Four.

It’s good that “Selection Sunday” was also St. Patty’s Day. Thinking green helped us not to feel blue.

(A view of Lexington from the University of Kentucky Library.)

Power Walk

Power Walk

Comments 0 Comment

The more walks I take downtown, the more I compare them with my walks in the suburbs — the pace, the people, the places.

Yesterday’s was an outlier but also an example: A helicopter buzzed the Mall, breaking through the music in my ears, annoying me. I vaguely wondered if I should be concerned. A truck bomb? A heightened security alert? (Do we do the colors of danger anymore? I forget.)

As I made my way back to the office, I found Constitution Avenue blocked. That phalanx of bicycle police I’d seen earlier, they were just the front guard. There were uniforms everywhere. No one would be crossing the street anytime soon.

You’d think I’d be motorcade weary by now, but I’ve seen very few and none for this president. So for five minutes I was a tourist like the others standing at my corner — only without a camera or smart phone in hand. And when the black cars passed, motorcycles in the lead, ambulances bringing up the rear, sirens blaring, all the trappings and pageantry — I wasn’t listening to the music in my ears anymore. I was completely caught in the moment at hand.

I wasn’t intending to take a power walk yesterday. But that’s what I did.

In and Out

In and Out

Comments 0 Comment

To exercise at lunchtime I don’t even have to leave my building. The health club upstairs is well stocked, well staffed and state-of-the-art. But two days out of three I put on my coat, slip in my ear buds and walk outside instead.

There are no weight machines, ellipticals or tread mills; no pool or spin class. Just pavement and people. But that’s the combination that works for me.

Turns out, it works for many. Exercising outdoors is often better than exercising indoors, studies show. It burns more calories and tweaks more muscles.

It has psychological benefits as well — and that’s what keeps me going. I come back inside after a lunchtime stroll tired and happy. The pavement is my treadmill, perspective my salvation.

Stitchery

Stitchery

Comments 0 Comment

The lunchtime walk is timed, by necessity. No more than an hour, often less. Bracketed by desk work, it is more of a bolt than a saunter.

Down First to New Jersey, over and around the Capitol.

Or maybe down the Mall, to the Washington Monument and back.

Errands might take me up Massachusetts or along E Street to Penn Quarter, the bustle of Chinatown.

Sometimes just to the Botanical Gardens to smell the roses.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Each route stitches me more securely to this place.

Grand Central Centennial

Grand Central Centennial

Comments 0 Comment

Saturday marked not only the 127th Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but also the 100th birthday of Grand Central Station. It was the second train station on that site, and it opened on Sunday, February 2, 1913. More than 150,000 people visited the first day.

For me, for years, Grand Central was the place I passed through on the way to work. My office was in the Helmsley Building, an ornate wedding cake of a structure that straddles Park Avenue north of the station.

Grand Central was where we grabbed a newspaper and a bagel before starting our day at the oh-so-civilized hour of 9:30 a.m. It was where we went out to lunch for a splurge on our assistant editor salaries. It was where we met people for drinks or dinner. It was even sometimes where we caught the train.

Most of all it was — and still is — a grand public space. One of the grandest. And its currency is not stone or steel but motion. Of trains, of people. 

To stand at the clock in the middle of Grand Central is to be caught up in a great whirl of activity — but somehow to feel the stillness within the movement.


(Not Grand Central, but something of its scale…)

Thoroughbred Park

Thoroughbred Park

Comments 1 comment

I worry about my hometown, worry that it has lost itself. Known for horses and horse farms, it has allowed some to be enveloped or developed — one into a mega shopping center. Meanwhile, it erects shrines to the thoroughbred.

Like so many places, it may not know what it has, what if offers, just as itself. No need to market or develop. Just leave alone.

How many other places, small hometowns across the country, need the same?

Double Vision

Double Vision

Comments 0 Comment

To walk the streets of my hometown is to see not just what is but what used to be. Vacant storefronts, open blocks, streets moved and one-wayed and changed beyond recognition. They are overlaid with the bustle of the past, with people and places no longer here.

It’s double vision, a condition only open to natives. Here, and here only, I have special powers.

That street, it used to end at the field. I remember when it was cut through. That corner, it was the epicenter of downtown. A dog hung out there, Smiley Pete. He was mean but everyone loved him. When he died, the city put up a plaque to honor him.

Now, even the plaque is gone.

People and Places and Things

People and Places and Things

Comments 0 Comment

In his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal tells the story of 264 small Japanese figurines called netsuke that generations of his family collected, displayed, lost and found. Made of ivory or wood, these tiny carvings of people or animals are delicate but strong. A cooper making his wheel. A rat with a curved tail. A hare with amber eyes. If you carry one around in your pocket, it “migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget it is there.”

The netsuke are by no means the most valuable artifacts the Ephrussi family possesses, and when the Nazis storm their Vienna home in April of 1938, a loyal maid with an ample apron manages to smuggle the statues out of the house. Everything else — the paintings, silver, porcelain, jewelry, an entire library of cherished incunabula — “the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions” — was taken.

I’ve read other accounts of the Holocaust. This one moved me more than almost any other. The objects people touch and cherish are the keenest and saddest reminders of their absence.

After the war, the maid, Anna, gives the netsuke back to the family, and de Waal eventually inherits them. He treasures the figurines, but he also finds them an affront. “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more.”

This book is not only about people and places and things; it’s also about love and loss and endurance.

(I cherish our old cuckoo clock, and — even though my family disparages me for it —the worn wallpaper, too.)

Up Close

Up Close

Comments 0 Comment

There were fewer people then, but they huddled together. Eleven souls once lived in this tiny house, which consisted of one room downstairs (a bed, a hearth, a table) and a cramped stairway to the second floor. There, scads of islanders were born — including the mother of an old woman I met the day I visited this place, the oldest house in Chincoteague, Virginia (circa 1795).

Meanwhile, there are only three of us now in a once cramped center-hall colonial that is ever more roomy as the children move out. And we are one of the smallest houses around. Nearby neighborhoods are filled with McMansions, their two-story foyers and three-car garages of a different heft and scale than the houses here.

What sort of people does crowding create? And what sort of people emptiness? I re-charge in solitude and would probably have been driven crazy by the cheek-to-jowl existence of my ancestors. But still, there are times when I feel a deep-boned loneliness that’s not so much personal as evolutionary. Maybe it’s the crowded rooms of the past that I miss, the intensely shared life that never let us forget that we’re in this together.