Rain wasn’t the only thing that was falling yesterday. Leaves were twirling and swirling and landing lightly on hedges, yards and streets. They were mixing with the raindrops, they were dancing to the ground.
The reds, yellows and oranges that had so impressed me last week — in fact, I was marveling at how many trees seemed struck in mid-October rather than mid-November — were fading to brown and gray. Soon we will have monochrome. But before the color is all gone, a picture in its honor (photo by Suzanne).
One of the world’s greatest walks is the pedestrian path of the Brooklyn Bridge. Stroll across it at sunset on a balmy late fall afternoon and see the city at its finest.
If you’re walking toward Brooklyn, on your right is South Street Seaport, lower Manhattan and, once you’re out far enough, the Statue of Liberty. On your left is midtown, with the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Ahead of you is this view, the towers and cables of the bridge itself, built six times stronger than it needed to be, built for the ages, and now 127 years old. A bridge that has inspired poets and madmen and ordinary citizens who need to believe in beauty.
Sometimes a place you used to live reaches out to you from the distant past. It is an old lover from whom you once parted with great sadness (you adored each other but were incompatible). You had learned to live apart but then you ran into each other. There’s that old familiar catch in the throat. You had forgotten how you felt in that old life.
Here is a place that made you feel more alive than you’d ever felt before. You can’t go back to it — you are a different person now — but you are forever grateful — and yes, more alive again, too — just for having been reminded.
My sister, Ellen, was the pioneer. She moved to New York City first. I was next. Then my brother Phillip. Within two years, three of the four kids in my family were living in the Big Apple. Now none of us do.
But we haven’t gotten it out of our systems (does anyone ever?), so today Ellen and I take our daughters to the big city to celebrate their birthdays. We’ll walk through Times Square, the Village, Chinatown. We’ll shop, snap photos and take in a show. We will have more money in our pockets than we did in the old days. (That isn’t hard to do.) And we won’t walk as fast. But we will be more or less the same. And that’s something to celebrate.
One of the most important housekeeping tricks I’ve taught my daughters is to keep the lights low. Makes up for a multitude of sins. But I don’t do this just to hide the dirt. I feel more relaxed and comfortable when I’m not sitting in a pool of harsh light. At home I run around snapping off the overheads and turning on small lamps. At the office I shun institutional florescence for incandescent alternatives.
I was thinking of all this the other day while riding Metro. The platforms are so dim that it’s difficult to read small print when I’m waiting for the train. But I’m grateful for the perpetual twilight. How much worse it would be to stand shoulder to shoulder in a harsh glare. How much calmer and more inconspicuous I feel waiting in the darkness.
You know you are removed from a war when literature is what it brings to mind. But such is the case with World War I, which ended 92 years ago today.
I think first of All Quiet on the Western Front, a book I read so long ago but which saddens me still: “He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
And I think of the poets, their modern disillusionment stuffed to overflowing into the restrained stanzas of formal rhymed verse:
“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.”
This poem is by Wilfred Owen. He died in France — a week before the Armistice was signed.
Listen hard and you can almost hear it. The silence. The great pause. A momentary intake of breath before the hard exhale. It is shoulder season. Summer is over and the holidays have not begun. The fields are empty; the nights are long. November is peaceful, muted. It asks nothing of us now.
For some reason I have ended up on an email list for people planning my high school reunion next summer. This is funny to me because I was not one of the popular people then. But somehow now I’ve slipped through the ropes and gotten into the club. It’s enough to make me believe in democracy after all.
Last night I went to an obligatory driver’s ed meeting at Celia’s high school. As we stood in line to enter the auditorium, memories came rushing back. I thought about the cliques, the snubs, the constant measuring of one’s self against an ideal that probably does not and never will exist. Maybe democracy is a myth. Maybe I haven’t gotten over high school after all.
The phrase jumped out at me from the page, in this case a review of Tony Hiss’s new book In Motion in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review. I was reading the paper in the car, and the sunlight fell over my shoulder and onto the words. The letters seemed to glow:
Solvitur Ambulando. “It is solved by walking.” An adage beloved by pilgrims and monks and wandering scholars. The belief that there is wisdom in stepping out the door, putting one foot in front of the other, leaving the world as we know it behind.
Had I heard it sooner, I might have named my blog Solvitur Ambulando. Too late now. There is already a blog called Solvitur Ambulando.
But I move forward in the spirit of this phrase: that when the mind spins, when the spirit sags, it never hurts to lace up the old shoes, grab the Walkman (ancient technology though it is) and take to the road. “It is solved by walking.”
One of our favorite books to read aloud when the children were young was The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse by Beatrix Potter. Mrs. Tittlemouse is a very tidy little mouse and she lives in a small house full of passageways tucked into the roots of a hedge.
Mrs. T. has her hands full in the story. Ladybugs, spiders, bees and a large untidy toad named Mr. Jackson all come to call — without invitations — and Mrs. Tittlemouse shoos them out of her house, wipes up their footprints and undertakes a spring cleaning that lasts a fortnight.
It’s about this time of year, every year, that I began to feel like Mrs. Tittlemouse. My attention turns from outside to in. I suddenly notice the piles of junk in the basement, the dust on the tables, the stains in the carpet. I make people take off their shoes when they enter the house.
This attitude won’t last long. Soon my eyes will grow accustomed to the dim light; I’ll no longer notice what needs to be done. But today, at least, I’m channeling Mrs. Tittlemouse. (Illustration by Beatrix Potter)
