where I work now

It says New York. It says the future. It says something.

Garth, sleepy sepia, April 2007

Unexpectedly I found this digital image of Garth on the computer. Like finding a $20 in the street, something completely undeserved and undreamed of.

Going visual

OK, it isn't that great a picture, and it's a bit of a visual cliche, but I am still figuring out to use the camera, and I have to start somewhere. Everyone who comes to the Brooklyn Promenade takes some variation of this picture: the East River and Lower Manhattan. In this photo the water looks pink to me, but in real life around sunset it is a magically luminous blue that never fails to amaze me, however many times I see it.
That bargelike thing halfway across the river is...I don't know what it is. It's been there for a few weeks now. There seems to be some dredging going on, but I don't know why.

The longest day

Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? Me too. But last night at work, I glanced back behind my desk, at the wall of windows that give me a view out onto Eighth Aveue, and noticed the sun still gleaming on the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was 8:30, and bright as day, and suddenly I remembered.

Today I woke up at 9:13, early for me, though the sun had been up for about four hours already. The sun was shining on the jungly vegetation that grows in the courtyard our apartment looks into. The Longest Day of the Year! I thought, a change from the usual He is Dead that I think upon waking. A ridiculously beautiful day, cool breezes, deep shadows, doesn't stink of urine and garbage. It doesn't get any better, really. The beauty of everything lies precisely in its impermanance. Which is not to say I would reject the chance to be immortal, at least not without serious consideration.

Robin has survived her brush with death that I am sure she will describe in her own due time, when she gets any. Garth is still dead. He is not coming back, and the pain is not any less but it is different. When he came to live with us, I remember, it almost immediately seemed impossible to recall that we had ever not had a dog. The same thing has happened now that he has gone, but in reverse. I look at his photographs and see... photographs. A handsome dog, looking the camera in the eye challengingly, looking out a world now gone.

Where I've been

You might well ask. I've been asking myself.

Sunk in gloom. Busy pretending to be busy. In mourning, you might say. It's summer, but I have hardly noticed. Today I took a fairly long walk, from Times Square to Eighth Street. It was hot, but not so hot that such a walk seemed like insanity. There were refreshing pauses at Grand Central (eating an over-rosmaried slice, still slighly astonished that the once so seedy train station basement had become a dining destination), the silver trees in Madison Square Park, and the DSW at Union Square. No, did not buy any shoes. I tried to enjoy the freedom of knowing there was no dog at home anxiously waiting for dinner and a walk, and almost succeeded for moments at a time.

An essay in The New York Times this weekend up so perfectly the pathos and appeal of having a dog that I truly felt there was nothing else to say about the subject. So I won't.

I am starting a new blog to accompany this one. But more on that later.

P.S. I said that I hardly noticed it was summer, but that is not true. There was something different in the air today, along with the unexpected green smell of trees: a curious, un-New Yorky languor. People I passed on the street and in the park seemed to be having long, complicated conversations, to be taking their time to think about what they meant and to state it as clearly as possible for the benefit of their companions. It was curious, like time was pausing a bit in its relentless forward march.