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As always, the drive into the city blots out all that has happened in the last decades and puts me into my childhood days again. Especially as we crawl into the gut of Manhattan at 49th, near the UN, just blocks from where I lived during my first years here.

I don’t think it has the same effect on Ed. I hear him groan as we move in that incremental way one moves from east to west here. Let’s get out and walk, he says. We do. An overnight bag rolling behind us, backpacks in place – we look weird, but, as always in this city, not weird enough to stand out.

I remember three years ago, during my routine trips here, I’d walk the streets at midnight, often in great distress, often sobbing actually, at the enormity of life and the difficulty of finding a good way to move forward and I did not stand out then either. New York is a city that pretends that eccentric is normal so that it can turn away and ignore all that should not be ignored.

It’s a gorgeous, albeit crispy cool day. It makes the city look clean and fresh, especially if you look up toward that patch of blue.



Rockefeller Center
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I leave Ed and the suitcase to the vultures of law and set out to meet a family friend (Martha) back at the UN. It’s a rare chance for me to get back inside and look around. I used to have a pass, but security measures have tightened so much over the years that our permanent passes became worthless and we, once children of the UN, have become part of the crowd again. Outsiders.



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Did you notice there are no children at all visiting the UN? Martha asks me. No school groups. No children. They’re not allowed. The building is not up to code.

It’s one of the reasons why I am here: come spring, the UN is going to be gutted and rebuilt from the inside. For the next four or five years, it will be closed, under construction. And once it reopens, all the remaining people that I still know and could ask to let me inside, will have retired.

We stroll now past the big rooms – the Security Council, the General Assembly.



General Assembly




head of the Polish delegation ?


And the delegates’s lounge, where you can get your espresso fix.





My father, after his stint as head of the Polish delegation, returned later to the UN as USG. Two ends of a career in diplomacy: the first trip was so brilliantly optimistic and exciting. The second – so different! The family’s grown and gone, the wife’s tired of diplomatic functions, the future is uncertain.

My parents broke up after his final years at the UN. He went back to Poland, she stayed behind. As I walk now with Martha, I remember these spaces as ones I walked through on my own. It had been my father’s world, but I knew it best as a place where I hung out in the company of no one.



from inside the glass tower of the Secretariat
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looking out from the UN cafeteria
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Out on the streets again, I move rapidly to reconnect with Ed. And now I am in his world. From the midtown law firm, we walk to Union Square, with suitcase, backpacks, my cameras, all of it. Hobos in black and blue, past the shadowed streets of a city rushing to call it quits for the week.



42nd street
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We spend some time with his cousin. Ed has family business stuff to talk over and I listen to them speak in that familiar way that you have toward those you needn’t pretend anything anymore. You’ve been through it all, childhood, bar mitzvahs, funerals, and now you talk in short cuts, with references to facts and faces that are understood.

And then I am tired. It’s evening and I do not want to go to the free MoMA exhibits. I want to go to Brooklyn, leave our bags and find dinner.

I know very little of Brooklyn. I used to go swimming at St. George hotel somewhere in this borough, because they had a pool open to the public. End of Brooklyn experience.

Now we are in a neighborhood that is very much as it may have been forty years ago.



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Except for the occasional brownstone that is being renovated (for example, our B&B on Sterling Place)...





... it is still a place for people who are just hanging in there. A place where meats are roasted outside a grocer's and people hang out casually, in pairs or small groups.



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Our hosts recommend Cheryl’s soul food and it is a good choice, even though I think it says something about Brooklyn that we should be in a basically Black neighborhood, with African American restauranteurs, serving food to mostly White people. Distinctly New York types. A family with a son who reads during the entire meal. Grandparents with a college kid who brags about her ambitions all evening long. Three couples who call themselves troublemakers, sending back the by-the-glass wine, complaining of too much spice in it. Who sends back house wine?

At the b&b, I struggle with the Internet, but not for long. I have never known the night life of New York, not the part that continues past midnight. And I wont know it this time. And that’s a good thing. New York was at its best for me when I was a kid. That’s the part that’s pleasurable now as well. The bars, the nightclubs—that’s someone else’s New York, not mine.

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Such a challenging place! I think I would be slightly more at peace with its peculiarities if the b&b Ed and I are in had reliable internet. In the absence of that, we are left to muse (gripe?) about what it is that we do and don't like about the city.

I'll get back to that topic, for sure. For now, enjoy, as I did, the approach to the New York on a bright bright autumn day.



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maybe not the big red apple, more like the red spicy pepper of my life

Everyone has an opinion about New York. The French love it. Midwesterners think it’s stuck up and full of itself but fun to visit anyway. Asians flock to it. No one can quite ignore it.

For me, New York is like a recurring dream. It keeps coming back to haunt me as a place that changes my life. Again and again. Sometimes in good ways, and sometimes not so much.

I moved there when I was seven, stayed six years, returned when I was a young adult, stayed three years and then left for good. I returned for visits thereafter, but they were short visits. Inconsequential, really. Until just a handful of years ago, when I returned to visit my now ex, who was spending the year there. One of my last trips to Manhattan ever was to see him. It was, sadly, the last time that we still felt married.


So tomorrow I’m heading to New York. Ed has legal matters to attend to, and I seized the chance to travel there with him. I want to experience a neutral New York. One that doesn’t rock my life any. Ed hates the city with a passion (like a true New Yorker that he is, he’s incapable of feeling merely indifferent about the place) and so I’m thinking we’ll have a fine old time. I’m not looking to eat well, to shop, to see the sights. The trip is a return of two aging former New Yorkers who see it as a place where they grew up, for better or worse.

That’s tomorrow. Today, I worked. In downtimes, I played around with the stitches in my mouth. Discreetly. And watched students kiss the soil out on Bacom Hill. Or something.

altered states

Well, it had to come out (the part of the tooth that chose to remain, nestled snuggly somewhere below the surface).

I remember loving my oral surgeon last year (call him Dr. Handsome, though this is not his name) and so I chose him for today’s visit as well. At the rate of a tooth out per year, my mouthful should hold me through until I’m almost eighty. Dr. Handsome will be there to pluck them out and all will be jolly.

That is, with the help of nitrous oxide.

Perhaps meditation relaxes the soul even more effectively, but I’m not hoping for a spiritual mending. I just want a nice state of dulled senses for a while. Breathe in, close the eyes, ahhhh….

The nurse sighs wistfully. Sometimes I wish we could take a chunk of this home with us for the evening, she tells me.

Do you know what it’s like? I ask it in a whisper. At least I think I am whispering. What do I know. Senses fully dulled.

Yes, my dentist gave it to us always when we came in for visits as kids.

Nice dentist. My childhood dentist was Dr. Heinz of New York. Once he looked into my seven year old mouth (I first moved to New York then) he never let go. I was his most reliable source of income for years. He’d get his face very very close to mine and stare into my mouth through little telescopes attached to his nose. He never asked me how school was going or if I was going to school at all, or if I liked dogs, or New York or summer by the sea. He was not even close to handsome.

I sat for a long time in Dr. Handsome’s office today, breathing steadily and feeling swell. I wondered if people who did drugs felt this calm. Of course, I know a little about smoking pot. I went to college on the Columbia campus of the early 70s for God’s sake. You go to a party and you see handmade cigarettes and you know they’re there to produce some altered state of being. Still, fresh off the boat from Poland (a plane, really, but who’s counting), I was too terrified of American drugs to experiment. Had there been someone schooled in the medical sciences standing nearby by (like Dr. Handsome this afternoon), I might have said sure, create visions of loveliness in my head for five minutes, no more, so I can see what the fuss is about. But the people around me where so far gone that I felt strangely alone, there with my glass of cheap Chablis. Almaden. From a round jug. Anyway, someone had to stay sane and keep windows closed up in the apartments of Morningside Heights. The temptation to prove once and for all that humans can fly seemed ever present among the smokers. At least that’s how they talked.

Once I left New York, the whole smoking pot thing faded to a distant memory. For one thing, someone finally told me that it wasn’t quite legal here. You could have fooled me. Everyone had been smoking pot on campus. These were foggy times indeed. I moved between the fog of rolled cigarettes in school and of dry martinis and scotch on the rocks back in the homes of people whose children I watched.

Oh, but what did I know about the law anyway. Laws were oddly irrelevant in Poland. A mystery for most of us. We lived by standards set by family, peers, school teachers. No one talked much about The Law. Indeed, if someone got arrested, you wondered if it was for good reasons (politics) or bad reasons (drunkenness). There seemed to be no other. Crime was rare. Even against a young girl walking alone after a high school dance, cutting through dark alleys and streets of a city whose lamps never had enough light in them to make a difference.

I thought about all this today, at least before Dr. Handsome started breaking up what was left of my tooth. Twenty four pieces later (his count), I was free to go.

And now I sit here trying to decide what I should have by my side for the debate tonight: a narcotic painkiller (strongly recommended by Dr. Handsome) or a glass of rosé. I’d go with the rosé in a beautiful glass, but I’m not sure it pairs well with thin soup or yogurt. Oh what the heck. Let’s give it a go.



Ocean author in the early 70's:
can you guess which side of the ocean?

teeth

Legislation without teeth. Political accusation without teeth. Proclamation without teeth. A former resident of postwar Poland without teeth.

I saw them all today.

Before my morning class, I was sitting in my favorite dentist’s chair asking him to please glue back a crown so that I would not look silly in class. Not so fast, he tells me. You see, you no longer have a tooth.

I have heard this before. I'm Polish and those of us who resided in Poland in the after-war years have troubled teeth. Maybe it’s all that kielbsa we put down on the dinner table. More likely it’s the absence of fluoride in the water and the utter dread everyone had of dentists who practiced the mantra of drill baby drill without much attention to issues of pain.

The interesting thing about my current state dental insurance program is that it pays for the cheap and bypasses the expensive. I left the clinic knowing that I had both lousy teeth and lousy dental insurance. Perhaps I can forgo teeth in the years ahead of me. I can see it: I become a caricature of a person, dependant on rosé wine and very soft cheese. Without the crusty bread.


In the afternoon, I take my papers to a favorite café, one that no one appears to like and so it guarantees for me the peace and quiet that I need for class preparation. I finish early, pack my papers and head back for my late class.

I cross West Washington and remembered how, four years ago, I had witnessed a demonstration here. A packed street. Tens of thousands of hopefuls, turning out for Kerry. Not that it did him any good in the final scheme of things. But the scene was like no other that I witnessed in Madison before or after.

Today, the street is golden and empty.



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I note it and keep walking toward school. But here’s a little twist to this day: on State Street, I hear the announcement: John Kerry, speaking in support of Obama on the Capitol steps NOW! I look at my watch. I have a few minutes. I turn back toward the Capitol. This is what one does in American politics, I tell myself. You listen, over and over, to people who support your candidate. Big crowds or small.




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I listen to the Obama people drown out the group of students who have a different vision for the next four years.






But still, for me, it’s all slightly bizarre. A toothless rally if you will. Kerry, who once drew crowds, now has this to deal with. Does he remember his West Washington speech, introduced by Bruce Springsteen, four years back?

I wait, but Kerry still does not show up by the time I have to head back to class. I leave the relatively small gathering and make my way to the Law School.





Do tooth fairies make the rounds only when baby teeth bite the dust? A shame.

on how it is clearly ordained that I should not drive a car

Morning brunch on the Square. The streets are empty. It’s a holiday, isn’t it? I park, I read the meter: not enforced on week-ends and holidays. I put away my quarters.

After brunch I find a ticket on the windshield. I chase down the enforcement cop. Not a city holiday??? -- I ask. Look, if you want to give me the day off, that’s great. I’ll vote you in. Until then, pay up.

A cop with a sense of humor. Ha ha.

Afternoon coffee off of State Street. I know better. I feed the meter with a quarter and a dime. It buys me 22 minutes of peace and quiet in the parking space. And yet, after 17 minutes, I get a ticket. What just happened??? I have no idea.

In the early evening, I drive my daughter to the airport. I see her through the lines, I wave, my eyes brimming with daughter love (for the one who is leaving, for the other who is far away)…





I exit the parking. I clock in at sixteen minutes – one too many to get a free pass.

At home, I put the pumpkin and its cousin out on the balcony. I’m feeling sort of like the slumped guy. There are days when everything falls into place. So they say.

another fall day

Warm, tantalizing Sunday. My older daughter and I set out for some of my favorite autumnal outposts. The girl’s deprived. It’s a paved world, out there is DC, where she lives.

I am only now (at midnight) recovering from the pace.

Let me try to pick out the essential pieces of the day:



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Gibraltar Rock




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(yes, it's positively inspiring at this time of the year)




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Ice Age Trail by the Wisconsin River




Ski High Orchards




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Somewhere near Oregon, Wisconsin

Then came the cooking. Favorite autumnal recipes. Hurry, please, people are hungry.

At midnight it all stops. Or almost stops. Finishing up the post... Yawn... A new week. Yawn. Well rested, ready for the challenges... Yawn... Stretch those tired muscles. Such a pretty autumn we're having...

one fall day

I can hardly catch my breath.

My older daughter is home for the week-end and the day cannot hold enough minutes. In case you wonder how it is -- you know, when they grow up, go away, get a life, but then, for one fleeting suny fall week-end, you get them back. Home again. It's like this:



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Westside Community Farmers Market: fall berries





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Westside Community Farmers Market: sweet peppers




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Downtown Farmers Market: sweet potatoes




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Downtown Farmers Market: cauliflower





Downtown Farmers Market: pumpkin spice cake





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Tree Farm: hot pepper picking




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Tree Farm: picking flowers




Tree Farm: picking flowers and gourds with daughter





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Indian Lake County Park hiking trail




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Indian Lake County Park hiking trail, continued


And that's just before the sun goes down. Oh, daughters.

warm evening ride

In the late, late afternoon, just before the sun disappeared on me completely, I biked to Ed’s place.

It has been a long week and I admit it, I am sleepy tired. Ready for a winter nap.

My Polish grandmother always went to sleep when the sun set and got up just before it came back up. I never appreciated how short her awake time must have been in early winter and how long her up time was in midsummer.

Today, I felt like I had a week of Polish midsummer days.

I watched once again (probably for the last time this year) the farmers in the fields next to Ed’s place. Bending, always bending.



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It’s that last effort before the final frost allows you to give up. It all moves at a slower pace now. There's less to pick. And there are fewer family members picking. No kids in the fields now. The shelter from the sun is neglected.



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I allowed myself a five minute nap in the sheep shed at Ed’s, then asked for a ride home.

the thinker

I am more like McCain than Obama in at least this way: I act on impulse. I think afterwards. I have to say that this has lead to some unbelievably fantastic results. And, I admit it, some poor ones. The interesting thing is that my unbelievably fantastic results would, most likely, have happened eventually, had I not acted on impulse. On the other hand, the bad outcomes may have been avoided had I paused to think. So I’m in favor of thought.

Like this guy, discovered on my walk down the hill in the early afternoon:





For those who think I have become too serious, what with my postings on thought and dirt paths disappearing, well, we are in the midst of serious times. But, life is silly anyway. Agree? I mean, look at this trio. I passed them on State Street this afternoon. Bucky! Buck up already!





Much later, I gathered up my texts and papers and set out to bike home. On Bascom Hill, all was quiet. Almost. I’m not sure what these people were doing. Do you see them? Specks on the darkening turf. Push ups? Exercise inspires thinking. So that’s a good thing.





The bike ride home was long. My gears wouldn’t shift. Here’s the good part: I didn’t fall. It was a thought-filled and thoughtful ride.

erasing the dirt road

Until the 1970s, my permanent home was in Warsaw Poland. The family apartment (where my dad lives to this day) was in the city center, but very quickly I discovered that this center also harbored a secret wee little neighborhood of homes along a dirt road. Strolling along that stretch of unpaved road, well hidden behind a city park, you could imagine you were in the countryside. It felt remote, insular, peaceful.

I was away from Poland for some years and when I returned for a visit, the dirt road and the homes adjacent to it were gone. So much so, that I really came to think I had imagined it all. No one talked about it. No one seemed to remember it. In a push for modernity, Warsaw had wiped the dirt from its landscape.

I do not recall ever seeing a dirt road in New York (where I lived afterwards), nor Chicago (my next residence). But something similar happened when I visited Beijing in China. Toward the close of the last century, I found myself searching for a neighborhood of huts and dirt tracts. I’d read about them in a book. No one seemed to be able to tell me how to find them. But I did find them. Here, this time I have proof (with apologies for the quality of the photo):



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Two years later, I returned with my daughter to Beijing. I wanted to show her this older, exceedingly tired neighborhood. But this time I really could not find it. I realized that it had disappeared. Erased from the city plan, it will survive for me only through this photo. In a push for modernity, Beijing had wiped the dirt from its landscape.


I learned this week that the block across from the condo where I live (in Madison) is no longer going to house a bigger and better Whole Foods. You need only say “the economy” to understand why. People nod and sigh and then they look to the big hole in the ground made ready for the store and wonder what will become of it all.

Today, for the first time, I went to a place that, until now, I hadn’t known existed: a community garden just next to the Department of Transportation building. Just down the street from my condo. The garden looks tired now. Some tomatoes still cling to spent vines and the zinnias are relentlessly pushing their color, but you know that the season is really over. You can smell the indifference to growth.



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This garden has a dirt path. Not a road exactly, but a path. More than you’ll find in Warsaw or Beijing, that’s for sure. (Don’t tell me about parks. I know about parks. They are sensual. They are sublime. But they are not the soil that, for better or worse, covers your feet and gets under your fingernails.)





I heard that the garden is slated for removal. Something about future development, bla bla bla.

My friend Barry thinks we should turn over the once meant for Whole Foods plot to the people who want to garden. A community place to grow things, right there, on the intersection of University Avenue and Segoe Road.

What a terrific idea! There would be something enormously gratifying to live across the street not from Whole Foods, but from whole fields of foods. And let me put in a quiet plug for a dirt road cutting through. No pavement, just dirt. With woodchips maybe, to keep the dust low in the summer. In Madison, progress means that you can think about making room for dirt roads.

when not to bike

The decisions you make at daybreak come back to haunt you by sunset. Call it a Polish proverb. Though I think in true Polish speak, it would be something like: drink vodka before the cows are out to pasture and you’ll lose your herd by sunset. I’m not stereotyping. Many Polish proverbs have agrarian roots and involve references to drinking and/or dancing.

As a good Madisonian who would rather not drive if she can help it, I took the bike to work this morning. Yeah, yeah, drizzle on the horizon. Drizzle will come and go. And I miss the lakeshore path. Something to do with the ducks, I suppose (or, are they not ducks?).



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In the course of the day, the drizzle gets worse. By evening, it rains.

It’s a long way home in the rain. I’m despondent. It’s easy to let the stork fly south when the winds are favorable (another Polish proverb that I just made up).

My students say – put that bike on the bus bike rack and leave the driving to others. I watch a film clip on how it’s done (thank you, students). I set out.

I wait at the bus stop, wet and tired, along with others who are wet and tired.



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The maneuver is successful: bus comes, I pull down its bus rack, place the bike on it and clip it in place.

I am so pleased with my accomplishment. And like so many who feel the tickle of success, I let it go to my head. I get off at the Whole Foods store. I need some greens for supper. And bread. And a bottle of rosé to help me through tonight’s debate. I stuff my purchases into my backpack. Oh dear, it’s really raining. I whip out my umbrella and climb on the bike. Clumsily. At least I have the sense to stay on the sidewalk.

At the intersection I pause. And then, suddenly, it’s not so easy to get back on the bike. I don’t know why. I’m tired. My coat is in the way. My umbrella is crazily obstructing my view. I wobble and I fall. Onto the green strip by the sidewalk. Pure mud.

Sigh… I make it home alright. Wet and muddy and bruised, knowing that it’s all my fault. Because I let the cows graze with vodka on my mind. Or something.

so long as we’re on the subject of art…

In the days when I was looking at various photo printing options around town, I stumbled upon the studio (workshop? salon?) of Tom & Barbara Crozier. Picturesalon.com: Fine Art Giclee Printing Services – their ad says.

Ed was intrigued. Don’t you want to find out what giclee printing is all about? He has a mechanically curious mind. I don’t. Besides, he was mispronouncing the word terribly, making it all sound very slippery and eelish.


But today, a day after my own “art show,” I am primed for something new. We call Tom and Barbara, the owners of Picture Salon, to see if we can pop in for a visit and learn more.

They are the friendliest people in the world. If I were to construct friend material, I’d say, let’s start with a base, modeled after these two.










Though this is perhaps besides the point. I'm on a mission to find out what giclee printing is all about and how you pronounce the darn word anyway.

Here’s Tom and Barbara’s take on it: Giclee is a French term which means "to spray." It was actually coined by a U.S. company to distinguish the printing process (using a highly refined inkjet printer that sprays micro-droplets) from that of a standard offset printing process.
And it’s pronounced "jhee-clay.”

That’s the short of it. But for me, it is truly an eye opener on how one might (okay, I might) present photos: on beautiful, creamy, all cotton art paper, for example. Or on a canvas, stretched over a wooden frame.





Such possibilities! And as you inch toward the model of a painting, you get inspired (I got inspired) to play with photos (on my computer) so that they become canvas-like in all ways. Like Tom’s own work, seen here:





Someone asked me at the art show this week-end why I don’t paint. Well, really, it’s because I am awfully average. I mean, I can do a credible job of putting something down on canvas that looks like a rendition of what is out there, but my God, it’s nothing I would ever put anywhere, not even on my own bathroom wall.

Photo canvases are different. The paint brush is irrelevant, except as it appears on my laptop's little photoshop icon. The canvas is stroked by what the camera framed, delivered in a format that suits the image -- muted maybe, or dappled, or faded, or made bold. And then delivered on a canvas as if it were a painting.

Barbara and Tom walked us around their studio (workshop? salon?). Impressive stuff! I watched one of their workers stretch a canvas. In another room, I looked at a stack of quality prints, ready for shipment to the Art Institute of Chicago, a regular client.





Do you guys want to handle small jobs? Like a print here and there? From insignificant me?

You see, here’s where their agreeable nature clicks in.
Sure. Of course! -- they tell me.

So watch for this new way presentation of cherry trees from Door County, or of the café at sunset in Avignon. As I said on Saturday: time for a new project!


Want a preview? Okay, here's my favorite so far. Send me an email if you like it. For example, on your office wall. At special, crashing economy prices! Dreams of constant travel recede, but art's a constant. This canvas-print wont fade. At least not in your lifetime.





[For the loyal reader who keeps track of ongoing other projects: the writer’s shed will have heating. And walls, too, I’m told. One of these days. Months. Years. As for my book project? Always on my mind. Sometimes I even make progress.]