Light Left the Fainter Stars

As soon as we step into the cold night air, New York bears down on me with the full weight of a thousand painful memories. There is something familiar about the smell of the taxi and the brusque dispatch of business, about the barren treetops and brick buildings, about the unambiguous wanting. I can see my breath again, and I remember little things I thought I’d long ago finally lost, and I am drawn into the orbit of my history, veering too close to the vacated dreams and unvisited graves. New York shoves me over and makes me small.

But New York lifts and comforts me, too. It is a great cacophonous song of possibility and survival after all. I am here to see my daughter, mostly, and that alone is proof of better outcomes. There are also remnants of wondrous things: pickles in barrels, hot dog stands, fire escapes and gargoyles, noisy diners, ornate theaters, the great lobby of the Museum of Natural History with its murals and dinosaur skeletons. (My brother Eddie and I loved that museum beyond all reason. Oh, remember its haunting dioramas, and those astonishing collections of butterflies and gemstones?)

We walk across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Walker Evans’ personal postcard collection is on display and I am drawn to these tiny images of Main Streets and train stations, skyscrapers and storefronts. What Evans valued most in postcard photographs, however, was not a nostalgic view of the past, but rather, in his words, “the proper balance of lyric and documentary.” It occurs to me that this is a good way to look at the city and I resolve to approach things in that spirit.

Poems are everywhere to be found.

At Battery Park, Miranda discovers a grid of bronze plates on the ground. If you jump on them, each emits a different gong-like tone. So there's my girl in a red knit cap dancing around to make music. The sound is a little like wind chimes.

It’s Saturday night and Monte is in his overcoat and beret at the counter of the place that claims to serve the best damned frankfurter you'll ever eat. We order the recession special, two hot dogs and a drink, and it’s a most satisfactory dinner. I like mine with sauerkraut.

On a subway car, a poster among the ads presents these lines from Isaac Newton: “I was like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Coffee in a diner with a friend I knew in Syracuse in the 1970s. She looks great, exactly the same but blonde now, wearing a rust-colored faux fur jacket and an orange scarf around her neck, so the effect is all gold and autumnal, and it’s so nice to laugh together at all that we survived. “What was it with those men?” she asks, “We were only in our twenties, for God’s sake.”

At Trinity Church, we step over a plaque at the threshold commemorating Queen Elizabeth’s visit in 1976 (with Philip “nearby”) and enter as the Eucharist service is beginning. “We shall make no peace with oppression,” declares a woman at the pulpit.

Outside, there is a beautiful red bronze sculpture rising from the roots of a century-old sycamore tree that stood in the churchyard of nearby St. Paul’s Chapel until it was knocked over by debris from September 11. Two women in sunglasses are taking pictures of each other in sexy poses by the old tombstones in a churchyard where historical luminaries such as Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton are asleep in the deep.

A couple of young businessmen stride by in high volume conversation, and one of them is saying, “Okay, so you know the numbers, and that’s good, but you gotta close. Hell, I was on a twelve-day activation streak then.”

Be ignited or be gone. (Words by Mary Oliver, discovered by me in a Greenwich Village bookstore.)

We have to wait in line for pizza but it's good, although perhaps not as good as the pizza my grandfather sold in his shop on McDonald Avenue for fifteen cents a slice. And certainly not as good as the pizza my father made for us at home, but now I am seasoning it with all sorts of sentiment. In any case, I have decided there is no reason to deny myself pizza ever again. Maybe I am getting closer to enlightenment.

George Washington looks out over Wall Street from the steps of Federal Hall, and we enter the building to explore an exhibit about President Lincoln. Karl Rove happens to be in front of us with some other suits getting a special tour, and you can almost smell the arrogance. At one point, the poetic moment, he is standing directly under an axe, and the thought of its falling on his head seems both just and appealing, but as you might expect he walks away unscathed and with impunity.

We pass Ground Zero, the hole in the city’s heart, and there are construction cranes and workers and trucks and a hopeful industrial bustle.We enter St. Paul’s chapel across the way and see rainbows of paper cranes and piles of teddy bears and the faces of the lost and loved. Sunlight slants through an arched window by the pew where George Washington prayed after his inauguration; there is a narrow cot beside it of the sort where 9-11 rescue workers napped when they could. There is a sense of refuge here. And stillness.

We find a little section of lower Manhattan, perhaps two blocks long, called the Stone Street Historic District. Stone Street itself started out as an alley in the 1600s while New York was a Dutch colony, and through all the vicissitudes of history, it has somehow maintained its magic and integrity. The streets are cobblestone, the buildings 19th century, and there are no cars, so it’s like a tiny oasis that time somehow overlooked. Turning the corner and glimpsing this place for the first time in the waning sunlightof a winter afternoon, well, that's a poem right there. One might even callit a perfect balance of lyric and documentary.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusic echoes in a subway station. A bit of Mozart on violin and cello, and everything is changed.

I see a millinery shop: wall-to-wall hats, and I can’t resist. I buy something soft and furry with a leopard skin print. There’s no explaining it, but it works for me.

Dinner with our daughter in our hotel room, just the three of us: rotisserie-cooked chicken, roasted vegetables, and a bag of sweet dates all from a gourmet grocery on Broadway. We lounge around on feather beds with big pillows and I am dressed for dinner in my flannel polka dot pajamas. The part that’s different is that she leaves afterwards, jauntily walking back to her hotel and her sweetheart and stopping for ice cream on the way.

Ming comes into Dean and DeLuca from the rain and sleet, and she is so young and pretty it makes my heart ache. I wish I had a warm knit hat for her, but I give her a slice of potato pizza instead and we stand together at the counter by the window looking out at wet streets and a red brick building and the sketchy beginnings of snow.

There is more eye contact in the city than I remember, more acknowledgment. Businesses are trying to please. Politeness rears its head. Everyone is worried. Maybe we will recognize the vulnerability in one another and be kind instead of mean.

I pick up a used book called Our Starland by C.C. Wylie, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Iowa. I just like the look of it, and the feel. It’s a 1949 astronomy book for kids, with a blue cover, wonderful illustrations, and irresistible headings such as “The Air is Very Necessary”, “We Have Better Corn When the Sun Has Fewer Spots”, and “Light Left the Fainter Stars Before the Pilgrim Fathers Landed”. It is priced at one dollar. I am completely satisfied with my purchase.

Brooklyn. I am looking for the Hotel St. George, where my father used to go for a dip in the saltwater pool. I see the sign but can find no entrance, and I suppose that is a metaphor for something. A bearded scruffy stranger who looks like he sleeps on the subway asks if he can help me.

“Hotel St. George?” he says sadly when he learns of my quest, “Those days are long gone. Long gone. This here is a dormitory now.”

We walk on the bridge and take pictures in the wind. There’s the Statue of Liberty, that old and constant friend, still believing in the best of us.

A bookstore in Soho, and I wander over to the poetry books and open one to these words by Stanley Moss:

There is not a thing on earth without a star

that beats upon it and tells it to grow.