Brooklyn is a city of voices and messages. On the walls, in the street, even in this parking garage downtown. I do not expect to be spiritually nurtured by parking garages but this one stirred me to life and reminded me to keep living it. If they can be nurtured here, we can all be nurtured wherever we are. There are always messages waiting for us. If we can hear them.
All my life I’ve admired the New York City subway musicians. They remind me of artists in galleries, waiting for people to come in and look at their work, eat some hummus, drink some wine and slither out. I always put a couple of dollars in any musical case, and this gentle sang a send off to Levon Helm for me at the Brooklyn Willoughby Street Stop. Maria and I ran around, plays, movies, walks, but I know my girl, and on Monday morning I steered her towards the Central Park Zoo.
I know how much she misses her donkeys and her dogs and Rocky, and she just lit up when she realized where she was going. Big wide smile. We saw bears and monkeys and leopards and seals. Sweet visit.
I loved a woman once who vanished in the streets of New York. She just disappeared – by choice – and said she would never come back to her life, and she never did. I have another friend who lived on the streets for 25 years, and told stories to herself all day and loved every minute of it, and misses it still. New York City seems like the most intense place on the earth, but it is also a place of isolation and loneliness. I have always felt loneliness in New York.
It is an easy place in which to vanish.
Sometimes when I look out of a window in New York, I do want to slide it open and just sail through the canyons and out into the crisis and mystery. I never could quite crack New York, but will never stop trying, I think.
The morning light does not know what to do in New York, is brushes against the stone and bounces off the windows. It inspires awa.
