I like this photo, it is a bit film noir, but it capture the pervasive sense of hustling everywhere tourists are in New York. I love the city, but it has become challenging – difficult – to carry a camera in Manhattan or to be a visitor and a tourist. It is a wonderful city to photograph, but for me, it has also become a predatory place. If you are marked as a visitor, as a tourist – the camera seems to suggest this to the hundreds of hawkers who now prey on outsiders in mid-town – you are a target, set upon by immigrants from New Jersey in character costumes – Elmo, Spider-man, the Statue of Liberty; aggressive men selling tickets for tour buses, for bicycle rentals, for pedicabs and street tours.
They line the streets around mid-town and leading to Central Park, they flood the entrances to the park, they step in front of you, yell at you, follow you, sometimes badger you. One men trying to get me into a pedi-cab that competes with the carriage horses in the park stood in front and demanded to know at least five times why I wasn’t getting into a cab pulled by his brother. I had to threaten to get a police officer to get him to stop.
The hawkers gather in packs and clusters, sometimes they line up behind one another, sometimes four or five of them approach you one after the other. You often have to wade through a bunch to move up the sidewalk, yelling “no, thank you, no thank you,” but that doesn’t often work. They yell it’s a good Facebook photo, or the girls (or the wife) will love it, or “give it a try,” “have fun,” “see the sights.” I love walking and looking around, I am not into battling my way through crowds, it feels a bit like New Delhi near the park.
I have a good-sized Canon camera and I’m not wearing a suit, so I guess that marks me as prey, but it is daunting now to walk even a few blocks, there is the sense of being observed, pursued, harassed. I didn’t like it. Well inside the park, it quiets a bit, but it never seems anywhere where there are tourists.
The pedicabs are a fascinating addition to the predatory chaos that is being a tourist in New York. (I guess I am a tourist now, I have lived in New York many times, visited there hundreds). The prices of the cabs are not regulated – some charge $3 a minute, some charge $9 a minute, the city is flooded with complaints by tourists, especially foreign born tourists, who end up paying hundreds of dollars for a 10 -minute cab ride powered by a poor kids, usually from the Caribbean. If you think the horses have it hard, watch these poor sweating and skinny young men try and push families through parts of the park.
The pedicab vendors hand out leaflets with photos of the carriage horses, many tourists think they are paying for a cab ride to the carriages. The pedicabs clog the entrances to the park and line the sidewalks are curiously unregulated, especially when compared to the carriage trade, which lives under hundreds of pages of regulations and is still hounded continuously by critics and animal rights activists. Why, I wonder, does no one worry about humans who weight 110 pounds pulling five or six hundred pounds of people in heat and traffic?
I love New York, but I am not liking walking around the most beautiful parts of the city, especially those near the Southern perimeter of the park. The hustling is out of control, aggressive and obnoxious. Anywhere near the park is a free-fire zone for hawkers, peddlers and sign and pamphlet wavers and shouters. If you bring a camera and show it, and even, I suspect, if you don’t, you will run a gauntlet of mayhem and pressure to get to the park. It is an interesting walk, always, but not a peaceful or pretty one. Be careful of the pedicabs – they are, on average, much more expensive than a carriage ride and a lot shorter – and be careful if you look up at the buildings too often. You are likely to plow into somebody waving a sign at you.
Maria had a long talk this morning about whether my open heart surgery has affected our relationship or challenged it in any way. It is important to both of us to talk about things like this, the surgery was a major trauma for both of us, and the way we have always moved through challenges to our relationship is to talk about them. And it is important to write about it. Curiously, we are a bit gender-reversed, it is often me who wants to talk about things, she who is reluctant at first, then open and willing and grateful.
Maria said there are times when I am withdrawn, quiet and feel disconnected from her and our world. Not all the time, but some of the time. She sometimes worries, she said, that this won’t change, that this will be a permanent part of me. She hears some people never quite get over their open heart surgery, they are changed for good. One of the surgeons told us that their name for these people is “pump heads.”
I told her I worry about the same thing, yet I can say now, especially after these past two weeks, that I feel I am returning to myself a bit more each day. It is, in fact, getting better each day, I am changing every day. And in terms of open heart surgery recovery, this is just the first phase, not nearly the last. . Still, this week, I walked miles and miles every day, worked on my book and my blog, took lots of photos, and did not collapse in exhaustion every single afternoon. (Just once or twice.)
I told Maria my withdrawals and quiet periods and disconnections have nothing much to do with her, although it is perfectly understandable that she might worry about it. I am still struggling to recognize the many physical challenges and changes in my life, they are staggering and confusing to to me in their diversity, detail and complexity.
I am still working to understand what I am feeling, to separate normal recovery from my many new medications from my stitches and wounds and my diabetes and emotional make-up, all upended by the surgery. After all, six weeks ago, the idea of open heart surgery had never occurred to me. Now, it is my shadow.
At the museum of Modern Art in New York yesterday, Maria and I were going through one of the exhibits. Maria, absorbed in this dazzling art, was nearly hypnotized by some of the paintings and collages she was seeing. I was beginning to feel something might be wrong with me.
I had broken into a heavy sweat and felt myself slipping into a low blood sugar episode. I felt some shivering, and was flushed. My chest hurt – not my heart. I wasn’t entirely sure if the symptoms were not being caused by the medications, the aftermath of the surgery – chills, sweating, disorientation sometimes – or my diabetes, which is still settling from the surgery. I had taken an insulin shot after leaving the hotel, but then I did not eat for a long time, and so I guessed that might be what was happening. But what if I was wrong. If I had any heart trouble, I had been forcefully instructed to call 911 immediately. Yet I will be candid, the thought of being hauled out of the museum in an ambulance in front of thousands of people and hauled through Manhattan to a strange hospital just did not seem like something I was prepared to do.
It felt awfully up there on the fifth floor of that museum, stuffed with many thousands of people all over the world. I felt quite tiny and helpless.
I waited a few minutes to sort it out, then I decided to alert Maria, who was off in a corner of the gallery that we might need to get moving quickly. She is wonderful in a pinch, she is calm and focused. I was both frightened and confused. I told her I needed to eat something sweet, we went quickly down the escalators to the museum cafe and got a muffin and sat down. She was concerned, I told her I was certain it was a mild low blood sugar episode – not good in heart patients after surgery – but that I caught it early and in time. And I was right.
In a few minutes I was fine, the symptoms all receded, I felt strong and eager, we continued our trek through the museum. Then I made sure to take another shot and get lunch. It is critical to eat after some of the insulin shots, yet those symptoms mirror the symptoms of some of my new or early medications. Also of the heart tiring so soon after the surgery and after a lot of exertion, signalling the need for rest. Should I have called an ambulance? Called my cardiologist? Gone back to the hotel? Lay down on a bench?
I don’t think so, my nurse practitioner, who I trust the most, says I need to return to my normal life, this can’t be what my life is all about. By all means, she says call for help if you are in trouble. If you can handle it, handle it.
But many things were going through my mind. Am I going to be sick? Throw up? Be dizzy? Incoherent? In pain? Would I tire and collapse? Should I never have come to New York? To the museum, where I was so vulnerable? The last thing I wanted for us is to end up in a New York City hospital. I explained to Maria that these distractions often preoccupy me as I struggle to sort them out, and I am sorting them out. She should ask me if she feels disconnected or if I seem withdrawn sometimes, I will be honest with her and tell her what is happening with me, something I do not always like to do. Sometimes I need to be pushed. it is not just that I am a man, it is that these things are so intensely personal. The surgery is not who I am.
I don’t want the operation or the recovery to be the center of my life. And it will not be. And yes, I was surely discouraged rushing to find a blueberry muffin three photos into an exhibition I wanted to see. And yes, healing is a wild ride on a roller coaster, sometimes, it is not a walk in the park.
The thing about love and recovery, I told Maria, was to never take it personally, because it is never personal. It is never her I am disconnecting from, I am literally struggling for my life back sometimes, and I am getting it back because I am paying attention to it, not because I am not.
I love Maria madly, and all of the time, but sometimes love hides and waits. The body needs what the body needs, especially now and for the next few months. The heart doesn’t wait for the timing to be just right, for everybody to be ready. It was good to say those things – Maria well knows how much I love her and trusts it – and it was good for her to hear them. The very act of communicating re-connected us, we were soon yakking up a storm, holding hands through Central Park, sharing a pretzel. Life seemed almost normal to me, and it almost was. One day soon, it will be. Not quite yet.
Then, the next morning, another world, another reality. We walked 10 miles through the park, I was strong and clear. There was a sudden sweating fit I recognized as the interaction between my new meds and the sun. I kept on walking, hoping I guessed right. I did. I drank some water and felt fine. Later, we walked a few more miles to a wonderful restaurant for dinner, and then a few more blocks to a movie, and then all the way back to the hotel. My feet were sore, my heart was happy. My blood sugar got with the program.
I am learning something about myself every day, but we do have to get reacquainted – talk about disconnection. Sometimes it takes all of the energy and emotion I have, yet it has only been a month since my surgery. It will be months more before I get it all down.
Maria have been talking to one another for years, and often about some difficult things. it is never really hard for us. But still, it is important and we know that. Sometimes these days we just need to yell at each other a bit. Five seconds later, nobody remembers what we were yelling about. I have learned in my recovery that I need to be very open about what I am doing and feeling. It does not make me selfish or narcissistic or self-absorbed, it is only fair to the people around me, and to me, it is, in some ways, what healing is about.
I know that Maria has suffered as much as I have through this surgery, perhaps more, it kills me that I couldn’t spare her that. There are people in my life who have drawn close to me after the surgery, people who have fled and vanished. This all reminds me a bit of my divorce. Then, there was suddenly nobody there. That is no longer true. I have real love and real friends.
Some people run to trouble, some people run away, and you cannot ever blame them. They have the right to do that and without penalty.
This is the thing about love, I told Maria. It is, in a way, just like recovery. It never moves in a straight line, it is never the same two days in a row. But if you are committed to it and open to it, you will find it.
I followed this man for half a block before I noticed that his dog and dog tattoo matched. New York City is a dog-happy place, New Yorkers have, by and large, really made it work for dogs there, the city being a place long considered utterly incompatible with dogs. This reminds me that the city could do as well and as easily for the horses, if they would just make the connection.
I love the energy of New York, even though it would destroy me to live there. A love-hate thing, I guess. Friday morning, Maria and I got up at 5 a.m. and walked downtown to Times Square, which was quiet but by no means deserted. There I ran into the most stylish street sweeper I have seen in awhile, the man in the red suit with a cell phone in his hand checking his messages. He just spoke to me of life in New York City and in America.
Just back from New York, my Emerald City, the land of crisis and mystery. A birthday trip, two days in New York. Visits to the carriage drivers and the carriage horses. In between, Maria and I rode the horses in the Central Park carousel and communed with the gargoyles there, walked many miles through the park, saw “Guardians Of The Galaxy” in a new IMAX theater with bone-rattling sound (I loved the movie), visited the Museum Of Modern Art, had some wonderful Chinese food, I took a couple of hundred photos and have lots of things to write about.
Yesterday I walked more than 10 miles through the wonderful park, was hailed by a bunch of carriage horse drivers, took a carriage ride and then today, walked some more. We walked through Times Square before dawn, traded hugs with Mello the hotel doorman (he reads the blog and read about the heart surgery and greeted me with an enormous and loving bear hug. Thanks Mello.) Nice to be there, nice to be home. Photos to come, news of the horses as well. Lots happening, and soon.
