There's a wild streak of green in the sink in the kitchen,
It comes from the rill trickling out of the plumbing,
The streams from the mountains, the pools from the lea,
All run from my faucet and down to the sea.

Susan’s tiny apartment is rent-stabilized, and the landlord’s been trying to get her out since forever.

You can't ask the landlord to put in a washer,
He'd rather you move than to put in a washer,
The faucets are dripping, they sound in my ears,
The tap in the bathroom's been running for years.

It’s the tap in the kitchen that’s been running for years, and it isn’t just dripping, it’s dribbling. Fills a glass in forty seconds (a thousand one, a thousand two...) multiplied by who knows how many years multiplied by who knows how many landlords.

If we wanted to move to New York we could have Susan’s apartment--inheritance is the only way you can get a rent-stabilized apartment in Greenwich Village--but we don’t. It’s a back apartment in a quiet building, but the minute you go out, there you are in New York, and it’s just too noisy and fast for us. When I visited New York as a kid, my mother explained that the reason New Yorkers talk so fast is that they have to say everything they want said before the next El comes along and drowns out the conversation. No Els now, but trucks and sirens do the same thing, and on Sixth Avenue, the sound of the subway comes up through the asphalt like the roar of some great underground beast. (Well, not really through the asphalt, it’s coming up through the station stairway behind you which you don’t notice, but that’s the effect.)

WARNING: We had been resisting cell phones, but Claudia needed one for some work she’s doing so she got Metro PCS, cheap but local. Before we left for this trip, she called to get the national coverage. She set payment up from her bank, but Metro neglected to tell her that she also needed to reprogram her phone. When we arrived, it wouldn’t work. She called and found out that the technology permitted it to be reprogramed only while still in California. Luckily, Susan had a cell which Claudia can use for the zillion calls she’s needed to make and receive here, but she can’t check any messages from her Metro cell till she gets home. If you have a local service, watch out for this.

In the real world, City Hall has plans for Washington Square: moving the fountain to align it with the arch, shrinking the dog park and moving it closer to the street, dangerous for getting dogs in and out and folks passing on the sidewalk won’t like the smell, more concentrated in a smaller area. They’ll close parts of the park for three years to accomplish this. Now, the fountain is shut off on Sunday afternoons and becomes a stage for magicians, fire-eaters, street theater. The dog run, maintained and supported by volunteers, is not just for the dogs. It’s a place where dog-owners meet and make friends—which helps make the neighborhood a community. If the city wants to improve the park, they could just take out the three fenced-off ugly asphalt mounds in the south-west corner, fix some cracks in the concrete, and pony up some money for maintenance of the restrooms and such, but that, of course, would be too subtle. They want something showy for their money: a more spectacular fountain which would take more water and energy, both in short supply, and might not lend itself so well to weekend theater. So there’s a sort of be-in at the park tomorrow afternoon. I hope we have time to go. We will definitely contribute some money to the fight, in Susan’s memory. She was at the dog run every day she was in town.

I have read that New York is supposed to be naturally “green” because so many people walk (this is true, and a delight) and have small, easily heated and cooled apartments as opposed to the supersized houses of the exurbs. Yeah, but there are all those dripping faucets. And I just read in the NY Times about an energy-conscious guy who walked along a New York street closing shop doors on a hot day. Policy in many stores is to crank up the air conditioning and leave doors open on hot days, giving passers-by a blast of cold air to entice them inside. When a proprietor followed him, tapped him on the shoulder and accused him of closing the door, the guy asked what law, exactly, was he violating? Now he wants to get a law passed making the open-door policy illegal.

Sunday: When we went to the dog run, the sign for today’s event was down and the wind was blowing so we kept working on Susan’s apartment, finding old family jewelry of mostly sentimental value, letters, books. We only wanted a couple of the books, the rest we carted down to the sidewalk and notified the guys who sell books off tables on Sixth Avenue who came for them right away. We’ve recycled a whole lot of paper. People say “oh, that’s so California” but they do it too, big piles of clear plastic bags of recyclables on the sidewalks every week.

Too early Monday: Can’t sleep again, can’t even read in the bathroom due to lousy hotel design. Turning on the light turns on the noisy fan, and the switch is in the room, not the bathroom. Dinner last night with one of Susan’s friends at the Cornelia Street Cafe. When I told her about writing limericks most mornings--but not while I’m here because I haven’t been able to check that email so far--she gave me a word to write one about: ort.

The maitre de said with a snort,

No, you can’t have a bag for your ort.

He thought he was classy

But we remained sassy.

We sat ’round and sang “Hold the Fort.”

I had to tell the friend that “Hold the Fort” was an old union song, and you have to know that I wrote the limerick on the bag I was taking our leftovers back to Susan’s in. Every time we both order dinner (instead of splitting with added salad) we take half the meat home for lunch. Funny how you always get too much meat, usually too much starch, and hardly ever too much salad or veggies.

Saturday, in a rented SUV (forgive us, for we have sinned) we’re off to take some of Susan’s crochet art, ceramics, paintings and family photographs up to her little house in the country near Hudson. Crossed town on Houston Street, looked up as we neared the river to see a man on a trapeze on the roof of the river tour parking structure, silhouetted against the sky, swooping back and forth, letting go, dropping and bouncing high from the net. Drove up the Taconic Parkway, no billboards, no buildings visible from the road, Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park and Donald J. Trump State Park in quick succession. Susan’s house is in a little village, just a post office and houses. I’m hit again by that amazing contrast between NYC and upstate New York. Stars! I haven’t seen them in weeks. Susan’s friend Chadwick, who miraculously shows up for dinner at the same restaurant in Hudson without anyone planning it, tells us he took some New York teen-agers to an environmental action conference in the woods in Wisconsin. Some of them had never been out of the five boroughs and were astounded by the stars. Just sat and stared. The next morning driving into Hudson for breakfast we see a robin hopping in the road, just catch the flash of red breast before he flies off. Then a sign saying “Federation of Polish Sportsmen.” I like the specificity. Susan’s house is a marvel, a combination of antiques and kitsch and cutesy and high art. But, alas, it is inhabited by her three cats, awaiting their move to California, and I am sneezing, sneezing, sneezing, much worse than in her apartment, though they were gone only a few days when we got to NYC. Is there an expiration date on cat dander? A possibility, though my theory is that that gummy yellow air-pollution film that comes to coat every exposed wall and object in Manhattan just glues the dander down, so it doesn’t bother my nose, while the clean country air lets it fly.

We thought we would get to meet Edythe, Susan’s maybe ten-year-old dog, but we got a call before we left Manhattan saying that Edythe had uncharacteristically peed on Chadwick’s dining room floor, he had cleaned it up and let her out, five minutes later he went into his back yard to check on her and found her lying under a little evergreen tree, dead.

ATTACK OF THE FLYING DUST BUNNIES. Good clouds flying into Houston—towering thunderheads, some windblown, like successive stages of an explosion. Inside the airport, other strange atmospheric conditions. Dinner in Bubba’s Bayou City Grill, with ceiling fans. After we got our water, grey fluff rained down from the ceiling. The guys at the next table said, “Asbestos?” We asked the waiter for new water, explaining why, and he smiled and said, “Oh, yeah, they sped up the fans,” and he brought clean water. Got back to the gate and found that the two-hour layover had been stretched to two-and-a-half, then three, finally four. We got in around midnight, but of course that was three a.m. New York time. So we were in every way glad to be home.

 

©2007 by Nancy Schimmel