At the Greenmarket

http://nycitywoman.com/features/women-farmers-new-york-city%E2%80%99s-greenmarket

Walking through a carpet of sunshiny leaves, happy.

And So They Flew

Nesting

Sun rises on Election Day. 

This morning, as I walked down the hall past the

high school marching band members and their moms and

dads selling banana breads, muffins and coffee, on my way to 

vote, I thought of my father. I remember standing in the back of

an auditorium once as he voted, in that tiny place with the curtain.

That night we went to City Hall after the polls closed, to wait around 

- late on a school night - to see who won. I was maybe seven.  

He said something about how all the people had made their individual 

choices and now they were being gathered up and counted. That night or 

the next morning there'd be a mayor, a senator or a president.

It seemed electric then and even now, it still does. 

On Halloween

That first day of fall

Swings, late August

A Little Philosophy Along With the Lettuce

Hmmm...

A Small State, A Husky Nation

What a lovely way to take the grey out of March and early April
and color it blue and white,
to have not one team but two to root for this weekend
in the Final Four,
the incredible UConn Huskies.

I remember covering the UConn Women's Basketball team back in the mid '90's, writing color stories that magical first NCAA Championship season when the smallest fans would gather after games, hoping for autographs, and the players would stop and chat and sign their programs and notebook pages and tell them that if they wanted to be Huskies they should always practice hard and study hard.

 I remember talking with the director of an assisted living facility who said the residents there crowded around the TV in the common room every game night and all they could talk about were "their girls." And I member driving up to Storrs to the pep rally after they won that first title. Fans were stopped on overpasses holding up banners and folks cheered and waved posters all along Route 195 as their bus passed by, then they crowded into Gampel Pavilion to celebrate with them and to say thanks for such a ride.

Twenty years have passed and it's every bit as magical. Twenty years later and we're all still rooting on each new group of players and the coaches who, year in and out, give it their all. 

Five individuals on the court who find a way to play as one. 

How very lucky we are.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2014/04/01/sports/ncaabasketball/ap-bkc-uconn-final-four.html?ref=sports

Sentences That Keep

This week NPR ran a story about how The American Scholar magazine released its list of the top 10 best written sentences in the English language, in fiction and non-fiction.

It came about because staff members at American Scholar found themselves discussing what makes an exquisite sentence as they gathered at the water cooler, perhaps along with talk about their busted NCAA brackets.

They decided to make a best sentences list and started thinking about lines that stopped them in their tracks when they were younger, lines that were artfully crafted but also made a beeline for their hearts. They went in search of gems, sentences so beautifully crafted they could make a reader see something more clearly or in an entirely new way, lines with an interior rhythm, parallel structure or simply graceful gathering of words.

Some of the writers who made the list: Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion and Toni Morrison.

What a lovely thing to collect. I like picturing pretty or startlingly gritty sentences pinned to a string and you could pluck one each morning like fresh and fragrant clothes just off the line, taking the wind and the air, a bit of the world and a character with you as you walked off into your day.

Hundreds of comments poured in; people offered sentences they felt were best, the lines that stayed. I started to think of so many:

That moment after Scout walks Boo Radley home near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird and she sees the town through his eyes and understands all he has done for her.

“Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives."

I thought of Toni Morrison too, but of lines from Beloved.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."

Or
"So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky."

It's hard to pare a favorite passage down to just one sentence, as so many lovely lines live around them. In Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street, the main character, a young girl named Esperanza, takes solace in the trees that insist, that grow out of the concrete, trees with secret strength that "keep and keep."

Esperanza says, "When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against too many bricks, then it is I look at the trees."

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/26/294823375/it-was-the-best-of-sentences

Happy Birthday

When I was in college I was lucky enough to have an English professor whose curriculum seemed as broad and wide as the world; novels, poems and plays, short fiction and nonfiction. We read at a clip and still she'd pass more on to us, a haiku, an intro to a book she was reading and yellowed newspaper clippings. "Read everything," she exhorted. Sports, science, art, politics, within and outside your interests, all!

Watch what the writers are doing, she said, like a ball player might study another's at-bats. It's a free education, right there for the taking, so take it, she said.

That was how Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem ended up in my hands and how, later, at a used book sale, I found Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. That night I read "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)" about Steinem's mother who was a journalist in a small town. Her mother loved her work but left it to help with a fledgling resort her husband was running. Soon after, her vital mother began to change; she retreated, heard voices, could no longer care for her family. Her father left; her sister was away at college. So from the age of 11, Steinem tried to keep a house, make meals and keep her mother's fears and worries at bay. She wrote about how for years she tried to get help from doctors but couldn't get any. Her older sister insisted that she get away and go to college, so Steinem did and went to Smith College. She and her sister were finally able to get mental health care for their mother.

As soon as she got to college, Steinem knew she wanted to write about women whose voices - because of so many different circumstances - were not heard.

A piece by Barbara Lovenheim in NYCityWoman.com, brought that story back. When Steinem won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Silurians, a group of veteran journalists, she accepted it on behalf of her mother, who showed her how to create her own reporter's notebook out of folded paper when she was a little girl, who had so loved her short career telling stories.
http://nycitywoman.com/features/gloria-steinem-award-my-mother?page=0,0

This weekend I saw a piece in The Times that said Gloria Steinem turns 80 today and she looks, I don't know, 40? Maybe 45? It said she plans to celebrate by riding elephants in Botswana. At 80 she travels the world, speaks out and writes, as she has all her life, most often about people who live on the margins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/collins-this-is-what-80-looks-like.html

Just Spring

In March

It’s that time of year again when, if you hear the `word’ “bracketology" even once more, you start looking for the hills and consider running for them.

Still, despite that word, I love the mayhem of a mad march.

I join bracket groups for the fun of it, no money on the line, and not much in terms of reputation either as I’m usually out, in the men’s bracket, shortly after tip-off of the first game. But I fold up the bracket anyway and check scores now and then. I like the upstarts and the upsets and learning about a college tucked in a corner of a state I haven’t yet visited; I like knowing that a shock of wheat can be a mascot and, while pundits are expounding and mathematicians are devising formulas and sports fans, the crazed and the casual, are bantering back and forth, they’re all filling out brackets by the millions and for a couple of weeks we all go merrily mad together.

Yesterday on Colin McEnroe’s radio show on WNPR, he had Bill Curry, a political analyst and former Democratic nominee for governor, share a bracket that was essentially created entirely from grudges, mostly centered on who did UConn wrong at one time or another (makes sense to me). Meanwhile, Julia Pistell, the director of writing programs at the Mark Twain House and Museum, concocted her own scheme. She researched foods that were either produced or made in that team's state or could be found at a state fair there and she’d pit the two foods against one another. Her thinking was that the players were made up at least in part (perhaps) by these local foods and, also, it was a hoot.

So in one game, it was fried scorpion (sold at a local fair) versus jello. (People in that state consumed the most jello per capita.) The scorpion, she said, would likely trounce the jello. In another face-off, she had emu tacos versus Johnny cakes. McEnroe thought that emus, known to be hard cases and elusive in terms of the chase, would take that game.

http://wnpr.org/post/march-madness-2014

It’s doubtful Pistell willl take home Warren Buffett’s billion dollars, but I kind of like her chances.

What I like best, for all the pontificating, exhorting and cheering, is that it all comes down to a whole bunch of games played by a bunch of college kids, the Creighton guy whose mom, the former college standout, taught him his three-point shot back when he was a kid at the hoop on their garage, or the guy from Providence who plays every minute of every game and the players from Wichita State who haven’t lost yet and, of course, the UConn women. At a party the other night, a friend said that when she wants to teach young kids how to play like a team, especially boys, she tells them, “Just watch the UConn women play."

The college bands will make their music; the mascots will romp; the fans will shout, a group of
kids may summon up something they didn't know they had and a little-known team may make a run. On any given night, anything can happen. I guess that’s why it’s mad but also why it’s magic.

Still, Frozen

Yesterday:

kickball in the street and

and tree climbing.

Shirt sleeves and light jackets,

in place of heavy coats and hats and scarves.

Windows flung open to let

the air spill in,

sweet and fresh,

and the birds' songs followed.

Puddles everywhere,

small rivers of melted snow.

Daylight stretched

before our eyes and

nighttime waited.

The City

These Hollows

It was crater-like

the pothole,

hungry,

waiting on tires, stealthily,

around a sharp corner.

It swallowed up my front left tire and a

a good bit of my nerve.

These hollows and gaps 

as familiar now as snow days and

22 degrees.

But just this morning I saw what looked

like a the hint of a blossom

on the slender branch of a tree.

One morning, warm light

Always a Beacon

Morning bench

In Charge

   The swan drank from large puddles and patroled the parking lot,

not so keen on us,

the interlopers.

Could it be?

A small, happy sign of spring!

Flying

Little Fish

Central Park Snowgal

Snowmen and snowgals dotted Central Park today. This one a tribute to the Games in Sochi. The snow artists used leaves and sticks and chestnuts to give each one distinct look.

Just behind her, little ones took to the hill on plastic snowboards and sleds, intrepid, ruddy faced and content.

Icing

Traveling Together

Small treasures

Happy

Happy, it's a toe-tapping, smile-inducing, can't-possibly-be-down-once-it's-on kind of tune and I can't stop playing it. The video? Even better.

I remembered reading a story in The New York Times about how Pharrell Williams, the hit maker, producer and singer, was struggling to make a light-hearted but pivotal song for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack. According to the story, he wrote and rejected nine songs and felt "backed in a corner" until he finally wrote a song he said captured what 'happy' felt like.

Then he and his team created two videos, a four-minute version and "24 Hours of Happy," with celebrities and regular folk dancing through the streets of Los Angeles and in a bowling alley, a rooftop, in a church, and a high school hallway in real time over a whole day. Old, young, balletic, goofy, they let the song just carry them, along sidewalks and side streets, making me wish this was the way the whole world moved on, say, a Thursday in February.

Williams dances all over the video, in his charming Canadian Mounty-like hat, and he sings, "Clap along if you feel that
happiness is the truth."

With this song playing, it is.

http://youtu.be/y6Sxv-sUYtM

(www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/arts/music/round-the-clock-giddiness-in-a-24-hour-music-vid)

A Kind of Poetry on Ice

Even after all these years and so many Winter Olympic Games, I am still astounded by the hurtling down mountains over moguls, the zipping down face first at 75 miles an hour in the skeleton and how, in the pairs skating, Maxim Trankov could toss Tatiana Volosozhar out into the air and she could spin and spin and spin and land perfectly on that thin blade - on ice - at once gracefully and strong, and they could finish a program together that seemed to me a kind of synchronized poetry on ice.

But it's what came next that will linger. As soon as they finished the long program, he slid across the ice on his knees, pumped his fists in the air, and she stood there as the crowd roared and began to cry. He skated over to her and took her face in his hands. They had left all of themselves there on that ice.

How lucky to be invited into such a moment, when the pressure they'd felt as the favorites faded and this palpable, exuberant joy took its place. That they won gold was almost secondary.

It crystallized those times, epic or small, when we put all of what we have, all of ourselves, into something and what we wish for and work toward actually happens.

The moment had that much heft
and that much beauty.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/sports/olympics/russian-pair-wins-gold-restores-tradition.html

From The New York Times

Singing

In John Muir's Travels in Alaska, he wrote about how he ventured out one very cold night to camp on a small mountain, to discover whether he could hear the trees singing. He stayed there all night, in the very bitter cold, and later wrote that the trees' "songs never cease."

I thought about those lines walking among the trees at Kent Falls. I didn't hear singing but I noticed how these two seemed almost like good friends, laughing together over a familiar story.

It made me think of something else Muir said. "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

Waiting' on Spring

Pop

The popcorn is popping.
Such a happy sound, those
kernels popping and and pinging
against the metal cover of
the friendly old pot,
retired from all tasks,
save for this one.

Sunday Mornings at the Cafe

The Cafe Atlantique: It's that home-away-from-home kind of place, good tea, and salads and a local baker who drops off her tasty from-scratch creations. On Sundays, a jazz and pop duo stop in for a couple of hours to play and, this morning, a little girl danced, unfettered and free, and then, from another table, a little boy got up to twirl, his small stuffed puppy in one hand.

Today, on this anniversary weekend of the Beatles bursting into America's homes on The Ed Sullivan Show, they're playing lots of Fab Four. At the tables nearby, two friends lean in and catch up, a family crowds around a small table, talking and laughing, a man reads his Times, and a line forms for cappuccinos and chai teas.

The cold outside the window seems far off and the little ones keep dancing.

Local Charmer

A Hopeful Sign

It was just a little homemade sandcastle, surrounded by a dry moat, a few shells for decoration, a stick as sentry or flag at its center and a bright red shovel left behind. 

But it was a promising sign on the first weekend in February; the snow and ice had mostly melted and, for a couple hours anyway, the beach became a playground again. 

On the walk home I heard someone say, "Snow tomorrow, three to four inches."

Ah, the library

At the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, they're celebrating children's books in a lovely exhibit, "The ABC of it, Why Children's Books Matter." Max is there, where those wild things are, and Alice in her wonderland and that inviting room from "Goodnight Moon."

It's like stepping back into the warmth of those days when nothing suited a cold afternoon better than a cosy couch and a gathered stack of library books and Mom reading a story.

http://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/2013/06/18/new-york-public-library-presents-new-free-exhibition-‘-abc-it-why-chi

15 Degrees

On a winter Sunday, 15 degrees and icy-slushy, I smile thinking

 of summer road trips and silly stops along the way. 

How many months 'til then?

Little bird

Making Tracks

I like the strength of

the single branch, resolute,

alone there in snow.