Like the Eiffel Tower

In the morning, if my car is on 109th Street, I turn right on Broadway and drive north to 125th, where the subway comes up from the ground because there's an earthquake fault line that runs below Manhattan.  The elevated tracks remind me of the Eiffel Tower's massive steel lace.  Cars wait to turn left, past the BP station where Sikhs fill your car with gas, to a right on 12th Avenue past the Fairway and Dinosaur Barbeque, a left on 133rd Street past the Hudson River Cafe, and another right onto the Henry Hudson Parkway which travels along side the Hudson River, past the George Washington Bridge, across the Harlem River to Riverdale, up to the Sawmill River Parkway which begins in Yonkers.

Reader's Digest Flowers

7:10 a.m.:  Turning right from the Sawmill River Parkway onto Roaring Brook Road, I'm waiting in a line of traffic until the train passes through the intersection and the guard gates rise again.  I catch a glimpse of the orangey-red stripe of the red-wing blackbird in the green leafery of a tree.  I turn off NPR and an annoying report on Goldman Sachs and open my windows, hoping to hear the birds.  Indeed, there's the trill of ss ss ssss -- ss ss ssssss lingering, hanging in the air of morning just after a heavy rain.

Up ahead, Reader's Digest is abloom -- the front lawn bursting with yellow daffodils; fruit trees dabbed in pink and white.

4:13 p.m.:  Coming home down Roaring Brook Road, past Reader's Digest, making a left to cross the railroad tracks and make another left onto the Sawmill.  The red crossing lights started flashing and the gate blocking access to the railroad tracks came down -- on the roof of an SUV -- where it stayed.  I wondered why the driver didn't back up.  The driver behind the SUV backed up, as if to make room.  The train was coming.  It was clear that the train's width would, were it to sweep down the track, swipe off the grill of the SUV.  Instead, the train slowed to a stop.  The conductor signaled to the SUV to cross the tracks.  It did.  And then, at a few miles per hour, the train slowly passed by.  Then the gates rose again, and we were on our way.

To Citi Field for a Met Game

And from David, on his commute to Citi Field for a Met game:

I recently went to a corporate charity day to see the Mets at Citi Field.  I took the Number 7 train, the most convenient transportation from my office on an overcast day with a threat of drizzle.

 As the local rumbled from station to station, we emerged from the tunnel into bright sunlight.  I was enjoying the ride and looking forward to watching the ball game when cell phones appeared from everywhere.  Within two short stops, I was trapped in an international phone booth surrounded with oppressively loud conversations in Spanish, Russian, Chinese and a bit of Brooklynese.

I thought of a dozen ways to silence these obtrusive conversations but none without getting into an altercation, so I resigned myself to suffer through the rest of the trip.  Good fortune smiled upon the car as at the next stop the doors opened and a four-piece Mariacchi band appeared—replete with two big guitars, a large bass and an accordian.  They immediately broke into a great version of La Bamba much to the chagrin of the cell-phone conversationalists.  All calls quickly ended before the next stop, but  as soon as the band exited, re-dials were hit.

Lady luck smiled on us that day, as at the very next stop, an elderly woman entered and began playing a horrible version of La Cucaracha on an ocarina.  Cell phone conversations abruptly ended again and the rest of the ride was peacefully quite.  Some days, even bad music on a subway is a blessing.   

Sawmill Closes, Trees Bloom

Left early today to get to school early to finish putting in my grades for the 3rd quarter.  The time I should have gained was lost due to a vehicle fire on the Sawmill.  The parkway was closed at exit 27; we were routed onto the local roads in Thornwood where we wended our way along Route 117, through Pleasantville, left on Route 120 to Chappaqua. 

It's spring.  The broken trees, many of them splintered through their hulking trunks, lay with their skirts on the ground bursting with greenery.  All along the hills, tufts of green dress bare winter skeletons of trees -- or "sculpture without their leaves" as Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast. 

Coming down Broadway the meridian is abloom making small parks between lanes of traffic rushing north and south.  Suddenly, it's pleasant in the middle of Broadway to sit in the sun on a park bench, pastel tulips opening, pink trees flowering.

Yesterday we (my dog and I) walked across the park to the Central Park Conservancy at Fifth Avenue and 105th (about a 20 minute walk.)  There it was an olafactory feast.  The crab apple trees which line two parallel paths, were abloom with their pinky white flowers that smell like nothing else.  The lilac trees were in bloom.  The wisteria.  I go there to breathe in the smells. 

There was a crab apple tree in our back yard in Birmingham, Michigan that bloomed every year on my daughter's birthday, the smell so sweet you could cry.  There is a picture of Sari when she was 5 standing by the crab apple tree holding a branch of the tree.  She is wearing a blue dress that she loved and refused to let me pass down to her younger sister, so I framed that dress with the picture mounted on the dress (something I'd seen on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art).  So when I pass a crab apple tree in bloom, I always reach for a branch and bring it to my nose to sniff the smell of my daughter's youth.

Wisteria bloomed in purple bunches like grapes on an arbor along the side of my grandmother's garage on 7 Mile Road in Detroit.  Cars would stop and people would ask if they could photograph the side of her garage in full bloom.  I need to smell the wisteria, its sour-sweet scent -- and I am again with my grandmother at the side of her house, the cars whizzing by, warm lace cookies waiting inside.

Spontaneous Haiku

(written while teaching haikus to 9th and 10th graders):

March's cold winter rains
filling streets with black puddles:
a mirror of the sky.

Falling Trees

Six People Killed in Storm from Falling Trees

http://www.greenburghny.com/Cit-e-Access/news/archnews.cfm?NID=2354&TID=10&jump2=0

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/03/15/2010-03-15_untitled__2vics15m.html

Fallen Trees on the Sawmill

The Sawmill River Parkway is littered with fallen trees.

Too many to count.  Hundreds fallen into the road or beside the road.  Some lay uprooted, their tangle of roots exposed.  Some lay chopped into two, three foot diameter logs.  Others lay in a tangle of branches, like strands of unwashed, unkempt hair.  Others like brooms, their webs of extended branches reaching out.

And those white birches that didn't snap remain bowed, bent into an unnatural arch, like a ballerina taking a bow.  They remind me of Robert Frost's poem, Birches:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.


Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
            

And a week after the storm, water overflowed from tributaries reaches the road just north of Thornwood.