Friday night I walked through the Soho – Chinatown border, where continuous leans in structural black smoked cigarettes and lounged on restaurant benches next to vibrant old Asian women selling branches of longan, dragon’s eyes, and grapes the size of toddler fists. Fall is coming. My son’s last first season, and my own, in this […]
The best thing about marathon training — and long runs, generally — is that distance becomes a feature instead of a deterrent. And with that distance, comes the thrill of chance discovery. I run the same general outline but at some point the lights or a thickety glimpse propel me one or two or ten […]
The air Tuesday morning was like a hot towel, eighty and climbing at 6:30, when I took the dog and the baby on our neighborhood loop. By mid-afternoon, when I returned to our apartment with two bags full of the random and banal and occasionally poignant accumulations of office life, the bruise in the sky […]
Well those are four words I never expected to string together, and certainly not in an homage to this city. (More homages here and here.) I’ve realized that many of the parts of New York I love most are the ones that make it feel small and knowable. I don’t know if it’s the unexpectedness […]
[Writing love letters to my city is, it turns out, both fun and therapeutic. The first three are here; I’ll try to keep ’em coming!] It doesn’t sound particularly nice, does it: “Eastern Parkway.” Sounds like it would be wide and drab and dreary, colorless and featureless. But oh, the part of it that swings […]
Listen, if spring’s not well and truly arriving in the upper mid-Atlantic, her simulacra is pretty darn convincing. Normally, I’m a stickler for seasons starting and stopping when they ought to (said primly, like an old schoolmarm), but now that I’ve got a wee baldie in my care, I say to heck with the Gregorians, […]
New York is a funny town. It’s not ineffable — but it is both whatever adjective is put to it and the opposite of that adjective, sometimes simultaneously. The streets can be dirty but the parks are clean. Midtown is one neon high-rise after the other, but nearby ‘hoods are full of genteel brownstones and […]
