After an exceptionally busy week in Buffalo that included a party for 60 here at my apartment on Friday night, I flew down to NYC for a couple of days and then ventured out to the North Fork of Long Island. All in all, an embarrassment of reconnections, remembrances, and the riches that are relationships.
I flew into JFK after getting almost no sleep. Cleaning up after the party lasted until one, one-thirty in the morning, then I had to get up early to pack since my clothes were still in the dryer. The flight downstate isn’t long enough for real sleep, but I tried. The biggest drag was the long, complicated subway ride into Manhattan. AirTrain wasn’t so bad, but the E was running local and along the F line on a construction schedule, so I transferred to the D at Rockefeller Center. Instead of getting off at Columbus Circle for an uptown local, I stayed on and ended up having to backtrack along Central Park West on a local A. Two and a half hours after my plane landed, and after turning on the AC as high as it could go, I crashed on the couch of my friend Deanne’s Upper West Side apartment and slept for a while. It was hot and sticky in NYC, the sort of weather that makes you hate the city in August.
I went down to the Village for coffee with my friend Harry, then headed up to Lincoln Center for a free dance performance at Damrosch Park. The two companies were those of Ben Munistieri and Mark Dendy. The work by the former was simple and inoffensive, if unexciting; the single piece by the latter, set to a mix of Tibetan bells and instrumental versions of Metallica (I recognized “Enter Sandman”) was long but thrilling, the kind of modern dance that makes you want to stand and cheer—which we did. The piece had about 24 dancers, and boy, did Dendy know how to use them! After the performance we headed to The Red Cat for dinner, and we were treated to some tempura of green beans and baked fontina. We ordered a variety of entrees, and the management sent out nearly a dozen desserts. It was really humbling to be treated so generously.
The following day I visited with a friend in the morning, then called on another friend who is leaving NYC for Fort Lauderdale. She and I went for a snack at Westville, right on West 10th, in my old neighborhood (1994-2001). Then I headed uptown to change my shirt (not because of the heat, but because of the coffee I spilled!) and grabbed a cab up to the Columbia campus. I hadn’t been on that McKim, Mead, and White-designed Morningside Heights main campus in several years, and unlike other places I’ve been after many years, it didn’t seem smaller; it seemed even larger, just as grand and impressive as the first time I saw it in the fall of 1987—though perhaps the lack of people helped. I met my colleagues from graduate school on the steps leading up to Dodge Hall, and instead of feeling like it had been 14 years, it felt like it had been five minutes since our last class. Yes, some gray here and there; yes, some body mass and wrinkling. But overall, it felt like a time warp. We quickly moved from one conversational knot to another, sometimes in twos, sometimes as an entire group, filling each other in on what we’d been up to. Some of us had seen each other since. Because it was so hot and humid, we quickly took some pictures by the statue of Alma Mater, then adjourned for a nearby Ethiopian restaurant called Awash. The reason for the choice was that we were there not only to reconnect with each other, but to remember our dear friend Andrew (see the post from June 22, 2009). Because Andrew lived in Brooklyn and was a writer and because of other correspondences, some passages from Sophie’s Choice were read; remembrances were offered. Photographs were passed around. Laughs were shared; tears were shed.
Grieving someone is necessarily a process, a work in progress. It goes on. It can’t be forced to closure. Seeing my friends, seeing the campus, made the reunion bittersweet and my sense of the loss of Andrew stronger. Sometimes it was so sharp and painful as I was sitting there that I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes I was comforted by the others’ presence; sometimes I felt saturated by sadness yet was numb to it. I was struck by one individual who insisted on a way of remembering Andrew that in my opinion resisted to admit the truth of how he died. Maybe if you refuse to admit how someone dies when he takes his own life, then you are also refuse to admit how he lived. I don’t know. I was able to offer some of my own thoughts and feelings about suicide, having been so close to it at one very painful moment in my life. I felt that I understood very, very clearly where Andrew had to go to do what he had done.
To be continued…
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Landmarks
This past couple of weeks I finally ventured to explore some areas in Buffalo I’d long been curious about. One exploration was motivated by the composition class I’ll be teaching this fall at Medaille College, the other by curiosity about a major Old Buffalo landmark.
The comp class is paired with another class in critical thinking (I confess to wondering at times what happened to good old-fashioned college classes) and we will form what is called a Learning Community. The other instructor and I will organize some of our syllabus around a theme, and we will try to link into some aspect of the “story of Buffalo.” Prof. Cullinan and I chose the theme of “life as a river” and the Buffalo River as the linking aspect. I was only vaguely aware of where the river was, and how to get there. Via the Skyway or the 190 south of downtown, I often passed by the old industrial waterfront and the deserted grain mills. But nothing in my two years here ever brought me into that part of the city, so on a recent sunny Saturday, after an errand brought me closer than I’d ever been, I took a left turn and skirted around the HSBC Arena and found myself where I wanted to be. The neighborhood is known as the First Ward, and according to Prof. Cullinan, is largely Irish (like her). I found the river by visuals, driving to the end of Hamburg Street, past McCarthy’s Pub, whose windows were crowded with handwritten community signage (“Benefit for Joey ____”). I thought of stopping, but made a mental note to return when I spotted a man walking a dog. He was in this sort of channel that looked like the remains of an old railroad bridge. When I drove to the dead end, I was at the river. I got out of the car. It was a beautiful summer day (one of the few we’ve had this year) and the grain silos were across the water. I could hear a couple sitting somewhere nearby, talking, and to my left, a solo kayaker was coming downstream. There are rusty old railway trestles, and the water looked as brackish as I expected it to be, but the sun and dry air did a lot to make the scene. Those deserted silos have a Monument Valley-meets-the Industrial Revolution grandeur, forlorn and daunting at the same time. What is going to happen to them? After leaving that spot, I drove around the First Ward some more, and eventually found my way to the mouth of the river. On the western side of the river’s mouth were some small-craft marinas and slips, and the sailboats looked very expensive compared to the mostly-deserted mills on the opposite bank. There were a couple of oil-painters across the river, so I crossed back over to investigate. This brought me to the General Mills plant, where some men on a weekend shift were taking a break at a picnic table. I spoke to the painters for a moment, then got back in my car and went home.
Today, after going to the Science Museum to see the amazing “Body Works” exhibit, I suggested to my friend that we drive in the direction of some of the churches whose steeples are among the highest in the city. We headed for St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church (now known as the King Urban Life Center), which is at the corner of Genesee and Guilford. The church was built in 1891, in the Rhenish Romanesque style, and designed by Adolphus Druiding. It’s a spectacularly tall church, and commands the neighborhood the way a cathedral must have commanded towns in the Middle Ages. Large swaths of this part of the city were among the bleakest and most desolate I’ve seen since I moved here. Although there are empty lots here in Allentown, they seem like English gardens compared to the blocks of blight in this part of Buffalo. My friend and I commented on how bleak it felt, even on a Sunday afternoon in summer.We drove next to St. Stanislaus, which is a substantial complex on Townsend Street three blocks south of St. Mary of Sorrows, and then we drove to the Central Terminal. I’ve seen this building only from the highways and expressways, but seeing it up close was amazing. Hard to believe it was built less than a century ago, and that it was used for only 50 years. There were a lot of cars in the lot, and I found out by going on the terminal’s website that a public tour was going on. Despite that, between the churches and the grain mills and the terminal, it brought some of the harder, harsher reality of Buffalo home in a way I hadn’t experienced yet.
The comp class is paired with another class in critical thinking (I confess to wondering at times what happened to good old-fashioned college classes) and we will form what is called a Learning Community. The other instructor and I will organize some of our syllabus around a theme, and we will try to link into some aspect of the “story of Buffalo.” Prof. Cullinan and I chose the theme of “life as a river” and the Buffalo River as the linking aspect. I was only vaguely aware of where the river was, and how to get there. Via the Skyway or the 190 south of downtown, I often passed by the old industrial waterfront and the deserted grain mills. But nothing in my two years here ever brought me into that part of the city, so on a recent sunny Saturday, after an errand brought me closer than I’d ever been, I took a left turn and skirted around the HSBC Arena and found myself where I wanted to be. The neighborhood is known as the First Ward, and according to Prof. Cullinan, is largely Irish (like her). I found the river by visuals, driving to the end of Hamburg Street, past McCarthy’s Pub, whose windows were crowded with handwritten community signage (“Benefit for Joey ____”). I thought of stopping, but made a mental note to return when I spotted a man walking a dog. He was in this sort of channel that looked like the remains of an old railroad bridge. When I drove to the dead end, I was at the river. I got out of the car. It was a beautiful summer day (one of the few we’ve had this year) and the grain silos were across the water. I could hear a couple sitting somewhere nearby, talking, and to my left, a solo kayaker was coming downstream. There are rusty old railway trestles, and the water looked as brackish as I expected it to be, but the sun and dry air did a lot to make the scene. Those deserted silos have a Monument Valley-meets-the Industrial Revolution grandeur, forlorn and daunting at the same time. What is going to happen to them? After leaving that spot, I drove around the First Ward some more, and eventually found my way to the mouth of the river. On the western side of the river’s mouth were some small-craft marinas and slips, and the sailboats looked very expensive compared to the mostly-deserted mills on the opposite bank. There were a couple of oil-painters across the river, so I crossed back over to investigate. This brought me to the General Mills plant, where some men on a weekend shift were taking a break at a picnic table. I spoke to the painters for a moment, then got back in my car and went home.
Today, after going to the Science Museum to see the amazing “Body Works” exhibit, I suggested to my friend that we drive in the direction of some of the churches whose steeples are among the highest in the city. We headed for St. Mary of Sorrows Catholic Church (now known as the King Urban Life Center), which is at the corner of Genesee and Guilford. The church was built in 1891, in the Rhenish Romanesque style, and designed by Adolphus Druiding. It’s a spectacularly tall church, and commands the neighborhood the way a cathedral must have commanded towns in the Middle Ages. Large swaths of this part of the city were among the bleakest and most desolate I’ve seen since I moved here. Although there are empty lots here in Allentown, they seem like English gardens compared to the blocks of blight in this part of Buffalo. My friend and I commented on how bleak it felt, even on a Sunday afternoon in summer.We drove next to St. Stanislaus, which is a substantial complex on Townsend Street three blocks south of St. Mary of Sorrows, and then we drove to the Central Terminal. I’ve seen this building only from the highways and expressways, but seeing it up close was amazing. Hard to believe it was built less than a century ago, and that it was used for only 50 years. There were a lot of cars in the lot, and I found out by going on the terminal’s website that a public tour was going on. Despite that, between the churches and the grain mills and the terminal, it brought some of the harder, harsher reality of Buffalo home in a way I hadn’t experienced yet.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
