A Year In New York

Today I’ve been running last-minute errands and pondering what it all means, spending a year in New York City. I’ve worn through a lot of shoe leather in this crazy town and learned some hard lessons,  and now it’s time for me to pass those lessons on to you.
Here goes:

1. The World Won’t End If [...]

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At 6:30 this morning, a small family of raccoons crawled from the shrubs in Central Park. Mom flattened herself under a green wire fence while two little ones scrambled over. They had just collected themselves for the journey across East Drive when they looked up to see a giant! Their mouths almost formed into little [...]

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I live across the street from one of the neighborhood’s grocery stores, a Food Emporium. Every midnight after the place closes, a pile of retired produce and collapsed cardboard boxes four feet tall is left at the curb. Garbage trucks come and take it away, and in the morning delivery trucks arrive with new produce [...]

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Recently I headed to Williamsburg in Brooklyn to see an exhibit by Joe Mangrum, an artist friend who creates fantastic visions from everyday things. He and I moved from San Francisco about the same time.
Joe unlocked the door of Chi Contemporary Fine Art and showed me around just after the place closed for the night. [...]

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The battle for New York City’s green future arrived in my mailbox last week. It took the form of a fundraising appeal from MillionTreesNYC, a campaign to plant 100,000 trees every year for a decade, and bore the signature of that eminent environmentalist, Bette Midler.
Which immediately brought questions to mind. Who made the star of [...]

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My wallet lacked $20s, so I visited the WaMu down the street. This particular block has a coffee shop,  a frozen-yogurt place and a cigar store with a wooden Indian outside, yet I like the bank the best. That’s because it’s a WaMu.
WaMu is Washington Mutual, the Seattle bank known for its open floor plan [...]

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As I type this post, my body vividly remembers yesterday’s maiden snowboarding trip to New Jersey, in the form of a stiff shoulder and a chest that is so bruised it hurts to exhale. Other memories are less painful.
For example, driving up Route 23 into the Kittatinny Mountains, Joo and her friend Bobbi snoozing in [...]

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As a Californian used to spending lots of time with trees, especially pine trees, New York City can be a barren place. These East Coast maples and elms have lost all their leaves. If it’s a pine smell you want, hail a taxi that has a tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror.
Or you [...]

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A few weeks ago Joo and I traveled to Boston, where temperatures were in the twenties, and the clothing dilemma that I had mothballed for months gained a sharp, aching clarity. Winter is coming, and this Californian had arrived on the East Coast woefully unequipped.
The problem isn’t staying warm, exactly; it’s staying fashionable. I had [...]

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As the sun rose on this November 4, 2008, the most significant Election Day of my life, I pulled my bedroom shade up to see that a long line had formed across the street. This was the queue for my voting station. It stretched almost the length of two city blocks and remained that way [...]

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