Midsummer Night's Walk

Wandering down a deserted Tenth Avenue the city reminded us how it is Still New York.

How good it felt to be home.

**
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Night Walk in the Land of Oz

Night Songs from the Second Floor Revisited

Night Travels to Hope

Seconds Before Becoming a Sunday Memory

"We're the last tire shop in the city," the man said.

"How long do you got here?"

"Maybe seven months?" he said

"Then what?"

"I don't know.  They're talking Houston Street."

"Gotta be east by the projects, they're developing the west side..."

"Yeah."

"This is such bullshit." 

"Yeah."

And then there was nothing left to say because what words were left in the world that could stop barely occupied glass buildings from erasing needed businesses taxis and cars and livery and delivery trucks relied on to keep New York going.

**

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Night Boat

Home

Top (and a Couple of Dresses) Goes Pop!

It was a rare date night of dinner and a movie.  We thought First Avenue might have something cheap and unfamiliar so we headed out. 

Imagine the delight and surprise when we arbitrarily decided to walk down Ninth Street rather than St. Marks and saw this.

DL Cerney had come home to the East Village!  At least until August 30th.

For years, this rare dress - suit - shirt - vintage shoes store nestled between McSorley's and the Ukrainian gift shop.  And then - O.K. I know you're going to be shocked - the rent went up.  DL Cerney had an amazing sale to end all sales and then went upstate and online.

It is rare either one of us would choose clothes over food but, hopping up the steps of the Pop-Up-Stop, choose we did.

Linda St. John had filled the Umbrella Arts Gallery with awe-inspiring frocks...

...and some beautiful men's slacks and shirts... 

... as well as her memoir, Even Dogs Go Home to Die. 

As we looked around and talked to Linda, I remembered one of those rare and special moments that happens in a new relationship. 

Years ago, we had seen the 'Going-Out-of-Business' signs in the window of the 7th Street shop and stopped by to find out more.  

The dresses there all looked like they remembered the curves of a woman's body and, although buying one was out of my reach, I couldn't resist.  And when I slipped one on the Mariner's face melted.  When your beau's face melts like that, there is nothing to do but buy the dress.

This time was no different only it was him who slipped on a beautiful shirt that celebrated his beautiful eyes and it was me who melted.

Nothing to do but....

DL Cerney
at the Umbrella Arts Gallery
317 East 9th Street between First and Second Avenue
12-8pm
July 6 - August 30, 2015


**
Related Posts:

DL CERNEY

Even Dogs Go Home to Die

Memories of a Sunday Drive

The Unsinkable Jutta F.

Her friend, Eva insisted and pulled two of the best works from a pile.

Jutta's work deserved to be shown.

Almost housebound now, painting from the haze of whatever sight remains in the corner of her eye, Jutta steps into the abstract remnants of  landscape she once laughed through.

To keep moving towards where she is going she now slowly and determinedly walks from one side of the living room to the other every day 100 times before standing before her easel or sitting at her painting table.

The works, engaged with ferocious intelligence and thought, are guided by 89 years of a spirit that could not be quelled, stopped or drowned by the sadder and unfortunate events life offers, despite our best intentions to politely decline.

And now two pieces her friend Eva insisted on submitting are finally hanging on gallery walls.

CERES GALLEY PRESENTS

With a Little Help from our Friends

July 21 - August 15, 2015

Ceres friends: Esther Aronson, Jacqueline Barnett, Alberte Bernier, Christine Bluhm, Chevalier Daniel C. Boyer, Silvia Soares Boyer, Patricia Cobb, Jutta Filippelli, Elizabeth Frishauf, Jessica Gondek, Betty Guernsey, George Jellinek, Angela M. LaMonte, Vicky Duk Lee, Julie Levine, Willie Marlow, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Marcia Rubin, Eva Sochorova, Deborah Zerdenz

Ceres Gallery 547 West 27th Street Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 phone: 212-947-6100 fax: 212-202-5455
email: art@ceresgallery.org

**

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Sunday Memories of Jutta's Kitchen: This Is What the Journey Looks Like

Sunday Memories of Jutta's Kitchen that Stops for Nothing and Other Solstice Miracles

Ceres Gallery

Sunday Memories: The 1000 Mile Journey Of the Purple Shoes

The box was left outside the door the way a broken heart might have left their precious child or an abandoned kitten to someone who they knew would do the right thing.

Inside the box was the decision anyone would dread to make and a plea for help to make it. 

• "These shoes need to be thrown out.  I wore them for over 20 years... especially in my purple period..."

(And what New York woman didn't have a purple period?)

• "Could you throw them in the garbage for me?  I can't bear to.  I really loved them..."

I understood.  It is why tucked away in boxes were oxfords so ugly they looked hip and antique heels that no longer fit, black boots not worn past the age of 45 and unwearable platform shoes that failed to bring back the '70s.

Those and the loved-to-tattered purple shoes were not just protection from broken glass-filled, urine-soaked sidewalks of a city we both grew up in.  Those shoes let us walk our history and our story as we went from young to middle-aged and from youthful confusion to wise clarity.  Each time we, like Cinderella, slipped our foot into them, we were reminded in tangible colors and specific style of important names, momentous occasions and a multitude of details lost to aging memory and an overworked brain wondering where we put the house keys.

We stood our ground in those footwear as we challenged governments we knew to be immoral and children we knew to be adolescent.  Our sturdy shoes, our boots, our sandals, our too-high stilettos, our comfy flats all demanded our strength and complex beauty be acknowledged.  What we put on our feet was never an after-thought but the bases for our stride into a larger world as we insisted to be seen fully and wholly as extraordinary women.

To say goodbye, to surrender the past, to let go of remembering every step of how we got to who we are now... only a friend could take that box and answer that plea.

**
Related Posts:

Sunday Memories: Those Shoes Were Made For Talking

A Fearless and Moral Inventory

Summer Reruns: In The Still Of The Night The Sound Of Silence Is Revisited

During a visit to Sunnyside, Queens, we came back into my friend's building after errands. There behind the stairwell was an open door to an old fashion apartment, maybe the kind you would see if Scorsese made family movies.

"Super's apartment?" I asked.

"Yep."

And that made me wonder and yearn for those times when, on hot summer days, doors were left open.

Originally posted August 17, 2010













In those days, only the fancy apartments or rich people uptown had air conditioners.  So, during hot summer days and nights, Florence, along with all the neighbors, would prop open her front door and hope for a breeze to waft in from the stairwell's window facing Columbia Street.

From all those many opened doors, all the different lives would  drift up and down filling the stairs with television commercials, occasional conversations shouted from one room to the next and the smells of a billion things cooking for shabbos or Sunday dinner - all of it weaving in and out of the village of thirty-five apartments.

One late night at home, during a heat wave that had gone on for days and with only a tiny air conditioner in the bedroom, I propped open my front door in hopes of relief.  A breeze blew in from the airshaft.  And as it did, the cat ran out, unable to resist the cool of 100 year old marble floors.  I tried to catch him until, feeling better for the first time in days, I realized he had a good point.

Soon after, like Florence, I began opening my front door into a cool deep night.  The cat and I wandered the stairs, listening to our neighbors sleep and humming along with all the air conditioners in the airshaft.  And after our stroll, the two of us sat in the still and the silence.

I miss the normalcy of open doors during hot days and sleepless nights, and when my door is closed because the neighbors are awake, I miss my mother.
**Related Posts:

Wherever You Go, There You Are.  Sometimes in Queens

In the Still of the Night, the Sound of Silence

Walkin' After Midnight

The Silver Lining

Like the Chrysler Building, that sign had been waiting for me to look up, just for a second, and remember:

That at any given second of any given day I can remind myself of all the gifts given, all the chances sought and all the work created and then start the day over, right then and there, knowing who I am.


**
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The God of My Understanding Cannot Be Photoshopped

It Would Have Been Enough

Summer Reruns of Sunday Memories:Where I Still Could Find Her

Her New York began as a way of standing witness to a mother (Florence) and a city (New York) that, despite the brutality of dementia, illness and ultra-wealthy development, insisted on still being who and what they really were.  

Since Florence's death in 2008, what New York was became, at times, elusive and other times heartbreaking reminders of loss.  

Yet the exploration has never ended.  Small and big celebrations are still found in a city that refuses to completely die and in the spirit of a woman that continues to guide me forward, always.

Originally posted November 29, 2009

**

O'Keefe asked me to explain all this.

I said I was trying to illuminate where New York and Florence still were themselves even as they faded from recognizable forms.




















And now a year after Florence died and New York continued in its odd way and the home I grew up in now looks like a nice apartment for other people we never were, there are places still here and there, still persistently themselves ....















....that I go to and feel at home.

Wherever You Go, There You Are. Sometimes in Queens

It was just like what we had, growing up so long ago in our own corners of the city.  A decent pub.

That familiar daylight seeping in, the dark wood blanketing the walls, those high stools you slip onto as a feeling of greater kinder hands rises up to greet your tush and cradle you.

It was empty except for some guys scattered along the bar.  Two were doing construction in the neighborhood, finishing up their burgers.  Another, very tan and summery, contemplating going or not going or someone coming in, and in a quieter corner a man older than any bar I ever sat at, just sitting.

A talkative fellow came in, wanting to see the lunch menu.

"Lunch menu same as the dinner one," the waitress told him.

Mick ordered a really good looking chicken sandwich.

I had salmon on lots of salad.  I stared longingly at Mick's fries.  His beer looked really cute too.

When the bill came, it seemed a bit low.

"Half off for happy hour," the waitress told us.

That bar was just like my favorite bar, I told Mick afterwards.  Except it had food and didn't smell of cat pee. 

Next time... burgers.

**
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Sunday Memories of Old Homes and Family

Mick Andreano: Portraits

Donovan's Pub

This is 97 year-old Hyman.

And this is 97 year-old Hyman after we got yelled at by the bus driver for Hyman taking too long to get off at his stop.  (He is zipping off to hang out in Union Square Park.)

"That's not the way you speak to a veteran," I said to the bus driver. 

The lady with the Whole Food bags chimed in.  "Disrespectful!"

The bus driver, a young guy, grumbled something under his breath about this not being a tea party or that our socializing was holding people up...

But Hyman lost years of his life in a P.O.W. camp during World War II.  So we can fucking give him an extra 60 seconds that allows someone who knows his name to ask him how he's doing.

**
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The Exhaustion of Diaspora: Part Four- Hyman Comes to Visit

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Sunday Memories: The Home Inside Our Hearts

We all grew up here.

They on two different parts of the upper west side that could have been in different countries and me on the lower east side which often was a different country.

But when you know, in the midst of chaos and fear and loss, someone is a home for your heart, you don't quibble about addresses.

One we visited in a hotel room befitting for a 15 year-old runaway.

One lived with me when we were barely 17 or 18.

And I ... I always knew I would never be unmoored from the world as long as they still knew me.

Four decades of showing up for meals and memorials, reckonings and illness, celebrations and rare comfort.  We always knew - NO MATTER WHAT - we were always here, there and everywhere.  It was family and connection.  And sometimes, in dark corners of crushing moments, it was the only family and connection we had.

Modern life's interpretation of time and distance (whether to Seattle or Harlem) makes visits rare.   Still - NO MATTER WHAT -  how little or how often we send casual hellos, when home is needed to shelter a broken heart or share rare delight, we are here, there and everywhere.

One got married in a Halloween festival, dressed as a wench to her new husband's pirate.

And just today, the other in full colonial finery got married to the love of her life on the porch of a mansion once owned by a trouble-maker woman who defied all rules of her times.

And today, like any day  I see either of them - NO MATTER WHAT - my heart both weeps and dances with joy.    

**
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This is Her New York

Morris Jumel Mansion

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!!!HANDS ACROSS THE WATERS!!!

After years of toil, several continents, different cities and many burgers, Adrian Garcia Gomez and C.O. Moed are happy to announce their joint collaboration video, FUCKING HIM (1:46).

The piece asks the simplest of questions:

• What is fucking?
• What is love?
• What's the difference?
• When do you know?

Screenings will be posted at a later date.

***

Adrian Garcia Gomez is an interdisciplinary artist working in film/video, photography and illustration. His artwork, which is largely autobiographical, explores the complexities of race, immigration, gender, spirituality and sexuality. His short experimental films, photographs and drawings have exhibited around the world. He currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. (superadriancito.com)

C.O. Moed chronicles the heart and soul of a disappearing family and a city in the throws of extinction and evolution on IT WAS HER NEW YORK. A recipient of the Elizabeth George Grant for fiction and a Rockefeller Media Arts nominee, her short stories and dramatic works have been published in several anthologies and literary reviews. (myprivateconey.com and myprivateconey.blogspot.com)

**
Related Posts:

The Eyes Have It

Night Boat

The street was once a place where working people lived and businesses made things and bars served anyone who needed a drink and had a couple of bucks.

Someone took an eraser and wiped it clean.  Put life into the nooks and crannies that looked like a Walt Disney movie only with a ton of cigarettes, cell phones and almost no smiling.

The clothing store kept the old neon liquor sign to display the grit it had purchased for clothes only a few could afford.   In a city where church ladies and baseball fans were the only ones who wore hats, millinery stores seemed to be flourishing.  And cafes with exclusive gardens that had gatekeepers were packed with sockless loafers and dresses so short ... I still don't understand how they sit down and they sure as hell can't stand in those heels for more than five minutes.

But turning corners and choosing avenues trying to impress no one, all I had to do was look up and remember what it was like to float on a greater idea towards a richer world.

And again, I missed my mom and all the night walks we took on our way home from neighborhoods where working people lived and bars had cheap drinks for just a couple of bucks.

**
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Sunday Memories of Old Homes and Family

Sunday Memories: Where I Still Could Find Her

Night Cruise

Songs from the Second Floor

Sunday Memories: Higher Ground

Bells Are Ringing

Not a lot of guys know the old land-line wiring.  One guy didn't even have a clue where to start with the wall phone.

Mr. Verizon did.  He not only knew the wiring, he fixed the phone.

There in the middle of all his tools was a vase. 

"You need that to fix phone?"

"Nah.  I just pick up stuff from the dumpsters and the basement garbage.  I also just got that vise."

He even took home cats dumped in basements. 

Since almost everything in the apartment were hand-me-downs or found on the street - including the cats - we got to talking.

His family's been here since 1812 or 13 - a long, long time - and one branch owned Farrell's.  Not his branch though.  He wouldn't be working Verizon if it was.

Commiserating about the city going down the toilet, he shook his head.  "They're selling the city on an old reputation - tough, gritty, a real city... but it's not anymore."

Then he packed up his tools and vase and headed out to the next call.

**
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Sunday Memories: Playing Telephone

Sunday Memories: Even the Cat Was Found on the Street

Farrell's

Memories of a Sunday Drive

It was like stepping into a time machine.

A real freight elevator with a real gate with a real handle that made it go up and down and fast and slow and stop and start.

The guy grabbed the handle and up we flew.

I used to drive one of these, I said to the Mariner.

Well not drive, drive.  In 1975, it wasn't like girls were freight elevator operators.  But, fresh out of high school, every chance I got, working in the back channels of an old, respected office supplies store, I begged the freight elevator guy, a big burly guy at least 100 years old or his pimply 15 year old second hand to let me zoom the freight up and down.  It was the closest I got to driving a race car.

How did you get it to stop right on the floor, the Mariner asked.

Oh it was just like parallel parking.  Only vertical.

**

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Look Back in Love at Home

You Never Expect What Dana Says

Bits and pieces of Dana are slowly beginning to visit other places.   

Yet, she is like a lighthouse.   

When you least expect it, her brilliant light explodes into clarity and words that change the world.  David, her son takes as many down as he can and shares them with me.

Over the next while, old stories and new moments of Dana will be noted.  What Dana Says is worth pulling close and holding tight. 

**

The dentist called.

"Overdue?  It sounds like I'm giving birth to new teeth."

[to David]

"She's still laughing."

**
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Sunday Moments and Memories of What Dana Says

What Dana Says: Why I Visit Dana or How I Keep Writing

Same Park. Different Reason to Run Fast

It was already a wonderful evening.  Incredible music and the perfect night air to stroll through.

Sauntering into Bryant Park, I marveled at the couples hanging about, the concession stand like a cafe in a French movie and all these folding chairs around for people to sit and enjoy.

(It always surprises me how you don't see people stealing them.)

Past a grove of trees, there was suddenly several ping pong tables and lots of guys with paddles lining the edges, waiting patiently. 

Like Mr. Godwin.

"I'm an O.K. ping pong player"

 Mr. Godwin is from Nigeria and if it wasn't for certain facts about certain things, he and his mother would be back there.  She had been a very successful milliner there.  But sometimes you gotta go where there is something more important that homeland.

Here in New York Mr. Godwin was getting ready to go to APEX to study automotive stuff.  Meanwhile, as he waited for school to start, he came to Bryant Park, signed up for ping pong and played all night for hours.

There was lots of running and dashing and jumping and slamming.

"I used to work on 40th Street many years ago.  There was no ping pong then,"  I told Mr. Godwin.

No indeed.  There was not much of anything.  Except a lot of bad, bad, bad people taking a break from crime, a lot of drugs, a lot of selling of drugs, and in the middle of this dangerous neighborhood, the deserted walking path between 40th where the office was and 42nd Street where an old bar served Happy Hour from 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and had little hotdogs and other cute things to eat for dinner.. 

And at 4 p.m., especially on Thursdays and Fridays, all of us - all the young girls and every single one of the old broads, including Mary who was easily 60 or 70 - all of us would make a wild dash from one side of Bryant Park to the other.  For someone almost not quite five feet tall and about three feet wide, Mary ran fast.

There was no table, no ball, no paddles between our running from one spot to another.

And there was no Mr. Godwin, shyly beaming as he described how he worked hard to be an O.K. ping pong player.

**
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THE LIONESSES RULE THE PRIDE AND MARRY IF THEY WANNA...

This piece first posted in 2008, while Florence was declining, I was in touch with the woman she had been in love with, involved with and in war with since they were teenagers. 

Today the highest court of our country has recognized gay marriage as a right, making gay marriage, well, just marriage marriage.  

As I have in the past, I wonder what my mom and her lover's life would have been like if only the world had loved their love as they had.  

And knowing Florence more and more as I enter the ages she began to set herself free, I wonder if, in fact, she would have even gotten married.

How wonderful to think that if she had been alive and well today she could say "I do" or "I don't" just like everyone else.

** 

THE LIONESSES RULE THE PRIDE

 Florence walking in the Gay Pride March

1982
All the other gay seniors rode.

In the convertible, on the bus, in wheelchairs.

But not Florence.

She walked.

She was in her 60s. She had waited her entire life to walk down a street as who she really was. And she wasn't going to give up that walk for anybody or anything.

Home

Whether it is 4 a.m. or midnight, leaving home is never terrifying when you know you get to come back.

Home is the place where all the roommates are gone and all the ripped off clothes have been flung against every single wall and it's a hurricane outside and you're laughing so hard and the beat-up furniture that had been left behind in 1980 has never looked so beautiful and your 1950s bathroom so bright and cute because suddenly someone you like is happy to be lounging around with you.

Home the place you run to when your heart is so broken the cab driver keeps throwing you tissues.

Home is the place where, after you wake up to in the middle of the night, uncertain and worried, you pray in until your heart calms down and hope returns.

Home is where your parents and your friends' parents, all raised in brutal poverty, got to go to school for free and then college for free and become the artists and thinkers and musicians that made the neighborhood exciting which made all the other artists and thinkers and musicians move here because home was a place you could afford the rent as you went out into the world to create amazing things. 

Home is where you never go to sleep and when you look up at the clock it is 3 a.m. but you lost track of time because you got deliciously lost writing a story about what it was like to grow up in New York City, riding the train by yourself when you were seven or rolling sanitation truck tires down Columbia Street.  And you look outside the window and there's a riot going on so you go downstairs to check it out.

Home is the watertowers and the smokestacks.  Not trees.

Home is the city you grew up in, doing normal things like performing bluegrass in the subways and theater on the streets and demonstrating against wars and nuclear bombs and homophobic assholes and you could do it here because your parents and their parents and all the neighbors,  everyone  all made sure that's what you could do at home.

Home to millions of New Yorkers is the place they were born in, defying all the rules and getting to the point fast, and that's why in the movies when you want a character to be different than Barbie and Ken you give them a New York accent.

Home to millions of New Yorkers is the place they immigrated to with nothing in their pockets except their individuality and their dreams and goals and they got to make this city amazing because they could afford the rent. 

And that's the reason New York is the center of the Universe. 

Because it's home.  Not to an expensive apartment or loft or luxury building with two entrances depending on your income, but a land where everyone is welcomed to the table.  Including the people who, because they had affordable rents and could do all these amazing things, made it an amazing home for everyone.

After all, isn't that why everyone keeps moving here?  Because of all those interesting people?  Doing amazing things?

After all, if all those people weren't here, what would New York be? 

I don't know what it would be but I can tell you what it wouldn't be.  It wouldn't be New York. 

This Is Not A Movie Set

It's not an exotic street.

It's not a edgy photo of a "real" city.

It's not art.

It's not affect.

It's 27th Street.

Sunday Memories of When This Was Normal

Amy put out a call to all of us who contributed to Shades of Blue: writers on depression, suicide and feeling blue (Fall 2015, Seal Press) asking us to write something about writing our particular 'shades of blue'.

It meant remembering a life that now feels as far away as Mars.

And that was just it.  Writing “Nothing Helps, Except…” brought me back to the decades I spent living on Mars – a barren landscape, barely hospitable that occasionally promised me that life existed there.   It took decades of heart-breaking-open work to heal and then transform my assumption that life was and always would be so bleak.

As I recovered my soul, remembering how it FELT to live like that became a distant memory, not a daily reality.  And, quite frankly, it was nice to forget how waking up to morning was often like crashing through glass at 90 miles an hour.  (While I was drafting “Nothing Helps…” I found in one diary of that time my describing one morning as “I woke up screaming ‘I’m tired of waking up backwards’.”)

On top of stepping back into those long-ago emotional layers, it was daunting to fit a complex and repetitive journey into 3,000 words or less.  Many false starts, lots of Buddhist practice, more false starts, even more Buddhist practice.   Nothing helped.

Then one day, I visited with someone I loved very much who lives on the other side of the world and practices a much different religion.   We were talking about the anthology, when without thinking I blurted out, “Planning my suicide was the only thing that kept me going.  For years."

And that’s when I saw how I had traveled out that brokenness and returned to who I had always been.  The rewriting of the piece still took tons of prayer but once I got through the sadness of how I had lived for so long, I began asking fellow writers, some who barely knew me, to give feedback.  I appreciate their courage and honesty that helped me make the piece even stronger, for I can’t imagine it an easy thing to read how someone lived with such self-hate for so long.

An unexpected benefit came out of all this.  That pain is no longer a memory I held at a distance, but a cherished and respected one.  I wake up every day so happy – happy that I don’t live on Mars; I live on Earth and there’s life here.  Yet, because I reopened those old days, I now also see where that shadow still seeps into my hopes and dreams.

Writing that piece and writing this has strengthened my muscles of gratitude and prayer and each day I take a bigger step back from the ledge and back into my birthright.

**

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It Only Takes One Person

On the Way to Get the Cat Shaved

It happens only once a year.

Jupiter, the 18 pound plush monster-cat,  needed to get his fur all shaved off.

That meant shoving said beast into a huge plastic box, which has a handle on it to give the illusion a human being could actually pick the box up while there was an animal in it.  No, you cannot.

I get that one's arms are too short to box with God.  Mine are also definitely too short to carry this plastic box.  So,  getting to the corner of the street headed west to shaving-it-all-off-land looked like a scene out of Benny Hill, only not as funny and dangerous to anyone within a 2-foot radius.

Holding the box, jumping out of the way of marauding cars turning right at 90 miles an hour, and watching a sea of yellow cabs whoosh by already filled with paying customers, my heart and my arms sank.

Until this bright, shiny, new, van-like taxi flashed lights at me from all the way on the other side of the avenue and then somehow, without crashing into anything, cut across four lanes of traffic to pull up to the corner.

Mr. Emmanuel A. from Ghana.

Usually, taxicab drivers just want to know if their back seat is going to be the same after you leave.

But sometimes, slipping into the back seat of a cab is like a homecoming, like running into your neighbor of 40 years at the supermarket or bumping into an old pal at the bar.  

And it was no different stepping into the chariot of Mr. Emmanuel, who immediately wanted to know all about a now VERY unhappy feline banging about against plastic walls.  And also if I could direct him to where I was going as he had only been on the job for a month.

Mr. Emmanuel loved being in New York!   He loved driving a taxi in New York!  He loved living in New York!  He loved the United States Government because at least when there was corruption here you could do something about it!

In Ghana?  Mr. Emmanuel just rolled his eyes and then told short horror stories of bribes and injustice.

But back to more wonderful and happy things to talk about!  He loved animals!  Because back in Ghana he had been a farmer with a degree from the university in animal husbandry.   And yes one day he would like to practice that here, maybe even in New York.

Was there anything he missed, I asked.

Leaving his animals, he told me.   Including his 22 ducks.

The way he said that, like other times of hearing necessary diaspora, hurt-openned my heart a bit bigger. 

Before dragging out the plastic monstrosity to the famous Elly and her magic shaver, I told Mr. Emmanuel he must, he just must get his animal husbandry license here.

We need more citizens who hate corruption and, instead, love their animals, especially their 22 ducks.

The end result:  Jupiter with a "lion-cut" which actually makes him look like a small poodle.

**
Related Posts:

Another Night Home on the Range

Your Arms Are Too Short to Box with God

Benny Hill

Sunday Memories: Another Small Small Small World After All

Sunnyside Up

Taxi

The Exhaustion of Diaspora - Part Six: Home Where My Love Lies Waiting

Townehouse Grooming

Taking Flight

Goggla aka Laura Goggin aka Goggla always took the best pictures of the East Village, our neighbors, beloved bars, the sky and sometimes it seemed even the wind.

Then some red-tailed hawks moved into the neighborhood.  Christo and Dora.  And Goggla turned her camera on them.

This past Saturday night, up five or six flights of old marble stairs - because sometimes you gotta climb up high to see birds -  in a building still overlooked by developers, in an apartment where the bathtub in the kitchen transformed into a bar, in a home lived in for 40 years by the same person, Goggla's photos of Christo and Dora covered the wall and amazed our eyes.

And now they can amaze yours.

Goggin Photography

Laura Goggin on Photoshelter.com

**
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Part One: Home Work