Linnetontheleaf

Each morning, I commute 23 miles from my home in Maplewood, NJ to my job in midtown Manhattan, one block north of Radio City, and back again in the evening. A New Jersey transit train carries me for 21.3 miles; I walk the remaining 1.7 miles. I have done some version of this NJ-NY commute for 34 years, astonishingly, first from Jersey City, then from more-suburban Maplewood after we moved there in 1996. It’s a rare day that I get a ride to or from the station in Maplewood, and even rarer that I succumb to the dubious temptations of the NY city subway.  (I’m convinced it often takes longer.) I have walked in all weathers, from frigid cold and blizzard conditions, in torrential rain and beastly heat. I have walked when hungover, heavily pregnant, and when plagued by plantar fasciitis, cracked heels, sciatica and morning sickness. But most days I feel fine, thankfully, and the weather is usually unremarkable or, occasionally, splendid, and I enjoy my daily excursion and all the sights and sounds I experience along the way.

My morning itinerary begins with a .5 mile walk from my house, on a suburban street in our leafy Essex County suburb, population about 24,000, to the train station. It’s downhill most of the way in the morning – I wish it were backwards, since I sometimes dread the uphill trek at the end of a tiring day or in the worst heat of a summer afternoon. The downhill walk can be treacherous in winter weather; ice collects on our sloping, shaded driveway, melting daily and refreezing smooth as glass overnight. In years of negotiating this minefield, I’ve fallen only once, though as I grow older, I don’t know whether to question my sanity for venturing forth in risky conditions or to squelch my misgivings as a biddy’s jitters.

In deepest winter, day is scarcely dawning when I leave the house, and the sun has long set when I return. I remind myself to consciously enjoy the pearly morning skies and the blazing sunsets, and to listen to the rhythmic, throaty hoots of mourning doves, the monosyllabic conversations of coupled cardinals, and the rattling flight calls of robins.  (A few robins overwinter in our area, though there are many, many more in the warmer months. I always watch for their return in the early spring.)  We don’t have many deer in our neighborhood, thankfully, since I’m a gardener, but we do have other forms of suburban wildlife.  Fairly often, the pungent odor of skunk hangs in the morning air, and I have seen raccoons scurrying back to their beds in the trees after a night carousing in Maplewood’s garbage cans.  Little brown rabbits graze the lawns, freezing motionless as I pass by, and I know why, since predators abound.  Hawks often float overhead, and coyotes and foxes are sometimes seen skulking along. I’m impressed with how ably these predators have adapted to urban life.

Three blocks along suburban residential streets (where I know every house and front garden by heart, observing new paint jobs and plantings with interest) brings me to Memorial Park, 25 acres of grass, ball fields and playgrounds laid out in the 1920s by the Olmsted Brothers (of Central Park fame). I walk past the adorable Civic House, built in 1929 in the Arts and Crafts style, with leaded-glass windows and a slate roof; in days of yore, I would stop at the Civic House each evening to pick up our children, who as kindergartners spent their after-school hours here in a town childcare program.  My route also takes me along the East Branch of the Rahway River, spanned by several quaint bridges.  The Rahway is usually tame, a chuckling little brook at the bottom of a six-foot deep stone-walled canal, but a heavy rain can bring it to full gushing life, flowing swiftly and bearing along substantial tree limbs and other debris. It has been known to crest its walls after unusually heavy downpours.

A great egret takes up residence in the canal nearly every summer, and I greet him each day as he stands motionless, fishing near a little weir. I’ve also seen the occasional blue heron, and once, surprisingly, an American bittern.

Flowering cherry trees line the canal-side walk, bursting into luxuriant clouds of pink and white bloom in early spring, virginal as Victorian brides.  It is breathtaking to walk beneath them; I always feel I should salute them like sacred beings.  Sadly, this past winter’s late snowstorms felled several of the largest specimens.  As I greet the flowering trees in April, so do I the lilacs as well the following month, pausing morning and evening during their brief bloom time to savor their sweetly heady perfume.

Across the path from the canal is a low-lying playing field used in season by the sports teams of nearby Columbia High School. When our children were small, it was flooded in winter to create an ice-skating area, but that seems to have been discontinued, although the little frame Skate House still stands in the field. Old-time residents describe great town-wide winter gatherings at the pond and Skate House, which sound to me like a scene from IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

The flooded field used to attract ducks and geese, who would forage in the waters when the ice would melt. I always enjoy seeing ducks tipped over, tails upright, as they feed underwater.  I was also tickled to see a duck slip and fall on the ice one morning, its big flat feet sliding out from under him as he sat down hard on his feathered bottom.  Barn swallows enjoy this field as well, darting over it like stunt pilots, often daringly low, in their ceaseless quest for insects.  The birds raise their young beneath one of the park bridges in a colony of cup-shaped mud nests. When the bridge needed repair recently, Maplewood bird-lovers successfully petitioned to have the work postponed until the nestlings had fledged.

I negotiate the long but gentle slope up to the train station, past the large field where the music festival Maplewoodstock is held each July. This is also a favorite sledding hill. One recent summer, a mockingbird always stationed himself at the top of a lamp-post here, singing his heart out every morning. He must have moved south as winter approached (though many of these birds remain in the area year-round), or some worse fate befell him, as one morning, he had vanished. I still find myself looking and listening for him as I pass his lamp-post!

There is no need to waste words on the travesty which is New Jersey Transit, the agency responsible for the next stage of my commute, the 21.3-mile ride through the Oranges and Newark, across the Meadowlands and beneath the Hudson River to Penn Station. It used to be a fairly model rapid transit system, but increasingly starved of funds and bereft of leaders and advocates, it now provides commuters with decidedly substandard service, inadequate equipment and frequent delays and cancellations. Despite all this, I read my books, chat with my neighbors, and enjoy bits of trackside scenery, such as the wall of brilliant graffiti near Newark Broad Street station, and the ospreys which perch on power poles in the Meadowlands. (A signal indicator of an ecosystem’s health, the birds had declined precipitously due to pollution and rampant development, but have returned as the area has been gradually restored.)

But this essay is about my walk, so let’s pick up again outside Penn Station, a bland architectural crime perpetrated in the 1960s on the 1910 masterpiece of McKim, Mead and White. I emerge from the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere onto the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan with 650,000 other passengers who pass through the station each day, and begin my 1.2 mile walk uptown.  I have taken several routes north and south through the years, depending on construction and traffic patterns, and occasionally to accommodate shopping or other errands on my way. My current uptown itinerary takes me first north for a number of blocks, along Seventh Avenue to Times Square. (I take a different route back to Penn at the end of the day.)

After years of walking these blocks, I’m intimately familiar with the sights and sounds along the way, and I look and listen for them each day, just as I greet my mockingbird and my cherry trees.  For instance, at the intersection of Seventh and 34th Street, across from Macy’s (‘the largest store in the world’), I always prick up my ears for the East Indian newspaper vendor who chants ‘good morning, New York Times, Post, Daily News’ in a pleasant, murmuring monotone.  One of the last of a dying breed, he is there every morning, having collected his papers at the crack of dawn, and staked out his usual spot at this corner.

This account is not a travel document, so I won’t focus on the monuments and attractions along the way, although there are several sights which interest me.  For instance, there’s the plaque on the Macy’s building which proclaims ‘here the motion picture began.’  Really?? The plaque goes on to say that on April 23, 1896, Thomas Edison first projected a moving picture in Koster & Bail’s Music Hall, formerly on the site.  The Motion Picture Industry, the vague entity which affixed the plaque, is apparently incorrect, however, as there were considerably earlier projections.

TO BE CONTINUED!

When I left my office last Monday evening, a mini-demonstration in support of Trump/Pence was proceeding up Sixth Avenue. A little band of whooping supporters dressed in stripes and stars rollicked down the sidewalk in rampageous high spirits.  ‘Oh no,’ I thought irritably. ‘I’m going to have to deal with a sideshow all the way to Penn Station!?’

I didn’t have to; that was the one and only political display I witnessed that evening — but my reaction seems quaint to me now, and blissfully naive. Trump isn’t something I’ll have to deal with for 20 blocks, but for 4 long years!

When the unthinkable occurred last Tuesday, like most liberals and Democrats (and maybe many Republicans too), I was profoundly stunned. I walked around in zombie numbness for several days, knowing that eventually the novocaine of shock was going to wear off, and that sucker was going to hurt like hell.

And now it does. It’s a grief like any other, I guess, with its stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and (ultimately) acceptance. With faint interest, I note that my mood is much like that after my parents died — at first there’s almost an excitement; it’s engrossing to be the recipient of such decisive news. You reel a bit, sure, but you might even mistakenly believe you’re doing well. Then reality sinks in, and you glimpse the long, difficult road before you — to come to terms with a very big fact that will alter so much about your life and your mental landscape — and in the case of this election, so much about our country as well (I fear).

So here we are, taking our first steps down that road. I won’t offer advice or comfort; I have none; I only know that we must walk this place.

This morning on my train commute through New Jersey’s swampy meadowlands, I saw one of those ospreys I wrote about last time. Though they’re rather common, city-dwellers don’t get a lot of opportunities to see them, so it’s always a thrill for me. They’re majestic — over 2 feet tall, with bold brown and white markings. They usually perch on a branch or power pole surveying their favorite fishing grounds, as this one was doing this morning.
My joy at spotting this bird seemed to spill over into my entire morning. I found my eyes somehow ‘primed’ to appreciate the beauty and meaning around me — an adorable child in a stroller, the bright stripes on a woman’s bag, a cooling breeze on this humid morning. In the same way that a cross word with your mate can make you grumpy all day long, my brief encounter with the osprey brightened my whole day.  Thank you, Pandion haliaetus!

Photo by Yathin S. Krishnappa

Most weekday mornings and evenings, I am on a commuter train through northern NJ into NYC and back. I’ve done this for an astonishing 20 years, and have mostly enjoyed it (except when the trains don’t run well), as there is lots of interest to see along the way, not just suburban backyards of sandboxes and swingsets. Today I made a partial list.
Stretches of incredible graffiti on the walls of the track cuts — I have some censorious elderly misgivings about graffiti, but sometimes it’s so ingenious in its design and eye-popping in its color that I love it anyway. I especially appreciate the humor of scrawled remarks such as ‘my mom thinks I’m at a sleepover.’
A parking lot where dozens of day laborers gather every morning to seek work. Movers, landscapers and contractors who’ve hired them report that they are excellent workers.  I find this touching, sad and wholly admirable: working like this, far from home in the US, is the best way to support their families (I bet nearly all the money is selflessly sent home to Guatamala, El Salvador, etc.), whom they can now never see.
I’m also touched by the little scenes which reveal homely human habitation of the most industrial areas along the route. There’s an old-school picnic table outside a foundry, where I often see arriving workers sitting chatting with their morning cups of coffee, a companionable scene.
The Meadowlands, after decades of industrialization and pollution, have been cleaned up in recent years, so that they now support lots of wildlife, including several nesting pairs of osprey. I’ve seen the occasional majestic white-headed osprey perched on a power pole, also countless egrets, cormorants, blue herons and red-wing blackbirds. Bald eagles are also said to nest in the area. Isn’t that nifty, just a few miles from New York City?

I was recently lucky enough to spend a couple of days in New Orleans, though with the very specific and limited goal of visiting a college with one of our offspring, so we confined ourselves to Uptown and didn’t have much time for sightseeing. (Or even for music or dining, NOLA’s two great triumphs.) Still, I found just walking down the street to be a highly aesthetic experience, because the balmy air was deliciously, seductively perfumed with the scent of confederate jasmine and gardenias. Where I live in the NE near NYC (zone 6 for you gardeners), these are diminutive houseplants. In New Orleans, jasmine vines clamber over walls and fences in jungly billows, and gardenias grow to be the size of minivans. Both are laden with flowers, luxuriantly spangling their dark glossy leaves. It’s like being in the world’s finest perfumerie, though no human creation could match the sweetness of these fragrances.

I’ve been preoccupied with a work situation today which is really preying on my mind. It will probably blow over and be forgotten quickly but feels major at the moment. I wish I were stronger-minded and could push these intrusive troubled thoughts aside, but I rarely can.
I recently had a little lesson in priorities, however. I had a pretty severe health scare and spent a couple of days anxiously awaiting test result. During that time, I found, nothing else could shake me: all that mattered was that lab report. I barely batted an eye when I dropped my phone in the toilet!
It shouldn’t take worrying about alarming lab results to get one’s priorities straight, but I guess sometimes it helps.

Ever heard a child make an adorable comment which totally changed your view of something?  Seeing things through the wondering eyes of a newer resident of the planet can be refreshing and delightful. Our son was especially good at this when he was little, constantly delivering messages from the new, unfamiliar world which he inhabited.

One day he spotted our parish priest walking through our suburban town. Having never seen him street clothes, only in clerical robes, our son had formed a comical misapprehension, we learned when he excitedly pointed him out to us as ‘the king!’. I also loved his comment when he first glimpsed the New York skyline as we drove towards the city, which was suddenly laid out before us in all its vastness. Gasping in awe, our little boy exclaimed, ‘a castle!’.

I learned so much from hearing these precious comments every day during our son’s young childhood.  They reminded me to continually cultivate a sense of wonder.

I recently cleaned out a file on one of my computers which contained a number of personal items from my children’s younger years — among them, several invitations to theme birthday parties of which I have almost no memory. I brought up first one, then another, asking myself, ‘did we really have a Mean Girls birthday party? a  dinosaur party?’ It’s unsettling to have no recollection of these milestone family events!

I assert that I actually have a very good memory (my family is always astonished by the specific details I can dredge up about people, places and incidents in our past), but that there’s just too much to remember!  Even precious memories are constantly being crowded out by new events and information — like that scene in  Inside Out where workers weed out the old to make space for the new in long term memory.

The process is inevitable, but I wish I had better conscious control of it — instead of agonizing over that speeding ticket, the time my boss reamed me out, or the argument with my spouse, how much better it would be to savor recollections of those birthday parties!

I started this blog, oh so long ago now, with such high hopes! I’ve always written (both as employment and for pleasure) and hoped that blogging would open new doors for my work. But I was surprised to realize how vulnerable I felt exposing my life and feelings online. It made me question whether I was really a writer, if I wasn’t prepared to lay bare my personal secrets. Too distressed to continue, I eventually abandoned the project and resumed my hermit ways.
But helplessly, obsessively, I kept writing — it’s an addiction, a form of therapy, an outlet, a pastime, a friend. In my four decades of putting pen to paper and fingers to keys, I’ve amassed shelves full of journals, long accounts of family trips, essays, poems and song lyrics. I admit that I am powerless over the written word!
So I’m reviving this blog, with a more outward focus this time (since I found personal revelation so uncomfortable), in the hope of finding readers for the words I’m driven to write.

Having written all my life, I thought blogging might be a good outlet for me. I admired how Julie Powell had brokered her Julia Child cooking project into a book deal, and thought maybe I could follow suit on some level.
But I was surprised to discover myself strangely shy online, unwilling to reveal enough about myself to make Linnet very interesting! I didn’t realize how much I cherished my privacy, and how unwilling I was to expose myself and family to public scrutiny.  And unfortunately, these hermit-like impulses seem quite antithetical to blogging!
I considered this a failing at first (a uniquely 21st century one), but have gradually accepted that I’m just not cut out for a tell-all sort of project.  Maybe not even a tell-some kind of project!

But there must be alternatives, surely, that will keep me writing publicly without making me so intensely uncomfortable, and my new year’s resolution is to find them.  So the Linnet will live, I hope!