Life: December 2003 Archives
I just finished a long, long week in New York City, working at my day job that of course respects no 9-5 boundaries. Then a long, long trip home to DC on the Acela train--quiet car. How eventful! The city is packed with holiday shoppers from around the world and, since my office is right in Times Square, I spend most of the week in the thick of humankind, a camera-snapping, oggling, gawking, pushing, shoving, shouldering, jostling press of people. I always find that this sort of experience does wonders for me rhythmically. It awakens me!
The weather has been electric the entire week: big snow over the weekend giving way to melting-point temperatures on M-T-W. The city, as always, is fully scaffolded, block upon block, and every scaffold traps a foot or more of snow that leaks upon us all--native, resident, visitor--as we pass underneath. A bit like being in an urban rainforest. Then on Thursday, rain. Lots of rain. Rain to take the crease out of your pants. Rain to pound old newspapers back into an oatmealy pulp, wash them down the sewer. Rain to pool two inches deep, three feet wide at every corner, exactly where the curb slopes to accept the handicapped (and the businesswoman with roller-bag in tow). There you find the blackest, vilest looking water in the world. And then Thursday evening, a friend sweeps through Manhattan: wind. That old animator. Big, gusty, strong and cold. All night outside my hotel room window it bangs a scaffold, thump thump thump. I like it. It keeps me company in that lonesome place. And this morning? Blue skies above New York. Wind had trucked the cold in from Canada. That feels good!
Today I led a business writing class for real estate consultants. We don't teach in the corporate world, we lead. It was fun spending the day talking with businesspeople about punctuation, style, audience, tone, purpose. They make eager and extremely interested classmates. The best part for me, though, must be the classroom itself: twenty-three floors up, wrapped in windows overlooking the Hudson River and the city--on this gloriously blue and bright day in the middle of December.
Penn Station a completely exotic zoo of travelers. A salesman here, an interior designer there. A retired couple dressed to the nines. A grungy, bearded, leather-faced guy in knit stocking cap looking like one of Bad Santa's elfs. A priest, a cop, a musician, an investment banker, a student. A man gnawing a giant pretzel. A woman snoring. Somebody reading a Michael Crighton novel. Somebody else reading The Wall Street Journal, already yesterday's news. Somebody staring at nothing, dog-tired and rumpled, wondering where the week went, maybe his youth too. Or maybe just thinking about home and a pot roast.
Home. The Acela to Washington. Two hours, forty-five minutes. And on the way I start work on a poem whose title will be "Bessings to Daddy from Sophocles." I like that because I never thought about Sophocles having a daddy, or about loving him. I can tell I'm going to like thinking about it.
