this old anvil

Brendan spent his recent spring break in New York City.  His older brother, Nick, got to do the same back when he was fifteen, and now it was Brendan’s turn to get the grand tour, conducted by his two uncles.  (My younger brother Bob’s companion, Jerry – they’ve been together over twenty years – has always been referred to as “uncle” by my boys and my sister’s kids as well.)

They had a great time: a couple of shows (Broadway and Off-Broadway); Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty; and restaurants – my epicure brother and brother-in-law know where to chow down in the Gotham city.  When they started this thing with Nick, I kind of wondered, why, at age fifteen?  Turns out it was a brilliant insight.  At that age a kid has a certain modicum of maturity but also still the capacity to be “wowed.”  And at sixteen, well, he’ll be working a part-time job to get some money to buy a car and not have the time to spare.

Brendan was telling me about “real” Chinese food, “like they have in Chinatown” the other day and I got to thinking about my visits to New York and the city’s history.  Like how Brooklyn was an isolated small-town surrounded by dairy farms until the bridge bearing its name was opened in the 1880s.  Or how Central Park used to be a swamp full of poison oak and sumac.

Wall Street is named for a real wall that stood there to defend against Indian attacks.  Broadway was a trail along which early Dutch settlers could see deer and mountain lions.  Mannahatta, as its original inhabitants referred to it, was a hilly, rocky island criss-crossed with rivers and creeks.  Over the years, the hills were leveled, their soil used to fill streambeds and so provide the base on which to build the present towering metropolis.

Now look, this is not a screed against the spread of concrete and steel at the expense of Mother Nature.  What’s got me in this “New York State of Mind” (sorry, Billy Joel) is not the havoc we, as a species wreak on nature.  It’s what we as individuals do to ourselves.

It’s Janet I’m thinking of.  There won’t be any weekend roadtrip to San Antonio.  She called me last night and told me what I had suspected.  She has been living with a guy – who had moved out over some issue or other – who is now back.  So, I’m the odd man out.  That’s okay.  We weren’t in love with each other.  But there was an attraction, and maybe it could have led….

It was a painful conversation.  She didn’t like telling me we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore.  And I didn’t like hearing it. 

It’s serial monogamy, all over again.  I think there’s something unnatural about it.  I think the need for exclusivity in a relationship springs more from ego and a desire to control than from love.  And suppressed feelings and desires will come out, eventually, in some form or another.

It still rains in New York, and that water, which used to flow into now-gone rivers and creeks has to go somewhere.  The city maintains a massive and elaborate system of pumps that keep some 12 million gallons of water a day from overwhelming the city.  That’s on a day when it doesn’t rain. 

When it rains, there’s no soil in Manhattan to absorb it.  The streams that used to carry it off are gone.  The water runs down the streets into sewers that were laid a hundred and twenty years ago, above the subway lines (they were built later).  Back on September 11, 2001 with its resultant power failures, if emergency generators hadn’t kept certain key pumps in operation, the Hudson River could have burst through the tunnels that connect New York’s and New Jersey’s subways, inundating the island borough.

Relationships are like New York.  You think you’ve suppressed all those desires and urges but they’re still there, like all that water.  Underground.  But it’s going to come up again, somehow, someway. 

C’mon Janet.  You know you like me.  Don't wait till the pumps fail.