we interupt this season for a reminder what spring feels like...

Today is the second day of spring season in New York. Yesterday and today have been completely perfect days after a week of bitter cold, and it is hard to think of life as anything but pleasant with such weather.

Winter will return, but today I have my windows open and the fan on low. A cool breeze is blowing through, and I hear the voices of children playing outside. Franklin the dog and I had a long walk this morning ... he chased a squirrel ... life is good.

tests are over

The chimes rang out this afternoon at about 5:15 to signal the end of this year's General Ordination Exams (GOEs). The senior ordination track students have been taking three hour tests twice a day since Wednesday (They only had one test on Friday). These tests are administered by the national Episcopal church.

We heard a round of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus and then Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Those of us who live on campus have been quietly slipping down halls and walkways, with signs plastered on the hallways asking for quiet during the testing periods.

cold

The winds started a few days ago. Franklin the dog and I began our morning walk towards the Chelsea Piers, but the wind was too cold as it came rushing across the Hudson. We turned around.

Now the winds have died down and the forecast is for warmer weather.

It is often colder in Indianapolis than in New York, but I didn't spend as much time outside on really cold days. So I am quickly relearning wrapping up skills.

new day, new year, same old blogger

I feel like I have been riding a rocket since moving to NYC and starting work at the Seminary.

Having been off for more than a week, I have had an opportunity to reflect on last year.

I am mostly without dirt on my hands these days ... there are some volunteer opportunities at the seminary that I hope to take advantage of this next year.

Living where one works means that I can go a couple of weeks at a time without leaving a 3 block area of Chelsea. This is not healthy. I am committed to having non-seminary experiences, going to the movies once a week with a friend, and finally starting to do some museum visits, something I haven't had much time to do until now.

Now that the holiday season is over, I think there will be a period when getting around Manhattan will be a bit easier.

against the dark lord

I.
Partner and I walked to the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue on Saturday morning and bought our copies of the last Harry Potter book. This is not nearly as thrilling as Shelley's experience getting her copy.

The weather Saturday was much cooler than the humid week preceding it, and I ended up reading the entire book, finally ending at 12:30 am.

The best way to experience these novels is on a long car drive listening to the voices of Jim Dale reading the book. His creative interpretive reading is far superior to the actors in the movie versions. The Harry Potter books were great fun to read, but I will not be reflecting about passages that I read through the series.

II.
On Sunday I started reading Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Woman, and was surprised at similarity in tone (emerging adolescent, in hiding). Except her book was not a fantasy or an entertainment, and the people she wrote about were real. The epilogue at the end lets us know that it did not turn out well. The dark lord of her book, Adolph Hitler, is not toppled in time to save Anne, and instead we learn that only one person from the hidden Annex survived the war, her father. The rest suffered brutal deaths in the camps.

lady bird, gardener

I.

It was in late Spring, 1971, and I won a high school speech contest in Waco that was sponsored by the Garden Clubs. The theme was the environment, and I remember that I had read some of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring in preparing for it. The world felt scary in 1971 -- we were in an extended war in Vietnam, and there had been several riots in major cities in the preceding summers, my head was full of the apocalyptic warnings of my Baptist faith, and the Cold War was still on. I am sure that I was adamant that we must do something right away. But I cannot remember what it is that I wanted us to do, nearly 40 years later.

Somerset Maughn once wrote in his memoirs that politicians off prove that the gift of speech is often not followed by the gift of thought.

But as a result of winning, I was invited to speak at a regional luncheon of the Garden Clubs that was held at the Austin Country Club. It was a well-lit room, full of ladies with hats and soft pastel dresses, mostly older. I was a factory worker's son from South Waco, and felt quite out of place. The main speak was Lady Bird Johnson, the former First Lady. She wore a simple blouse and skirt, no hat. "Lyndon and I just got back from Acapulco," I heard her say to the woman who was in charge of the event. We all sat at a head table.

She asked me about Waco, always speaking in a soft quiet voice. After I gave my speech, she reached over and whispered to me that it was a real barn burner.

II.

Years later, when I lived in Austin, a friend and I started walking each day around Town Lake, the small lake in the middle of the downtown. There were a series of crushed granite paths that went along each side of the lake shore past landscaped hills, grasses, flowering trees and wildflower patches. Everybody said that Lady Bird Johnson was responsible for these beautiful pathways along the lake.

My first spring living in DC, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the city, bulbs blooming on almost every corner, flowering trees and shrubs, making spring one very long production of wave after wave of color. In Lady Bird's White House Diary, she wrote about going out with the garden club ladies and planting 500,000 daffodils along Rock Creek Parkway. She inspired, pushed and prodded people to help beautify Washington, DC.

Hidden on the South Lawn of the White House is a secret children's garden, completely surrounded by trees and shrubs. Mrs. Johnson developed that garden with its rock paths. Inside it, one cannot see or be seen from the gaze of official Washington.


III.

The campaign in the early 1960s to beautify America was an easy thing to mock. For most people it meant picking up litter, and ok, that was something we should do. But it also means taking the opportunity to tend living things, especially in public places. To take care of living plants, to garden, requires time, and slowing down, paying attention to weather conditions, stopping and looking and touching plants.

The effect, the beauty of gardens, is the opposite from what one gets from living and walking and driving by shabby buildings and vacant lots. We respond to the beauty of a river, to the sunlight and breezes alongside it, to the coolness of green shrubs and trees, to the delight of blooming plants, to the mystery of a path that turns and bids us to walk further on, to see and experience place.

Of course, gardens are designed, artificial, high maintenance. But I do not think it is an accident that paradise was described as a Garden.

IV.

Sometime later, Partner and I flew in to Austin to visit with family and friends. Mrs. Johnson was sitting on a bench to one side. A few feet away were, I suppose, her security people. She was waiting for someone who was flying into town. I wanted to go up to her and say thanks for what she had done, how I had enjoyed the beauty in two cities that she had a direct hand in making happen, but she seemed so quiet and in her thoughts, so I walked on by.

sunday morning

I.
The dog and I begin our early morning walk. People must be away on holiday. The streets, usually quiet, are even more so today. We walk toward the center of the island, and all the five story structures, boarding houses in the 19th century but apartments and homes now that are incredibly expensive, give way to much taller buildings, warehouses and offices and other kinds of commercial activity, intermixed with new condo projects.

The streets are littered with the stuff of late night party goers, empty bottles, brochures, cigarette butts. Everywhere we hear the hum of airconditioners and air systems. There are fewer trees in the middle of the city, and I hear no birds chirping.

We walk past the avenues, finally reaching again the private Gramercy Park. It was a marsh in the early 19th century, drained by Samuel Ruggles, a developer who gave a key to each property owner around it. The park is beautifully manicured, with formal walks, planters and planting beds, sculptures and trees. We see a woman walking along the edge, a gray gravel path. We saw her last week, too.

The park is lined with a tall iron railing fence, but even that separation allows the beauty of the park on this square to spill out to us, softening the hard surfaces of dirty concrete.

II.



Edward Hopper has a fairly well-known painting called Early Sunday Morning. It's in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, and is a prime example of the loneliness he portrayed in almost all his paintings. In Hopper's world, a person is always an island. Light is more interesting than people.

In this painting, Hopper, notoriously introverted, celebrated solitude and aloneness. There is no sound, no people, no wind, only light on a row of shops. As if all life had been eliminated, all movement, all sound, all messy, noisy movement.


III.
The dog and I walk past the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace Museum, a recreation of the townhouse in which he was born and grew up. I have not seen it before. Partner told me that it was shrouded in scaffolding recently, so I must have missed it before. The scaffolding is gone. The whole block is in deep shadow and the air is almost stifling.

It takes a strong imagination to think of this block as once lined in brownstone townhouses like this one. Someone told me that we should never think of these large family dwellings as "single family." In addition to grandparents, aunts and uncles, these houses also were home to servants, sometimes constituting their own family.