Month: April 2010

When I was volunteering during the 9/11 recovery effort down at St. Paul’s, musicians would come at lunch and play for the recovery workers. A quartet led by violinist Jorge Avila came regularly. I knew Jorge because he leads the orchestra that plays for all the Grace Church Choral Society concerts. One week Jorge came, but the other members of the quartet weren’t there. I don’t know if there was a mix-up about the days or what, but after waiting Jorge finally stood and played alone.

Now the truth is, while the recovery workers were always very grateful to the musicians, they were tired so the music was treated as background music while they ate or socialized.

When Jorge stood and played, that’s what happened at first. People were only half-listening. But slowly, person by person, every one in that large room stopped talking and listened. I had never seen them so rapt before (or since). Jorge had those guys in the palm of his hand. I wonder how many knew before listening to Jorge that they could love the sound of a single violin? But afterward some of them said it was the most beautiful thing they had ever heard.

If you can afford to go to this benefit, you will have the pleasure of listening to Jorge in an intimate and I’m told gorgeous setting (someone’s very swank NYC apartment), while sipping cocktails, and benefiting my choir, one of the best things in my life. So I of course would be very grateful. (I also understand if you don’t have the money right now.)

I’m going to be emailing some of you as well. But the important thing is if you buy the tickets through me you save $25.

St. Vincents, the hospital near me, closed this morning. The place was crawling with news trucks. It’s sad. This was the hospital for 9/11. It was started by four nuns 160 years ago, in response to a cholera epidemic in New York, and well, it’s just plain sad that what they started has come to an end.

Also, I have a lot farther to go in case of emergency.

I will be back at the Census by the time you read this.

The People Magazines are piling up.

TV shows on my dvr are piling up.

I’m not getting reading done, not getting writing done, not getting research done, not exercising, not meditating.

Tonight I am going to work out a plan. I will have to write this book in increments, ie, an hour of writing one night, an hour of research another, and so on. Plus I have to fit People Magazine reading in. And my big yearly Spring Cleaning, which is coming up fast!

It’s fun at the Census though. Yesterday I had to find various foreign language speakers to be enumerators. Oh, the name of someone I knew came up on the list of possible people to hire and I hired her.

We’re training all the enumerators now who will be hitting the streets shortly. If you didn’t return your forms New Yorkers, they will be knocking on your door.

That’s my apartment in the top window. I took this looking down the airshaft from the roof after feeding the birds this morning.

Mavis sent me this New Yorker cartoon!

Coincidentally, today, aka day two of my two days off, I’m going to pick up bird seed (and other things), write, go to the library, work at the Grace Church archives, exercise, make my lunch for tomorrow, iron the curtains I washed yesterday and put them back up, and no where in all those things is any kind of real day off activities! There’s no time! This is insane.

I still haven’t quite got the hang of how one has a full time job and also writes a book. I’ve done this before though, so I know it’s do-able. But at the moment, I’m feeling severely stressed. I have today and tomorrow off and while I desperately feel like relaxing (I worked six days in a row and overtime) I have a ton of work to do.

Sigh. I took this the other day on the way to work. I couldn’t come back later to see what they movie or tv show they were setting up a shoot for, alas!