Month: May 2016

When I lived on 11th Street between Waverly and West 4th, our building shared a garden with Saint John’s in the Village. It’s a beautiful garden. I haven’t seen it since the 1980s, but at the time it had a wild, overgrown feel, it was not perfectly manicured, which is just how I like a garden. It also had statues strewn about here and there, like the one pictured below. I took tons of pictures, but they’re underneath my bed which I need help to lift. For some reason this one was out. A friend of mine from my choir just started singing in their choir, coincidentally!

I was so impressed with this article in the New York Times about Hart Island I was inspired to upload some pictures I took when I visited the Island years ago. Hart Island is the home of New York’s Potter’s field.

These aren’t my favorite shots, although I do like them, but I don’t have decent copies of my two favorites. I don’t have the energy to find the negatives right now to make them. Someday. Maybe. I wasn’t using a good camera, but the low-res/soft focus works in the subject’s favor.

I already posted about Elsie and the Oke Doke here. But it was a bar on East 84th Street that I used to go to back in the early 1980s. Kevin Connell was nice enough to send me a picture of Elsie (with one of the regulars according to Kevin, a woman named Irene). Thank you, Kevin!

He looks so innocent in the picture below. I took that not long after bringing Bleecker home for the first time. How could we have known that to this day his favorite thing in the world is jumping on the back of my poor old arthritic and diabetic cat Finney, then wrapping all his legs around Finney’s belly while he chomps on his neck. He just did it again! Just now, as I started to describe it! He doesn’t chomp hard, he just wants to play.

But Finney most definitely does not want to play. We have tried to make this clear to Bleecker, but he pretends to not understand. For the millionth time: Finney, I’m sorry for bringing the monster into the house.

I’m still reading my friend’s book, The Country of Ice Cream Star. It’s going to take me a while because of work on my own book, but it’s just blowing me away. I recently read this line in the book:

“The worst thing about a war, senyora, is that it produces war heroes.”

Aside from the death, yeah. And actually, maybe it is worse than death because making war heroes leads to even more death.

Crowds at the America’s Cup. We do love a hero, don’t we? We make them all over the place.