“Monday” / cinquain

18Nov09

Monday
Foggy morning.
Mesmerized, she’s alone
Nihilistically. Subway
Lurches.

photo: Sion Fullana

Filed under: Manhattan, cinquain, depression, subway   |  2 Comments

Rosa offered me camarones

10Nov09

Rosa offered me camarones, but I didn’t know what camarones were. She says she wants to bring me one of her favorite ceviches that she eats in her native Ecuador. I speak broken Spanish and she speaks broken English every day when I pick up my towels at the gym before I go into the locker room to change.

She has four daughters and I have celebrated with her that she recently passed her driving test at the DMV and recovered from a successful surgery and have prayed for her suegra (who has vascular problems) and her suegro (who fell and broke his hip). I tell her about my boys and what we do on weekends.

She, in a typical exchange: “El sabado…I cooking, cleaning, comiendo, a little bailando—” confiding laughter—“then, el domingo, choich—” and she presses her palms together in front of her lips, and her sentence ends there. Her laughter turns to a gentle smile and her brown eyes go soft.

But today, after her offer: “Rosa, que significa ‘camarones’?”

She purses her lips and looks at the ceiling over my head to the left, which she does when she is trying to think of a word in English. My Spanish is better than her English. We speak Spanish more often.

“Emm.” And she looks back at me with a smile and holds her fingers up and wiggles them next to her lips, indicating many legs.

“Shellfish?” I ask.

“Yes…. Maybe, yes.”

She flips open her cellphone and speaks quickly after dialing. “Camarones” comes up quickly several times. Then she hands me the phone. It’s her teenage daughter.

“Hi,” I say, “It’s Howard. I work out at the gym where your mother works.” I know she has three sisters, one of whom who has a baby, and a sick grandmother and grandfather, who will likely die soon, and probably around the same time. I know that her parents send money back to Ecuador often. Rosa’s husband, the son of the dying grandparents, is the only one in his family who is in the United States.

“Hi, it’s Doris.”

“I didn’t know what ‘camarones’ were.”

“It’s shrimp,” she says with a laugh that I recognize.

“Great; that sounds familiar now. Thanks! Here’s your mother.”

Quick goodbye between them, and then I say, “¡Me gustan mucho camarones!” I told her I liked a lot of shrimp instead of saying, as intended, I liked shrimp a lot.

Rosa will bring some for me on Thursday—“el jueves”—and I must show up at 11:00 or so. Usually, I say each day, “¡Mañana, por la mañana!” And she says “¡Por la mañana!” And that’s that. Sometimes, though, I come in the afternoon, and she leaves at 2:00.

Today she’s the mother. And she’s bringing lunch in a couple days.

photo: Stefan

Filed under: Crunch, Ecuador, diversity, food   |  1 Comment

2 First-Graders on a street corner

06Nov09

My 6-year-old son, Teak, was walking with my wife and came across a school friend, Ella, on the corner of 84th and Amsterdam. Ella is in front of him and turns around with a smile.

Ella: “Teak, you are so weird!” She faced ahead once more.

My wife Karen’s thought-cloud: Uh, oh. What did he do now?

Ella, turning again and pressing: “You’re just weird and you should know that by now!”

Karen to Teak, aloud: “What did you do that was weird?”

Teak: “Nothing. She has me confused with herself.”

Six years old.

photo: Pink Sherbet Photography

Filed under: Manhattan, Upper West Side, children, parenting   |  4 Comments

Bennett’s First Birthday [Conclusion]

10Oct09

The raindrops pattered onto the clear plastic cupcake containers and sounded like tiny timpani.

Though partially protected at the bottom of the two bags, the rhythmic drumbeat augmented my steps, moving up Columbus Avenue and around 83rd Street, heading west. Fifty feet to my left, the red painted façade of Engine Company 74 glistened with silver from the moisture, and the flowers people had placed next to the large overhung door had oranges and yellows that popped brightly against the grey concrete sidewalk. It was Friday, September 11, eight years since the attacks in lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and over a field in Pennsylvania.

I rang the buzzer on the entrance door to the right, which had a small square window at head level with chicken wire embedded in the glass for security. A man about 5’6”—three inches shorter than I—came to the door and opened it. His eyebrows were raised.

“I brought these for you guys,” I started, handing him the bag in my right hand. He took it and smiled. “I just wanted to say ‘thank-you.’”

“Hey—thanks a lot! What’s your name?”

I told him. Then I asked, “What yours?”

“Dave.”

“Dave,” I repeated. To remember. “Thanks, Dave. I really appreciate all you guys do. My family and I live on West 84th Street. All my kids go to school there—” and I pointed behind me to P.S. 9 at the corner of 83rd and Columbus “—and my church is renovating the building there—” and pointed down the block past the firehouse, “—so this is where we live our lives.”

He thanked me again. We shook hands—his, like a vice—then he went back inside, the red door closing as I turned.

I continued along 83rd Street, shifting the other bag of cupcakes to my right hand.

My face was wet.

It was my son Bennett’s ninth birthday.

photo: Jaume Fernandez

Filed under: 9/11, Upper West Side, children   |  1 Comment

[Interlude] Deep Joy, Sorrow and Hope

19Sep09

The Christian will express deep joy, deep sorrow, and deep hope.

Deep joy is laughter in the face of imminent death. Each of us will die, either in a moment from now or in decades, but die we will. And because the Christian knows that this transition leads only to a new and unending chapter of life with her Creator, she is joyful. She can’t help it. People see it. It flows from her social intercourse and from the way she looks at a tree. She will be joyful in the way a child is playful. Neither thinks about it.

Deep sorrow grieves that there is even one person in our community of 6.5 billion who doesn’t know this deep joy. Hell is real. Even if one doesn’t believe in a place of eternal separation—a belief that neither proves nor disproves any fact but is based on as much faith as claiming there is such a place—I can vouch that hell is real on earth. If you haven’t had a personal experience with complete isolation and separation, just read the morning news and you’ll see hell in all four corners of our earth. Deep sorrow identifies with those who are in a living hell now and others who may spend eternity in a living hell. This is painful for one who watches, and it causes a sense of helplessness to sense the pain of another that even the pain bearer himself can’t verbalize or articulate, and to be unable to fully assuage it. The one watching feels like a parent, not patronizing but rather caring: one who wants to bear the pain for the pain bearer. He would be tempted to trade places if he could. Deep sorrow is tears cried for another. Deep sorrow is what God felt for us, and deep sorrow is what motivated Jesus Christ out of love to give his life for our sake. He experienced the deepest sorrow so we could experience the deepest joy. He was not “tempted” to trade places with the pain bearers of irrevocable separation and isolation. Rather, he willingly did it.

And this is our deep hope. Christians will express the sure faith that God himself took the sorrow and isolation so we can take the joy and community. Deep hope knows that God is making all things right, even working through the hell that some women, men and children are in now—because he is God. Deep hope is sure faith cast as knowledge that there is a God and that he can see a way when there appears to be “no way” in our view. My eyes are covered with contact lenses yet are still fairly functional, and I can look forward and peripherally. Yet God looks with perfect “eyes,” which see 360-degrees, across and outside of time, and into and through dimensions that our minds can’t even come up with words, pictures, or numbers for.

Just because a snail can’t see around the block doesn’t mean there isn’t a mansion five miles away that has a big front yard with really tasty leaves.

photo: Blue/Marco

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