Phyllis and Yonah Shimmel's

     Phyllis and I were supposed to meet in front of Vselka's on 9th Street and Second Avenue. I was sure that we'd recognize each other and we did. Her first words were something like, "We haven't seen each other in fifty years." That isn't true, but it's basically true. We were good friends in high school, though I remember nothing of her story, of her family, of being in her house. What I remember, and what I needed, were the Hai's who lived next door, who she introduced me to and who became our Mama and Papa. They were Ruth and Andre Tao Kim Hai. He worked at the United Nations and fished for minnows in the bay right when the high tide lapped at the wall of their house. He used a large white net on a pole that I now recognize as similar to those used in Vietnam. Then he put them in the small pool he'd built so the cats could catch tiny fish.

     I adored the Hai's. I needed a surrogate family and they provided one, always accepting and with food in the house. Phyllis and I spent quite a bit of time there, as I remember. She'd be in the kitchen with Ruth and I'd be outside with Andre. She was there much more often, of course, and remembers their house with more clarity.

     I recognize traits that the high school Phyllis had, the rhythm of her speech, the way she slowly spoons soup. But she didn't have the same laugh. She said that she got it from her husband who laughs a lot. He can be sitting in a chair, thinking, and he'll just start laughing. I'm glad that she has a laughing husband, a man whose gone back to study play writing with a teacher who he remembers liking and who likes his work so much. 

    The fifty years part isn't quite true. I remember her in the loft where I lived with Krissy's father. Krissy might have been just starting to walk. I remember the sound the scuffing of the plastic soles of her pajama feet made. Phyllis, her son, Benji, and I once sat at a table, some table, can't remember much of that, toward the back of that gloomy loft on the Bowery. I'd given Benji, who must have been around two, a tablet to draw in and I was surprised that he drew on one page and immediately turned to the next to draw more. That shows how much I knew about little children. I truly expected him to take more than a few seconds with each page. I was so stupid and so worried and so poor.

     That also means that Phyllis must have met Krissy's father. Unless he'd gone out while she was visiting, he would have been up in front, by the windows, in the bit of light.

     But what's more amazing than this tad of a memory is that Phyllis remembers being in the studio apartment that my father had rented when he thought that he'd be free of me, on his own, in New York. It was the top floor of a corner building on Charles and Bleeker Streets. I had no idea that anyone I knew, now know again, had been there and could testify to the low partitions that somewhat divided the space, who saw that I had no privacy, who remembers the configuration of the space where my bed was. That's quite amazing and I'm grateful.

     And she went with me to Ruth Ingalls, to the lovely dance studio she rented one night a week on 57th Street. I don't remember Phyllis's presence, but she remembers being there and liked that form of unrestricted, wide gestural movement. Ruth Ingalls taught interpretive dance in Port Washington. When I was a child, before my mother died, she sent me there to whirl around with butterfly scarf wings made from tie-dyed parachute silk, to walk like a bear and hop like a frog. For a while, after I graduated from high school, I worked with her, demonstrating, carrying the illusion that I would become a dancer. How I imagined that was possible is hard to fathom. I would have been entering a art form  no rules, no directions, no support. And an even harder one that I actually did enter some years later.

     I don't know how to explain that Phyllis seems almost like a template of who I might have been had I not allowed myself to get kicked around so much, had my childhood not been so ungrounded. While I don't remember Benji's father, I know that they had a close and lasting friendship even after their divorce. And that she's had a long and good second marriage with a man she met, I think, in graduate school. She's pursued various directions that included learning Chinese calligraphy, living in China for some time, teaching in a Montessori school, writing poetry and running a small press. She always wanted to write full-time, she told me during our visit, was waiting for the time when she could do what she's doing now. She's really engaged in the New York poetry community, appreciating the support and the challenges and she's learning Tai Chi with a group of Chinese and Vietnamese folks who practice together. She was allowed to join it after promising that she's be there every Monday and Friday mornings. Her life seems mellow, contemplative, rich and unstructured and it provides her with a lot to laugh about.

     We walked downtown and went to Yonah Shimmels for my old times sake. They do still have glasses of yogurt to drink, and the heavy blueberry knishes that Krissy's father and I used to eat because they were inexpensive and good. It was so nice to be there. To find it so much the same. To watch Phyllis eat her barley soup.

Shelia's place

     I was supposed to stay with Susan during my 70th birthday trip to New York. Well, I'd planned to stay in a hotel, but Susan wanted me to stay with her. That was really much better, a good idea even though my plan had been to see how tough I was and whether I could do it all myself. The last time I'd been to NY was with my big guy, three or four summers ago, before that relationship ended.

     New York was my city, for eighteen years. I still consider myself a New Yorker, not having ever forgiven Boston for the disgusting display of racism during bussing when I first moved here in 1974. But New York has changed and so have I. And it was a bit daunting to make this trip. 

     I travel very little since my body is so cranky from fibromyalgia. If I sit too long, it gets angry. And if I carry heavy things, it gets angry. If I work at the computer, it gets angry. It absolutely hates the bus and loathed PeterPan all the way down, no leg room and uncomfortable seats. And I'd had a hard week, helping out a friend whose mother is very ill, going back and forth to deal with the cyst and taking antibiotics that produced stomach angst. So, I wasn't in the best of shape. 

     Because Susan wasn't able to have me at her condo, she asked her friend, Shelia, if I could stay there. Shelia (how do you spell her name?) makes friends just walking up the block, gives away many keys to her apartment and was willing to try me out. Susan bought a blow-up mattress and took me there on Friday night after I got off of the bus. 

     Shelia is easy. And nothing could have been better, barring the fact that I couldn't stay with Susan. 

     Lady, Shelia's golden retriever who seems more like a large refrigerator that moves from place to place, placidly, quietly, was rescued from a friend whose mother, in Mexico, died. Lady understood only Spanish, had never been on a leash, and lived in extreme luxury. Shelia's friend had found good homes for the servants, but couldn't find anyone to take the dog. When Shelia said that she was finished mourning for Chico, their former beloved dog, part Chow, part Pit Bull and something else that seems equally fierce, her friend flew to Mexico and brought an extremely frightened Lady back to New York. 

     Lucky Lady. Adored Lady. After having tried giving her the food that she was used to, and trying many other brands, Shelia now boils chicken for her, adds green beans to a bit of kibble and stirs it all up. 

      I don't know how Sly got adopted, but he follows her around as if he's a dog. It took him a couple of days before he'd allow me to photograph him, but on the last day, after I'd moved to a hotel, he allowed me to capture a few images. I'd stopped by her house on the way to the bus station, dragging my suitcase. I'd forgotten the bones that I wanted to take back to Boston so that I could make pinhole images of them. Why I got this hair brain idea is beyond me. But the bones, that Shelia had put on the shelf when Lady finished with them, were fascinating. Perhaps they remind me of "50 lbs. of clay," an installation piece. I'd never been at all interested in making anything that's beautiful, but for the last four years, I've been working with clay, amassing these impractical installations that I won't ever find a place to show. Anyway, I saw the bones. Photographing them with the digital point-and-shoot wasn't enough. They have to be pinhole images, I thought. Insanity.

     Shelia said, "Don't take them all. Your suitcase will be too heavy to pull." I obeyed, though I wanted them all. The suitcase was very heavy to pull. But now I want her to send me a monthly supply of bones by mail. I'll send her postage money. I hope I make the pinhole photos. 

     And Shelia allowed herself to be part of my 2008-2009 self-portrait series. That was terrific, more terrific because Lady wanted to join us.

4 East 15th Street, New York, New York

      I was in New York and staying with a friend of Susan's who told me to go left when I left her front gate and then walk across to the Farmer's Market. Since I was strangely disoriented, very strangely, I needed instructions on how to get anywhere and I did just what she said. As I was walking across 15th St., I passed a barricade of suitcases and carts and glanced at it. A man with a ruddy face was sleeping there. He looked like a farmer, large and capable, covered by a blue blanket. 

     Much later in the afternoon, I walked by again and noticed that he'd awakened, made a blanket hood to hide his face and had a pack of cigarettes lying next to him. The smell of urine was pervasive.

     That was Saturday. 

     The next day it threatened rain and I wondered how he would manage to protect his mattresses and belongings, wondered whether he was going to lie in bed until the rain began. But when as I crossed Fifth Avenue, I could see that his belongings had been consolidated, that the mattresses were folded and the carts pushed against the elevator structure that had served as his headboard. There's no telling where he had gone.

      His address had been 4 East 15th Street, but on Monday his make-shift home was gone. The only trace of it was a cigarette pack, the same brand that I'd noticed on his blanket, tucked into a corner of the window ledge. And the large gray push card was still there, almost cleaned out. 

      I think he'd had two mattresses, one buttressed against the building, the other tucked against his partitioning. But they were gone, his broom was gone, all the suitcases had vanished. The area was swept clean. I couldn't help myself. I had to look into the bin to see if there was any evidence of his presence left.

     When I lived in New York, there were derelicts on the Bowery, and men wandering in and out of the Dorothy Day house for homeless men near where the Hell's Angels lived on Second Street near Second Avenue. But there was nothing, nothing, like the level of homelessness there is now. If it was ordinary to see men sleeping in doorways near that loft where my daughter, her father and I lived right after she was born, it wasn't ordinary to see them sleeping near Fifth Avenue in a neighborhood that was considerably better.

     I understand some of the issues of homelessness in Boston, having worked some in the women's section of a shelter. Once the state mental institutions were closed and patients had been released, supposedly, to residential living and, after the many rooming houses had been sold for private residences, there was an exponential increase in the number of people who were homeless and in shelters or living on the streets.  

     I can't know whether the man who'd made a bedroom so resourcefully has a social worker who has helped him get some services. I have no way of knowing whether he's one of the many who refuse medication because they hate the side-effects or are afraid of going to doctors and afraid of sleeping in shelters which seem far more dangerous to them than being on the streets. And I don't know who was paid to toss out all his belongings and sweep away his traces.

           

     I was staying on 15th Street with a friend of Susan's who told me to turn left and walk across to on Square to the farmer's market on Saturday. Since I was strangely disoriented and didn't know uptown from downtown, I followed her directions. Just as I crossed 5th Avenue, I walked by a barrier of suitcases and carts and noticed the ruddy face of a sleeping man. He could have been a farmer, lying there, covered by a blue blanket, on top of a mattress. I could see him through a crack between his partitioning.

     When I walked by much later, probably about two, his head was covered with a blanket hood, his face hidden, a pack of cigarettes lying next to him. I could smell urine from several feet away.

     The next day it was threatening rain and I wondered how he would manage that. It seemed probable that he had two mattresses, one buttressed against the building and the other against the carts and his suitcases. How would everything stay dry?

     But when I walked by his area, 4 East 15th Street, the mattresses had been folded up and the carts pushed against the outside elevator shaft that had served as the head of his bed. He was gone.