The Bronx Is Up And The Battery’s Down

All last week, I was in a place I’m not sure I ever believed I’d visit; New York City. The first walk from the depths of the hot, dank, underground train station up the stairs into the smells and the crowds and the noise of the street was something I’ll never forget. 

People, people, people…pushing, cars honking, sirens wailing, heat, smoke from the street vendors selling all kinds of greasy food. Immediately, you feel like you have to hurry…the sweat is pouring from you, you can’t hear each other speak, you keep smashing your suitcase into things, trying to negotiate it around a swarm of human bodies, all rushing off somewhere else. Nobody really gets out of your way…you get out of theirs. You don’t know where the heck you are, you’re trying to get perspective, trying to keep yourself from having an anxiety attack. 

Then there is the great relief of finding a cab, finally seeing a way out of the madness…you sputter the address of the hotel and, sighing, you sit back in the cool leather seats of the cab and watch a whole different world whiz by you. Cabs have TV’s in them. And GPS video image maps so you can watch yourself getting to where you’re going. How strange is that?

From that moment on, it was a whirlwind of activity…we were overwhelmed. New York is almost a world unto itself. You know it’s big because you can’t see a way out of it! Every street you look down is just a cascade of tall buildings, one after the next. You don’t really get any geographic perspective; all of the buildings are so tall that you can’t identify your landmarks even if you’re only a block away from them! It wasn’t until the last day that I figured out which way to go when I walked out the front door of the hotel.

Now I’ve lived in a city, the city of Vancouver in the West End in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and I remember the feel of it, the pace, the constant rush of white noise. So I’m not exactly a country bumpkin. 

But it’s been awhile, and even though I anticipated what it was going to feel like, I was still thrown for a loop. We all were.

Yellow cabs. There are over 12,000 yellow cabs in Manhattan alone. And they are always honking…honest to Pete I don’t know how there aren’t ten times more accidents than there are. The cabs are always chasing each other, twisting and turning, squeezing in between and then squeezing some more. And honking some more. They honk at each other and at everybody else if they can’t get their way. Fists come flying out windows, obscenities belch through the air, out into the streets where a person like me stands on the corner trying to figure out where the heck I am. Too late…the crowds push behind me and I have to cross the street. Damn.

Pedestrians. They don’t wait for walk signs here. They wait for the last yellow cab to peel through and then casually cross behind them, cellphones glued to their ears, oblivious of that little red hand flashing across from them. Usually by the time the walk sign comes on, there are three or four trucks jammed in the intersection. But the locals brazenly swarm off the corner in groups, either rushing between vehicles or their heads peering back and forth looking for the first hole. Then bam! A car couldn’t make it through the horde of human bodies if it barreled them all down. The sheer volume of pedestrians, especially near places like Times Square, is unbelievable.

Times Square. That’s the picture you see above. It was the first recognizable landmark we came across the first night we ventured out. We were fish out of water, just meandering aimlessly looking for food, when suddenly the whole world lit up and started buzzing and flashing. There’s a law in the city that in Times Square a majority of the percentage of the buildings’ face must have advertising. One building owner doesn’t even have tenants anymore. He makes $300,000.00 a month just from the advertisements on his building! There are giant M&M characters climbing the Empire State building on a 30 foot high screen. I saw a 20 foot high bottle of Corona, my favourite beer! Nike, Pepsi, DKNY, Broadway theatre advertisements, movies, television stars. Macy’s Department Store, Rockerfeller Centre.

What an assault on the senses!

And would you believe it, it so happened that the Tony’s were being broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall, just as we were moseying on by. Whoopi Goldberg was in there, and the limos and black Cadillacs were lined up and down every street, parked and waiting for their consorts.

Okay. That was just the first night. There is so much to tell that I’m going to have to do this in bits and pieces. But I will certainly have more to say.

“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town

The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”

Now I finally know what that means!

IJ

We’re All Immigrants

One of the highlights of my trip to New York, was a visit to Ellis Island.

I am here in North America, as many of us are, as a result of my recent ancestors’ immigration to this continent. In fact, if we all look back far enough, we are all immigrants.

Ellis Island was a place my father always told me about. My Grandfather John Jokumsen (who got frustrated with people being unable to spell his name, and changed it to Jackson), came across the Atlantic from Denmark all by himself on an old rust bucket of a ship nicknamed the Holy Oly. He was only 16 years old.

The reason he came was because he had a wealthy Aunt and Uncle who lived in Kalispel, Montana. They had offered my grandfather’s parents the opportunity for one of their 12 children (the “smartest” one) to come to the US, so that they could take him in and educate him.

And that’s how my grandfather, who was apparently the smartest one of the lot, got on the Holy Oly for that infamous trip to Ellis Island. It was 1912. And guess which other very famous ship was crossing the Atlantic at the same time? That’s right. The Titanic.

When my Grandfather’s ship pulled into the harbour at Ellis Island, they could see the lifeboats of the Titanic moored up to the docks. Can you imagine? The mightiest, “unsinkable” Titanic, didn’t make it, but the Holy Oly did. The photo above is the main hall on Ellis Island where every immigrant was processed before they were allowed into the U.S.

To make a long story short, my Grandfather did not take to his aunt and uncle very well, and ended up jumping on the rails and travelling all over the US and Canada by himself, working wherever he could and then moving on to the next stop. Eventually, he went back to Denmark and married my Grandmother, and brought her to settle in Canada. My father was born not long after they reached Calgary.

My mother was also an immigrant. She came to Canada via Montreal after a year’s tour on a Danish hospital ship, the Jutlandia, during the Korean War. She was a registered nurse, and had been banished from her family (long story), so she decided to move to Canada in 1954, because a lot of other Danes were doing the same during that time. And that’s where she met and married my Dad.

Here in Canada, we depend a lot on immigrants…if it weren’t for the growing immigrant population, our economy would pop like a balloon stuck with a pin because our birthrate isn’t great enough to sustain us. But, as has always been, there is a segment of the population who resent the “foreigners” “invading” our country, “taking over” all of the jobs that should be “ours”, etc., etc. When I listen to Lou Dobbs on CNN talking about the “alien” Mexicans invading the US, it makes me cringe. We forget that most of us are here because our ancestors were also immigrants, trying to find a better life in another country, full of hope for a better future. Maybe they don’t all do so in a legal, above board kind of way, but their intentions are almost always good. They are simply trying to help their families. Over hundreds of years, this is one ideal that hasn’t changed.

When I walked through that building on Ellis Island and saw the way the immigrants of those times were shuffled around like cows, marked with symbols on their clothes if they were blind or sick or poor, put behind bars if they were thought to be of dubious character, unable to defend themselves simply because they couldn’t speak the language, I felt a great deal of compassion. In the present day, there is no difference…people just want to find a way to do better, and we have no right to deny them that. Not really.

Ellis Island is now a museum. It is part of a tour that includes the Statue of Liberty…the ferry takes you from Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, over to the Statue of Liberty first and then to Ellis Island, and then back to New York. A part of me wondered how many people would actually get off at Ellis Island. Everybody did. Maybe they were just curious, maybe they didn’t know any better, or just maybe they were from immigrant families too, and knew the significance of the place. That’s what I’m kind of hoping.

IJ

Weed Me, Seymour

I have a love/hate thing for gardening. My Dad was a very disciplined green-thumb, out there in the yard every day that it wasn’t raining, doing one thing or another. As a kid, I used to be upset when he didn’t want me playing in the yard and ruining his lawn and flower beds. Now, I understand.

I think I spend 95% of my time weeding. This is what feels wrong to me. How am I supposed to enjoy gardening when all I do is weed? I just want to plant pretty things, not pull out ugly, difficult, sweaty, dirty things. But weeding is all I ever seem to do.

I admit, when we first acquired a house (and a yard), 25 years ago, I did not know what was a weed, and what wasn’t. I had to bring my poor Dad over to instruct me, and I’m sure I forgot half of what he told me. So he ended up doing all of the weeding, while I watched from the livingroom window. He hated it. But every time he came over, he’d resolve himself to go out there and do it. I swear, if it weren’t for my Dad doing that every three months or so, my weeds would have been taller than my house. I was a gardening failure.

When we moved into our second house, my Dad was smart enough not to offer his services. I don’t blame him, we moved to a corner lot with a whole lot more lawn and garden. The people who lived here before us had a good thing going. It was well taken care of, and well-planned. But of course, not long after we moved in, it all went to pot.

I did my best, but I was a young mother and taking care of kids and getting a good night’s sleep were far more important than house cleaning or gardening. I’m sure I killed a few more things that weren’t meant to die, but I did get a little better over time. In fact, there came a time where I actually started planning my garden (poorly) and created a few flower beds, putting in flowers that couldn’t tolerate the area I planted them in, or neglecting to water them after they were in.

You have to water those stupid little flowers or they die.

We put in a swing set in one corner of the back yard once. The kids played on it so much that the lawn beneath it became dirt. That corner never did get back to what it once was after that. Still, I would get myself all enthused to go out there every spring and start weeding. By the time I got all around to every flower bed, it was fall and I’d long since given up. What’s the point? You just have to start all over again. All I did was weed.

Last spring, my husband resolved that we had to really make a project of the back yard and try to create a space so that we would actually want to spend time in it. So we hired a lovely English couple (you have to actually live in Victoria to get that THIS IS WHAT YOU DO IN VICTORIA), to come and take a look around our yard and give us some advice.

I have to say, I’ve never been more embarrassed. They took one look around the massive devastation that was our back yard and you could see their expression of horror. ‘Ohmigod, what do we tell them?’, I’m sure they were thinking. But they did their best to look beyond our pathetic yard space and gave us a list of things to get, a design to keep in mind, and lots of other pointers. 

My husband took copious notes. We resolved ourselves to take their advice and get started. It would take at least two years, they said. I’m sure they were being generous.

We tried to put things in order…this is what you do first, this is what you do last. The more we educated ourselves, the more confident we became that we could actually do this. That area that became dirt because of the swing set, was replaced with a little patio and a gazebo. We took care of the lawn for the first time, re-seeded and weeded-and-feeded. We took every dandelion out by hand. We moved numerous big rocks, replanted this and that, disassembled the pathetic, collapsing wooden compost and bought another more efficient one.  We repainted the garage, and found ways to get rid of the bugs and ants that chewed the heck out of everything. We edged the lawn, we found plants and trees that would work in different areas, we created more shape, more colour.

Today, I actually finished weeding the back yard. It’s the last day of May. In the late afternoon, I took a glass of wine with me and wandered out there and realized that we’ve actually accomplished in one year what we thought would take two. It’s a work in progress, of course. No putting in plants and flowers and letting them take care of themselves! No letting it go to pot again. Then I walked around to the front yard.

Oh, sh*t, we have a front yard too.

Sigh.