North Bergen

So the home town...about half way between Washington and Providence...high on the Palisade Cliffs overlooking the Hudson River and "the city"...as we refer to Manhattan.  The cliffs rise some 300 feet over the river front.  They were a playground, a place for exploration and "dares," such as swinging from a rope tied to bridge girders...swinging some 50 feet over open space.  In quieter moments, the cliffs were a place to find a convenient rock ledge or cave and sit there reading a book, looking up from time to time to note the ship traffic on the river.  As kids, the cliffs were a big part of our "open space."


I had gotten the train into "the city" in the morning, then caught the bus (through the Lincoln Tunnel and along Blvd. East).    It had been decades since I'd ridden that bus route and, somewhat embarrassed, had to ask how you request a stop.  The cord that passengers used to pull to ring a buzzer for the stop was missing.  A woman in the seat in front pointed to a small, red button over each row of seats.  I got off at 74th Street and walked up the hill.  According to Wikipedia, North Bergen, after San Francisco, is the "hilliest" municipality in the United States. 

Robert Fulton Elementary School

101 74th Street North Bergen NJ

So there they all still are:  my old apartment house (101 74th Street, apartment 1A), Robert Fulton Elementary School....two blocks further up the hill..., Woodcliff Community Church....further up the hill and two blocks over on 77th Street...the buildings and institutions that structured my early years. But what came into my mind as I walked (a beautiful fall day) were the names of old neighbors, family friends, and kids with whom I went to Robert Fulton.  Agnes Wright who had worked with my mother as a secretary in New York before my mother had to leave since she had gotten married...couldn't be married and take the bus every day into "the city."  Agnes had remained single.  Astrid Johnson...a Norwegian woman who spoke Norsk with my parents after a few highballs.  June Shanloogian (we got caught by a policeman picking flowers in the park when we were about seven...."How would you like someone to take off YOUR head."  Ted Doll....his father was Mayor; his Mom taught our cub scout troop.  Never made it to boy scouts. 

But it was not memory that had me catch the 166.  Or was it?  I had come to have lunch with some of my kindergarten friends...friends whose old apartments, like mine, still hold multitudes.  Well some of us actually had single-family houses...funny but I never sensed any class difference in this.  We were all part of the same neighborhood, often the same "block."  When we were kids, the bar on 75th Street was called the Colonnade, an Irish pub.  Now it was The Havana Mambo.  A happening spot.

I am not certain that we (Sheila, Nancy (who still lives off 78th Street), and Bernadine) added to that sense of "happening"....but we were loud in our laughter.  Sheila is going to host a 50th Class Reunion (of our high school not the kindergarten class....that would make it the 62nd Class Reunion) in June.  We met to "plan" the occasion but really we just shared our lives to date...what we'd been doing, what we'd come to believe, and who knew what about our classmates. 

So the quick trip to North Bergen was about the present and the future, as much as it was about the past.  The neighborhood is vibrant, as it was when we were young.  And, somehow, we are still vibrant along with it. 

Portraits

When you go to the National Portrait Gallery, you meet all these people.  People you might have known before.  Like Pocahontas.  Painted 1616 from an engraving.  But there she is.  You wanna say "hi" or something, but you feel she has other things to think about.

And then, around the corner, John Singleton Copley, the early American painter who made this portrait of himself.  Somehow I imagine him holding a cell phone, stretching out his arm, snapping a photo, and sending it up to Facebook with a note "Decided to move to England...wish me luck."  Which, of course, he had for a while.  I wonder "Who does his hair?"

And, then, not really a portrait (don't know how it fits into this gallery) but a detail of a painting by Ryder of Jonah, about to be swallowed by the whale.   Now he looks scared....   So it's not just all portraits...it's people in all kinds of situations. 

And, then, around another corner, new acquisitions.  Bill and Melinda.  Looking good.  No worries about whales here. 

Still the best portraits are of our own.  Tom, home after a long day at the magistrate's judicial offices, a good-bye luncheon for one of his colleagues, a happy hour for an intern leaving next week, interviews with new intern applicants, telephone calls from clients, an evening visit from Rob McDowell, an old family friend, and, finally, just a moment to sink back into the couch before packing for a flight tomorrow....well, all portraits of people at a time in their lives.  And all of them in my life too. 

Meeting in the gallery

Fine, well bred museums abound in Washington.  Aside from being with family and friends, one of my joys in visiting the city is to wander rooms and galleries filled with painting, sculpture, video projections and other works that stimulate the imagination.  A favorite so far on this trip is a portrait of Gertrude Stein made out of spindles of colored thread hung on long chains suspended from the ceiling.  Gertrude would have loved it.

Besides the interplay of light and shadow in long corridors, I love the interaction of museum-goers with marble figures and sculpture...the way the present and the past juxtapose one another.  People moving among these immovable objects and, in some way, communicating with them.  Communicating with the figures itself.  "Who were these people?"  "Who are these people?"  An idealized beauty alongside our ordinary beauty. 

And is the message between these marble figures and ourselves?   It could be a message of beauty alone, of harmony or, equally, of disquiet and protest, of love or violence.  This communication is what touches us, causes a reaction, brings us toward the object or away from it.  Perhaps it is a form of communication not that far off from the early cave paintings....leading us to reflect on something quite beyond ourselves.

But even in these galleries and rooms, we are drawn back to our daily lives....a cafe set up amidst the elegant figures attunes us more to the possibility of food than of a deeper communion.  And that is part of the fun of these museums....the way the timeless interacts with the present moment.

traveling

Snow fell in the "high country."   Most of the ski resorts had not opened but with cross country skis all you have to do is park your car and head out onto a trail.  I skied at Berthoud Pass and at Cameron Pass...snow still being spotty lower down in the Middle Park valley.  At Cameron, I took the short trail up to Zimmerman Lake, skiing along its shoreline, looking up from time to time at the Medicine Bow Mountains in the not-too-far-away distance.

Yesterday I arrived in Washington at Dulles Airport...far from the wide spaces of Zimmerman Lake into a different scene.  But this man-made landscape was also filled with light, an interior illumination designed to move people between airline planes, between arrivals and departures, between countries and continents.  On the lake, I had to move myself though a "natural" space (though the lake is actually a man-made reservoir)...at Dulles, I was moved by trains, escalators, moving sidewalks. 


Both of these were experiences with space, with movement, both of them visually stimulating, both of them liberateing in a sense.  But vastly different in how my individual energy at the lake was not channeled to become part of a vast, collective energy system structured by architects and engineers hired by governments.  And how the private experience at the lake (no one else was on the trail that day) became a social experience shared by thousands of fellow travelers.  Interesting how we can move between these zones, these geographies and somehow remain the same.  Or do we? 

The weekend

Drove up to Salida for the weekend with Charlotte and our long-time friends Jane and David.  We stayed at the house by the river, across from the old mining industry mill, down the street from art, coffee, and consignment shops, and close by the Joyful Journey Hot Springs (to the south over Poncha Pass) and Mt. Princeton (to the north up Chalk Canyon). 

 
I was doing some stretching by the hot spring pools and Charlotte asked if I were happy.  "Well," I said, "I guess I am." 

We soaked at the hot springs, we hiked (a bit), we ate (a lot), but mostly we hung out...reading the morning papers, watching a few movies, mostly just being with one another.  Like most mammals, I guess, enjoying the sense of one another's company...our humor as well as aches and pains.  In short, a weekend in the mountains...one of those quiet joys you get by living in Colorado.