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new york!

by oisercage on Oct 11, 2012 • No Comments

New York is one of those places that is exactly what you bring to it. It is whatever you dream of it. It’s a little bit like champagne. Half the fun of drinking champagne on New Year’s Eve is in your head. It’s what champagne represents. New York is like that.

In Haiti the entire United States of America is New York. When someone sent a letter – a letter that you’d get only if it was your lucky day because the postal service system is as chaotic as the alley streets around our part of town– you’d look at the address on the envelope: “Boston, MA.” Well, must be a new way of writing New York.

Even when people moved to Texas, their parents continued to tell friends “yeah, you know my daughter’s coming home next month. She said things are getting really expensive in New York.”

You dreamnt of New York because people who had gone there came back, their healthy bulk ripping through their “nice jeans.” Maybe they brought you a pair. Even though it’s sweltering out, you wore those jeans like a talisman. I got these jeans from New York. If the jeans had a stamp that said New York on them somewhere, even better.

The university? Education? Umm probably not gonna happen. Who you know at FAMV*? Your mother knows somebody? No, OK. Laughter. People could laugh off your dreams just like that. But you knew they’d regret it when you got to New York and you spoke English and you got a job and you came back in a pair of nice jeans you bought yourself. How one gets to New York is totally irrelevant when you’re dreaming. The point is…NY!

What’s in New York? You’re not sure. Tall buildings. What else? It doesn’t matter. Did you see Yvonne when she came back? She built her mother that room (read: house). It has a wooden porch out front. She is working now –in New York. She doesn’t stay with the mean people anymore. You know Mary-Joseph’s husband tried to get funny with her. She got herself a good job. She got out…

It’s New York. From thousands of miles away, it will feed your dreams.

Up close, it’s whatever you make of it.

It’s the New Yorker and its intimidating building. It’s the New York Times. If I could read the New York Times without having to look up every third word, I knew I spoke English. It took me a year to do that. Broadway, Madison Square Garden, always as featured in my memories after watching Annie when I was younger. The Subway! A gateway to discovery. Flatbush Avenue. The Village and the University. Chinatown. The fresh food stand next to your building. The New York Public Library System, my very first American friend. My friends, none of whom came from the Caribbean, almost all of whom spoke at least one language I didn’t know.

I lived in New York for four years and I never went up the Chrysler or the Empire State Building. It was not until I left it that I thought about visiting them. Every time I come here I find something new that I love.

Recently I discovered the New York skyline…

*Mouse over photo for variation!

*Faculté d’Agronomie et de Médecine Vétérinaire

life*style

cafe gitane

by oisercage on Sep 27, 2012 • No Comments

Cafe Gitane, Nolita, NY. Love at first sight. Blue and yellow always make a joyful combination. The Atlantic blue of the tables. The mustard yellow of the walls. We could not easily fit the sugar bowl – a beautiful sugar bowl – a bottle of syrup, two coffees and two plates of food onto the small round table. But still, it felt cozy rather than cramped. The staff outfitted in quirky uniforms. The barman and the woman barrister who worked constantly, hardly chatting with anyone, turning this time to the machine, this time to the counter to deliver drinks, like she was an extension of the machine, both wore striped shirts – black and white. They both wore faded grey berets and I think the lady had cordoned her neck with a little handkerchief — or maybe I remember it that way because I’ve just seen that look done too often.

As we walked in we passed a woman standing squarely in the doorway, wearing a kind of flappery faded blue dress. She had sandy hair that scalloped down her back and wore an unnecessary amount of make-up. A round face. Central Park Lake green eyes. Her eyes rounded the bend of the block.

We like the table by the window. We will sit there.

She brings us two menus, silently. Her eyes roving the street. My eyes were too excited getting the lay of the small place to wonder at her wandering mind. Later, I saw her outside. She walked out and spoke with a man who came on a bike. She had had enough. Friday was the worst. That’s it. She’s done.

Another girl who came in — well, I didn’t see her come in — but she came in after us and sat down at the bar. She was wearing this long black dress with an asymmetrical design on the chest and a slip over the right knee. She sat on the tabouret in her three inch black peep toe shoes and I guess she felt comfortable enough because she contorted and crossed her legs so that the left shin showed prettily through the split. It looked as though she knew that she could be the object of rapt observation.

Her legs matched the tone of her arms, chest and neck. But her face looked as though she had accidentally rubbed it red with a starched towel.

She help the pose for a very long time. Through her entire breakfast and the few pages of the book she read. Croissant and coffee. Sometime after 11 a.m. A brunch toute seule.

The food? Delicious, yes. The Merguez sausages were exceedingly spicy but I loved them. Ask for a glass of cool water. Is the menu in French? No, no. Just the section titles. All dishes are described in crisp English. Are they gitanes, Gypsies? I’m not sure. Could be. To me everyone kind of looks alike, to be honest. But, I do know one thing: they don’t accept credit or debit. They only take cold hard cash. Oh, oh –I know another thing. They deliver!

postscript

frances mayes

by oisercage on Sep 1, 2012 • No Comments

If we walk to town that way in late afternoon, we see a prolonged, grandiose sunset over the Val di Chiana, lingering until it finally just dissolves, leaving enough streaked gold and saffron behind to light a way home until nine-thirty, when indigo dark sets in.

Frances Mayes and her rapturous descriptions. I like her enthusiasm, her bravery which come through her book, Under the Tuscan Sun. I know that there is a movie and I have seen it — many times. But the book is another thing — more intimate and lingering on details that make the particulars as romantic as the big bright picture we have of Italy.

Frances Mayes likes to eat and her book, though it is in no way a cookbook, includes generous recipes from the Tuscan diet. She also writes fiction and this blog.

life*style

siesta

by oisercage on Jun 21, 2012 • No Comments

The orange nail polish on my toenails sparkle as the last rays of the sun slither through the window. A spicy silence. A hissing noise I can’t locate punctuates the nothingness of this siesta hour. In another house someone is listening to loud American 80′s music. Maybe it’s KissFM. Maite shifts in her rocking chair. She has awakened. Her blatter wants relief. Then she is shuffling around, touching everything, rustling the keys on the table by the door, handling them like a talisman trying to remember if she has an errand to run.

long live the

Siesta

In the time it takes to write a paragraph the sun has gone. The ash-gray clouds float down but the horizon is the color of cream on the surface of boiled milk. Let it rain from above and quell this heat. Pebbles of rain against the window as we sleep at night. Another kind of silence.

Siesta is an old tradition in Spain. Despite the invention of air

conditioning units it still sneaks up on you, even in a city like Madrid. When I first visited Salamanca in 2001 many shops and offices still closed for siesta hours.
Now many employers simply don’t offer a horario partido, a split schedule, which would allow the worker to go home for a long lunch, sleep a quick nap, before returning to the office. A shame. I never felt there was any laziness in this custom because these folks usually worked long into the evening.

In the golden days of agriculture, the siesta was essential to the field worker who wanted to avoid heat-stroke. It is still essential to the ambitious traveler who wants to avoid skin cancer. At 1 o’clock in Granada, it is simply impossible to keep walking around. It’s time to find a place for lunch and then draw a shortcut to the hotel. Take a shower and fall into your fresh bed linens.

When I was traveling in in the southern province of Andalucia this summer, I woke up early with the sun and retreated from its glare after lunch until late afternoon, sometimes until 6 pm.

That seems late to my Americanized psyche but the truth is that 6 pm is not quite evening for the sun does not finish its work until 10.30 pm, when the youth crawl out in swarms for la marcha, the march, as the natives call the custom of going out a night for drinks, clubbing, and if you’re really having a good time, an early breakfast at 5 am…

Long live the day!