It didn’t take much to talk me out of winterizing my outboard motor. I called my friend Pete and told him that the Boss had said I had to take it to Buster but I was thinking of doing it myself, and he said, “Take it to Buster.” So I took it to Buster. So much for my burning desire to master the complexities of the internal combustion engine before it becomes obsolete.
The infamous Buster didn’t seem so bad to me, although you have to wonder, if a man is content to be professionally known as Buster, what his real name is. A hale and hearty fellow of around sixty, he wears reading glasses, which give him a professorial look as he stands at a counter behind a window festooned with marine paraphernalia: Mickey Mouse ears to flush your cooling system, emergency flares, multicolored rope for towing a children’s banana boat. Buster said it would take forty-five minutes to an hour to winterize the motor. “Put it right in the tank,” he instructed an employee named Wayne. I could wait, if I wanted, or I might like to go to a restaurant across the street, with a view of the bay (it would be cynical to imagine that Buster, like my car mechanic, also owns the waterfront restaurant), or drive up to Howard Beach. I remembered to ask how much it would cost, in case I had to go find a cash machine: $65. Not exorbitant. If I could kill time without spending money, I could pay out of my pocket and have two dollars to spare.
I decided to go to the Wildlife Refuge, where I walked down a trail I’d never been down before, between high reeds and birch trees. Two women with field guides and binoculars blocked my way. “Is there something up there?” I asked. “We think it’s a merlin,” one of them said. I couldn't see anything, so I went on ahead of them. At the East Pond were cormorants, Canada geese, swans, snow geese, gulls, flights of smaller birds, ducks, including some gorgeous green mallards. I got out my binoculars and watched a duck fishing, its butt bobbing in the water like an upended football with webbed feet; when it surfaced, I saw that it had a huge bill that came right out of its forehead. It seems funny to say that a duck has an “aquiline” nose, but that was the only way I could think of to describe it. The two women I’d passed on the trail came up behind me. I told them I had seen some kind of duck and tried to show them where it was, straight out in front of me, to the right of a piling. The woman to my far right made a derisive sound; she had a German accent. “Don’t be dismissive,” her companion said, and then to me, “Would you like to use my guide?” I declined. “Ah, you’re like me," she said. "You’d rather look around as long as you’re outside. I could stay here all day.” I agreed—plenty of time to look in books when you get home, and the pond was pretty. (Also, I can never figure out how those field guides are organized. I'd have spent a half hour on the flamingos.) The geese and swans had swum up to us, looking for handouts. The disgruntled German leafed through her guide.
I retraced my steps and took the other fork in the trail, to Big John’s Pond, where I’d been before. There is a blind, from which I once saw a whole pondful of what I have it on good authority were glossy ibis: prehistoric-looking crooked-necked long-beaked shorebirds. At first I saw nothing—well, foliage reflected in a shallow pond with some oil making rainbows at the edges. Then I saw a long-beaked brownish-gray bird with extraordinary long legs—a sandpiper?—stalking out to a mound of debris in the center of the pond. I got out my binoculars, hoping the zip of my backpack wouldn’t scare the bird away, and now on the mound I saw something black with white spots, like a gull’s tail. It turned out to be the head of a turtle. And on the other side of the mound was another turtle. I wanted to point them out to somebody, but there was no one with me in the blind or nearby on the trail. On the way back to the car, I ran into a couple who were too absorbed in each other to care about turtles, and then two more middle-aged ladies, one of whom fell behind the other and asked me, “How’s your memory? What are those . . .” and she indicated the many trees with branches full of yellow and orange and red berries. “Bittersweet?” I said. “That’s it! That’s what I was trying to think of!” she said. Hurray! I knew something.
I drove back to Buster’s, paid him and picked up my winterized outboard (it turns out that I do not need one of those Mickey Mouse ear contraptions to flush my cooling system; Buster said once a year at his place is enough), drove home, lugged the outboard into the bungalow, and stood it up properly in a corner. Later that night, I found myself reaching for the field guide to see if I could identify those birds and add them to my life list. The sandpiper might have been a willet or a dowitcher. There are a lot of different kinds of ducks. I don’t think this one was a coot, or an eider, or a shoveler. It might have been a bufflehead. Or a phalarope. All I can say for sure is that it was definitely some kind of duck.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
Curbside Service
My preferred parking block was cordoned off for a street fair or something last night, so I am back in the same hour-and-a-half Monday-Thursday spot that I exhausted last week. Not a break in sight for the alternate-side parker until November 1, All Saints Day. In front of me, as if to underscore the length of time I’ll be sitting here, is a black Infinity from Florida. Behind me, cars turn incessantly into the parking lot. At 9:20 there’s a pickup from the Chinese laundry. The Indians lost last night, so there is no glory to relive and who cares if the barber shaves another customer?
Still, it’s a beautiful fall day, sunny with a breeze. I’m tempted to smoke a joint, because I just found one in my bag while rooting around for a pen to address an envelope. I’ve never tried this out here before, for the simple reason that it sounds like a really stupid idea. Police pass. Definitely not a good idea. Still … I’m bored. I’ve already read the whole paper. I finally find a pen at the back of the glove compartment. Must make a note always to keep a pack of matches in the car. The lighter went missing after a sojourn at the mechanics. Constant pedestrian traffic: dog walkers, cell-phone talkers. I could grope under the seats . . . Poor Kenny Lofton.
I made this list a week ago Saturday night, when the Indians beat the Red Sox in extra innings, the Tribe’s finest moment since the attack of the Canadian soldiers. Where but on an American baseball diamond would you find such gorgeously adulterated names?
Papelbon vs. Betancourt (shouldn’t they be playing in the French Open?)
Asdrúbal Cabrera (named for an African king)
Ryan Gorko (what nationality is Gorko?)
Franklin Gutiérrez (pronounced by the sportscasters “Gooty-ear-ez”; a Latino Wasp?)
Youkilis (Boooo!)
Grady Sizemore (deserves to have a Starbucks quantity named after him, the next size up from venti: “I’ll have a triple skim sizemore latte, please.”)
Eric Wedge (Would that he had driven one in.)
Now a waiter runs up to the car, all in black with a black apron. “I gotta small car,” he says. He wants me to move up, but not until he gets his car from the meter, so he can park behind me. He thinks there’s room between me and the entrance to the parking lot. “I don’t want to get trapped,” I say. “Don’t worry, I work right here,” he says, meaning at the Greek diner on the corner. He runs to the corner, gets in his car, pulls up behind me. I pull up, then get out to see if he has room: I don’t think so. So I approach the window of the black Infinity. A young Asian guy is in there, asleep. I tap on the window (How rude is that?) and wake him up (it’s getting close to ten, anyway). He starts his car, gives us a few inches; everybody fits.
“You wanna cup of coffee?” the waiter asks before he goes back to work.
“No, thanks,” I say. I just bought a takeout coffee in that very same diner, possibly from this very same waiter. Last week, I stopped in the Dunkin Donuts across the street—some people swear by Dunkin' Donuts—and was horrified to find that a small coffee cost $1.69 (plus tax). It’s enough to make you buy a doughnut out of sheer despair. A small coffee costs $1.25 at the Greek diner, and they’re nicer to you. It’s 75 cents at the cart on the street, and that guy is the nicest of all.
I ask the waiter if he happens to have a pack of matches. He pats his apron pockets and shakes his head, then he makes a Flick-your-Bic motion and says that he has to go get one from his friend. A while later he comes back and says, “Where’s you cigarette?” Now look what I’ve gotten myself into. He wants to light my cigarette. I flop my hand around in my bag and say, “I can’t find them. Can I just bring you this?” He says yes and hands me the lighter.
The stoop next to the barbershop seems to be a favorite loitering spot. It is occupied at this moment by a man wearing a T-shirt with an Omega-Alpha insignia, which seems to me backwards. I roll up my window on that side. Just before ten, the Asian opens the back of his Infinity, pulls out a textbook and a notebook, and crams them into a backpack. A student of alternate-side parking.
Before I return the lighter to my waiter friend in the diner and ask if I can use the rest room (“For you, anytime,” he says), I check out his small car: a silver-gray Toyota Echo from New Jersey, with a Black Ice deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror and a Persian cat stretched out on the ledge of the back window (stuffed).
Still, it’s a beautiful fall day, sunny with a breeze. I’m tempted to smoke a joint, because I just found one in my bag while rooting around for a pen to address an envelope. I’ve never tried this out here before, for the simple reason that it sounds like a really stupid idea. Police pass. Definitely not a good idea. Still … I’m bored. I’ve already read the whole paper. I finally find a pen at the back of the glove compartment. Must make a note always to keep a pack of matches in the car. The lighter went missing after a sojourn at the mechanics. Constant pedestrian traffic: dog walkers, cell-phone talkers. I could grope under the seats . . . Poor Kenny Lofton.
I made this list a week ago Saturday night, when the Indians beat the Red Sox in extra innings, the Tribe’s finest moment since the attack of the Canadian soldiers. Where but on an American baseball diamond would you find such gorgeously adulterated names?
Papelbon vs. Betancourt (shouldn’t they be playing in the French Open?)
Asdrúbal Cabrera (named for an African king)
Ryan Gorko (what nationality is Gorko?)
Franklin Gutiérrez (pronounced by the sportscasters “Gooty-ear-ez”; a Latino Wasp?)
Youkilis (Boooo!)
Grady Sizemore (deserves to have a Starbucks quantity named after him, the next size up from venti: “I’ll have a triple skim sizemore latte, please.”)
Eric Wedge (Would that he had driven one in.)
Now a waiter runs up to the car, all in black with a black apron. “I gotta small car,” he says. He wants me to move up, but not until he gets his car from the meter, so he can park behind me. He thinks there’s room between me and the entrance to the parking lot. “I don’t want to get trapped,” I say. “Don’t worry, I work right here,” he says, meaning at the Greek diner on the corner. He runs to the corner, gets in his car, pulls up behind me. I pull up, then get out to see if he has room: I don’t think so. So I approach the window of the black Infinity. A young Asian guy is in there, asleep. I tap on the window (How rude is that?) and wake him up (it’s getting close to ten, anyway). He starts his car, gives us a few inches; everybody fits.
“You wanna cup of coffee?” the waiter asks before he goes back to work.
“No, thanks,” I say. I just bought a takeout coffee in that very same diner, possibly from this very same waiter. Last week, I stopped in the Dunkin Donuts across the street—some people swear by Dunkin' Donuts—and was horrified to find that a small coffee cost $1.69 (plus tax). It’s enough to make you buy a doughnut out of sheer despair. A small coffee costs $1.25 at the Greek diner, and they’re nicer to you. It’s 75 cents at the cart on the street, and that guy is the nicest of all.
I ask the waiter if he happens to have a pack of matches. He pats his apron pockets and shakes his head, then he makes a Flick-your-Bic motion and says that he has to go get one from his friend. A while later he comes back and says, “Where’s you cigarette?” Now look what I’ve gotten myself into. He wants to light my cigarette. I flop my hand around in my bag and say, “I can’t find them. Can I just bring you this?” He says yes and hands me the lighter.
The stoop next to the barbershop seems to be a favorite loitering spot. It is occupied at this moment by a man wearing a T-shirt with an Omega-Alpha insignia, which seems to me backwards. I roll up my window on that side. Just before ten, the Asian opens the back of his Infinity, pulls out a textbook and a notebook, and crams them into a backpack. A student of alternate-side parking.
Before I return the lighter to my waiter friend in the diner and ask if I can use the rest room (“For you, anytime,” he says), I check out his small car: a silver-gray Toyota Echo from New Jersey, with a Black Ice deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror and a Persian cat stretched out on the ledge of the back window (stuffed).
Friday, October 19, 2007
Ship's Log
The boating season ended abruptly over the weekend, when the Boss said, “You’re coming out on Monday.” He had a red scarf tied on his head, pirate style, and addressed me from high on his forklift, balancing a powerboat on the two canvas slings. He said I’d have to get the motor off and take it to Buster to be winterized. “Can’t I winterize it?” I asked. He shook his head no. “Warranty,” he said.
The Boss has been remarkably tolerant since I introduced a new outboard motor into the marina without his permission in August. After my voyage with the eggbeater and two futile trips to the boat mechanic known as Abdul, in Meadowmere Park, I had had it with used outboards. The Boss was willing to set me up with a new motor, but it turned out that I couldn’t go to his marine-supply store, out on Long Island, and buy it myself (“They won’t break it down for you”), and he couldn’t send his assistant, Frank, till the following week. It was already well into August, and I was beyond frustrated. So I ricocheted back to my old buddy Pete and had a meltdown on him. He made a few phone calls on a Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning I bought a six-horsepower Mercury for $1,300 in cash at Buster’s, the second-largest employer in Broad Channel after Call-A-Head ("Portable Toilets of Every Description").
“Now all you have to do is enter Buster’s number into your cell phone and call him when you break down on Jamaica Bay,” Pete said on the phone. I was puzzling over this when we got cut off, and he called back to say it was a joke. (I have a history of calling Pete when I get in trouble out on the bay; his number is in my cell phone under “SOS.”) When I brought the motor over to the marina to put it on the boat, Pete helped, but he kept his distance. The Boss, who was a little distracted because he was hosting a party, grumbled, “Any trouble you have with that motor is Buster’s problem.” I don’t know what their problem is with Buster, or with Mercury motors (unless it has something to do with the markings on the throttle: a turtle for slow and a rabbit for fast). That night, I dreamed that wherever I went I was carrying around a great weight. I’m pretty sure it was my destiny as the owner of a new outboard motor.
I’ve taken good care of the motor, hosing it off after every use, so the salt won’t eat it, consulting the owner’s manual, checking the oil. I put a lock on it so it wouldn’t get stolen. Pete would have been welcome to use the boat anytime, but the motor has a little gizmo on a lanyard that has to be wedged under the stop button in order to start it up, and I keep that lanyard zipped in a plastic pouch in my backpack, along with the boater registration, the owner’s manual, and my crib sheet. I consult the crib sheet religiously, both going and coming: Attach gas line, Open vent on gas can, Attach lanyard, Set throttle on Start, Put gear in Neutral, Pump gas, Open choke, Pull cord, Close choke. I check the flags in the marina to see which way the wind is blowing and decide which end of the boat to untie last. I put her in reverse to leave the slip, then change gears and cruise past the cormorants, watching me with their beady red eyes as I head into the open water.
The Boss had given me notice late on Saturday afternoon, so I had time to go out once more, on Sunday, and to think of a way to get the motor off the boat without dropping it in the water. For my last excursion of the season, I had a passenger, my friend G., who lived for years in Venice. She had dressed all in black, so I lent her a shirt and a sweater, partly because I was afraid she’d be cold but mostly because I consider it bad luck to wear black in a boat. She borrowed a pair of shoes, apparently expecting the boat to get swamped and not wanting to ruin her own shoes. She had twisted her wild red hair into two horns.
We went first into Barbadoes Basin, because I had read in the Wave the details of a plan to build a new marina there. I was telling G. about it—room for thirty-five to fifty boats, a public boat ramp, a restaurant and catering hall—and she said, “But why would you want to change marinas?” I DON’T want to change marinas. While I had been at the marina the day before, watching the Boss and Frank and Pete lowering that boat into the water, a big excursion boat—the Golden Sunshine—had come by, on a sunset tour of Jamaica Bay. We could hear the tour guide’s spiel from the marina. The Boss grinned, and said, “We’re on the tour!” Then he shouted, “Go away! We’re the mean marina! Everybody hates us!” I wouldn’t be interested in boating at all if a boat weren’t an excuse to hang around with this crew.
G. and I crossed the bay, sticking near the buoys, the nuns and the cans. It was breezy, and my Vermeer cap blew off, which was too bad, because it was also sunny, and that cap was a souvenir of my sibling’s tree-cutting business. (Vermeer makes wood chippers.) For years I’d been wanting to take the boat into Hawtree Basin, to see West Hamilton Beach, a neighborhood that is visible from the A train, on the other side of the tracks from the long-term parking lot at JFK. From the train, it looks like redneck country. There is a narrow boardwalk along the tracks over canals and an isolated neighborhood of rickety houses with boats tied up in watery back yards. At moon tides, the bay is lapping at the floorboards. From the boat, the houses along the canal were charming, with a squalid little trailer or two, and clothes flapping on a line. There was a ferry, like a traghetto in Venice, to get back and forth across the canal, and a fire boat, and a boat called the Phoenix. There were swans, a fisherman on a blue bow bridge, a man having coffee and reading the paper on the dock behind a house that might have been a little yacht club. We nosed our way to the end of the canal, then turned around and headed back.
Before going back into the marina, I consulted my notes: Unplug gas line (so that the motor will putt to a stop and there will be no gas left in it), Plug in gas cap, Close vent on gas tank. I slow down entering the marina, and put her in Neutral as I turn into my slip. Sometimes I manage, once I'm in position, to put her in Reverse and come in for a perfect landing, but I have also been known to accidentally put her in Forward and then have to throw myself on the dock as she churns away, out of control. I usually rinse off the motor after raising it out of the water, but the hose on the dock had been disconnected. Frank helped me take the motor off the boat. O.K., Frank took the motor off the boat for me—it weighs about forty pounds, and I am certain that if I had tried to do it myself both it and I would have ended up in the water. He trundled it up to the parking lot on a handtruck and hosed it off. My job, as I saw it, was to keep him from laying the motor down on the side that said “This Side Up.” (The manual includes very urgent warnings against this: the crankcase will leak or something.) I stood the motor up in my car, on the floor of the back seat. I felt a great weight lift from me. Pete and the Boss may have washed their hands of me and my mechanical problems once I started doing business with Buster (and I may yet find out why they don’t do business with Buster), but once I got a new motor I didn’t have any mechanical problems. In fact the only casualties of the season (an admittedly short season) were a few splinters, from grabbing the dock when I misjudged my landing, and the lost Vermeer cap.
The Boss has been remarkably tolerant since I introduced a new outboard motor into the marina without his permission in August. After my voyage with the eggbeater and two futile trips to the boat mechanic known as Abdul, in Meadowmere Park, I had had it with used outboards. The Boss was willing to set me up with a new motor, but it turned out that I couldn’t go to his marine-supply store, out on Long Island, and buy it myself (“They won’t break it down for you”), and he couldn’t send his assistant, Frank, till the following week. It was already well into August, and I was beyond frustrated. So I ricocheted back to my old buddy Pete and had a meltdown on him. He made a few phone calls on a Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning I bought a six-horsepower Mercury for $1,300 in cash at Buster’s, the second-largest employer in Broad Channel after Call-A-Head ("Portable Toilets of Every Description").
“Now all you have to do is enter Buster’s number into your cell phone and call him when you break down on Jamaica Bay,” Pete said on the phone. I was puzzling over this when we got cut off, and he called back to say it was a joke. (I have a history of calling Pete when I get in trouble out on the bay; his number is in my cell phone under “SOS.”) When I brought the motor over to the marina to put it on the boat, Pete helped, but he kept his distance. The Boss, who was a little distracted because he was hosting a party, grumbled, “Any trouble you have with that motor is Buster’s problem.” I don’t know what their problem is with Buster, or with Mercury motors (unless it has something to do with the markings on the throttle: a turtle for slow and a rabbit for fast). That night, I dreamed that wherever I went I was carrying around a great weight. I’m pretty sure it was my destiny as the owner of a new outboard motor.
I’ve taken good care of the motor, hosing it off after every use, so the salt won’t eat it, consulting the owner’s manual, checking the oil. I put a lock on it so it wouldn’t get stolen. Pete would have been welcome to use the boat anytime, but the motor has a little gizmo on a lanyard that has to be wedged under the stop button in order to start it up, and I keep that lanyard zipped in a plastic pouch in my backpack, along with the boater registration, the owner’s manual, and my crib sheet. I consult the crib sheet religiously, both going and coming: Attach gas line, Open vent on gas can, Attach lanyard, Set throttle on Start, Put gear in Neutral, Pump gas, Open choke, Pull cord, Close choke. I check the flags in the marina to see which way the wind is blowing and decide which end of the boat to untie last. I put her in reverse to leave the slip, then change gears and cruise past the cormorants, watching me with their beady red eyes as I head into the open water.
The Boss had given me notice late on Saturday afternoon, so I had time to go out once more, on Sunday, and to think of a way to get the motor off the boat without dropping it in the water. For my last excursion of the season, I had a passenger, my friend G., who lived for years in Venice. She had dressed all in black, so I lent her a shirt and a sweater, partly because I was afraid she’d be cold but mostly because I consider it bad luck to wear black in a boat. She borrowed a pair of shoes, apparently expecting the boat to get swamped and not wanting to ruin her own shoes. She had twisted her wild red hair into two horns.
We went first into Barbadoes Basin, because I had read in the Wave the details of a plan to build a new marina there. I was telling G. about it—room for thirty-five to fifty boats, a public boat ramp, a restaurant and catering hall—and she said, “But why would you want to change marinas?” I DON’T want to change marinas. While I had been at the marina the day before, watching the Boss and Frank and Pete lowering that boat into the water, a big excursion boat—the Golden Sunshine—had come by, on a sunset tour of Jamaica Bay. We could hear the tour guide’s spiel from the marina. The Boss grinned, and said, “We’re on the tour!” Then he shouted, “Go away! We’re the mean marina! Everybody hates us!” I wouldn’t be interested in boating at all if a boat weren’t an excuse to hang around with this crew.
G. and I crossed the bay, sticking near the buoys, the nuns and the cans. It was breezy, and my Vermeer cap blew off, which was too bad, because it was also sunny, and that cap was a souvenir of my sibling’s tree-cutting business. (Vermeer makes wood chippers.) For years I’d been wanting to take the boat into Hawtree Basin, to see West Hamilton Beach, a neighborhood that is visible from the A train, on the other side of the tracks from the long-term parking lot at JFK. From the train, it looks like redneck country. There is a narrow boardwalk along the tracks over canals and an isolated neighborhood of rickety houses with boats tied up in watery back yards. At moon tides, the bay is lapping at the floorboards. From the boat, the houses along the canal were charming, with a squalid little trailer or two, and clothes flapping on a line. There was a ferry, like a traghetto in Venice, to get back and forth across the canal, and a fire boat, and a boat called the Phoenix. There were swans, a fisherman on a blue bow bridge, a man having coffee and reading the paper on the dock behind a house that might have been a little yacht club. We nosed our way to the end of the canal, then turned around and headed back.
Before going back into the marina, I consulted my notes: Unplug gas line (so that the motor will putt to a stop and there will be no gas left in it), Plug in gas cap, Close vent on gas tank. I slow down entering the marina, and put her in Neutral as I turn into my slip. Sometimes I manage, once I'm in position, to put her in Reverse and come in for a perfect landing, but I have also been known to accidentally put her in Forward and then have to throw myself on the dock as she churns away, out of control. I usually rinse off the motor after raising it out of the water, but the hose on the dock had been disconnected. Frank helped me take the motor off the boat. O.K., Frank took the motor off the boat for me—it weighs about forty pounds, and I am certain that if I had tried to do it myself both it and I would have ended up in the water. He trundled it up to the parking lot on a handtruck and hosed it off. My job, as I saw it, was to keep him from laying the motor down on the side that said “This Side Up.” (The manual includes very urgent warnings against this: the crankcase will leak or something.) I stood the motor up in my car, on the floor of the back seat. I felt a great weight lift from me. Pete and the Boss may have washed their hands of me and my mechanical problems once I started doing business with Buster (and I may yet find out why they don’t do business with Buster), but once I got a new motor I didn’t have any mechanical problems. In fact the only casualties of the season (an admittedly short season) were a few splinters, from grabbing the dock when I misjudged my landing, and the lost Vermeer cap.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Thursday Spot
“Are you leaving your car here till tomorrow?” A cheerful light-skinned Latino was addressing me from the curb.
“Yes.”
“Oh, O.K. I’m on the other side and I was going to try to move now so I don’t have to do it tomorrow. But I just missed.”
“It’s all filled in already?”
“Yeah. I guess it’s because the three guys didn’t move.” Nobody had come to mind the car in front of me or the car and motorcycle behind me. I’d watched from a meter across the street as a policewoman issued tickets to both the cars (but not the motorcycle).
“Maybe you could try to negotiate with someone farther up.”
“Nah, I know all these guys. They park here all the time. You do, too, right?”
“Yeah, I park here a lot.”
Actually, it’s been a long time since I put in a full hour and half of alternate-side time on this block. I got here at eight-thirty. The street sweepers came, a pair of them, at nine. Competition felt fierce. There was a green Pathfinder double-parked in front of me. I was determined not to let anything come between me and my spot, so I tailgated the second street sweeper and then waved the Pathfinder back so that I’d have room to parallel park between the two scofflaws. It worked.
I am outside a barbershop. A man with a big pink head and sparse white hair is getting blow-dried. He checks his watch. What more can the barber possibly do? Oh, it’s a nape shave.
The pink guy is out of there and a boyish young man is in the barber’s chair. He executes a funny gesture. He wants an inch off at his temples? And a straight line down each side of his face? The barber is Italian. He talks with his hands as he clips and combs.
A man with a barefoot baby asleep in a Snugli stands on a stoop and rings a buzzer. No one answers, so he makes a call on his cell phone: “Hey, what’s going on?” A woman comes out the door with a stroller, and the man cheers up: “Hey, how are you?” The baby wakes up when the man extricates him from the Snugli and puts him in the stroller. But he doesn’t cry. I assumed that the man was handing the baby over to the woman, but no: he leaves, pushing the baby in the stroller.
There’s a delivery to the door on the other side of the barbershop, and a pickup of two big net sacks of dry-cleaning from the Chinese laundry. I could be on Sesame Street. Or Penny Lane.
“Yo, I’m leaving from that spot,” a black guy at my passenger window says, pointing across the street. “You could move, and that way you don’t have to sit no more.”
“Thanks, but I already invested, and I don’t want to sit tomorrow.”
He understands. “You only got fifteen minutes left. The machine come by?”
“Yea.”
“It did?”
And he's off. In less than a minute, his spot is taken.
At ten, a couple arrive at the car in front of me, a pewter-colored Ford Taurus. She plucks the ticket off the windshield and gets in the driver's seat. The Latino guy who wanted a Thursday spot reappears, just in time. He is getting his wish. He pulls his car up next to mine and waits for the couple ahead of me to leave. His spot across the street gets taken instantly.
Meanwhile back in Penny Lane the barber shaves another customer.
“Yes.”
“Oh, O.K. I’m on the other side and I was going to try to move now so I don’t have to do it tomorrow. But I just missed.”
“It’s all filled in already?”
“Yeah. I guess it’s because the three guys didn’t move.” Nobody had come to mind the car in front of me or the car and motorcycle behind me. I’d watched from a meter across the street as a policewoman issued tickets to both the cars (but not the motorcycle).
“Maybe you could try to negotiate with someone farther up.”
“Nah, I know all these guys. They park here all the time. You do, too, right?”
“Yeah, I park here a lot.”
Actually, it’s been a long time since I put in a full hour and half of alternate-side time on this block. I got here at eight-thirty. The street sweepers came, a pair of them, at nine. Competition felt fierce. There was a green Pathfinder double-parked in front of me. I was determined not to let anything come between me and my spot, so I tailgated the second street sweeper and then waved the Pathfinder back so that I’d have room to parallel park between the two scofflaws. It worked.
I am outside a barbershop. A man with a big pink head and sparse white hair is getting blow-dried. He checks his watch. What more can the barber possibly do? Oh, it’s a nape shave.
The pink guy is out of there and a boyish young man is in the barber’s chair. He executes a funny gesture. He wants an inch off at his temples? And a straight line down each side of his face? The barber is Italian. He talks with his hands as he clips and combs.
A man with a barefoot baby asleep in a Snugli stands on a stoop and rings a buzzer. No one answers, so he makes a call on his cell phone: “Hey, what’s going on?” A woman comes out the door with a stroller, and the man cheers up: “Hey, how are you?” The baby wakes up when the man extricates him from the Snugli and puts him in the stroller. But he doesn’t cry. I assumed that the man was handing the baby over to the woman, but no: he leaves, pushing the baby in the stroller.
There’s a delivery to the door on the other side of the barbershop, and a pickup of two big net sacks of dry-cleaning from the Chinese laundry. I could be on Sesame Street. Or Penny Lane.
“Yo, I’m leaving from that spot,” a black guy at my passenger window says, pointing across the street. “You could move, and that way you don’t have to sit no more.”
“Thanks, but I already invested, and I don’t want to sit tomorrow.”
He understands. “You only got fifteen minutes left. The machine come by?”
“Yea.”
“It did?”
And he's off. In less than a minute, his spot is taken.
At ten, a couple arrive at the car in front of me, a pewter-colored Ford Taurus. She plucks the ticket off the windshield and gets in the driver's seat. The Latino guy who wanted a Thursday spot reappears, just in time. He is getting his wish. He pulls his car up next to mine and waits for the couple ahead of me to leave. His spot across the street gets taken instantly.
Meanwhile back in Penny Lane the barber shaves another customer.
Friday, October 12, 2007
It'll Fit Her
Yesterday, because I took some clothes to the cleaners and was on my parking block anyway, I decided to see if my car was O.K. In a sense, it was another day off for the Alternate Side Parker, because if I’d parked on the other side of the street, I’d have had to be in the car at 7:30 in the morning. Such is my absent-mindedness that by the time I got to that block I’d forgotten what I was doing there and was surprised to see a car that looked just like mine parked across the street. It was behind a moving van, and I paused for a moment, wondering if I should volunteer to back up and give the movers a little room. But they had plenty of room. Looking around a bit, I realized that there were a lot of moving vans on that side of the street. Some small green signs were taped irregularly to the signposts. They said, “No Parking Today,” by order of the Police Department.
Well. If they expected us to obey that sudden law, they should have given us warning back on Tuesday, when we secured these places through next Tuesday, if need be. I decided I just wasn’t going to worry about it. It has been a problem with that side of the street that it is subject to sudden rule changes. There are often special events in the building with the big copper bands on it. Now that the scaffolding is down, that building looks like a huge—I mean, city-block-size—pirate’s chest. People are always coming and going, filling it up and emptying it out.
I checked this morning to make sure my car was still there. Much of that side of the street was barricaded and marked off with orange cones looped together with yellow tape, but my car, down at the end of the block, was O.K.: no tow, no ticket, no barricade. So far Id al-Fitr has been good to me, Allah be praised.
Well. If they expected us to obey that sudden law, they should have given us warning back on Tuesday, when we secured these places through next Tuesday, if need be. I decided I just wasn’t going to worry about it. It has been a problem with that side of the street that it is subject to sudden rule changes. There are often special events in the building with the big copper bands on it. Now that the scaffolding is down, that building looks like a huge—I mean, city-block-size—pirate’s chest. People are always coming and going, filling it up and emptying it out.
I checked this morning to make sure my car was still there. Much of that side of the street was barricaded and marked off with orange cones looped together with yellow tape, but my car, down at the end of the block, was O.K.: no tow, no ticket, no barricade. So far Id al-Fitr has been good to me, Allah be praised.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Go Tribe!
Theoretically, the Alternate Side Parker had a choice this week: park on the Monday-Thursday side and celebrate Columbus Day, or convert to Tuesday-Friday and observe Id al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. But in practice there was no choice: the only spot available on my favorite parking block when I got back to the city on Sunday was on the Tuesday-Friday, or Muslim, side of the street. A beautiful spot opened on the Columbus, or Christian, side as I was leaving the scene, but I was laden with the bounty of Octoberfest in New England (apples, chrysanthemums), and, besides, it had been no mean feat to squeeze into that space and I was not about to move.
So I was out there Tuesday morning, at the stroke of seven-thirty, in one of the twelve spots recently freed up by the removal of scaffolding, wondering if it would be any different on this side of the street. And it was. Usually the street sweeper comes at about 7:40, but no sooner was I behind the wheel than the sweeper appeared in my rearview mirror, at the far end of the street, and I heard the sound of gentlemen starting their engines. A woman with a poodle arrived at the silver Lexus S.U.V. in front of me just in time: I was wedged in so tight that I couldn’t move until she moved. After the sweeper passed, there was a lot of jockeying back and forth to fit back in (a woman up ahead had ended up too close to the fire hydrant, and I was too close to the curb). The pigeons swooped from their roosts on one side of the street to roosts on the other (surely pigeons don’t have alternate-side parking! Were they imitating the cars?). The woman with the poodle left at 7:41 (she did not get a ticket), and I settled in to read the sports section.
Somehow I hadn’t realized that local baseball coverage would be more about the Yankees’ loss than about the Indians’ victory. The highlight of the baseball season so far, by my lights, was the bugs that swarmed onto the pitcher’s mound at Jacobs Field, in Cleveland, during last Friday’s game and drove the Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlin to distraction. The Times called the insects “gnats” and “midges,” eschewing the local usage. As kids growing up in Cleveland, we called them Canadian soldiers, with no inkling that this was not their scientific name. It still sounds perfectly natural to me—Canadian soldiers—though I guess it’s politically incorrect: a slur on the military readiness of our neighbors to the north. The Random House Dictionary (but not Webster’s) has an entry for Canadian soldiers: “the mayfly” (“Chiefly Northern U.S.”). Canadian soldiers were as much a part of summer in Cleveland as swimming lessons at Brookside Park and the stench from the stockyards when the wind was right (or wrong). We would discourage them from swarming on the front porch by lighting punks, those cork-smelling sticks that smoldered and that you could use to touch off a sparkler or a firecracker. When we didn’t have punks, we experimented by lighting cattails from the swamp. A cigar would have worked. Instead of spraying Off! on the back of Joba Chamberlin's neck, they should have gotten a beekeeper to come with a bellowsful of smoke. Or just lit up themselves. Ironic, isn't it, that Joba, a Native American, was undone by the Indians, whose logo, Chief Wahoo, is as politically incorrect as you can get.
The series against the Red Sox opens in Boston on Id al-Fitr, Friday, at sundown. I don’t know why alternate-side parking is suspended if the holiday doesn’t begin till sundown, but I’m not complaining.
So I was out there Tuesday morning, at the stroke of seven-thirty, in one of the twelve spots recently freed up by the removal of scaffolding, wondering if it would be any different on this side of the street. And it was. Usually the street sweeper comes at about 7:40, but no sooner was I behind the wheel than the sweeper appeared in my rearview mirror, at the far end of the street, and I heard the sound of gentlemen starting their engines. A woman with a poodle arrived at the silver Lexus S.U.V. in front of me just in time: I was wedged in so tight that I couldn’t move until she moved. After the sweeper passed, there was a lot of jockeying back and forth to fit back in (a woman up ahead had ended up too close to the fire hydrant, and I was too close to the curb). The pigeons swooped from their roosts on one side of the street to roosts on the other (surely pigeons don’t have alternate-side parking! Were they imitating the cars?). The woman with the poodle left at 7:41 (she did not get a ticket), and I settled in to read the sports section.
Somehow I hadn’t realized that local baseball coverage would be more about the Yankees’ loss than about the Indians’ victory. The highlight of the baseball season so far, by my lights, was the bugs that swarmed onto the pitcher’s mound at Jacobs Field, in Cleveland, during last Friday’s game and drove the Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlin to distraction. The Times called the insects “gnats” and “midges,” eschewing the local usage. As kids growing up in Cleveland, we called them Canadian soldiers, with no inkling that this was not their scientific name. It still sounds perfectly natural to me—Canadian soldiers—though I guess it’s politically incorrect: a slur on the military readiness of our neighbors to the north. The Random House Dictionary (but not Webster’s) has an entry for Canadian soldiers: “the mayfly” (“Chiefly Northern U.S.”). Canadian soldiers were as much a part of summer in Cleveland as swimming lessons at Brookside Park and the stench from the stockyards when the wind was right (or wrong). We would discourage them from swarming on the front porch by lighting punks, those cork-smelling sticks that smoldered and that you could use to touch off a sparkler or a firecracker. When we didn’t have punks, we experimented by lighting cattails from the swamp. A cigar would have worked. Instead of spraying Off! on the back of Joba Chamberlin's neck, they should have gotten a beekeeper to come with a bellowsful of smoke. Or just lit up themselves. Ironic, isn't it, that Joba, a Native American, was undone by the Indians, whose logo, Chief Wahoo, is as politically incorrect as you can get.
The series against the Red Sox opens in Boston on Id al-Fitr, Friday, at sundown. I don’t know why alternate-side parking is suspended if the holiday doesn’t begin till sundown, but I’m not complaining.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Into the Weeds
Last Sunday at high tide, a friend in the marina led me through the cow path to the airport. This is the other cow path, the main cow path being a high-tide shortcut into Broad Channel, which I negotiated by myself for the first time a few weeks ago, in a stiff wind. “Risk it. You need the experience,” the boss had said. That cow path is marked with a white “No Wake” buoy at each end, but in the middle there are plenty of tempting routes into the weeds. Lucky for me, a boat was coming out just as I was going in, so I knew to make a sharp right turn. Later, in the car, I could see the cow path clearly from the bridge.
So this friend, Frank of Assisi—the one who feeds the birds—left a pile of peanuts for the squirrel, turned on the tap in the fish sink to give the swans a drink of fresh water, and mounted his jet ski. His engine has 125 horsepower; my new outboard has 6 horsepower. He is on the equivalent of a racehorse while I am holding the reins of a horse-drawn beer wagon.
He idled at the mouth of the path till I caught up, and led me through yellow-green meadows of salt marsh. Sometimes he would disappear, and only when I came to a turn would I see which direction he had gone in. There were straightaways and doglegs and floating mats of weeds that I had to be careful not to foul my outboard with. We flushed a couple of egrets from the meadow, as well as some big dark goose-shaped birds. In the distance was the control tower of JFK.
After meandering for several minutes, we came to open water just south of a runway. A Homeland Security vehicle drove past on shore, flashing its rooftop light. I did not take a picture of it. “Do you know where you are?” Frank asked. I did. I had been following our progress on the chart, in case he ditched me. There was a skeletal pier parallel to the runway between me and the channel. Two big boats at anchor were tied up alongside each other, the only other vessels in this fishing hole. The bay is very deep here; I read somewhere that the fill for JFK's runways was dredged from Jamaica Bay.
Frank went back the way we came, and while I was still poking around in the high-security area he came zipping through the cow path at speed, churning up a wake.
Since I had plenty of gas, I went up to the head of the bay to Meadowmere Park, all the way to the Rockaway Turnpike. Driving in a car on the Rockaway Turnpike, you would never suspect that behind the International House of Pancakes and the carpet outlets was a scene out of Maine or Cape Cod: boats and buoys and stacks of crab traps in people’s back yards. If I had wanted to, I could have tied up and crossed the street and used my credit card to buy a new outfit at T. J. Maxx in the Five Towns Mall.
On the chart, it looked as if I could turn right just before the turnpike and go under a bridge and up a channel to circle back into the bay without retracing my route. The bridge looked utterly forbidding, however—squat and concrete, like something an industrial troll lived under. And the only way to tell if the water was deep enough was to poke through the weeds growing right in the middle of the channel and risk getting stuck in the mud. I was tempted—what is the point in coming this far if you're not going to see if there is a passage to the Orient? where would we be if Christopher Columbus had not dared sail over the edge?—but the tide was starting to go out, and there was a big "No Trespassing" sign on a waterfront building, and though I usually assume that this doesn't mean me, I headed back the way I came.
My jet-ski outrider got back to the marina about the same time I did. He'd been all over the bay. When I told my friend Pete where I'd been, he was unimpressed. “It’s not fun unless you have a breakdown,” he said.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
High Tide Street
If you look closely, you can see the No Parking Anytime sign, on the right, near the boat in the trees. This car will never be the same.
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