End of the year

It was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon in Central Park today and the crowds were out in number! Apart from the nice days when runners pretty much line the reservoir, I don't think I have ever seen so many people on the track. Most of them were foreign - here for New Year's Eve, no doubt. ( Don't know why I felt the need to capitalize that, but I did.) Among the languages I heard were Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, German and several dialects of the mother tongue. Something else I noticed was the ubiquity of the puffy coat. Maybe it has even replaced the sneaker or running shoe as the world's most popular garment and I am not exactly sure why. Yes, they are warm and light in weight and though good ones are costly, you can also buy them very cheaply - but by and large, they are anything but flattering. In fact, though I took a bunch of pictures of people wearing various lengths and colors of the jacket, I couldn't bring myself to include them because, apart from the three cute little teens I snapped near the pump house, nobody looked good wearing one of them. I loved the dogs and the beautiful sky, but my prize today goes to the girl in pink. No ski jacket for her, no way!

a small city with soul and a pulse

Louisville surprises. When you approach it on the highway, the most vivid sight - and the one you would remember if you simply drove right by - is the KFC (Yum!) Center, a new and flashy sports arena that could be in any city anywhere in the USA. But you would be making a mistake if you let "the Yum" as they call it be your only image of the city because if you were to exit into the downtown, you would find an interesting mix: a Victorian center where despite the fact that the buildings have been beautifully preserved, their street level stores are mostly empty - vacated by businesses which now prosper in malls on the outskirts of the city; a metropolis pretty much devoid of public transportation but with very cool and edgy sidewalk sculptures that serve as bike racks for the increasing number of cyclists; acres of desolate and empty urban landscape surrounding pockets of beautiful mansions and small village-like areas where indie bookstores fly rainbow flags and shotgun houses have been turned into restaurants and boutiques; and there are even two city parks in Louisville designed by Olmstead. Because our daughter is living here at the moment, working at the extraordinary Actor's Theater of Louisville, she is something of an insider. So in scouting for a hotel that would accept both us and our doggie for the Christmas weekend, she found 21C - a chic, modern and, let's face it, luxurious hotel whose rooftop is lined year round with red penguin sculptures. The lobby of 21C is a fantastic modern art museum and the mens room is something of a design legend involving a waterfall and a one way mirror!

Perhaps the essence of Louisville showed itself best last night when we went to the Garage Bar for Christmas Eve dinner. Having walked all afternoon, we decided to take a taxi to the restaurant which is, as its name suggests, an old gas station out on one of the highways that cuts across the city. The driver chatted with us of course (this is Louisville, afterall) and we discovered that we all shared the same last name, though no relation that we could discover. Then dinner at the bar - local ingredients, microbrews, a variety of bourbons - and late in the evening we asked our adorable young waiter if he could call a cab for us, since we were a long and desolate walk from our hotel. There were no cabs late on Christmas Eve, so our waiter said "my car's out front - I'll drive you back" and off we all went through the silent streets of a most appealing city.

Red for Yuletide?

You have to go far from the madding crowds of Union Square to find an empty street in today's Manhattan. But it is possible if you're wearing comfortable shoes. You just walk south and east towards the Williamsburg Bridge. By night, this area - known in caps as LES - is hopping with hipsters because of the bars and restaurants that have taken up residence in the area that was once a immigrant Jewish neighborhood. But by day it is still blessedly deserted, a little edgy and pretty interesting. There is a magnificent old synagogue, now painted pink and used as an arts center, an indoor market where Hispanic grocers and butchers sell canned pigeon peas and pigs trotters alongside of several upstart artisanal cheesemakers and bread bakers. And watching over it all on top of a roof, a statue of a man - whether he is waving a welcome to the area or directing newcomers to move right on by and leave the Lower East Side in gritty, ungentrified peace, I don't know, but in my mind, it should be the latter.

the season to be jolly

You really don't need ornaments to decorate the trees at this time of year because nature - or "Mother Nature", as my mother always referred to it - does the trick for you. I was struck when I was walking through the park today at just how un-bare the trees are in December. Apart from dead leaves, which can in themselves be quite beautiful, there were interesting dried pods, pine cones, birds nests and even the odd pink blossom (deceived by global warming into thinking it was spring) all prettying up the naked branches. But for holiday purposes, the berries take the prize. Bright red, yellow and purple in abundance like so many tiny Christmas balls and then, of course, the two solitary holly berries - rightful royalty of the season - sitting proudly beside their emblematic leaves.

beyond soggy

I wish I had carried my camera with me today when, in the twenty-five minutes that it wasn't raining, I went for a run. Up the road from here is a pond which I dubbed the "magic pond" back when my kids were little and I did things like that. But the pond is actually sort of magic because its surface sits above the level of the road as if the basin is somehow suspended in space. I don't exactly know how that happens, but if you stand on the road next to the pond and look towards it, the top of the pond will be above your eye level. To me that is as close to magic as it gets. So I always stop in the middle of my run and puzzle over it, enjoy it (because it is a pretty pond) and hope that perhaps there will be a blue heron somewhere nearby since they seem to be attracted to this particular pond as well. But no matter how much rain we have here, the pond has never overflowed its banks - until today. Indeed, in the wake of Irene and the post-Irene rains we have had for the last three days, the pond has actually sprung a leak. As I ran by I noticed water pouring through a gap and into the ditch at the side of the road. I think it is probably going to be OK, though I did have visions of the pond emptying out or something like that since it sits like a sink above the rest of the ground. . .but I do wish I had been able to take a few pictures of the water coming over the side just to prove to any doubters that it actually happened.

To prove just how wet and soggy it is around here, however, I am posting just a few pictures of the myriad types of mushrooms that have sprung up in the grass in the last few days. I have no idea whether any of them are edible and I am not going to find out, but there is one - the picture at the bottom of the toadstool with the egg under it - which I think will soon be housing elves.

small town

This morning my husband and I went to watch a road race in the village near our farm. The race was called the "Covered Bridge 10k" because, obviously, the route takes the runners near or through a covered bridge. In this case the covered bridge was the halfway point: the race started at one end of Main Street, headed out along Route 10, then through the covered bridge and back to town via the Back River Road, ending in front of the courthouse. I would like to say that the whole town turned out to watch, but that wouldn't be accurate. I would say that maybe 1/20th of the town was there, runners included. But it was a happy crowd. Lots of the runners were parents, so their kids went wild as they crossed the finish. Some of the runners were kids themselves - either running with a parent or by themselves - their parents and siblings cheering them along. There was, of course, a bake sale. There were policemen to keep the traffic at bay. There was an announcer in the bandstand at the center of Courthouse Square announcing the splits times of the front runners. We were particularly proud fans, since the boy who won (who is a nationally ranked athlete) is the son of very old friends; he was born the same week as our own boy and even now 22 years later, the two finish each others' sentences. The winner's mother also ran the race and did her personal best time. I could post a picture of her coming across the finish, but even though she looked great, she wouldn't thank me for that!

a little tirade

I started jogging in Central Park in 1978 at a time when the sport of running was just gathering steam and when women runners were few and far between. And I have run there ever since and seen its many changes. Back when I started to be a park regular it was a wild and wooly space in what was also, then, a wild and wooly city. Like many of the surrounding streets, the park was rough, filthy and dangerous. Running around the reservoir - ragged, overgrown and almost completely deserted - was taking your life in your hands, particularly for a woman. But with all its dirt and fearsome qualities, its grassless fields and crumbling footpaths, it was still a place of refuge for the citizens of the city. Warm weekend afternoons brought out the hippies, the ball-players, the magicians and the families with their liquor and their barbecues. Yes, the smell of marijuana pervaded the air, but so did the sounds of children and the strains of music from the string quartets, garage bands and solitary troubadours who returned week after week to the same locations collecting faithful audiences who would sprawl on the ground to listen for as long as the musicians would play. The park was dangerous after dark and raucous on the days when parade watchers would spill into it from Fifth Avenue. It was sinister in places like the Ramble and the woods at the north end. It was disorganized and threadbare, but it nonetheless pulsed with a sort of edgy, interesting energy like an embarrassing but idiosyncratic backyard for the lively, crazy, throbbing city around it.

I actually loved the park back then. It had big problems, but it belonged to us, the diverse, rag-tag people of Manhattan. So when the Central Park Conservancy began its giant clean-up some years back, I had mixed feelings. I was definitely relieved, on the one hand, that the reservoir would be safer and that the beautiful old structures - the bridges and pavilions - would be restored and preserved. But on the other hand, I was a little leery of the fact that the bulk of the money for the project was going to come from private donations and that a large part of those donations were going to come from people who lived along the periphery of the park whose interests weren't the same as, for instance, those who came down from Harlem for a bit of fresh air on a hot summer afternoon. I hoped for the best, however: for a green, clean and safe version of the park I had come to love. But as one by one the ball fields, the grassy knolls, the stands of trees and the pathways were cordoned off and prettied up, it became increasingly clear that the park that was once the haven for real city people was becoming another jewel in the crown of a city that was more and more thinking of itself as a sort of urban Disneyworld.

I certainly won't deny that the Conservancy has met their mandate brilliantly. The flora couldn't be prettier, all weeded and pruned and wood-chipped into nice, neat areas. The buildings and bridges are in tip-top shape, restored to fair-thee-well. The baseball diamonds are worthy of the finest stadiums and the lawns are green and immaculate. In fact it is a picture

perfect city park - almost like a museum. And, like a museum, it is now a place full of rules and regulations not to mention barriers and fences. And as if the metal demarcations aren't enough to keep visitors in line, there are signs everywhere as you can see in the photos above. No bicycles, no dogs, no picnicking, nothing but tranquil ("passive") activity, no ball-playing, no tree-climbing, no noise. In other words no activities for which parks were created.

When I run and walk in the park now, it is with a sad mixture of awe, nostalgia and more than a modicum of anger. Awe for the wonderful vision of Olmstead and Vaux which has been resurrected with sparkling accuracy, nostalgia for the park I knew when I was young, and indeed anger that what was once a colorful, noisy, multicultural playground is now a showpiece for the tourists, the white and the well-behaved.

harbingers, perhaps

Here's hoping! Today in the park, there were daffodils visibly shooting out of the earth, a lone trumpeter on Poet's Walk playing "Summertime", a high school band all bundled up in their winter coats playing in the outdoor bandshell, and the west side skyline from the reservoir - still light at 6 PM!