I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
If there could be a chip implanted to track one’s vocabulary, as miles logged are counted with those fitness bands people go around wearing, I’m sure beautiful would be in my top ten most-used words. I am always saying that that’s beautiful or this is beautiful. The thing is, beauty comes in unbeautiful ways here.
One Sunday morning not long after moving here, I was standing on Sixth Avenue at Eighteenth or so waiting for a light to change when I heard what sounded like the low rumble of snow plows. But this wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, the streets are clean, and then the light turned green and no one walked or drove through the intersection. One couldn’t. Sixth Avenue had been taken over by a brigade of boys on skateboards—dozens and dozens, maybe a hundred or two, I’m not sure, there might have been a girl or two as well; it was all a blur. The sound of their wheels on the street was all but drowned out by their whoops and hollers and the barking of dogs made mad by these four-wheeled paw-level intruders. Some boys had their shirts off and waved them in the air like flags—the flags of an invading army, here to spread a message of freedom, fleetness, speed, wind, wit, youth, grace, the anarchy of pure joy, and fuck you.
I was not the only one on the sides left openmouthed and clapping spontaneously. In a flash—far too soon—the skateboarders were gone, no doubt taking over downtown. The light had turned red by then, and we were still stuck standing there on two feet on the sidewalk.
I wondered what it was all about but never investigated. Someone’s always selling something or someone, and if it was for a promotion of some kind—for a brand of skateboard, let’s say—or being filmed for a music video, I didn’t want to hear about it. The only evidence I have that it really happened and was not something I dreamed up is a cryptic message I sent to my friend Jimmy from my phone as I walked home: “Beauty stops traffic,” I texted.
Jimmy’s lived in New York a lot longer than I have; I love how he responded: “I know,” he texted back.
PART II
ON BEING NOT DEAD
Washington Square Park
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
12-17-11:
O: “I thought being old would be either awful or trivial, and it’s neither.”
I: “What makes it not awful and not trivial?”
O: “Aside from you, thinking and writing.”
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1-1-12:
Just before midnight, I taught O how to open a bottle of champagne, something he had never done before: sweet to see the joy and surprise and fear on his face as—pop!—the cork exploded. He had insisted on wearing his swimming goggles, though, just in case.
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1-22-12:
O and I watch the view of Eighth Avenue from his apartment; it is cold and gray outside. He has his monocular to his eye, and zeroes in on a smokestack.
“The smoke is doing exactly what it must. It looks like a universe being formed; embodying the air currents.” Pause. “Some has dipped down, curiously, to look beneath the roof.”
He could be narrating a film.
“It’s budding off now, like smoke-lets, like a hydra … Dissipates … trails …” He puts down the monocular. “Trail: Nice word.” O turns to me. “Do you feel on a trail?”
“Now I do,” I reply. “For a long time, I felt off it.”
O nods.
“A trail is for one. But one has to make it,” he says.
Minute after minute passes as O and I watch out the window. I feel serene. I don’t have to ask; I know O does as well, his quietness speaking to it.
“‘Old men ought to be explorers,’” he suddenly says. “I like that line.”
“Auden?”
“Eliot.”
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Undated Note:
Getting dressed for a walk, O habitually announces each article of clothing as he puts it on: “Coat. Hat. Gloves. Muffler …” But then he stops himself. “Do you say ‘muffler’ here?”
“Here? What do you mean, ‘here’?” It’s as if he had just arrived in America, I point out, as if he were just visiting from England for a few days.
“In fact, I’ve been here for fifty-two years, since the summer before you were born!”
Here before I was born: This still surprises me. Sometimes I feel older than O.
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3-17-12: O: “I don’t know if a passion for symmetry is an intolerance of asymmetry. Do you?”
I: “I think one can be passionate about both. I think one can embody both.”
O: “Good. Very good.”
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4-7-12:
A not untypical dinner: