Back over the Hell Gate Bridge. It looks like its namesake with a desert-rose sunset over the roofs in the west and the waterfront to the east burning with sodium lights. I still think of them as real streetlights, not the artificial screen-glare impostors of LEDs. The moon too is tawny, and like always it's following us home.
We did not go to the Strand. We did not go to the Met. We slept into the early afternoon at my mother's cousin's house in Park Slope (
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spatch discovered how to close the heavy wooden shutters on the windows of the parlor we were sleeping in; it was dark and quiet even at street-level; I can't believe we have to go back to Venetian blinds) and exchanged greetings with the other houseguest and packed up and walked down to the IRT station at Atlantic Avenue and the weather was so nice that instead of taking the 5 train to Union Square as hazily planned, we disembarked at Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall and spent the next hour and a half doing whatever you call the English verb whose French agent noun is
flâneur: we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge into Brooklyn and then across the Manhattan Bridge into Manhattan. We should perhaps have foreseen that the temporary cessation of hostilities between the recent heat wave and the chronic torrential downpour would have brought out everyone else who also enjoys walking a city. The pedestrian side of the Brooklyn Bridge was so crowded it kept overflowing into the bike lane, which then caused the bicyclists to shout at people who had nowhere to go except maybe over the side of the bridge, which I believe is discouraged on account of the lanes of traffic and all the water below. We kept having to dodge selfie-takers striking poses and vendors hawking everything and pedestrians walking the wrong way whichever way that was. But the sky was sea-drift and sun-struck and the wind kept vibrating through the rigging of the cables and it is rare in a metropolis to feel so much air and light around you even if there are also tourists trying to get their entire families into shot. I had not thought about the geography, but halfway across the bridge I understood that the small hump of land I could see past the curve of the Battery was the former Bedloe's Island and the Statue of Liberty herself quite distinct in the haze, a little scratch of a torch uplifted, the gesture and the profile. Despite the best efforts of this government, still there. The Manhattan Bridge was nowhere near as jam-packed, to the point where I could stop a couple of times and take pictures through the chain-link with my archaic phone; we got a splendid view of skyline under westering sun like something out of
Manhatta (1921) and the mirror-green swarm of the East River, kicked white with boat-wakes and plated with light. It smelled like heat and harbor water. Never mind the subway cars crashing and rattling behind me. It was a good place to stand for a moment and breathe.
We had dinner at
Veselka. I had cold borscht with dill and sour cream and tiny cubes of cucumber plus both halves of their legendary Baczynski, because it doesn't matter how much I talk about trying other sandwiches, I can't get this one anywhere else and it is a delicious stack of protein and counterintuitively tasty cauliflower pickle. Rob ordered challah French toast with kielbasa on the side and a small plate of short rib pierogi, which I did my patriotic duty to help make disappear with sour cream. Somehow neither of us had room for dessert.
We finally got the wi-fi on this train to work, but it took some fighting. We have not gotten the electrical outlets to work. Win some, lose some, wish the railways in this country had a budget.
I have come to love the city where I live, but I feel lucky that a city where I don't always treats me so well.
