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Snow
There is nothing better than waking up to find my city covered in snow.
(That was this morning.)
This one is back in December, the second snow of the year:
Cotton Candy-like flakes!
But of course they weren’t super sticky, and the ground wasn’t cold enough to make it last. So this:
…quickly became this:
Then we got some more a few days later.
And it was cold enough to make icicles for a while.
But then I took down our tree, and the season of winter seemed to end. What’s with all these 36 degree days?
Then finally a couple days ago the snow finally deigned to visit again, so Eric and I went to Central Park.
And found that Jesus had been there.
We also ogled the Zamboni.
But the snow still kind of sucked.
So Snow, quit being a fair-weather friend and give us one really pretty, snowball-friendly storm. Thx.
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Does a body bad.
Mmm… Just as I was about to have my daily 5:00 milk, I come across a story about the stuff being tampered with in Old New York, just as it is now in China.
In a city growing fast, but lacking refrigeration, it was hard to provide sufficient milk. Fresh milk was brought in from Westchester and Orange Counties, but not enough to meet demand. In 1853, it was found that 90,000 or so quarts of cow’s milk entered the city each day, but that number mysteriously increased to 120,000 quarts at the point of delivery.
Some of the increase was due to New York dairymen padding their milk with water, and then restoring its richness with flour — just like their latter-day Chinese counterparts, who increased the protein levels in watered-down milk by adding the noxious chemical melamine. But the greater part was swill milk, a filthy, bluish substance milked from cows tied up in crowded stables adjoining city distilleries and fed the hot alcoholic mash left from making whiskey. This too was doctored — with plaster of Paris to take away the blueness, starch and eggs to thicken it and molasses to give it the buttercup hue of honest Orange County milk. This newspaper attributed the deaths of up to 8,000 children a year to this vile fluid.
Do you want to eat anything ever again? Oh, you still do? Read on…
Finally, in 1858, Tammany Hall sent Alderman Michael Tuomey to “investigate” a notorious swill milk dairy on West 16th Street. Tuomey sat down with the dairy owners and drank a glass or two of whiskey. He concluded that swill milk was just as good for children as ordinary milk, and anyone who refused to drink it simply had a “prejudice.”
Again, there are echoes with China. The Chinese government had exempted several of the nation’s biggest dairies from inspections, one of the reasons the scare was allowed to spread unchecked from baby formula to yogurt to the whole of the Chinese dairy industry and its exports. (The British candy maker Cadbury announced yesterday, for instance, that it had discovered melamine in some of its Chinese-made milk chocolates.) This isn’t just laissez-faire — it’s an approach to the food supply that is so deliberately hands off that it amounts to an invitation to swindling. Heads are rolling now, but too late for the sick babies.
The similarities between China today and New York 150 years ago shouldn’t come as a great surprise. Adulteration on such a scandalous scale occurs in societies with a toxic combination of characteristics: a fast-growing capitalist economy coupled with a government unable or unwilling to regulate the food supply. In such get-rich-quick societies, there is a huge temptation to tamper with food, particularly when margins are low. The rewards are instant, and it’s not always easy for consumers to detect the difference between the pure and the doctored — particularly with a substance like milk, which we have been taught to trust implicitly.
This is a much sadder story than I’m going to admit right now. So instead, enjoy your cereal tomorrow morning!
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Remembering
Seven Augusts ago, my grandfather succumbed to a protracted struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s. It was late that month that we finally gathered as the family that once was, and stood in the grass on a sunny morning to say our last goodbyes. I had trouble finishing the eulogy.
Two weeks later, I was happy to go to New Jersey, walk in through a familiar door, greeted by Grams and baked ziti. We enjoyed a typical afternoon: the crossword, some chatting, reading the papers, and looking out the window at Kennedy Boulevard traffic.
The next day, I made another trip to Jersey City, this one unplanned.
The reason I’m writing this today is that, as per usual, this anniversary makes people talk about it. All they seem to be able to do is talk about it. Where they were. What they were doing. How hurt they were by it. How affected they still are. We all have the right to our own ways, but I don’t like to see it used politically, I don’t like to see people who were not hurt by it act as if they can understand it emotionally. I don’t want to see it made smaller for the people who lost their lives and the families who now live without them. And personally, I don’t want to remember it anymore.
I woke up that morning, showered and dressed, tried to ignore the roommate gripes, thought about everything I had to do, and shoved my bag full with the things I’d need that day: long sleeved shirt and a pair of socks for my regular babysitting gig, two giant textbooks for the work I could get done after the kids were asleep, a five star notebook, and the necessaries (wallet, chapstick, tissues, inhaler).
My window on Water St. faced west. So when I heard the first crash, I looked up to find raging orange flames, unobscured, like a giant movie screen. I stared at it, horrified. But this was a small horror. I thought it was a helicopter, a big mistake, an awful loss of life, but a fixable error. The tower will probably be fixed within a year. I took a few photos with my little Olympus and threw it on my bed.
But as I stayed fixed on the brilliant blue sky and the orange and black against it, I saw the white silhouette of a plane, and the sun glinting against the windows made me squint. An actual fucking plane, much too close to the existing accident. What if those people got hurt? What if the plane caught fire too?
We all know what happened.
What I remember is the collective scream. It was as if my entire building gasped at the same time and knew. Time to go.
But I didn’t know where to go, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. None of us knew what to do with this. Under attack? What next, bombs from the sky? I kept looking up as we headed south. I had my father on my cell phone for a few minutes, but we didn’t make any kind of plan, and the next time I tried to reach him, there were no lines. Stranded in my own city. Terrified of what was next. Staring at strange faces, all contorted with fear. Lines around the block for payphones.
We ran down Front Street, where I dumped my books on a corner. Psychology and Art Through the Ages lay there in the gutter with the charred ruins of banking memos and non-disclosure agreements.
Lighter on the back, we ran south. My plan had been to get the fuck off Manhattan and board the ferry to Staten Island, but we arrived to watch it depart, overcrowded like an immigration boat, tipping like it was about to sink. That was the last boat. So there we stood in Battery Park, waiting, exhausted, among the other confused and nervous.
No phones. No news. Only the view of the flaming, smoking tips of the towers. We waited.
Then, there was the great sound of rumbling. And with it, a deluge of humans, running at us. So, like the bulls, we ran with them. South again, back toward the ferry, we ran for our lives, like lunatics, each of us in our own breed of panic. And we ran until we hit the south fence, where another group was running from the opposite direction.
Their mass was greater, so the entire group turned and ran back where we’d come from. If it weren’t what it was, it would have looked cartoonish. I’d never experienced mass hysteria before. The view of the sky was much like our Hollywood versions, like the sky over the White House in Independence Day.
By now the rumbling in the air had turned into something more terrifying: destruction, the crumbling of many millions of tons. And that mass was coming straight at us, falling on us, knocking some of us down. An old woman nearby fell out of her sensible shoe and then to the ground, while people eagerly jumped over her, stepping on her purse, her fallen hat. I held her hand, another man grabbed her, and we helped her up. But I lost her immediately, when the smoke came in.
All of a sudden, the black, billowing clouds that had chased us were all around us. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. There was utter silence. Minutes felt like hours. And eventually people started shouting, little pings in the blackness, trying to find each other through blindness.
The shards of fiberglass in the air stabbed our skin, turned our eyes bloody, and penetrated our lungs. I tied my extra shirt around my neck to create an air pocket, and breathed through my inhaler, while someone in the crowd shouted that they needed one. Too far away. How would I get it back?
It felt like an eternity, standing there. Where were they, those who would rescue us? Eventually, the black air around us faded to grey, and then to dense white, and twenty minutes later, it was merely foggy, the nuclear snow no longer suspended, but covering the ground. We were able to climb over the Hudson walls and board emergency boats. Halfway across the river, the top of the second tower started to wobble, and we watched it come down.
That’s how I ended up back in Jersey City, weaving my way through unfamiliar streets, covered in the debris of a fallen building, somehow ending up at Grams’. I slept in my father’s childhood bed that night.
And that’s why, on any other day, hearing wild fire engines go by my building wouldn’t be giving me the panic they do today. So please, twitterers, before you say how much it sucks that your husband’s on a plane today, remember that this was a real thing. And to many of us, it still is.
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the Open
I love US Open tennis.
Even when we’re squinting at it from up here.
But so much more when we’re down here with three matches at once: sitting between two, and listening to another.
BTW, Amex is the smartest event sponsor I’ve ever seen.
And. I’m still hoping for a Roddick win, now that Blake blew the long shot.
