Recently in New York City Category
Irony is alive and well and parked on 18th street between 3rd and Irving:
If you live in New York, you develop radar that pings when Something Isn't Right: when the crowd on the subway platform is too big, when the guy on the bench on the playground is looking too hard at the girls on the swings, when the little group that hangs out near the statue in Union Square starts talking a little too loud.
And we all know to swerve widely around the Ranters and the Shouters: you never can tell when Ranting will spill over into Wild Arm Swinging.
But what about those subtler NYC indignities: the subway crush, the zombie-like checkout clerk at Walgreens, the glacial crawl of cabs down 5th avenue at rush hour? Or--my personal favorite, now that I am a daily bus rider--the Woman With Stinky Perfume? Not stinky like powdery Aunt Tillie with her decades-old bottle of Shalimar. No, I'm talking headache inducing, get-inside-my-nose-and-stay-there-for-days type perfume, probably sold in ten-gallon drums.
Nothing to be done about Stinky Perfume Lady (SPL), usually, other than go home and try to wash out the inside of my nose, which generally fails because I start to snort and whuffle and realize that if I were ever waterboarded, I would pony up state secrets in a heartbeat.
Today, however, on my new home away from home, the 14D Bus, there was a collision between a Stinky Perfume Lady and a Ranter, and oh, my friends, it was delicious.
I smelled SPL but never saw her; her stench wafted far forward from where she was sitting and I started to calibrate whether I could get off the bus and still get to where I needed to go without being late. Then booming through the bus, a voice:
Lady if you're gonna wear perfume wear something good I've got a headache already and it's only been two stops and I sure as hell hope you don't have a family because you're gonna kill them with that stuff it smells like damn gasoline! You gotta get off this damn bus and air yourself out! Shit!
No one applauded but I wasn't the only one smiling in satisfaction. That's the thing about New York: in other cities, the id gets sublimated, repressed. Here? The id has a metrocard, just like the rest of us.
The other day on the playground, a mommy friend said, "did you hear? Bloomberg banned bake sales in the schools."
I thought she was kidding--we'd beeen the PTA Co-Presidents last year, and bake sales had been an ongoing aggravation: when to schedule them, how to staff them, how to scan every donation for potentially lethal ingredients (nuts! sesame seeds! wheat!), how to make sure that all the kids got a chance to exchange their sweaty quarters for a chocolate chip cookie.
But despite the aggravation, we staged those bake sales, yes we did. And there are four thousand, five hundred and twenty-two reasons why we did so: the four or five bake sales we held last year brought in 4,522 dollars.
That's a lot of sweaty quarters.
That much money allows our PTA to foot the bill for 5th graders whose families can't afford the price of the 5th grade class camping trip; to pay for kids who might not otherwise be able to join the track team; to fund instrument rental for kids who REALLY want to play the trombone, but whose parents don't have any extra money in their budgets.
The joke is that this is no joke: the DOE really and truly has put a policy in place that bans bake sales.
Bake sales sell unhealthy food, according to Mayor Mike and his sidekick, Joyless Joe, and so they are going to save our tubby children from further expansion.
Banning monthly or bi-monthly bake sales seems a tad...um...bass-ackward, frankly, if your goal is healthy kids with healthly habits. What about...having gym class more than once a week? Or a post-lunch recess period that lasts longer than 20 minutes? Oh--right--I forgot. Those activities would take time away from Very Important Test Prep.
So okay, clearly more exercise is out of the question because Data Collection and Accountability matter more.
Let us then consider the school lunch menu for elementary schools in Manhattan, shall we? Today's choices are Sweet & Sour Roasted Chicken, Golden Fish and Cheese, White Rice, and if you're at a SchoolPlus cafeteria you can get collards with sweet tomato. Anyone want to place bets on how many fourth graders are getting the collards? And could someone define "golden fish" for me? If you drop your kid off for the free breakfast, she could have had a turkey patty with cheese on a biscuit, or pancakes with syrup. Tomorrow's lunch is something called Southwest Style Beef that comes with something called "Baked Scoops." Not sure baked scoops of what, exactly, but I'll bet it's...healthy.
And as we peruse our school lunch menus, let's not even THINK about what all my friends are calling the "scary hamburger article" in Sunday's Times. I mean, given the choice, wouldn't you rather your kid eat a sugar-bomb cupcake than hamburger meat that's potentially riddled with E. coli or god knows what else? Can the DOE can guaran-damn-tee me that the burger patties, taco beef, and "baked scoops" on their lunch menus come from utterly safe sources? Given that the USDA is pretty much in cahoots with the beef-packing industry, I'm thinking that's a promise that will be a long time coming.
So yeah, let's ban bake sales instead of equipping school kitchens so that they can actually cook. Right now, most school kitchens simply assemble food from a list of DOE approved ingredients: frozen pre-roasted commodity chickens, for example. Would anyone like to think about the source of something called a "commodity chicken"?
Notice that I'm not even talking about how school organizations and PTAs are supposed to make up the shortfall in their budgets if they can't hold bake sales. The Times article quotes a school official as saying that maybe schools could hold walk-a-thons to raise money, instead of bake sales. Hmm... let's see. Collecting money from donors, finding a route, organizing the participants, hoping it doesn't rain...versus a table in the cafeteria stocked with treats brought in by parents.
Okay, now maybe smokers felt the same way when smoking was banned in bars, but no one yet has said that a cupcake a month causes cancer. Banning bake sales brings to mind the word "draconian" - also ridiculous, farcical, and you've-got-to-be-fucking-kidding (if I hyphenate it's one word, right?) It's like cutting off your hand because you've got a hangnail.
I'm fighting back, dammit. I'm going to send Liam and Caleb to school EVERY SINGLE DAY with lunchboxes filled with cupcakes, cookies, brownies, maybe even the occasional gummy worm--and I'm telling them to share with all their friends.
Let Bloomberg send the Sugar Stasi after me. They can have my cupcake when they wrestle it out of my fat sticky fingers.
The boys finally started school, which is good because they were damn near ready to kill each other by Sept. 9. I love the solitude of my empty apartment but the beginning of school makes for logistical hell: after-school program or babysitting? who is doing pick-up? where is the soccer practice? when is the soccer game? what time is that meeting? where are the lunch-boxes? can you get from 20th and 2nd to Houston and Ave D in 25 minutes (barely); who has the metro card and are there any swipes left on it? (O for the days of tokens, when you knew exactly how many rides you had left with a jiggle of your coin purse.)
Pretty much the only thing Husband and I have talked about in the last week or so has to do with logistics or the cost of having our kids in "free" public schools (let's not even get started on school supplies, shall we?)
So the other day as I hustled Liam to a playdate on the other side of Union Square,listening to Liam with about 1/3 of my attention and making lists and plans with the rest of my mind, I got one of those reminders that the city sometimes puts in our paths--lessons that we don't even know we need: in this case, a sand painter hard at work. He wasn't following a pre-set design but was just streaming colored sand onto the asphalt in complex patterns and shapes. When I walked by the first time (the picture at the top of this post), I thought the painter must be close to finished.
But I was wrong--the painting was much more elaborate by the time I brought Liam home from his friend's house, and the artist was standing to one side looking down at his work, while sweat dripped down his face. He'd spent the better part of a day focused only on his design, which would vanish as soon as the weather changed (and, in fact, it rained the next day).
Okay, so I can't chuck everything, pull a Bruce Chatwin, and head to Australia to follow the songlines, but I can (occasionally) give my kids all my attention; I can remind myself that the logistics always (mostly) have a way of working out; I can take a deep breath and remind myself to be here now.
We went to Patsy's Pizza on University Place tonight, celebrating several things: more than three consecutive hours without rain; the conclusion of the first week of summer camp; the beginning of the 4th of July weekend; summer.
Patsy's is just down the block from Dean & DeLuca's, whose gray banner was slightly longer than Patsy's green flag. Husband and I have each spent hours and hours in D&D's elegantly high-ceilinged interior over the past twenty years: it's a great place to meet students, a great place to meet colleagues to discuss the inanities of students. Early in our courtship we sat and discussed books and miserable previous relationships with equal fervor. The coffee was too expensive but the muffins were divine - it was Starbucks before Starbucks and with a lot more character.
Well, it's gone. Only the flagpole remains:
Vanished, another casualty in the endless New York real estate wars. Husband and I stood and stared, amazed, and a few other passers-by stopped too, equally shocked by the apparent vaporization of a University Place landmark (albeit one with a string of health code violations). Someone walking by said it closed on the last day of June, three days ago. And already the interior has been stripped bare - no sign, no notice, no "thanks for the memories," nuthin. Just ... gone.
University Place is the street of my graduate-school youth: it's the site of the NYU English Department, which I would walk to from Union Square, where I got off the subway from, variously, Long Island City, Fort Greene, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and miscellaneous "between apartment" couches at friends' apartments. Dean & Deluca was a big splurge in those days - a bigger splurge than beer at the Cedar Tavern, also gone.
Perhaps it was the dual deaths of Farrah and MJ last week that have made me more nostalgic than usual, but I noticed a lot of "gone" as I walked back up the street, after Patsy's, while the boys scouted for the ice cream truck.
The antique store on the corner across from D&D - gone; the dueling futon stores across the street from each other - gone;
the Cedar Tavern - gone; the great fabric store on the corner of 14th street - gone. Further down the block, where Joyce Leslie used to sell wildly cheap clothes (and great tights)? A Duane Reade is coming. The legendary Lee Bauman's, the amazing and less expensive alternative to Le Petite Coquette, where bras cost more than a week of my salary? Now a Chipotle restaurant.
There are, however, several spiffy new condo buildings that have gone up to replace some of these buildings, a fact I'm sure you'll find completely unsurprising. And replacing the fabric store on the corner of University and 14th? No surprise there, either:
If things go on at this pace, I think pretty soon all of New York will be condos or banks, banks or condos. With the occasional Duane Reade thrown in for variety.
Today, Tuesday, Caleb and I saw these teams of people along 14th street. Each team had odd contraptions on their laps and was studiously looking at traffic. When Caleb and I asked them what they were doing, they wouldn't answer us.
What do you think they're doing?
This just in: the DOE will be mailing out the results of the "talented and gifted" test on May 4. Three weeks ago, the scores were going to be mailed mid-April, according to the DOE website. When mid-April came and went, the website changed to say that scores would be mailed out April 29. Today, May 1, the website reads that scores will be sent out May 4.
The deadline for applying to "TAG" schools, however, has remained constant: May 15. Which means that if the score really goes out on May 4, you could get the report in your mailbox on, say, May 6 (an optimistic guess, given the vagaries of the NYC postal service), you would have nine days to figure out what school is best for your kid, fill out the form, and send it in - knowing, all the while, that there aren't enough seats in "TAG" programs for all the eligible children.
I've decided that maybe Joel Klein's role model is Lucy Van Pelt. Which makes me - and the thousands of other parents who have been attempting to be casual about is the mail here yet - Charlie Brown.
And Caleb's school future, unfortunately, is the football.
Let's imagine a company that wants to launch a new product. They get the factories working to make this new product, figure out a name for the product, spend a lot of money to test the product, and tell all their clients when they can expect this new product to hit the stores. At some point in this process, however, someone points out that there isn't enough shelf space in the stores - or even enough stores, for that matter - to handle the amount of new product that is rolling off the assembly lines. So the CEO of this company says "oh don't worry about it. Once the product arrives at the stores, we'll figure out where to put everything. Go ahead and ship the product ... maybe we can just squeeze more boxes onto the shelf."
Can you imagine a business that operates in this fashion? (Okay, no fair pointing figures at the Big Three auto makers. The CEOs for those companies have apparently been living in Skinner Boxes in Grosse Pointe for decades and thus are not responsible for their epically idiotic decision making. Hummers, anyone?)
But there IS an organization that does function according to the decision-making process I've just described. An organization that holds in its bureaucratic palm the fate of thousands of four-year olds, one of whom is my son. Yes, folks, I give you: the NYC Department of Education.
During the boom years, when glass-box condo buildings sprouted on every other block, young couples with steroidal bank accounts moved to the city and started families. Then the economy tanked, the bank accounts deflated, and these same couples - now with kindergarten-aged children - struggled to make their mortgages. Suddenly, forty grand in tuition at a private school looked like a lot of money, they couldn't unload the condo in this market, and so wham! Kindergartens in "good schools" are wildly over-subscribed: wait lists of thirty, forty, a hundred kids aren't uncommon.
While these glass boxes were sprouting up all over town, you see, no one in the Mayor's office seemed to think building new schools or refurbishing old schools mattered; I guess they thought that everyone would go to private school, or would move to the suburbs when kids hit school age, or that in some kind of loaves-and-fishes fashion, a kindergarten room designed for 20 squirmy four-year-olds would somehow hold...25? 30? In therapy-speak, we call this "magical thinking": assuming that one can bring about a set of circumstances simply by imagining it or wishing for it. Magical thinking is common in pre-school children, schizophrenics, and your garden-variety neurotic.
Magical thinking, as a policy-setting mechanism, however, pretty much sucks. Which brings us to this spring, and to the comedy of errors called "kindergarten registration." (Comedy, that is, if your child is safely enrolled where you want her to be - not so funny if your four-year old is languishing on a waitlist somewhere).
The DOE rolled out a streamlined process this spring that was going to make it easier for families to find the right kindergarten for their child, and give schools more control over the process. Sounds good, right?
Unfortunately, like my imaginary company, the DOE didn't notice the lack of "shelf space" for their new product: there are hundreds, maybe thousands, more kindergarten-aged children in the city than there are spots in kindergartens. It's like some pint-sized version of "Survivor" is taking place - or a high-stakes game of musical chairs.
The DOE seems completely stunned by this turn of events - and utterly unprepared to handle the problems.
One wonders, in fact, if the hapless Brownie, jobless since the Katrina disaster, isn't working at the DOE. Because despite the DOE's relentless drumbeat of "accountability" - for teachers, principals, and school staff - the DOE seems not to hold itself accountable to anyone or anything.
For one thing, these kindergarten waitlists, which get longer every day, are organized randomly; the lists don't form on a first-come, first-served basis. But as all New Yorkers know, the cardinal rule of "the line" is first-come, first-served: you get in line first, you get the best seat or first pair of sample-sale Manolos or still-warm Claude's croissant. A random waitlist? It's as if getting into kindergarten has suddenly become a velvet-rope nightclub: you, in the cool faux-vintage rock t-shirt, you're in; you with the pacifier, you're out.
Another example: the DOE website said that scores for the "gifted and talented" test would be mailed out mid-April, and then, in mid-April, changed the deadline to April 30. Wouldn't it be nice if we could tell the IRS "hey, you know? Just not ready with all the paperwork, so how 'bout I send that return to you sometime mid-May?"
And then, finally, there is the DOE's solution to the waitlists and to the very real possibility that many children may not have a seat anywhere, come the start of the new school year. A waitlist letter sent to families at PS3 and PS41 says that all students will have a seat by September 17.
No, that's not a typo. All students will have a seat in a kindergarten no later than two weeks after school has started. And this from the letter meant to be helpful. God forbid they decide to send out the unhelpful letter.
Now do you see that the imaginary company I described at the beginning of this post isn't so very far-fetched? In fact, perhaps we should call that company the Factory of Magical Thinking and Joel Klein could be the CEO. After all, one of the great things about magical thinking is that you aren't ever responsible for things not working out: the fault always rests in circumstances beyond your control (budgets, the economy, bad teachers, bureaucracies, unions, Albany).
In order to sleep at night, however, I'm going to force myself to patronize that factory of magical thinking. Instead of imagining Caleb wedged into a class of twenty-six kindergarteners taught by a harried and inexperienced teacher at some school miles from our apartment, I will imagine him trotting off with his older brother to the lovely neighborhood school that's just six blocks from home.
If only it were that easy.
Bryant Park. Frenchified oasis of a park (except that, unlike parks in Paris, here you can sit on the grass). Little green chairs that no one steals; a fountain; a carousel; the black-and-gold American Radiator Building (now the Bryant Park Hotel) gleaming through the trees.
And tonight, after a brilliant three hours of "Mary Stuart," as I walked through the park from the from the clotted tourist hell of Times Square to the subway, I saw...books. On carts. Just right out there for people to read. The Reading Room en pleine air.
Tables and chairs reserved for readers - even smal l readers:
Carts with magazines and newspapers - and "moderator" who is there apparently to recommend books and cover things up if it rains.
Free.
Free books and the smell of hyacinth in the evening air.
Maybe there's hope.
It's snowing today in New York and as always that first snow turns the city into an Impressionist canvas: the hard edges are softened, noises are muffled. It's lovely. (Eventually, of course, sometime in late January, the romance of "first snow" will be gone and we'll be left with piles of filthy slush, but we won't think about that today. Yes, there's probably a relationship metaphor in here somewhere).And snow, of course, causes delirium, veritable paroxysms of joy, in the small fry. Caleb doesn't go to nursery school on Fridays, so I bundled him up in all kinds of weather-appropriate gear (thus creating the particular kind of waddling run that can be achieved only by combining snowpants that are slightly too big with snowboots that don't quite fit) and went out on the terrace of our building. By virtue of being on the fifteenth floor, the terrace offers a wonderful snow-day opportunity: the snow is relatively clean - and thus edible, as long as I don't think too hard about the filthy air through which the snow falls - and because no one else goes out there, the kids have the joy of being the first to mark that smooth white surface.
Today's snowfall was particularly delicious for Caleb because he didn't have to share the snow with his older brother, who, truth be told, has a penchant for "accidently" pushing his brother face-first into a snow pile. I've been thinking a lot lately about city living versus suburban living - in part because of the low-grade stress over where Caleb will go to kindergarten, but also because of all those Things That People Say: more outside space, slower pace, more closets, owning versus renting, mini-vans versus strollers. And while I know that moving "out there" isn't a magic bullet for anything, and that my friends who live in various NYC 'burbs don't think they're living in PerfectLand, still...I wonder.
A guy named Leo Marx wrote a book in the late 1960s called The Machine in the Garden, which is about the constant tension in US culture between the technology of the cities and the pastoralism of the country as illustrated in the work of a number of early 20th century novelists, particularly Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Marx doesn't talk about kids, of course - his book is "serious" - but the tension he describes still exists, only now it also gets played out in the ongoing parental debates about the best place to raise children. Marx talks about literary characters being able to drive back and forth from city to country, or doing like Nick Carraway does, in The Great Gatsby - figuring out how to "rusticate" in the country on the weekends while working in the city (without having a big salary).
For those of us without ready access to a country house, however, "rusticating" is a more illusory condition. We need to find our country house (or suburban yard) wherever we can find it - perhaps a terrace on a snowy day (although in the time it has taken me to write this, the snow has changed to freezing rain, about which it is almost impossible to wax poetic - and thus we see the fleeting nature of first love snow). Judging from the grin on Caleb's face as he tromped around, however, he doesn't care where the snow falls - city, suburb, country - as long as he can be out in it.
I guess my lesson for this snowy day is that I should be equally zen, right? Less angst and worry, more "be here now," as Ram Dass would say. Even if "here and now" is face down inside a snowy police car, high on the 15th floor.Non-zen postscript, unrelated to snow: I'm now also contributing to the NYC Moms Blog (and shamelessly used this post to link to my first post for that site): Follow this link, or click on the NYC Moms Blog button on this page.
