When you move into a 98-year-old house, it is the house that owns you and not the other way around. No matter how attentive or inattentive the previous owners may have been, after most of a century, gravity has had a long time to do its worst, and even the best-kept homes will start to sag at the corners after nine decades. Since moving into the aforementioned house three months ago, I’ve learned that no project is as simple as it seems it should be.
Of course, there are few things that come easily that are worth having. I was 19 before I discovered the uncomplicated joy that hard work can bring, and with each task, I am thankful that I not only have the work to keep myself busy, but the good fortune to have a home to live in and a job to work at. There, but for the grace of God, go I, I think as I watch the "human interest" stories on the news of job loss, foreclosure, and the pain of a struggling economy. I do my best to remain thankful and to take nothing for granted.
This month’s issue of InTheFray features a piece from Suzanne Farrell, titled Spotlighting the neighborhood, about the effect of the recent U.N. General Assembly on ordinary New Yorkers. Shelley Horner shares her opinions of Elsie Sze’s new novel in her review Chick lit, Bhutan style. We will once again feature the exquisite poetry of Rae Pater in her collection Circles of memory. We also have an impressionistic, behind-the-scenes look at a recording session in the short video The marina is too shallow.
As is in keeping with the season, we at InTheFray are thankful for our wonderful contributors and our wonderful readers. It is you who make this site what it is, and we humbly thank you.
Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
The creative process is fleeting and difficult to quantify. Where does inspiration come from, and when will it strike? It is a mystery as old as art. Watch Portrait of a Drowned Man, an instrumental band from Duluth, Minnesota, wrestle with these questions in the video below.
Summer poems The jolly men hold their bellies and rock and rock, as they laugh
at the women holding their skirts above saggy knees and elephant ankles.
How they laugh at the idea of tanning such baggy, blobby legs.
Who’d ever want to look at them? The women stir, fan hot red faces,
and talk a mirage of romance beneath boardwalks, sunbrown muscles luring eyes and hands
to places parents forbade. Their talk weaves them into the silky girls they once were, weaves them
into tapestries of memory. The jolly men lapse to stillness
as they feel again the drift of sand shuffled down between the planks across bare backs.
The glass gate
When the sky is yellow children chatter on the front step.
Speech, scented with the fragrance of rainbow beetles trapped in a jar, slips around glass like insect legs.
The young embrace each other’s disbelief with acceptance. Amazement has more possibilities than truth.
A child is a gateway, as is a story. They are the open collar of a jar — freedom, if we had wings to lift us out.
Stories are irresistible, open arms like rosy children, ask to be picked up and held —
They carry us to grassy fields, through long corridors stretching back inside ourselves, the beginning of a journey home.
Tomorrow’s child
Dance in the pleasure of your skin — palest camellia flesh. A spring garden glistened with rainbulbs and cobweb skeletons against wet black boughs.
Feel your body bloom in expansion, ticklish fish slip between cells. You are the powder of stars, in the course of your dream Tuatara and deer spring from your feet swallows and marigolds from your fingers.
You are the child beyond the seventh scroll bitter belly soothed and sanguine, the trumpets of angels silenced in your hair, your song a circle of memory.
The Heart of the Buddha is a moving novel about a woman who travels to the remote Asian country of Bhutan in search of her beloved twin sister. Author Elsie Sze uses the journey of Ruth Souza to shed light not only on a country that is fascinatingly different from the western world, but also on the Buddhist religion and the relationship between two very different women. Call it, perhaps, “chick lit” Bhutan style.
Ruth’s sister Marian is a librarian from Toronto (like Sze herself). She writes regularly to Ruth while working in Bhutan, but disappears after completing her six-month contract. Concerned about not hearing from Marian in over two months, Ruth embarks on her journey. The novel interweaves Ruth’s first-person account of her experiences with a “memoir” Marian had written about her life in Bhutan, which is Ruth’s “only key to the mystery of her disappearance.”
In the memoir, Marian reveals herself as impulsive (maybe an alter ego for Sze herself) and more in touch with her sensuality than the more straight-laced Ruth. She has gone to Bhutan to have “an experience few will ever have” and, on an excursion into the Himalayas, ambles by a naked man preparing an outdoor steam bath. “He had an athletic form, with broad shoulders, brawny arms, a well-proportioned torso: an Apollo in action,” she writes in the memoir. She is interested yet embarrassed when she realizes he is a Buddhist monk.
Six days later, they bump into each other under ordinary circumstances (dressed), and while conversing, seem to find themselves falling head over heels for each other. Unfortunately, Buddhist monks aren’t allowed to experience carnal love (reminiscent of Catholic taboos), but since the librarian and the monk cannot ignore their passion, they take a secret and dangerous journey into Chinese-occupied Tibet to retrieve lost Bhutanese religious writings in order to atone for the sin that will be committed when he leaves monkhood. The countryside and religion of Bhutan are revealed to us as the memoir unfolds.
For her part, Ruth finds herself attracted to her Bhutanese travel guide. She too tries to deny these feelings, but passion, again, is hard to resist. “At last we were no longer (just) sending signals with looks and touches like high school boys and girls,” she says. Marian, who is usually guided by her feelings, becomes more rational, while Ruth, the logical one, becomes more passionate. Sister stories are often tales of integration of conflicting aspects of oneself. As Ruth says, “Perhaps, like the yin-yang circle, we complement each other, and our differences make us whole.”
Sze is Chinese-Canadian herself and identifies the sisters as Chinese-Portuguese. She lived in Bhutan while researching the book and lovingly evokes the atmosphere and landscape of the country. Ruth visits a small town to attend a religious event, and she describes the scenery as “golden terraced mustard fields, scattered with farmhouses and prayer flags, sloped down to a river valley. In the further distance were hazy layered foothills ranged across the sky like a blushing dream. A majestic chir pine decked with a white prayer flag at its top trembled by my balcony.”
However, the focus is more on the Buddhist religion of Bhutan than its everyday culture. The use of phallic symbols and statues to portray sex in the Buddhist tradition is depicted humorously. Ruth listens to a loudmouthed couple from Texas who describe their experience at a special temple:
“As soon as I walked in, this young monk touched my head with an ivory phallus, then a bamboo one,” Marge said, breaking into a brassy chuckle. “At my age, it will take a lot more.”
“He hit me with them too. I bet they’re more potent than Viagra. I feel I can carry on until I’m ninety,” her husband cackled.
Sze suggests that this way of combining sexuality with religion is strange and very different for those who come from the Christian-based world in which body and spirit are separate.
What’s intriguing but confusing is that the handsome young monk who Marian meets isn’t allowed to indulge when he desires the librarian. Sze doesn’t explain why monks can’t have a relationship. Is it similar to Catholicism insofar as clergy are committed only to their service to God? Since Buddhism appears to appreciate physical love, it would be fascinating to know why the monks can’t express their sexuality.
The parallel stories of the sisters are interesting, but the flow of the story seems a bit stilted. Sze says she wrote this book in English only and doesn’t feel proficient in Cantonese. But the book feels like it was written by someone whose second language is English, and Sze’s prose has a slight hesitancy. Or maybe the writing style just demonstrates the innocence of sheltered young women as they experience first love. Ah, charmingly shy naïvete!
On the ground with a New Yorker during the UN General Assembly.
Story and photos by Suzanne Farrell
Police keep watch from the UN roof.
A police officer wearing protective gear and holding an automatic machine gun stands in the middle of First Avenue. An armed motorcade rolls by him and into the parking lot he’s guarding. A dozen people with cameras wait at the top of the stairs that provide access from my street to the avenue below.
It’s a Wednesday in September, and I’m headed to the pharmacy.
Where I live
I share a block, which includes three fire hydrants, twenty street parking spaces, and a mail carrier named Bill, with the Perutusan Tetap Malaysia Ke Pertubuhan Bangsa-Bangsa Bersatu, or Permanent Mission of Malaysia to the United Nations.
Bill is frustrated that the recent shakeup at the Postal Service has left him with an unbalanced route — all his buildings are residential except one, the Malaysian Mission, simply because it’s on the north side of the block, and that’s where he rolls his mail cart. He tells me, almost every day, that he’d rather cross the street to serve another residential building than stay on the same side to serve a commercial one.
I often see VIP guests arrive at the Malaysian Mission. They step from black Lincolns and gather on the sidewalk in tight bouquets of hand-painted sarongs. Well-behaved children attach themselves to thin wrists. The groups disappear into the sleek high-rise while the Lincolns idle, their drivers dozing in the cool air furnished by the running engines.
My neighbor Joanne idles, too, at her first-floor window, until the dignitaries and their families are inside. Then she peels out, knocks on windows, and shouts at the drivers to move along: “No parking! Don’t you see the signs?” Every evening, Joanne tirelessly writes letters to the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission and calls 311 with plate numbers. She logs the offenses of the drivers — toxic exhaust, valuable loading and unloading spots taken, candy bar wrappers on the street, plastic bottles filled with urine tossed in the gutter — and reports them to our local community board services agency. As to the last of the offenses — the bottles — I’ve never seen one. Perhaps I’m distracted by the gold thread in the sarongs, burning in the late afternoon sun as it reflects indiscriminately off each west-facing window of the United Nations headquarters.
What happens inside that building has always been, and will likely always be, a mystery to me. As for community appeal, I like the glistening exterior, the row of flagpoles, and the general vibe of importance. (Once, a motorcade bearing then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan passed by me, and I turned downright giddy.) I like the banners outside my building that welcome visitors to “UN Way.” Alongside “No Parking 8-6” signs are flags from Uzbekistan, Peru, Costa Rica, Kiribati, and other countries.
Protester and police officer share a moment on the corner.
This is Tudor City, an eighty-year-old neighborhood on the eastern edge of Midtown Manhattan. Unlike other New York neighborhoods, Tudor City is just two square blocks, from Forty-First to Forty-Third Streets between Second and First Avenues.
This section of the island of Manhattan gently slopes upward to a granite cliff that once offered unobstructed views of the East River. In the shadow of the cliff, down on First Avenue, slaughterhouses and tenement buildings were erected in the early twentieth century. The architects who designed Tudor City’s gigantic gothic-style apartment houses included only small windows facing east to minimize the stench from below.
In the late 1940s, the slaughterhouses were torn down, and the United Nations Headquarters was built in their place. Though it is sometimes difficult for me to understand why Midtown Manhattan was chosen for the UN Headquarters and not a large open area somewhere with ample parking space, I chalk my lack of understanding up to post-9/11 worries about security. In 1945, New York apparently looked like an ideal — and safe — place to build the United Nations flagship complex. The topography does ensure that a car cannot drive straight to the UN’s front door. And the UN, juxtaposed with the gothic buildings, has Hollywood allure. The spotlights from late-night film shoots transform our neighborhood from night into day.
I moved here right after September 11, 2001. The prices in Midtown, particularly in Tudor City, had dropped substantially in the wake of residents fleeing for the presumed safety of the suburbs. My first impression of the place was that it was a Midtown anomaly, situated so close to Grand Central Station but with two little parks and the feel of a cul-de-sac. I noted snipers on several rooftops.
The annual UN General Assembly
Joanne, naturally, is the one who alerts us every year when the UN General Assembly is coming. Diplomats from over a hundred nations come to meet, greet, and speak. Every issue under the increasingly dangerous sun is discussed: environment, health, war, energy, food, water, genocide.
Out here, it’s like a festival of lights for my neighbors and me — red and blue flashes from police cars, neon protest posters, shiny orange cones. Being part of it by virtue of living in it, however, can be frustrating. The New York City Police Department, feds, and private security staff lock down the area.
The diplomats, however, don’t always stay in the neighborhood. (Qaddafi and his tent are a case in point. This year the Libyan leader, wary of elevators, tried to erect his private canvas sleeping space in Central Park and on Donald Trump’s estate in White Plains. He was denied both times.) Diplomats have needs. They visit friends and go out to dinner. My graduate school adviser, Diane, used to live quite a distance from the UN, on the Upper West Side. Still, she was stopped on West Seventy-Ninth Street: “Next thing I knew I was up against the wall being yelled at. There were tanks or Humvees and men with automatic weapons. I was in shock, but it turned out they were just providing security for Arafat, who’d come to a stationery store on the block to buy a fountain pen.” The footage of President Obama’s visit this year shows him jogging on a city street that has been emptied of cars and people. Diane and I laugh about the great lengths security staff will go to so that heads of state can do “normal” things.
Joanne forwards a notice to our building from Deputy Inspector Ted W. Bernstein, commanding officer of the Seventeenth Precinct. The accompanying map reads like a battle plan: street closures and coned-off lanes, checkpoints and vehicle inspection sites. No parking is allowed, except, it seems, for those indomitable black cars that crawl our block like roaches.
This year there is an added threat of terror. Reports of a plot, allegedly one of the most complex and sophisticated since 9/11, lead the news cycle. Authorities have discovered plans to explode homemade bombs in Grand Central Station and other New York transit hubs. Though the plot seems to have been thwarted, security is heightened, particularly on the subways. But it’s UN Week, and we are encouraged to take the subway rather than cabs or buses. I can’t decide if I’m comforted or disconcerted when Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announces that the city, accustomed to living in a state of high alert, is doing what it always does to remain secure.
One of the many side effects of UN General Assembly Week.
A day on the ground
After the pharmacy, I hop on a bus at Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner (just about everything in this neighborhood is named for a diplomatic star or two) and head toward the west side to pick up my camera from a repair shop. The trip takes twice as long as it usually does, and by the time I’m back, I’m ready for an afternoon latté. While waiting in line at Starbucks, I watch a bus pull up to the curb and empty itself of men in black, green, and red T-shirts. They unfurl flags and straighten out signs.
By the time I have my coffee, the men have turned up Second Avenue, along the stretch that has been renamed Yitzhak Rabin Way, and I follow them on my way to Alpian’s Dry Cleaners to drop off some clothes. I hear the noise from Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, on Forty-Sixth, well before I arrive.
“United Nations, we need your help, right now, right now,” a group from Tibet chants. I can’t cross Forty-Sixth Street at Second to continue on to the dry cleaners on Forty-Eighth because of the throngs of people and police barricades on both sides of the street. I can’t cross to the other side of the avenue either because a crowd of people has gathered as far as I can see up Forty-Sixth. While I debate what to do, a man selling buttons that read “Obama Rocks” and “Green Up Iran” proudly announces to no one in particular that he has only two of his thirty-six “America: A Nation of Immigrants” buttons left.
I reason that if I walk with the flow of foot traffic and not against it, I will be able to turn left on First Avenue and continue on my way. Halfway down the block I find an opening between barriers and sneak into the center of the street where it’s a little less crowded. I walk alongside several people with cameras and a woman with a megaphone. We pass the Holy Family Church, where parents are waiting for their children to get out of school.
Suddenly, the woman yells into her megaphone, “Hey hey, ho ho, Ahmadinejad has to go.” I look around. The crowd has organized into a march behind a banner as wide as the street. In front of us, cops pull barriers from the side of the street to erect a blockade. I follow some quick thinkers through an opening before it closes up. Behind the barriers, those ahead of the pack, some tourists and some journalists, are stuck. The cops won’t let them out. Protesters are still moving forward, repeating the woman’s spirited calls.
I’ve never been part of a protest. My vast experience as a couch observer of the news, however, makes me concerned that the protesters might push up against the barriers and strain to break through, try to overtake the UN, possibly Ahmadinejad himself. I wonder if the police will act especially brutally, if some child who has just come out of the Holy Family School will be accidentally crushed. Last year while I was in Argentina for a wedding, farmers there protesting the government blocked the roads with their equipment, causing such backups the bride’s ninety-year-old grandmother sat in a bus for eighteen hours when it should have been a two-hour trip.
Nothing that dramatic happens, of course. The police officers wait patiently on the other side of the barriers, chatting. Onlookers snap pictures. And the protesters stop exactly where they are told to stop. In a display of what I see as great restraint, power, and organization, they speak their collective mind, in unison, repeating the same simple statement. Hey hey. Ho ho. Ahmadinejad has to go. It moves me with its immobility. The voices alone, though loud, must sound like music three blocks south at the UN Headquarters.
Protesters holding an array of flags, including Free Tibet and American flags, listen quietly to a speaker.
On either side of the Iranian march are groups from Taiwan, Cameroon, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Israel squeezed in together. An older man with a long, grey, scraggly braid yells at the protesters, “It’s a society of wimps! You’re wasting your time, you assholes!” Remarkably, a group sits on the ground in the center, unfazed, eyes closed in meditation or prayer. Behind them, a sign reads, “Falun Dafa is Great.”
The chaos of so many nations with conflicting wants is muted by the general human need of expression and order, mail delivery and lunch, money and prayer. It’s almost as if there are too many sides to make for conflict during the Assembly, or that conflict itself is what makes the Assembly operate smoothly. No matter what is going on behind those reflective windows, out here there is some sort of peace.
My arms are tired from balancing my coffee and purse with my camera bag and the clothes for dry cleaning, though I’m grateful for the camera, as I too become an onlooker taking pictures. Finally, I make it up First Avenue to Alpian’s. On the way home, I stop in Amreen’s Hallmark to buy a birthday card for my niece. I ask Amreen’s daughter, who works the register, how it’s gone so far.
“Good. Not too busy,” she says as she rings up the $3 card.
“Have you had more customers than usual?”
She shrugs. “No, but we have sold out of some stuff.” She points toward a shelf. “We’ve sold a bunch of our New York trinkets!”
As I approach my building, a motorcade stops right in front. Suited men get out and flank a town car. Behind it, a suburban full of men in vests holding machine guns waits. I’m about five feet from them. My building’s awning is behind me, and a group of tourists is watching. A woman walking her dog approaches. The shih tzu makes his big decision of the afternoon — curb or tree — and chooses the curb. The dog squats, the woman watches with plastic bag ready, I snap a photo of the men with guns, the suited men on the street wait for a signal then return to their vehicles, and the motorcade rolls away.
Inside I ask José at the front desk how the day has been. “Beautiful!” he says. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. A neighbor writes on her Facebook wall, “I walked outside to protests by every ethnic and religious group known to humanity. Then, President Obama passed by in a car, waving. I almost got picked up by secret service, and [literally] bumped into Katie Couric. The traffic is only a small price to pay for this much fun!” In true UN General Assembly style, we get a little bit of the spotlight — and the festival of lights — every year.
Joanne, however, is already on to other things. I get an email about bus route interruptions as construction on a new Second Avenue subway line proceeds. And as for my friend on Facebook, she soon follows her comment with another: “On second thought, I’m so over the important people hanging out in my hood. They are clearly diluting my status as a local celeb.”
High security just outside the author's building.
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He would carry the title of "great-uncle," and no matter how wonderful of a relative he truly is to my son, that "great" would never be a superlative. It would stand as a reminder of the distance between he and my son. It would be a permanent label, saying that he is not a part of my son's nuclear family. (No sir, not even close.) It would state the widely-held assumption that his relation to my son — what he knows about him, how well they interact, how much time they spend together — is negligible at best.
Outside of the nuclear family, the standard titles of relatives in a common Filipino household are limited to five: cousin, uncle, aunt, grandfather, and grandmother. No one is removed from each other.We are all easily accessible, just as close an acquaintance in loyalty and reliability as your most trusted and valuable friend. It is not uncommon for cousins to be as close as siblings, for second cousins to be as close as siblings, for generations to be linked by the kind of psychic empathy and understanding that most Americans are used to getting only from their immediate circle of close-knit friends.
Maybe that's why the children of my first and second cousins take an immediate interest and liking to me: because, as far as they're concerned, I'm their aunt, plain and simple. Maybe that's why I can walk into any establishment in town and mention that I'm so-and-so's (insert one of the familial titles here) and I'm treated like family. Maybe that's why I instantly feel comfortable with my family in the Philippines, regardless of the fact that we haven't communicated regularly and thousands of miles have separated us for over a decade.
Or maybe it's just some deceit of linguistics and mind tricks.
The fact remains: here, in the Philippines, even extended family is close, and that comes in handy.
The smell is unmistakable, and yet I must be mistaken. Here in the Philippines, drug use is a serious offense, and punishments are severe. Until recently, carrying a sizable quantity of the green stuff guaranteed the death penalty.
I stand in the upstairs living room, look into the vacant lot next door, and watch as plumes of smoke carry the familiar smell of marijuana over the neighborhood. The smell drifts high and sinks low, contaminating everything it touches with the heady aroma I am so familiar with.
I ask my brother what it is they're burning, and he laughs. "They tell me they're just burning leaves, shrubs, whatever is growing in the empty lot, but I don't buy it."
"Late at night, I see neighbors sneaking in and carrying something away."
I wonder what will happen when someone finally buys the lot next door.
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