Peacock jewels

On cue, in autumn, the Abyssinian gladiolus opened. Some of the plants bloomed early, in late summer, so this is a nice present.

Abyssinia. Ethiopia. Both beautiful words. A pocket of eastern Africa. Imagine sheets of these growing wild on the hillsides, smelling like orchards of gardenias (or perhaps gardenias smell like hillsides of Abyssinian gladiolus...).

Acidanthera murielae. Peacock flower, Abyssinian gladiolus. Grown from corms, planted about three
inches deep. Full sun.

In the back of Mrs Reeler's algebra class, when I was about 15,  I sat and wrote

The rain on the leaves
pours them down
and with it pours spring.

My dreams are peacock jewels
in the classroom.

I failed algebra.

Six years later I walked into a bank on Adderley Street in Cape Town with a friend who had an American check to cash. The bank teller computed the exchange rate for South African rands and before her calculator had finished its job, out of my mouth came the conversion. I had meant it as a joke. But it was correct to the last, minute, decimal point. She held up her calculator to show me.

I always wondered about that.

Places of paper

The threat of rain - which promptly stopped - canceled a trip out to Staten Island's woodlands. So I bit the bullet of Things Bureaucratic.

This is a very boring story. Yet fascinating. To me.

I had to defer my jury duty for a second time, and was required to appear in person along with the summons that I had received at home, to do so. I imagined that this process would be complicated, tedious and involve waiting. So I had plenty of documents to support my case and a fresh New Yorker (I mean the magazine, not a lippy denizen of this city) to help pass the time.

It took 40 seconds. The lady behind the counter asked when I could serve, I told her, she nodded, she stamped my form and out I went.

Wow.

Next stop Canal Street post office in Manhattan. A friend had alerted me that a parcel he'd mailed to my PO box had bounced back to him. I had to find out why.

Bring on the valium.

I have kept a PO box since Flatbush Avenue days, to which address parcels could not be delivered safely. I keep the box as a billing address of record, mostly, and for receiving mail when we travel.

On Canal Street I opened my mailbox with my key. There was nothing inside.  A piece of paper was glued over the back saying something indecipherable from my end. I headed for the single, barred window across the room, from whence all help comes. In theory. Six people ahead of me spelled a 20 minute wait.  My back doesn't do standing. It does sitting, fast walking, running, tennis and canoe paddling. It just doesn't do standing. It's a lumbar vertebrae thing. So my back was not happy.

Neither was the lady in the window, once she'd heard my brief story.

No, she says, she can give me a renewal form but she can't tell me a) why my box is closed, b) why I was not alerted by email or at my residential address c) why all my mail (from the banks and credit cards who still insist on sending me paper and who now think this address is not valid) was returned to senders. I must knock on the door of the little room that houses all the PO boxes with my zip code and the man inside will help me. She can't. He does that.

Some years ago my mailbox resided in the  the Prince Street post office in SoHo, which closed, to a great wailing and gnashing of teeth (even mine, which tend to chip when gnashed). It is now an Apple Store. Worry not, said the USPS, although we are downsizing (they can't afford the cost of their healthcare plans, pensions and very decent wages - in short, the United States Postal Service is bankrupt and dying) we will transfer ALL your post office boxes to the post office on Canal Street, ten blocks downstream, in Chinatown.

And they did.

These boxes now live neatly housed inside their own room. A rectangular box, about 30 feet long by six feet wide was constructed just for them, and all the mail with the original zipcode and PO box numbers - so no one had to change their addresses - goes into the little room. And in the room is a man.

And the man's name is Alan.

Alan opened the door in response to my rapped tattoo. I introduced myself. I explained my problem. And I smiled. Broadly. He said I must apply to have my box reopened. I would need a passport to do this. And I had to go back to the lady at window. No, he didn't know why it had been closed and all my mail sent back.

Huh.

The lady at the window was not prepared to budge on the passport question. I had photo ID - my driver's license. I had the PO box key. I even had two bits of refugee mail addressed to me that Alan had managed to scrounge for me. Clearly - I thought - I was still me. She could enter my details provisionally but Alan had to sign off on it. She went to fetch Alan out of the little room. The queue behind me was now 10 strong. Alan appeared, followed her through the door to the beyond-the-bars section. And then disappeared.

This was at the 45 minute mark.

Has he gone to lunch? asked the lady.

You're asking me?

After another 10 minutes of this Alan pottered back into view, smiling conspiratorially at me. Alan knew something. In the meantime someone else had a loud and unrelated meltdown behind me.

Please bear in mind that at this point nothing has happened. Nothing has occurred. Nothing has been achieved. No explanation has been given. Nobody has said anything useful.

I am invited back to the little room.

Inside his fluorescent and neat, pigeonholed lair Alan offers me a little wooden stool to sit on. I make instant use of it. He says he is puzzled. My face and voice commiserate but I am detached, having given myself over to the twilight zone. I am now looking at the back of all the post office boxes. They are each labeled in the neatest script imaginable, on a small white or pale green or blue or pink label stuck above each opening. There is mine, Marie Viljoen. Impeccable capital lettering. Over the backs of some boxes are squares of paper in larger letters, an identical hand, with an explanation as to the holder's whereabouts or the box's status. Alan's notes to himself. Architecturally precise.

Alan may be puzzled by something but if he knows what it is he's not telling me. He only allows that my box is closed, all my mail returned to sender. I wonder if he plays poker.

He encourages me to make one more trip to the barred window to see if I can reopen the box with only my driver's license as identification. I go. There, I wait. I don't even know what I am waiting for. I don't know why I was granted an audience in the rectangular room.

I have been here an hour! I say crossly to the lady behind bars. Then go home and come back some other time, says the lady.

That's what she said.

Alan returns, an answer in his eyes. He leads me back, again, to the little room. In we go again, the door is closed behind me, again. When did you pay your renewal fee? he asks. I don't remember, I say,  but I pay it every year for an annual renewal; the last months have been blurry.

But Alan already knows: You renewed in July, he says. And then asks himself, So why did I close your box?

...

I say, Maybe it was just a mistake.

I don't usually make mistakes, says Alan, introspectively.

And I believe him. No one who works in a windowless box and who has handwriting like this makes mistakes. I think Alan is going to worry about this for days. Weeks. Or perhaps he's figured it out already. In the meantime I have to track down every credit card and bank and merchant, since my returned mail spells that my billing address is dead.

I left. No payment required. No passport.

No idea.

That is my story.

How to live

Photo: Andrea Frazzeti for the New York Times

If you have not already read it, there is a wonderful piece in the New York Times about the Greek island of Ikaria, and its long-lived residents. The author is Dan Buettner. His article leads off with the story of a Greek man in his mid-60s, living in New Jersey in 1976, who is diagnosed with lung cancer. He decides to go home to Greece to die, because it is cheaper than dying in Jersey.

He doesn't die. He is still alive. Eating and napping and gardening and drinking wine on Ikaria. In two-tone plad.

Here is a paragraph - the italics are mine:

"Although unemployment is high — perhaps as high as 40 percent — most everyone has access to a family garden and livestock, Parikos told me. People who work might have several jobs. Someone involved in tourism, for example, might also be a painter or an electrician or have a store. “People are fine here because we are very self-sufficient,” she said. “We may not have money for luxuries, but we will have food on the table and still have fun with family and friends. We may not be in a hurry to get work done during the day, so we work into the night. At the end of the day, we don’t go home to sit on the couch."

The article ends like this (but read the whole thing - the six pages of  inbetween bits are wonderful):

"I had one last question. How does he think he recovered from lung cancer?

'It just went away,' he said. 'I actually went back to America about 25 years after moving here to see if the doctors could explain it to me.'

I had heard this part of the story before. It had become a piece of the folklore of Ikaria, proof of its exceptional way of life. Still, I asked him, 'What happened?'

'My doctors were all dead.' "

It's a nice, long read, so pour yourself a glass of wine or a cup of black coffee and settle in. This is not about what to do in order to live. It is about how to live.

Fall in Brooklyn and what price, a park?

An afternoon stroll down Atlantic Avenue towards the water of the harbor took us to the Brooklyn Bridge Park, starting at Pier Six, and heading north. Amelanchiers are bleeding into orange, above.

My friends, the birds. These are siskins, utterly unafraid. Loading up on the fluffy seeds of...grassleafed goldenrod? Euthamia graminifolia? I think.

Sumac turning brilliant.

And Virginia creeper, up on the Promenade.

We have been excited to see the pedestals for a pedestrian footbridge take shape, to carry people up from the water-level park to the elevated Promenade. I can't count the number of perplexed tourists to whom we have given convoluted directions, when they ask how to get "up there."

Suddenly some steep berms had materialised, flanking the steps leading to the beginning of the unfinished bridge-supports. Crosshatched with irrigation lines and complete with quart pots of interesting-looking perennials. I hope there will not be a downpour within the next few months, to wash it all away.

Someone has a lot of planting to do. Tricky. Where to stand?

I have seen this park materialize from nothing - concrete wharfs, barren jetties, wasted waterfront. Most of the funding is private and I still have very mixed and conflicting feelings about this. Certainly, without private investment, this would not have happened.

And today, the Central Park Conservancy, also relying on private funds (yet it is the heart of Manhattan but not apparently, the city's responsibility) received a gift of $100,000,000 (count the noughts), from John Paulson, who has fond memories of being pushed through it in a stroller, as baby. Lucky Central Park. And thank you, Mr. Paulson.

I could not help wincing on behalf of Prospect Park, designed by the same, famous Olmstead/Vaux duo. Prospect Park, unlike its Manhattan yin,  has far poorer neighbours, and just one wealthy border, in the west. Prospect Park is Brooklyn's green heart and still resembles a ragged war zone on its eastern edges. The western part looks just fine. Funny, that. It needs money. The City sure as hell doesn't give a damn.

Perhaps Mr Paulson forgot about the spare $50,000,000 in his sock drawer.

Pretty please?

Restoration

My new favourite drink - Hermitage 1900 cider, made in France and pressed from apples growing in a hundred-year-old orchard on the border between Champagne and Burgundy. That's what the label says.

Lightly bubbly, sweetly dry, the colour of a pale sunset. I'm hooked.

I sat on the roof for half an hour, plane- and lettuce-spotting.

Sunday Suppers with Yvette van Boven

I've known about Karen Mordechai's Sunday Suppers, held in a Williamsburg loft (originally also her apartment), for a long time. The blog about them was - and is - beautiful, the table long and proper, the concept of paying guests mingling with friends and cooks, with the distinctions between cooking classes and dinners blurring pleasantly was an interesting one.

A small part of me was dreading this. A roomful of strangers. But I was propped up by the sturdy Frenchman who has long, strong legs.

And I had already met Yvette van Boven, the pretty (and tall) Dutch author of the Home Made books, and her husband and collaborator, Oof Verschuren (taller) at another supper event a week before, so I knew that that part would be fine. They seemed genuinely nice and unaffected. I owned Yvette's books. And Yvette would be cooking. That was key.

The room in the loft is beautiful. Wide open and white with windows toward Manhattan, on the other side of the East River. Getting to it from the East River Ferry's dock is a bit irksome as the large old building refuses to put a street number on itself. Part of the allure, no doubt. A large marble countertop slab in the kitchen held warming drinks - apple cider spiced with cinnamon and vodka. The recipe is in the book we were there to toast: Home Made Winter. Yvette and Oof (AH-oof) were busy cooking, kitchen cloths slung over shoulders.

Supper beckoned at last, and the cooks stayed where cooks do: in the kitchen, serving bowlsful of a wonderful pumpkin soup (book).

It was a wonderful pumpkin soup*, not straying into the too-sweet zone at all, and laced with goat cheesiness and topped with fried sage leaves. The recipe? Sorry! In the book!

*Correction: I've just had look at the recipe, as I'm making it for supper tonight: it is described as "butternut puree." 

Followed by crowd-pleasing porchetta (book...). I'll be making this, soon. 

Dessert nearly felled me, a sticky toffee puddingish sort of thing, very good in flavour but donated in greatest part to the Frenchman, who lapped it up.

My only quibble of the evening was the lack of wine for the first course; it may have been soup, but I was parched. This was either economics or poor timing but one should never, ever, let guests be thirsty.

In every other respect, a lovely evening, from the brisk ferry ride upstream on the way there, to the strange walk through the Hasidic neighborhood to catch the G home (the ferry goes to bed early). From the first, soothing sip of punch to the autumn flower arrangements (complete with leggy pansies and overblown roses), to the understated presence of the woman who is responsible for these dinners.There was a tangible sense of hospitality, often lacking in gatherings much-touted as convivial and of-the-moment.

 I was very impressed and better fed. (Actually, with my dessert in him, perhaps Vince was better fed!)

From farm to table

(...in case you were wondering)