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harmonydee · 9 years

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Day 3 post due date

June 20, 2015

Am now at my third AirBbB since I got here. Probably should start a blog about my AirBnB stays separate from this one. It's a cute garden-floor studio owned by a cop or as he calls himself NYPD.. I like it BUT I guess he rented the upstairs floors to a large family or maybe a circus troupe because the noise was abominable this morning starting at 7 AM. Not to mention the incredible amount of texts that I keep getting from everyone asking me what's happening. Cannot turn off the phone in case she goes into labor right God nothing like getting up woken up at 8 AM by beeping.

It's cloudy and rainy there's a crawfish boil taking place on Governor’s Island that I was thinking of going to, but instead I'm going to the Louis Armstrong World event today in Flushing, Queens. Coincidentally I was going to go to the Louis Armstrong House Museum today anyway, so this is working out perfectly.

I am not afraid of the subway. Repeat: I am not afraid of the subway. I never used to be, but then again there never used to be begging singers with one leg and break dancers who distract me from getting out at the correct stop. At least you can do work/text/email/call when it's above ground which is pretty amazing.

I'll never forget seeing someone walk onto the subway car ages ago when I lived here wearing headphones and something attached to their belt. I thought, “I know, that must be a subway worker or a undercover cop!”, but it was the very first Sony Walkman.

When I arrived here from California 32 years ago, in the late 70′s, I had a little round suitcase with a paisley pattern: hardshell like the Samsonite ones everybody carried. I had all my jewelry in it, money, probably some pot too. I left it on the subway platform and continued onto my train. (Incidentally I was wearing a cowboy hat and a long dress and smoking a cigarette...Subway cop said, “You’re not from here, are you??”) I came back a few hours later and someone had turned it into the lost and found. Everything inside it was intact.

Right now we're zipping along on this #7 train. Have no idea where we are.

#grandmother #louis armstrong #subway #lost #queens

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harmonydee · 9 years

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Day 2 post due date

June 19, 2015

Talking about the olden days:

Jennifer lived in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn with her stepmother, father, half-brother Alex . Her brothers Tommy and Miles lived there too. Jennifer was also Canadian but from Hamilton, Ontario (which always seems like another planet to me being from Montreal) so we had that bond; but we also had the going out and partying bond. We were young and early 20s and beautiful so we had a lot of adventures.

Working for the Phoenix had its drawbacks because the manager, Mike Armstrong, was perpetually short of cash. This impacted payroll and of course ultimately our paychecks. We knew they wouldn't be covered if we went to the bank, so we'd cash them at the local vendors because Jennifer was the salesperson and she knew them all and they trusted her. Of course we had to go to different ones every two weeks because those checks would bounce.

Once some of the vendors came in and removed all the typewriters as collateral until they were made good for their losses. We hid under the desk til they were gone. They were the huge, old-fashioned wooden oak kind so there was a lot of room to hide. Judy Linscott was the editor and she also would hide under the desk when this guy Nino would come in and and wanted to bug her with stories of local politics that she didn’t want to hear about.

Thursday night were going-to-press nights. I hung out in the back room with the production and editorial staff and watched the pasting up of the boards with a wax roller. I was fascinated with the process of creating an actual printed newspaper. So I’d watch and learn and flirt with Jon and we’d all eat pizza and drink beer til 2 in the AM. Then there was a mad rush to get the boards to the printer for publication early Friday morning. I’ve never learned things formally, always on the fly, and typically if something interests me enough I eventually make it into a passion or career. In this case I made graphic design and production into a career that landed me at The New York Times, working with Lou Silverstein who was the design editor for all the sections.

This flood of memories has only come about recently. I came here last week directly from New Orleans and in my fantasy, thought that the baby would be born the minute I got here or at least within 24 hours. Every day I thought that; it wasn’t until yesterday when I got that text about the moon being new and thus not labor-inducing that I stopped “expecting”. Seriously, I didn’t dare stray more than 10 blocks away from my daughter’s home in case she went into labor. That meant not reaching out to any of my friends, not going to hear music, nor running around to museums or even Broadway shows like I would normally do when I’m back on the East Coast. Every hour I expected something to happen. In the middle of the night instead of turning off my phone as I always do I kept it close by my bed.

Over the past nine (!) months, I’ve been following my daughter’s pregnancy progress via text, phone and weekly midwife baby update emails forwarded to the close family. But now that I’m in the same town as she is, something that I looked so forward to, I thought the whole situation would be different. I guess maybe I thought she would be lying around with her feet propped up on cushions sipping lemonades and wearing a little maternity dress. Instead she’s running around like she always does, stressing a little bit, doing errands, walking the dog, doing laundry, painting shelves for the baby’s room, taking the subway here and there. Nothing really seems to be different except she has a big basketball in her tummy.

This afternoon Ama and I went to get a latte for me at the Brooklyn Roastery and talked about Elliot Spitzer the once governor caught with a prostitute. He inherited and is managing his father’s real estate empire, and is building a multi-billion high-rise in South Williamsburg with 2 rooftop swimming pools. Ama thought that soon we wouldn’t be able to even see the skyline of Manhattan from the waterfront because of all the re-zoning and development. We saw a man dressed in khakis and polo shirt taking pix of buildings up and down the street and decided he himself was an evil developer.

By this time it was really really hot out - around 3 o'clock - my daughter was wilting and she had to leave soon to go to her sonogram. It was humid really high percentage of humidity got back to the apartment and ate our sandwiches that we had picked up at the corner deli after my coffee. Collapsed on the sofa and she then braved the subway and waddled off, whereupon I watched three episodes of “Orange is the New Black” starting from the very beginning all over again. Somehow this waiting just makes me exhausted; either that or the heat. I feel like I’m pregnant myself: my tummy is bloated and my back hurts and all I want to do is lie on the sofa and watch TV but then that’s a common feeling that I have.

A few hours later my sweet son-in-law came in from work and started making dinner. Then my daughter came in with my ex-husband, both of them exhausted from traveling on the subway and the sonogram which didn’t seem to have been eventful. I felt that she shouldn’t have gone since she has another one scheduled on Monday at 41 weeks. But she is determined to be following the midwives' instructions to the letter: making birthing lists, buying nipple cream, depends, coconut oil –all these things that I never heard of when I was pregnant 30 years ago.

We ended up the evening nicely, the four of us, watching "Game of Thrones” - the last episode - whoohoo! and eating calzoni and a beautiful salad.

#the new york times #newspaper #brooklynphoenix

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harmonydee · 9 years

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Back in my old hood with a new generation

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harmonydee · 9 years

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Day 1 post-due date

18 June 2015

Sitting outside a café in - Clinton Hill? Ft. Greene? some trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn which is kind of redundant these days. Finishing up a lavender strawberry muffin, sipping on an excellent latte. I have no sense of impending birth on the part of my daughter, mostly because of a text I received yesterday morning from a friend who pointed out that the new Moon precludes any birth. Apparently there’s no gravitational pull. This from a hippie friend in California who grows pot but nonetheless. Makes sense to me. So now I can relax and wait. It's surreal thinking of being a grandmother. All the more so because I am in Brooklyn where this journey sort of all began 30 years ago maybe 32.

I was living here, in Cobble Hill on a street called Amity I think, and working at the Brooklyn Phoenix. My friend there, Jennifer Butson, was the daughter of Tom Butson, a New York Times editor and also owner of The Villager - not The Village Voice - in Manhattan. He also part-owned the Phoenix and I guess thought Jennifer would do well working there. I was the receptionist and very quickly moved to doing paste-up in the back room, mostly because I had a crush on the editor, Jon Ciner, even though he was chubby and liked opera and had a girlfriend. (I made short work of her; Lucia was her name I think.) I was dying my hair with henna in those days, as I remember. It looked really good (or so I thought): the smell of it, the smell of that powder mixed with water still brings me back to those days. I would sleep with it on my head and a plastic bag wrapped around it to make it more intense, then in the morning shampoo it out and all little cakes of dried henna would fall off.

I furnished my little studio apartment, which was either $300 or $600 a month - I think it was $300 - I furnished it with things I found on the street. I was a huge dumpster diver in those days. I remember I found a beautiful cape with a red silk-lined hood in the dumpster one day. That was good because it was getting upon winter and it was chilly. I also took off the door knobs of someplace where I lived and sold them for money. They were the nice glass-etched cut kind. The reason that the studio apartment or whatever it was (maybe one bedroom) was so cheap so that there was a crazy lady who lived upstairs unbeknownst to me. She had a German Shepherd, but this didn't stop her from banging furiously on the floor and on the pipes whenever I walked across my floor to use the bathroom or do anything except stay motionless. I later found out that my place had a high turnover because of her. Didn't really matter cause I was never there. I was always out partying with Jennifer and our other friend from the Brooklyn Phoenix, Wendy Grabel, who is now an attorney. Wendy was short and had bright red hair and freckles. She was an actual journalist, very impressive to me the receptionist and Jennifer the salesperson, and very different from both of us in that she was Jewish and a college grad. The three of us would pal around but Jennifer and I were the hard-core partiers. Her parents lived on Dean Street. Sometimes I would sleep over there when I didn’t feel like going back to the crazy lady apartment. Jennifer’s room was at the very top of the brownstone, I remember once I borrowed nice corduroy dress from her; it was rust-colored. Not sure I ever gave it back.

#grandmother #brooklyn #patience #hipster #blogger

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