Blog: Books

Sometime in the 1950s, 20 years before I was even born, my father woke up in Harlem. He and a small group of friends, all new arrivals to this city, decided to walk down to the Battery. It took them the good part of the day – made longer still since they stopped to slake their thirst in a number of bars along the route. As a child the story of this day-long journey took on mythological proportions. It seemed to encapsulate all that once was good and now is gone, back when time moved slowly.

Here in 2008, I walk as often as I can, usually taking two strolls around Brooklyn a day. I am a new mother and walking is well suited to new mothering but I was a walker even before my daughter was born. I even considered walking to the hospital when I went into labor until it became clear that this would not be physically possible. We drove. But I really like to walk. As a New Yorker, this is nothing terribly special—walking is what we do here. There is even a yoga studio in my neighborhood that teaches a course in walking.

In the past I’ve written about famous walkers and have always harbored a fantasy to one day walk from my home in Brooklyn to my mother’s house in Pound Ridge, New York. It would be a journey of only 52-odd miles if I could walk there in the most direct way which, of course, I cannot. This has always been a pesky problem for me–how does a person walk out of New York City? Getting to Manhattan from here– Carroll Gardens — is no problem. They built a beautiful bridge just for that purpose. Then I suppose I could take the Willis Avenue Bridge from Manhattan and just start heading north once I reached the Bronx. But after the Bronx the path gets a bit uncertain.

Today I have to be satisfied with a walk through my own part of town. I am lucky that walking through my neighborhood is a bit like Hericlitius’ River – never the same walk twice. Case in point: Today a woman coming out of the South Brooklyn Casket Company told me I had a cute hat.

Later I spied this secret door.

As I was writing “The Invention of Everything Else” I started to pay very close attention to the pigeons in my neighborhood. At times, they would even influence my editorial decisions. If I’d spent a day revising and then went outside and saw a sick and mangled bird I took that to mean that perhaps I should reconsider the work I’d just done. But if I went outside and saw a bird with bright, healthy pink feet or a gorgeous flock circling overhead then I thought I’d done a good job.

So last week I got into a pickle. I found a pigeon wing on the sidewalk outside my house. With no pigeon attached. Ugh. While some might be able to take that as a good omen, I could not. It seems birds really need their wings in order to be birds. I thought I’d better take care of this lost wing. But what to do? I couldn’t make it fly through the air again. My daughter and I took the wing down to Red Hook with us on a walk. The Queen Mary 2 was in port and the harbor at Valentino Pier was bright white in the sun light. The area by the pier was once known as Fort Defiance and in August 1776, when the British had 400 ships in New York harbor, this fort was crucial in helping Washington and his troops escape to safety. The Staten Island Ferry passed by while my daughter and I stood by the water. Swimming seems almost as good as flying. We set the wing adrift on the sea.

Planes flying into LaGuardia pass right over my house. When I first moved in and saw them approaching at night I thought it was some sort of magical, magnificent, once-in-a-lifetime convergence. Until the planes kept doing it every single night. Still, it’s quite a spectacle when seven or eight planes are lined up from here to Staten Island to New Jersey. Here’s a blurry photo.

People still keep coops of pigeons on their roofs in my Brooklyn neighborhood. There is one coop very nearby so that when I look out my front window I’m often able to witness a gorgeous, fighting-weight flock, swooping and circling. The birds turn together as if hearing some silent command. It is a fantastic act of choreography and one I never tire of seeing.

Years ago my husband wrote a story about the pigeon keepers of Coney Island. The men all belonged to a pigeon club and while they were bird lovers they also used the birds to gamble, betting which pigeon would make it back to the coop first. The men told my husband about a man from their club who’d been caught cheating at the bird races. My husband asked what happened to the cheater. There was silence. The men said nothing. Next question!

I love the city’s wild birds as well though I don’t regularly feed them except from my back fire escape. I can’t understand City Councilman Simcha Felder plans to ban pigeon feeding and fine those who break the law $1,000. Has he never seen a pigeon? They are beautiful. Their necks are like jewels. They have pink feet! And what would happen to all the lonely souls in NYC’s parks who depend on the birds for companionship? Perhaps they could show up at Councilman Felder’s house for supper.