Schenley Plaza in January: Eight Desperate Observations

 1.

Snow today. Lots of it.

2.

I’m sitting under a white tent that looks like a funnel, but the wind and weather come in sideways. I want to enjoy this, to find something that draws me out in these evil months. I’ve been thinking that if I master winter, then Pittsburgh could be my city for a long time.

3.

There’s hardly anyone around. It’s Saturday and the college kids are still in bed. A few busses pass and small green plows like golf carts clear the sidewalk. The snow fills in their paths almost immediately and the work looks hopeless. In high school I worked as a janitor in college apartment buildings during the evening. When it snowed like this, which was often, I’d spend my entire shift shoveling and re-shoveling sidewalks even though I was the only person using them.

4.

Schenley Plaza’s restaurants are closed, but there’s a lingering smell of food indiscernible. Snow collects in the center crease of my notebook and I can't feel the pen in my hand.

5.

It’s cold, but not as cold as it’s been. At 25 degrees, today is twice as warm as yesterday, and bearable at first. It’s quiet, white, and hushed, like Christmas Eve but without the charm or nostalgia.

6.

It’s a textbook winter day, the kind of day I picture when I think of winter, and I realize the season really is better with snow. It’s a concession; something to look at in return for the cold and ugly weeks. In Baton Rouge the winters were warmer and shorter, but the watered-down sunlight made me feel uneasy. The grass and trees still died and everything was mudded brown.

7.

Every few moments I can look around without seeing anybody—no cars, no movement, no life save for the mobile pregnancy test bus next to the Carnegie Library. Once I took a girl I was seeing to a small office building not far from here. She thought she was pregnant, and we saw flyers advertising free tests. They came back negative, and the staff asked us to hold their hands and bow our heads while they prayed out loud. The clinic was decorated like a nursery, with plush toys and children’s books scattered across the floor. I bowed my head like they asked and even said “Amen” when they finished. I considered it their fee and thanked them. Then they invited us back for abstinence classes, which we declined.

8.

The longer I sit here, the more color I see. A blue tarp draped over the carousel, a pink parka climbing the steps toward the Cathedral of Learning (whose upper floors have disappeared). When I was in college, most of my classes were in that building. I used to have this dream where I’d be alone in its dim basement. I’d press the button for an elevator and the green doors would open but the elevator shaft would be empty, except for some clouds and light rain.

Questions for today's readers

• Ayers

• You mention in “Bear Candy” that your body begins to change tempo given a change of place. Is this something that you find happens naturally? Did you develop a schedule for yourself, or does your time in Massachusetts seem to organize itself? Does one biorhythm feel more “natural” than the other?
• Would you say that solitude has made you more of an introvert, or maybe more made you comfortable with your introverted side? I was surprised to read that after a while you had to remind yourself to be sociable. Were you aware of this shift while it was happening, or was it a sudden realization?

• Bakken

• In Chapter 5 (Meat), you're writing about something very specific: one kind of noodle at one restaurant on one section of an island off Greece. What challenges did you face while writing this, knowing that so much would be foreign/new to the majority of your readers (the language, the food, the landscape)?
• On the other hand, in Chapter 1 you write about Greece as a whole. You make a few generalizations (Greeks will want to eat with you) and you qualify others ("I don't know if all Greeks are like this..."). What advice would you give to writers attempting to survey a whole place and its people like this? What should we watch out for?

• 
  

Pigeons

I have to cheat, just this once.

I have to cheat because I’m pretty far from my weekly perch in Schenley Plaza. I’m 1,259 miles away, to be exact, and won’t be back until Tuesday. The sun is shining, the birds have beaten me here, and I’m sitting on the screened-in lanai of my parents’ house in Fort Myers, Florida, on a Friday morning in January. Through a sheen of queen palm and rosebush, there’s a narrow strip of backyard pushed up against a forest of cypress, pine, and fern. The palm fronds bounce against one another in the slight wind, creating a sort of crackling noise. A few egrets hop around on the brown forest floor while lawn mowers hum in the distance. South Florida has a distinct smell of humidity and plants. The air is light and soft and transforming—I felt it as soon as stepped off the plane at RSW.

My parents’ house is in Heritage Palms, one of thousands of subdivisions carved out of subtropical growth for retirees who spend their winters playing golf. I love this place, this house, and yet in many ways I feel guilty about it.

On my way down here, I was listening to JJ Grey, a Florida songwriter and environmentalist I’ve been following for a long time. He writes about the Florida landscape and the impact that subdivisions like this one have had on his home. One verse, specifically, sticks with me:

All we need is one more damn developer/

tearing her heart out

All we need is one more Mickey Mouse/

another golf course/

another country club/

another gated community

This song describes Heritage Palms exactly. While I stare at the forest in front of me, on the other side is a golf course. Up the street is a country club, and a six-foot wall surrounds the whole thing.

I’ve been thinking about Ashton Nichols and the concept of urbanature, and I can’t help but wonder whether this place meets the criteria. There are lizards crawling up the screen, alligators sunning themselves on stone laid for golf-cart bridges, and what sounds like an eagle shrieking somewhere deep within the trees. Nature is here.

And yet Florida has been gutted to build places like this. Not just out of human necessity, either. Hertiage Palms takes basic shelter a step further—private pools and putting greens, air conditioners and outdoor ceiling fans humming at top speed, massive SUVs in every other driveway (in case retirees encounter any unexpected terrain on their way to Walgreen’s).  Places like Heritage Palms are enclaves of privilege and indulgence—there’s even a gated community within this gated community, reserved for the double-plus rich, where the houses and pools and cars are twice the size.

It’s name? The Enclave.

And yet, sitting here with nothing to do but write and drink coffee and listen to birds, I understand why we build them.  They’re quiet. They’re seductive. They’re artificial and energy inefficient and (I'm just being honest here) they feel nearly perfect.

This is my view as I write this. Does this count as urbanatural? I don’t know. Should I feel guilty? I don’t know that, either. I didn’t build this place, didn’t ask for it to exist. But here I am, somewhere between nature and human extravagance, enjoying them both, and it’s hard to imagine appreciating one without the other.

It reminds me of a poem by David Berman about the inseparability of the two--or rather, the inevitable way that one finds the other. 

New York, New York

By David Berman

A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one.
Why another, no one asks,
just built it, and they do.

The city is still closed off
to all but the work crews
who claim it’s a perfect mirror image.

Truthfully, each man works on the replica
of the apartment building lives in,
adding new touches,
like cologne dispensers, rock gardens,
and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.

Improvements here and there, done secretly
and off the books. None of the supervisors
notice or mind. Everyone’s in a wonderful mood,
joking, taking walks through the still streets
that the single reporter allowed inside has describes as

"unleavened with reminders of the old city’s complicated past,
but giving off some blue perfume from the early years on earth.”

The men grow to love the peaceful town.
It becomes more difficult to return home at night,

which sets the wives to worrying.
The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.

The men take long breaks on the fire escapes,
waving across the quiet spaces to other workers
meditating on the perches.

Until one day…

The sky filled with charred clouds. 
Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.

Something is wrong.

A foreman stands in the avenue
pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark
moving towards us in the eastern sky.

Several voices, What, What is it?

Pigeons, he yells through the wind.

***

That's all for now. Will post questions for next week's readers in a few days.

JJ Grey and Mofro--"Florida"

Once More to the Park

It’s warm enough today to sit outside and be almost comfortable. Six years ago, I used to come here and write when the weather was nice. Before that, this place was a parking lot. It’s been restored to something resembling nature: a wide-open lawn, some hedges and trees and rocks.  But it’s also been modified with restaurants, restrooms, a carousel, and most recently a bar. Nature done right.

I’m thinking about how badly I could use a cigarette. I’m quitting for the third time this week, trying to put off giving another seven dollars to something that wants to kill me. I’ve already accepted the fact that cigarettes will likely take my father one day, and maybe mom too, and yet we keep smoking like a family trying to curse itself. My favorite thing to do all those years ago was to come out here in the sun with an iced coffee and a pack of Marlboro Lights and write until the heat became too much. No chance of that today—there’s not enough heat to go around and I’m sixteen hours hours nicotine-free.

It’s January and the park’s lawn is tan and green. Blades of grass alternate colors, still damp from the disappearing snow. The lawn is roped off, probably to keep it from getting churned into winter mud. The only things allowed on it today are sticks and some dead leaves. The sky is gray. The bare trees are gray. The buildings rising around the park are gray, as are the sidewalks that divide lawn from street (which is also gray).

I’m taking notes in a black journal that I’ve had since college. I used to write in this very notebook at these very tables in this very park, and the scattered dates are weighty reminders of my start-stop relationship with writing. The earliest entries in this notebook are from 2007 and it’s still only half-full. Reading through those first few pages, I see a passage (one of many) about a girl I used to be torn up over. I hardly recognize myself in those entries. The voice sounds familiar and the handwriting is mine, but whoever wrote it didn’t think he’d ever make it out alive, let alone come back to this place with an old notebook and a new perspective. At a party a few days ago my best friend told me he slept with that girl while I was still tortured by her. I thought I should have felt angry or betrayed, but the way my friend closed the door behind him and looked at me so seriously, as if it would kill him if he couldn’t just tell me this one thing before I left, I didn’t feel any of that. I was just glad to have an honest friend, even if it took him a while.

“That was six years ago,” I said, and smiled.

“You’re my brother,” he said.

In the park there’s the rising/falling rumble of passing cars, the tinny leftovers of music dripping from distant headphones, and a man laughing like he’s not entirely sold on the concept, as if he’s laughing just to try it out, you know, to see if it’s something that might one day suit him.