* Today I took a day off. Yup. I haven’t had one of those in a very long time. My lovely husband stayed home and watched the kids (sort of, he drove them all over the place in their wagon and spent hours at the park) and I took off to the woods. This is our new plan to give each other a break. We each get a day every other week to do with what we choose. Sleep, catch up on e-mails, shop, go to a Yankees game (as Tom did last weekend), sleep, read, play scrabble at the bar, did I mention sleep, whatever you like. I chose to hike in the woods alone. I drove north up the Palisades Parkway in NJ, careful to avoid Manhattan and multiple traffic obstruction protests going on because of the verdict in the Sean Bell trial. I got to NY’s Harriman State Park in an hour and ten minutes and drove through 7 Lakes Drive until I found a hiker’s parking lot. Most people would have spent the day at the beach (and the beach at the lake was really nice too) or at the spa, but I chose to walk uphill on a craggy, rocky, mossy path for about an hour or so. I sat on a rock and had lunch. Two wet golden retrievers jumped up and tried to eat my sandwich (no they are not wild in these parts, a hiker was walking them), then looked convincingly starving but in vain. I only saw a couple more people on the trail early on but most of the day allowed me my seclusion fix.
I took this from my cell phone camera today.
I don’t walk and talk to myself aloud, but hiking alone allows me the chance to have uninterrupted frank conversations with myself. And as the meters pass under my feet and my blood runs rich with oxygen and my muscles warm, I begin to feel more at peace and my head becomes a quieter place. I stopped at a stream and listened for a long, long time and felt grateful for the opportunity to be there at that moment and grateful for the love of the woods my parents instilled in me as a kid when we hiked all over Europe. This is my church, this is where I feel closest to my definition of God. I fantasized about camping trips and hikes I might one day have with my children, and then started to miss them, checked the position of the sun in the sky and headed back. Even rush hour through Newark didn’t bug me, I was so happy to have my family to return home to and proud of myself for making the effort to get to the woods.
* Tom and I took the babies to the Museum of Natural History this week. We decided that we were going to make this place a date destination. We tend to stop and kiss each other a lot in museums for some reason. The kids loved it and I think ill drag my sister here next week for their new exhibit on the horse. (She might not get Jeff Koons at the Met). She is a scientist and had horses as a teenager so I think she will dig it. J & M loved the dioramas of African and North American Mammals. They never seem to loose their appeal. I remember walking through the halls as a kid, everything exactly the same. The fighting moose, the wolves in mid stride in the moonlight, the imposing Elephants (stuffed in the 20’s!). It must have been an enormous undertaking and a revolutionary concept when they constructed these exhibits. Taxidermy, model making and paint meets science. So captivating that there has never been a call to replace them with more modern images. Thats the thing I noticed about them, there was no trace of human existence painted in the background. No Landrover behind the zebra, no airplanes behind the ibex’ spiraled horns (antlers?). That in itself is something that contributes to its curiosity. Its as if you are peering back into time, before man arrived and messed it all up.
* One thing you see a lot of in the city of Brooklyn’s skyline is church steeples. There are some very old churches here, the biggest concentration in Brooklyn Heights. But one that sticks out in my local landscape is a church that sits on 4th Avenue somewhere around 34th Street, it is seen easily from the Gowanus (Expressway) and most points in Sunset Park. This church has a huge pink (did they paint it pink?) steeple that sits over the brick bell house. Tom and I drove past it the other day as we do often and he noticed that it was now adorned with four new cell phone jumper boxes. OK, I understand that the congregation may not be able to raise the funds needed to maintain the church through its usual rummage sale, but this was in very bad taste. I don’t know if there were desperate measures needed at all really but I am assuming a vote was had and whatever ruling power of the church (God told me to) decided it was a good idea. Can you imagine Mr. cell phone jumper box salesperson knocking on the rectory door asking if they could put up a few inconspicuous boxes. At least the towers I saw along the highway today tried to disguise themselves as a tree (but looked more like an overgrown mangy fake christmas tree from the 50’s), can they make them any more obvious really? One day we will look back and laugh at those things like we do when we see someone with an ariel antenna on their roof. Perhaps the priests thought they would be able to reach God more easily if not just with better reception. Who cares that the congregation suffers from horrible headaches and have all gone sterile. Its $60 bucks a month baby! I once rode with a car service driver who was complaining about all of the steeples in Brooklyn. He said in his thick Trinidadian accent that they were polluting the sky. He asked if they were trying to get closer to God with their steeples, or were they an advertisement like a billboard for people all around to choose their church. He decided on his own that it was a pissing contest to see who could build the higher steeple. I wonder what he would have thought of the cell phone jumper box on one. Maybe now all the other churches will want one too.
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