Joanie On My Mind

Guy #1 “Look at this guy, Franklin Pierce. I’ve never even heard of this guy and he was one of our presidents.”

Guy #2 “He looks like Todd from Wedding Crashers.”

This last one is the back of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s how I know I have arrived.

I am so grateful to my uncle Mike who gave me the opportunity to be a New Yorker for a few days. I loved having a little apartment to come home to and meals in. (He’s so cool, he knows where to look at the camera when taking a selfie!)

Uncle Mike bought me a delicious three course French dinner and financed a cab for my trip back to Penn Station–I was gonna ride the subway, but he does things with style. My Uncle likes to paint, so I thought it fitting that I end my time here with a painting he did of the brownstone that is his New York home.

My subway to Brooklyn emerged from below to cross the Manhattan Bridge. I was not expecting that.

I woke up early and took the Subway to the 9/11 memorial and museum today. Mostly it has been sunny in New York, but I was gifted overcast skies for this somber activity.

This memoral is built right on the footprint of the 2 World Trade Center buildings and the museum artifacts are underground, below the memorial. The museum features the architecture of both the city as well as the buildings that experienced the attack that day, too. I did not take many photos and there are many areas where photos are not allowed anyway.

The slurry wall. Protected surrounding underground entities, like the subway, from harm.

Vesey Street Stairs: many survivors used these stairs to flee the World Trade Center Plaza and get to safety.

The museum tells a story, about a day that started out bright and sunny with a sky that was described as so many kinds of blue an atrist made a mural of of just blue squares in multiple hues of sky blue.

Then the unthinkable happened and the result lead to lives lost on 4 planes. The things I thought about the most were the lives lost within specific agencies whether it be financial firms or local firehouses. I can’t imagine going into work and realizing that many or most of my coworkers were just gone. In some cases, whole families perished on planes. That was another aweful thing to think about. I am grateful to have these places to go and sit in reverence and think about what symbolic ways people can be memorialized. I found myself expanding my appreciation for the human experience of violence. All over the world, people experience family, intimate partner, stranger, job related, institutional, racial, ethnic, gender, atmospheric and many other types of violence. Some of these events happen on a grander scale than others, and some never get memorialized in any grand way, but they are, nonetheless, important.

River , O river, thou rovest free
From the mountain height to the fresh blue sea,
Free thyself, while in silver chain
Linking each charm of land and main.
Calling at first thy banded waves
From hill-side thickets and fern-hid caves,
From the splinter’d crag thou leap’st below,
Through leafy glades at will to flow—
Idling now ‘mid the dallying sedge,
Slumbering now by the steep’s moss’d edge,
With statelier march once more to break
From wooded valley to breezy lake;
Yet all of these scenes, though fair they be,
River, O river, are bann’d to me!
River , O river, thou rovest free
From the mountain height to the fresh blue sea,
Free thyself, while in silver chain
Linking each charm of land and main.
Calling at first thy banded waves
From hill-side thickets and fern-hid caves,
From the splinter’d crag thou leap’st below,
Through leafy glades at will to flow—
Idling now ‘mid the dallying sedge,
Slumbering now by the steep’s moss’d edge,
With statelier march once more to break
From wooded valley to breezy lake;
Yet all of these scenes, though fair they be,
River, O river, are bann’d to me!
River, O river! upon thy tide
Gayly the freighted vessels glide;
Would that thou thus couldst bear away
The thoughts that burthen my weary day,
Or that I, from all, save them, set free,
Though laden still, might rove with thee.
True that thy waves brief lifetime find,
And live at the will of the wanton wind—
True that thou seekest the ocean’s flow
To be lost therein for evermoe!
Yet the slave who worships at Glory’s shrine,
But toils for a bubble as frail as thine,
But loses his freedom here, to be
Forgotten as soon as in death set free.

Charles Fenno Hoffman 1806-1884

I saw an extraordinary off-Broadway play today, The Play that Goes Wrong. I love farce. I had a front row seat, dead center. I got splashed.