Buckeye in Big Apple

(Sung to the tune of Merle Haggard's immortal "Okie from Muscogee")

I'm proud to be a buckeye in the Big Apple,
A place where even squares can have a ball...

I love that line "where even squares can have a ball." As I write this, I'm back in the Heart of it All and into the recovery phase of a weekend trip to New York. Jess and I got home last night after a trouble-free nine hours on the road, making good time driving through rainy western and clear eastern Pennsylvania, talking most of the way about this and that. The folks at More Gardens! gave us a nice send-off yesterday morning with homemade biscuits and strong coffee and a ritual smudge on the sidewalk on east 162nd street in the Bronx. It was bittersweet, as leaving sometimes is, but his plan is to return next spring.

Sunday night there was a campfire in Courtland Garden, where Jess and his friends do most of their gardening and where the summer camp for kids took place (see More Gardens! post). Alex, Gabby, Night, Aresh, Trey, and I spent most of the afternoon moving a big pile of 4x8 timbers from a corner of the Courtland garden to the Alvarez garden a few blocks away, while Jess and Luis finished the roof of the casita in another corner of the garden. It gave me a chance to help out a little in the work and to put the truck to use. It took three trips and it was fun loading, unloading, and solving the minor problems that come up in a project like that. I was impressed with their ability to work through the small glitches and get it done in good spirits. Afterwards, Jess and I took off for the Lower East Side and found a good, cheap Indian restaurant and enjoyed a kick-ass meal.

Saturday night was the big going-away party for Jessi. Someone in the house was cooking all day long while Jess and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so there was lots of great food and beer. Quesadillas, pasta, a yummy eggplant dish, a squash dish, something with tofu, cakes, brownies, and quarts of Ballantine Ale. Despite the cool, rainy weather, lots of people came over from Brooklyn and around town. Joe, an old friend from Oberlin, Ellie, and Jess all played a lot of songs on the guitar, and some of them are still going through my head, like Leonard Cohen's "Halleluja" and Joe's Yiddish version of "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." It was a gas just to sit on my rolled-up sleeping bag and eavesdrop or take part in the flow of multiple conversations. One of the hot topics - and the best metaphor of the entire evening - was a book called Wild Fermentation about various ways of preserving food from different cultures. Check it out if you ever want to make pickles, cheese, wine, beer, or sourdough bread.

The Met was a trip and a half. I love the fact that anyone can go there for next to nothing, and the admission prices are suggested donations. In general, I have an love-hate relationship with museums, and the great museums of the world - the Prado, the Louvre, Chicago, Cleveland, the Metropolitan - just intensify that ambivalence. But that's another story. I had a great time in a small exhibit of artists influenced by van Gogh, especially a couple of drawings by Paul Klee, and a larger exhibit of the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava that was tai chi writ large. It was cool to see his sketches of legs, wings, torsos, and heads alongside kinetic sculptures of rib-like structures moving up and down in continuous waves, alongside scale models and video of the buildings he designed for the Athens Olympics, a theater in Seville, and the new train station under the World Trade Center. After a few hours there, we were pretty drained, so we walked through the shi-shi neighborhood until we found a suitable place for coffee, where the gruff proprietor made us sit at the counter because we weren't ordering enough for a table with a tablecloth.

Friday night, my first night in the city, we went to a Greenpeace benefit on an old boat called the Frying Pan down at Chelsea Pier on the west side. It was a warm, clear night, and it felt good to be outside after driving all day. A klezmer/gypsy band from Brooklyn, Athens, and Yellow Springs called the Luminescent Orchestrae played an amazing set: three violins, guitar, and a large bass-like stringed instrument. Then a Latino/ska/punk band followed, and the dancing got a little more raucous. It was a lot of fun to meet some of Jessi's friends from the gardening scene and the music scene and the political scene, all of which overlap a great deal. They were all, without exception, completely welcoming and friendly. I'll try to write more when I come down.