New York
New York City. Sitting on the edge of a planter pot near Ground Zero. It's fenced off and bristling with cranes: a construction site for a memorial plaza.
It looks like any other hole in the ground in the inner city, an empty space where something will someday be. There's no innate sense here that something once was: this isn't my city, so I've no sense of its scars.
Yesterday was spent in transit: a tedious eternity of airline seats and airport corridors.
We were up at five, at Sydney Airport by seven, having walked down Qantas Drive in the chill of early morning. By nine we were on the plane, thirteen hours in our seats. They fed us dinner at breakfast time, breakfast at dinner while we stretched the day across too many hours.
We were fingerprinted at Los Angeles with green light instead of ink, and decanted into a smaller plane with sourer, drier air.
By the time we reached New York, we were dead on our feet. Susan and Meg fell asleep on the bus from JFK to the Port Authority, leaving me to watch the journey into town all alone. A cemetery by the highwayside stretched for blocks. Billboards flashed giant advertisements across the skyline: Lucy from the Awash Valley, a new Juliana Margulies series, the ripped abs of the guy in the Abercrombie and Fitch poster.
New York proper is a maze of one way streets and neon signs, a place for yellow cabs and fixed gear bikes: squeezing the bus through this traffic is an adventure in itself.
It looks like any other hole in the ground in the inner city, an empty space where something will someday be. There's no innate sense here that something once was: this isn't my city, so I've no sense of its scars.
Yesterday was spent in transit: a tedious eternity of airline seats and airport corridors.
We were up at five, at Sydney Airport by seven, having walked down Qantas Drive in the chill of early morning. By nine we were on the plane, thirteen hours in our seats. They fed us dinner at breakfast time, breakfast at dinner while we stretched the day across too many hours.
We were fingerprinted at Los Angeles with green light instead of ink, and decanted into a smaller plane with sourer, drier air.
By the time we reached New York, we were dead on our feet. Susan and Meg fell asleep on the bus from JFK to the Port Authority, leaving me to watch the journey into town all alone. A cemetery by the highwayside stretched for blocks. Billboards flashed giant advertisements across the skyline: Lucy from the Awash Valley, a new Juliana Margulies series, the ripped abs of the guy in the Abercrombie and Fitch poster.
New York proper is a maze of one way streets and neon signs, a place for yellow cabs and fixed gear bikes: squeezing the bus through this traffic is an adventure in itself.