We had no plans to visit Paris that winter. I was at the end of the second trimester of a difficult first pregnancy, when a few hours away from the comfort of home were all my hundred-pound body could afford. We were living in Salem, Virginia, five thousand miles from all our family in India.
3 things were called into the somehow of morning
two dissimilar metals + moisture = electricity
and me here dimmed, all yesterday I wrote
By LYNNE WEISS
Some say it’s the most dangerous place in the world, but that might depend on your species. Surrounded by barbed wire, minefields, and soldiers, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea seems anything but, yet this strip of land a couple of miles wide and about a 160 miles long is a safe and peaceful haven for plants and animals. There has been almost no human activity within it for over 50 years.
In 1964, as a kind of recompense for, or salvation from, moving us to the treeless, waterless plains of Minnesota, my parents joined with Henry, my mother’s brother, in the purchase of a cabin in northern Michigan, and for seven summers thereafter we escaped. It was three months of heaven after nine months of hell. I remember it, vividly; the memories are icons, glassed-in and shimmering like relics of the Church.
Shuji Kawashima stood at the door of his Tokyo flower shop, bowing at a three-quarter angle with sharp, reflexive motions to a female customer who returned the gesture. She backed out into the street, clutching a sheaf of flowers wrapped in heavy cellophane. Kawashima reentered the shop, edged his way past a workbench, and ducked behind an impromptu counter. Peering out from behind a row of tall vases topped with multi-colored roses, he reached for a wine bottle and began pouring drinks.
I remember how the air smelled, of eucalyptus and the Pacific. I was sitting under green corrugated fiberglass panels in an open-air classroom a mile from Santa Monica beach when President Kennedy got shot in the head and neck. Dallas was my hometown, and I started fourth grade back at the scene of that crime. A year later, we moved again, this time to New Hampshire.
New York City is too infinite to have a center, too hot-and-cold to locate its putative heart. But if one place can claim a measure of symbolism for the metropolis, it is City Hall and its adjoining park. Surrounded by Park Row, which once housed the legendary newspapers of James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, Joseph Pulitzer, and William Randolph Hearst, and now plays host to more contemporary media via J&R’s Audio/Computer World, by that majestic cathedral skyscraper, the Woolworth Building, with its beige and taupe terra cotta cladding, by the muscular Municipal Building, a McKim, Mead and White wedding cake of Stalinist-architecture bulk, abutting the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, by the ghost of what was formerly Ellen’s Coffee Shop, run by an ex-Miss Subways, and by the masses of civil servants on lunch break, shoppers frequenting bargain discount outlets, and criminals paroled from a nearby jail, the Tombs, all strolling up Chambers Street—City Hall itself is both grace note and anomaly.
My friend Alison and I have had a running joke that we’re cousins. When we met several years ago, she said, “I bet we’re related. My great-grandmother’s maiden name was Lichtblau.” Her father, like mine, left Vienna in 1938, but she didn’t know much more. Still, we called each other “chère cousine” for fun. Her father, like mine, left Vienna in 1938, and her great-grandmother had the same last name as I do, Lichtblau. Now I’m very fond of Alison, but never seriously believed we were related. The name’s not as rare in Austria as it is here, and I have a family tree going back to my great-great-grandfather—which gets us to 1811, amazingly. (My grandfather, born in 1877, was forty-three when my father came along in 1920, which partly accounts for the long generational leaps.) Alison didn’t know her great-grandmother’s given name, but her married name wasn’t on my tree and had never come up in family reminiscences. Reminiscence is to us Lichtblaus what watching sports on TV is to other families. It’s what we do when we get together. We sit in my aunt and uncle’s Upper West Side apartment on furniture that somehow made it over in 1938 despite looming disaster, and within five minutes, we’re talking about Grandma’s lover. So, I was pretty confident that I’d have heard of Alisons’s great-grandmother if she was one of us.
We sat side by side on the shore, staring into the sky above the sea, as if we could see the hurricane approaching. The same as standing on the porch back home, scanning the horizon for a tornado, wondering where it would hit. But this was no tornado. There was no escaping it.
Dogs lay on sidewalks
escaping the heat. The wind blew sand
in our eyes. Pupils burned. Garbage whirled.
Fruit piled up on street corners,
melon juice staining our skin
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