Essays | Page 39 | The Common

Things Left

November 29, 2012 Essays

A vinyl sombrero. A needlepoint rendition of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. A macramé lawn chair. If you go to the thrift store with a specific item in mind, you probably won’t find it. You’ll find something else. I forage for the else.

My relationship with the thrift store started a few months after my life-partner died and I dropped off the first bag of clothes he wouldn’t be wearing any more. Before that, in the early weeks of mourning, I couldn’t let anything go. Taking bookmarks out of his books, or emptying his pockets of keys or chapstick, could capsize me. I had no sense of what to hold and what to disown, what was essential and what was peripheral. Everything seemed important, even clothes that Rajiv hated or never wore. Everything he’d touched bore meaning.

Elsewhere, In Foodland

November 26, 2012 Essays, In House

By JENNIFER ACKER

Cooler mornings and nights, the sun sinking earlier each day, dried leaves underfoot. In the States, such season changes are clear heralds of roast turkey and forkfuls of pumpkin pie. Perhaps, too, some related reading on the romance of turkey hunting, or an inquiry into the increasing genetic modifications of America’s Broad Breasted Whites. If you’re a food critic, you hate Thanksgiving and are glad to see it passed. Now it’s Monday, and you’ve eaten your leftovers.

But here in the United Arab Emirates, shorter days and dropping mercury (down into the mid-eighties) kicks off a different kind of national food celebration—the Emirates International Date Palm Festival. Calorific and densely rich in vitamins and minerals, dates are a wonder fruit. A few of these and some camel milk will carry you across the desert; and if the milk spoils, dates are also super for an upset stomach.

Moment’s Notice

November 20, 2012 Essays

By ISHION HUTCHINSON

My place of fret is not a narrow room, but a room that is short and sort of wide. Poor in natural light, a perpetual bulb’s yellowish wash makes it feel like a cellar, homogeneous, belonging to neither night nor day. This is not a bad thing; the illusion that time is at a standstill helps, but the romance stops there.

Finding Common Ground: Aurora, Nebraska

November 19, 2012 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

Cornfields really are the primary element of the landscape in Nebraska; the primary color (yellow), the primary crop (grain), the recently threatened, but still primary income. Agriculture’s primacy is omnipresent, and the fields are much more factory than farm. Still, Nebraska is a beautiful place. The sun sets in an array of unsaturated colors–pinks, purples, and magentas not commonly seen. Light wavelengths mix in a uniquely flat-country way, and indeed the earth is so flat that if you stand on a tall building you can see the earth’s curvature. Against the unnamable shades of dusk jut irrigation machines made of steel and blades. In such a landscape, I felt both irrelevantly tiny and in awe of my fellow humans’ ability to manipulate the earth.

Nowhere Left to Look Away

November 15, 2012 Essays

By DALE MEGAN HEALEY

A video of a young woman stopping traffic and screaming at taxi cabs in the middle of a busy Manhattan street went viral a few weeks ago. Cell phone cameras recorded her yelling, “Sorry, I forgot you!” as she kicked at car doors that slowly passed around her. She’s fun to watch; pretty and sort of graceful, dancing around the cars as if she’s dodging waves on the beach. In her bleached blonde bob and skinny jeans, she takes breaks from her traffic dodging to strike pinup girl poses for the cell phone cameras. One of the top comments on YouTube read, “Either she’s a mental patient or a performance artist.”

woman in front of taxi

The comment seems to imply that when someone is acting strangely in public, they are either extremely aware of themselves, resembling performers, or extremely unaware, consumed by the force of a breakdown. It’s easy to find examples of less appealing presentations of emotional breakdowns on YouTube, maybe even easier than it is to find recorded public displays of performance art. YouTube reframes private moments of suffering for public viewing, and performance art aims for something similar: it captures and examines live events we might otherwise look away from.

Annals of Mobility: On the Forced Mobility of Exile

November 12, 2012 Essays, In House

By SONYA CHUNG

In New York City, where I live, thousands were displaced before and during Sandy: living in cramped quarters with friends or family, limited by downed transit and, in many cases, cut off from the instant, continual communications that we’ve all come to take for granted. Even so, there were, in my small world, such a wide range of experiences — from horrific to inconvenient to a nice break from normal obligations. For some, displacement and/or disconnection were traumatic; for others, they were a welcome disruption.

From the 17th Floor: All These Things So Arranged

November 9, 2012 Essays

By JENNIFER ACKER

Inside Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence and other Turkish wonders

Some places become museums because they’re ruins. Other museums are houses built to hold the relics.

In fifth century Constantinople, believers built a small Greek Orthodox chapel called The Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora. The Greek chora refers to the church’s place in the fields outside the city’s thick defensive walls. Rebuilt, restored, destroyed, and raised again over the centuries, the church became a truly glorified house of God in the fourteenth century under the stewardship of a powerful intellectual named Theodore Metochites, whose vision and funds decorated the interior with some of the finest mosaics and frescoes remaining from Byzantine times.

From the Stone House: Reading Stevie Smith in Milan

November 8, 2012 Essays

By MARTHA COOLEY

Beauty is overrated. Beauty is underrated.

Three months ago, shortly after moving to Italy for the year, I was walking along via Montenapoleone in Milan, gazing at lovely summer togs and shoes in the shops (beauty is overrated?), when I nearly stumbled into a bearded man wearing dirty shorts and old sneakers. He sat spread-legged on the sidewalk, an empty, leaning-Tower-of-Pisa paper cup between his knees. Not the right street for such begging, I found myself thinking—too upscale, everyone carrying credit cards rather than change. Nobody wanting to be bothered, what with the insufferable humidity and all the gorgeous distractions in the shop-windows.

Reading Place: Is Geography Destiny?

November 5, 2012 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

Last week, as Hurricane Sandy bore down on my waterfront neighborhood, I found myself worrying about the future of coastal areas across the country. I live in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a low-lying area that has always been prone to flooding, but which saw new levels of damage with Sandy. For years, people have been predicting a rebirth of Red Hook, in part because of its spectacular ocean views, but perhaps those same views will spell its demise. Will neighborhoods like mine eventually be washed away? In short, is geography destiny?

Grocery Domestic Product: Inside the Park Slope Coop

November 1, 2012 Essays

Honeycrisp

The first Honeycrisp of the year carries more significance than any piece of fruit should. Its annual appearance in September’s produce aisle—a brindled globe of green, yellow, and red—is still a shock to me. Shelves on each side are stocked with plastic cartons of withering raspberries and the last crate of pluots, still summer-sweet but invariably mushy-bottomed. The lustre of summer is spent. The bin of Honeycrisp apples—peeking out from beneath the words, “NEW CROP” — announces that fall is on our doorstep.