I got off the subway returning home a little bit ago after having dinner with a friend in Central Park (the trains were slow – took me an hour to get home). It had just stopped raining – the kind of quick downpour that leaves everything soaking wet, but the clouds part and the sun starts to shine as water drips from everything. A cool breeze, and the air smelled good.
As I was walking down the street a few brave souls resumed playing in the park, but instead of the voices of the kids playing catching my attention, I heard someone singing. I figured up ahead there was a car with someone sitting with the window opened listening to the radio, but I passed car after car and no radio playing. So then, I thought perhaps someone had a radio playing loudly in their apartment, window opened.
I started looking up at the brownstones, listening. The singer had a very nice voice – it sounded familiar, kind of a young, pop ballad kind of voice. It was nice. Then on the third floor of an old brownstone in the bay window I saw a girl with a microphone and another girl at an electric piano, barely noticeable. The voice I heard was hers – live.
I looked up and watched them through the window as I walked by. I decided to turn around and go back to listen a little more. I tried to be inconspicuous. I passed by, backtracked, but no where to hind. I just turned around again to continue home. At this point, looking up at the window, she saw me and smiled. I was caught. She was caught, and stopped singing for a New York minute. I don’t know whether she was caught off guard – not expecting anyone to see her or pay attention to her singing. Perhaps she was embarrassed. I don’t know.
The City is full of these little kind of things. So often they are lost in the noise and busyness of the City, but after a quieting rain a voice carries and I just have to pause and listen. I am fortunate when these little moments get through – kind of like stopping and smelling the flowers. I wonder what was going through her mind when she realized that someone heard her, someone was listening, someone discovered her and her friend practicing.
This neighborhood is a little too expensive at this point for struggling artists, but there are still some and the ones that have a little luck in their careers move here. I love this neighborhood and this City in all its dynamic craziness. Perhaps some day, this women will be famous and I will remember back to one rainy day when I heard a voice coming from a third floor walk-up in Brooklyn and think, “I saw her…”
A new Ikea just opened, yesterday. It is a 20 minute walk from my apartment. An Ikea 20 minutes away. Lord. Red Hook will never be the same. The Queen Mary docks, an Ikea opens, what’s next?

Riding the subway this morning, I had a feeling of dread thinking about the verdict coming this morning concerning the Shawn Bell trial. I’m worried about the outcome.
Update: The verdict is in and all three policemen were acquitted. What happens, now?
This morning I debated wearing clericals at the last minute before I left for work. Friday’s are “business casual” at CPG, and frankly I didn’t want to wear anything around my neck. Sitting on the subway, I wish I had.
There were a couple black people sitting around me, and I wanted to ask them what they thought would happen this afternoon. I wanted to know what they were thinking and feeling about all this. I didn’t because I am a “white-boy asking stupid questions,” someone intruding upon personal space. There comes a point when a person just doesn’t want to try to explain a lifetime of experience to someone they know they will never see again – especially someone they think cannot understand to begin with.
Wearing a collar, well, there is still an identification with something more than someone who just can’t understand and who won’t do anything anyway. (Don’t laugh.) With a collar, there is a generally understood justification for asking such questions. People still recognize a “something more than self-interest” – a concern that goes beyond the individual, beyond race, beyond being worried about my own lily-white behind.
The other thing is that the collar still gets a priest into places a “regular/normal” person can’t go. The collar still gives me an entré into people’s lives (strangers) that I can’t enter otherwise (and of course the opposite can be true, too). There is still, remarkably, a respect for the collar. It’s also becoming a curiosity.
Anyway, I wish I would have gone with my instincts and worn clericals. My soul is heavy, right now. There are no easy answers, and too many people will be terribly grieved this day. Was the judge right in his decision? Hindsight will tell us, but right now it doesn’t make a difference. People are functioning on emotion and not rational thought. Tomorrow and the days ahead, hopefully we will be rational.

Today is a day! This is the first really warm day and the streets are packed. I walked over to the Library at Bryant Park to eat my soup. Walking through the park afterwards in a sea of people. People eating, people reading. People talking, people starring. Eye Candy! Chess played, stone laid, children whirling, long lines for sandwiches. Balls rolling on the Boule courts, cameras pointing in every direction.
A guy talking excitedly to female table mates, “There is no city like New York. No city like New York – let’s just get that straight!”
Fountain spraying, cutest-in-the-world puppies roaming – women watching with big smiles. Pope at the U.N. and Yorktown, a 15 minute walk from here. Germanic evangelist talking about Jesus to “Savvy Americans.” Every shape, every color, every sound imaginable – all packed together. The lawn rests, this day.
This kind of day makes me thrilled that I live in New York City, “No city like New York…” Makes me want to not just live in Brooklyn, but in Manhattan. (Okay, I really like were I live in Brooklyn, but there it is different.) Makes me not want to leave.
This is a day in the City!

Sometimes, walking around the City I get a small, short glimpse of life – a snapshot, a moment in the lives of a few individuals. Sometimes, these snapshots are vividly embedded in my mind and remembering them seems as real as when I experienced them.
The other day I was walking from work to the subway. I crossed the street and walking to the intersection I saw a father with his young son in hand. The father, perhaps the boy’s grandfather, was bending low as they walked and was talking earnestly to the boy, about what I’m not sure. The little boy, who was probably an older-three or four years old, was looking up into the sky or at the buildings and was just doing “raspberries.”
Just that moment – the earnestness and seriousness of aging men and the frivolity and carefree-ness of little boys.
I’ve been in a “people are just plain idiots” phase over the last couple of weeks. This glimpse of joyous life brings me back to reality and balance and the realization that I do love God’s brazenly chaotic Creation.

Recently in New York (hat-tip to T19)

Too funny!

Just a couple random observations…
#1 – I was waiting in line for a coffee at “The Tea Lounge” in Cobble Hill (just north of Carroll Gardens) – this is my preferred coffee house hang-out when it is not just completely packed with people. I normally show up on Saturday mornings before all the stroller pushing mothers (sometimes with fathers) show up.
Anyway…. I was waiting in line for coffee and just happened to notice the number of laptop computers. I was waiting in line for a to-go coffee because there was no place to sit. There were around 23 people sitting around. A few reading newspapers or books or talking. So, I counted the laptops. Out of the 23 people sitting around, 17 were using laptops. 17! There were about evenly divided between Mac users and Windows users (normally, Mac’s win).
Now, this scenario is repeated at Nadras (most exclusively Mac territory), another favorite coffee spot, and at The Fall Cafe (tends to be more Windows people – too bad). Now, at Georgia’s, where I go Sunday mornings before mass, and which is definitively of the Old Neighborhood (working class Italians), there is nary a laptop in site. Of course, they don’t offer Internet access, either.
#2 – It’s interesting to watch people watch people. I was doing this on the subway train yesterday. A young woman was sitting down, the train was full, and I watched her as she watched the people around her. She was intent, seemingly interested, consistent, varied in who she watched, and I really wonder what was going on in her mind. What was she thinking?
Was anyone watching me watching someone who was watching people?
#3 – It is certainly easy to fall into the stereotypic New York City sense that there is little consideration for the rest of the nation. I was walking down the street last Saturday, coming back from The Tea Lounge, and thought, “It can be so easy to never think about the rest of the country. And, how easy would it be to just not care? I don’t think it is a matter of not recognizing the importance of what goes on in the rest of the country, but that everything is available here – first. So much starts here and goes around the world before it comes back around. It seems that the rest of the country could go away and New York City (along with perhaps Long Island, parts of New Jersey, and parts of upstate where all those second/vacation homes are located) would be perfectly okay and may New Yorkers might not even notice.

This is another one of those cool, foggy mornings. As I sit here and write about questions concerning the effects of “constant change” (my next post), I hear the fog horns on the bay and East River. I feel the closer one in my chest. One calling to another, “I am here. Be careful.” The other calling, “I hear you. Hear I am, be careful.” One after the other, the horns blow. One to all the others. One closer than the others.
It’s funny to think of this kind of thing in this kind of City. Perhaps I expect to hear old fog horns only in small fishing towns, but New York City? Sometimes, it is hard to remember that this place sits on the ocean, surrounded by two rivers, a bay, an ocean. The sound of fog horns just doesn’t jibe with the notion of modern New York City, for some strange reason. I like it.
Go Tribe!

This could have been another “City” post, but I’m not in the City right now. I haven’t had a real vacation in a long time, so I am taking one and spending a week in Provincetown, MA. I’ve had friends who have come here regularly for years and love it, so I thought that since it is a bit post-season and quite I would see what it is like.
It is full of bus loads of senior citizens on bus tours with nametags, that’s what it’s like. Not quite what I was expecting, but it is quiet right now. I’ve been the only one in the quest house for the past two nights.
Anyway, I was supposed to be going on a sunset sailing excursion this evening on the restored, oldest schooner still operating. It’s a great boat. There is no sun today, so I swung by the dock to tell the captain that I’m going to wait until tomorrow. He is a great, gregarious guy who loves to talk about what he does and tell stories about his lifetime of sailing. So, his schooner is named, “Hindu.” The original owner imported spices from India, thus “Hindu.” The original owner spelled it “Hindoo” which, according to the captain, many Indians find offensive.
A group of five decided to still go out on the excursion and the captain was explaining to them how so many Indian tourists come up and ask about the boat and why it is named “Hindu.” Then he said this, which is why I’m writing:
“You have to understand about the Indians and Hindu.” He tried to explain, “Hindu is like, well, like Irish. No, that isn’t a good example,” he said. “Hindu is like Jews. You know, it’s everything; it’s a religion; it’s a way of life. It’s everything about them. I was going to say like Irish Catholics,” he went on, “but, well, that religion isn’t everything to them – not something they do every day. Not like the Hindu’s or the Jew’s when it’s everything for them everyday,” he finished.
Isn’t that something? This could reveal a whole lot about Christians in general and Irish Catholics in particular (well, honestly, just about this person’s impression of Irish Catholics). I don’t think this guy is religious (although probably raised Irish Catholic), but his perception of Jews and Hindus as a people who truly live their faith (and culture so influenced by their faith) is far different from his impression of Irish Catholics, or Catholics, or perhaps Christians in general. I suspect this is the impression of too many non-religious folks or too many non-Christians.
I really think that most of the people in this country view “Christians” as not particularly committed to their faith – primarily because I think too many people see the rank hypocrisy and materialism of those who love the limelight and demand that all accept their version of what the Faith must be. And let’s face it, average American Christians sitting in pews and behind pulpits don’t do a very good job, either. The recent findings of religious literacy even among the born-again crowd show an abysmally low level of understanding of the Faith and the Bible.
Now, Mother Teresa or the Amish in the aftermath of the school shooting tragedy in Pennsylvania are different matters. There are good examples everywhere, even if they get little attention. But the Religious Right or the Religious Left? Nope. Both camps love to claim the mantle of the true expression of the Faith, but rarely does either live up to even the most basic of the ideals set before us by Jesus – or, at least in those who we readily see in the media and popular culture. “Power tends to corrupt,” and all that.
Frankly, and I’ve said this before, I do believe that there are less and less people in the West committing themselves to the organized Faith and intentionally striving to live by the teachings of Jesus (with the help of the Holy Spirit) because those already Christian do such a piss poor job experiencing the Faith themselves. We are living a deficient form of Christianity. There is little verifiable “difference” between the lives of self-professed Christians and those who aren’t, and too many self-professed Christians don’t see it.
The “difference” is found in the everyday life, the everyday interactions, and the change that is wrought within us when we truly turn our lives to the Light of Christ. It should be that the captain could say “Irish Catholics” (or any group of American Christians) and everyone could shake their heads because of the witness of the faith that exudes from their very being. (And yes, I’m sure the captain has a less-than-accurate vision of the faithfulness of those who practice Hinduism or Judaism.)
He asked me where I was staying. Then, before he got on his schooner he asked me whether I drove or not. He said, “If you didn’t, I have a car I was going to tell you that you could borrow.” That’s something.
Tomorrow, the American House of Bishops begins to meet. Let us watch and see whether the various interest groups world-wide and their media-hound leaders might provide for this captain a good and positive vision of what Jesus calls us to through their words and actions. Wouldn’t that be something?

A Tribute in Light – this morning, I went up on the roof of the Rectory and looked into Lower Manhattan. From where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood, two powerful beans of light shoot into the sky.
What powerful lights they must be! Two beams streaming up; they merge at some point and look as if they bend towards me, somewhat like a rainbow bends, but before it can come back around (which I know it wouldn’t) the beams disappear high, very high, in the dark, morning sky.
It is a striking tribute. It is a striking sight in the City.