Ghosts of cool

Nuyorican Poets Cafe

Third Street, East Village
Manhattan

Allure of the word

East Village
Manhattan

Untitled

Sheridan Square
West Village
Manhattan

Illustrated woman

East Village
Manhattan

Past or present?

Statement against racism and intolerance by artist James De La Vega
East Village,
Manhattan

He talks in pictures, not in words

Rico Fonseca

near Washington Square
West Village, Manhattan

Gone but still here

Public baths,
11th Street, East Village, Manhattan
built 1904
now a single-family home

I sip
rum and cokes
and blur
the here and now
at an East Village bar
steps from the tenement
where a midwife delivered my father
99 years ago

I rise
on stuttering feet
and walk
around the corner
past the old public baths
on 11th Street
between Avenues A and B
an abode now for well-heeled tenants
but through a rip in time
I see the place where my father
watched his father
get clean
after days of manual labor

I pass
the public school
where my father's mind was nurtured
its classrooms now luxury apartments
with big closets

I hear
idle chatter
about
stock portfolios
and
reality TV
and
real estate prices
but it can't drown out
echoes
of ancient immigrant sounds
whose meanings can be inferred
but not quite understood

I walk
these streets
arm-in-arm
with ghosts

My dad's childhood home
born there in 1907
Sixth Street
between First Avenue and Avenue A
East Village
Manhattan

Iron horse

Hells Angels MC clubhouse, East Village, Manhattan

Thanksgiving

Where have the years gone?

I met H. when she was a 12-year-old elementary school girl in a small Japanese seaside town and I was the English teacher at her school.
She's now going on 23, and I feel very old.
She lives in New York City and studies English at a language school there.
Here she is with her boyfriend, in SoHo on a recent weekend.
Watching her blossom as a person and witnessing the wonderful expansion of her horizons has been a rare privilege.
It has softened the impact of the passing years.