May The Best Creature Win

During my bicycle tour from France into Spain and back, I pedaled up some of the steepest climbs I’ve encountered.  As I pumped and grunted my way up a pass that crossed the border, some mountain goats seemed to line up for the spectacle.  I couldn’t help but to think they were chuckling, or even laughing, to themselves: “That human thinks he’s* all that.  We climb these mountains every day—and we don’t have low gears!”

I couldn’t have blamed them.  After all, compared to many other species, we’re not very strong, fast, agile, flexible or durable.  

If they learned how to ride bikes, would goats—or horses, cows or other creatures—beat us in a race? Or ride for longer?

Entering And Reaching During A Ride

The other day, I pedaled along the Queens and Brooklyn waterfronts from my apartment to the Williamsburg Bridge.  After crossing, I turned onto Clinton Street and crossed the Lower East Side and Chinatown before crossing under the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. 

Then I decided to channel the bike messenger I was many years ago and zig-zag through the narrow steel, granite  and concrete  canyons of the Financial District.  There, I did something that sounds riskier than it actually is (which is the opposite of so many things done in that part of town!): I stopped in the middle of Fulton Street, with a line of cars in front of,  and behind, me.

It wasn't so dangerous because the traffic was halted for a bit longer than it normally would stop for a red light.  Guys in thick boots and safety vests were doing some sort of construction or destruction, I'm not sure of which.  So they, with the help of police, stopped traffic for a few minutes, did whatever they were doing and let the traffic go for another few minutes.

That was good, for me, because there are some things for which one should stop before entering.

I couldn't help but to feel that I was riding into the entrance of a cathedral--of tourism?  Of capitalism?  Of this city itself?

When the new World Trade Center tower was under construction, about a decade ago, I was prepared to hate it.  I never cared much for the old "Twin Towers," but after they were destroyed in the September 11 attacks, I felt that nothing should be built in their place.  I thought that the twin rays of blue light that were beamed up from the site for about a year were a fitting tribute to all of the lives lost.

I must say, though, that I like the new tower.  Its curves on the outside give it the grace of a dancer rising and arching her arms as she pirouettes.  It's as if the feeling of transcendence one feels under the arches of a cathedral were the result of the cathedral itself reaching for something.

I feel the new WTC, in its architecture, honors the people lost in and around the Twin Towers.  If only they were here to see it.

What Color Are Their Burgers?

 An after-work ride took me through some familiar areas of Queens and Brooklyn.

When I say “familiar,” I don’t mean only that I know which streets go where.  I’ve seen some of those neighborhoods when you lived in them when you had no other choice—or where the people in them were, well, like me and my family when I was growing up and less like the person I am now. Indeed, I don’t think any of us could have imagined a woman in, ahem, middle age riding a bicycle—and writing a blog about it. 

(Of course, we didn’t know about blogs because they didn’t exist!)

Anyway, I can remember when Cobble Hill was an enclave of blue-collar Italian-Americans, like some of my relatives.  Court Street was a corridor of stores, cafes and bakeries, some of which served and sold the sorts of things what the proprietors’ families made and ate themselves.  

In other words, whether it was American, Italian or Italian-American, it was rich but unpretentious: No one tries to make the pastas, pastries, pizzas and parmigianas (chicken, eggplant or otherwise) seem like anything other than what they were. 

So all I could say was, “There went the neighborhood “ when I saw this:

There was an old joke that people like me didn’t know we came from working-class or blue-collar backgrounds until we went to college and encountered those terms in a sociology class—or people who didn’t come from those classes.

Likewise, only people  who comes from privilege can go to a place like that because it’s their idea of “blue-collar,” just as they choose to go to “dive bars” (or even call them such) if they have the monetary or social capital to go to a place people are chauffeured into.

I wonder whether those “blue collar” burgers are made from organic New Zealand grass-fed beef—and served on avocado toast and washed down with a triple IPA aged in an oak barrel previously used for a vintage wine or single-malt whiskey.