My godfather Fred Borcherdt is a
sculptor. He did a series of metal
and wood sculptures meant to be placed in various locations across the wilds of the
Southwestern United States. He
called them Markers. What follows
is my attempt to create three markers, related/un-related, with words instead
of metal and wood.
MARKER I
It’s been a year and about two weeks since Hurricane Sandy ransacked the Northeast, and I’ve been wanting to write about an experience I had after the Hurricane. A few days after Sandy my then girlfriend and I (our apartments were unaffected by the storm) went to volunteer at the local YMCA in Brooklyn, housed in the huge Park Slope Armory that they had miraculously converted overnight into a shelter for evacuees of nursing homes in the Rockaways. The place was overstocked with volunteers, lined with rows and rows of beds, and I was assigned to bed-patrol—tasked to walk up and down a certain line and make sure each patient/person had what they needed. The people were sitting, bundled, bridled, sleeping, wide-eyed, all laid out on those light, creaky beds no one ever wants to be laid out on. They were all in a general state of perplexedness, which mirrored my own feeling, I realized then. As it was after September 11th, the world was confusing after Sandy. It was about ten at night, quiet and echoey in the old Armory.
It’s been a year and about two weeks since Hurricane Sandy ransacked the Northeast, and I’ve been wanting to write about an experience I had after the Hurricane. A few days after Sandy my then girlfriend and I (our apartments were unaffected by the storm) went to volunteer at the local YMCA in Brooklyn, housed in the huge Park Slope Armory that they had miraculously converted overnight into a shelter for evacuees of nursing homes in the Rockaways. The place was overstocked with volunteers, lined with rows and rows of beds, and I was assigned to bed-patrol—tasked to walk up and down a certain line and make sure each patient/person had what they needed. The people were sitting, bundled, bridled, sleeping, wide-eyed, all laid out on those light, creaky beds no one ever wants to be laid out on. They were all in a general state of perplexedness, which mirrored my own feeling, I realized then. As it was after September 11th, the world was confusing after Sandy. It was about ten at night, quiet and echoey in the old Armory.
After plodding back and forth
through the rows a few times and having done nothing except escort one guy to the
bathroom and put another man to sleep trying to talk to him, I happened up on Klara. Klara was a black woman, who looked
like she could have been anywhere between 60 and 80, with the kind of cerulean
eyes you find in people with Creole blood in New Orleans. Most of her upper front teeth were
missing, like everyone she was a little perplexed, but she had a base cheeriness about
her.
I don’t remember the beginning of
our conversation, but I think I was talking to her for maybe an hour,
alternately standing and squatting, until it seemed natural for me to sit on
the edge of her bed. I remember
thinking, wait, I just sat on her bed without even asking her. Such are these moments after
hurricanes.
Klara told me about her dog. “Blue” was a black Lab. She had Blue when she lived in her
apartment in Red Hook, where she lived for most of her life until she went to
the nursing home. She and Blue
would take the subway up to Central Park and sometimes they would spend the
whole night there, sleeping on the grass, watching the sun rise together from a
bench. Klara didn’t have children
or a husband to speak of: Blue was her best beast.
When Blue died, Klara wrapped him
in garbage bags and took him down to the rocks on the Red Hook waterfront (long
before those rocks were torn apart by the Sandy surges), put him in the water
and sent him out to the ocean.
That first night, Klara and I two
specs on a creaky refugee bed in the Armory, she told me Blue didn’t really
die when he went out to the ocean.
For years, even after she went to the nursing home, when she was in a
rough place she’d have dreams about Blue. She’d dream they were walking again through Central Park, or
that he was lying right there on her feet at the end of her bed. Just the
weight of him made her wake up and know that things would be alright.
At some point, she’d stopped having
dreams about Blue. She missed
him. She said she hoped that
tonight, she’d dream of him. It
was about one in the morning and I asked her if she was tired and wanted to go
to bed, and her beautiful eyes widened for a split-second, and then she said, No not really.
Before I left I asked her if she wanted anything—and she said some mango yogurt, please because that was her favorite and they were only giving out the plain kind.
Before I left I asked her if she wanted anything—and she said some mango yogurt, please because that was her favorite and they were only giving out the plain kind.
The next day I went into a used
bookstore and found a big coffee table book, a Taschen collection of photographs
called “1000 DOGS.” It weighed
about five pounds, and seemed a bit ridiculous, but I bought it for Klara.
I went back to the Armory with the
book and a few packs of mango yogurt and Klara was there, sitting on her bed, staring off
into the distance, exactly as I’d left her. When I gave her the book she groaned and said, It’s so heavy!
I showed her the trifle of an inscription
I had written in the front, which said something like “I hope this makes you
have dreams about Blue,” and we set
about arranging ourselves so we could both look at the book without lying
together on her bed. Eventually we found something that worked, and for the next
couple of hours, Klara flipped through all 1000 dogs. When she turned a page, she’d fold the corner strongly, an almost exaggerated authoritative turn, like some teachers in kindergarten do when they’re reading a book to the whole class. If she saw a dog she liked, she would
say Oh! from her belly, with a
certain energy. Sometimes she’d
smile.
When we were finished, I helped
Klara put the book down at the side of her bed, and told her I was sorry it was heavy and that she could get rid of it whenever she wanted.
That was the second night.
The third time I went back to see
Klara, she told me about her collecting. One of her hobbies, besides walking
with Blue, was going to art auctions.
Though she couldn’t afford to buy anything, she would stand in the back
(because black people weren’t allowed at those auctions then)
and watch. Eventually the
auctioneer noticed her, and invited her to stick around after everyone had
left. He told her he admired her, and
started giving her left-over auction items. I asked her what the man gave her and she couldn’t
remember anything except for, strangely, a collection of handwritten letters of
John F. Kennedy.
Klara once had a collection of original
handwritten letters of JFK. And
she collected a lot of things from auctions and elsewhere in her apartment
until, as she put it, it all just got too
much, and she gave it away to a man she had found in the classifieds, who
bought the letters and everything else for something like a hundred dollars.
The next time I went back to see
Klara, bearing more packs of yogurt, about half of the patients had been bussed off
somewhere else, to another shelter, and Klara was among them. I asked some of the nurses about her
whereabouts, but they couldn’t give out
that information. I went to
the food room for all the volunteers and left the yogurt in a pile of other food that needed to be kept cold.
MARKER II
Two weeks ago on Halloween, I was running my last run before the New York Marathon. It was unseasonably warm, as it has been almost every Halloween that I’ve spent in New York City. I was running along the edge of Prospect Park, on my way home, when I came upon a makeshift memorial at the entrance to the park, for a boy named Sammy. A week before, Sammy had been killed when he chased a soccer ball onto Prospect Park West and was crushed by a van. He was twelve years old. I remembered that night seeing the ambulances, hearing the words hit a kid whispered as I ran by. Then I had forgotten about it.
Now it was all laid out in a shrine of stuffed animals, flowers, newspaper headlines, notes from parents, class, friends, and strangers. I stopped in the warm night to absorb it, and in the yellow light outside the park I was drawn to one particular note, taped with duct tape to the metal police barrier that formed the shrine’s skeleton. It was from a girl named Miranda. From her handwriting, I guessed she was maybe six or seven. At the bottom of the page, Miranda had sketched a boy beneath a rainbow, labeled the boy you and drawn a halo above the boy and marked that halo. It was all pretty overwhelming, but the postscripts are what made me kneel for a while. Over the rainbow, Miranda had written two:
Two weeks ago on Halloween, I was running my last run before the New York Marathon. It was unseasonably warm, as it has been almost every Halloween that I’ve spent in New York City. I was running along the edge of Prospect Park, on my way home, when I came upon a makeshift memorial at the entrance to the park, for a boy named Sammy. A week before, Sammy had been killed when he chased a soccer ball onto Prospect Park West and was crushed by a van. He was twelve years old. I remembered that night seeing the ambulances, hearing the words hit a kid whispered as I ran by. Then I had forgotten about it.
Now it was all laid out in a shrine of stuffed animals, flowers, newspaper headlines, notes from parents, class, friends, and strangers. I stopped in the warm night to absorb it, and in the yellow light outside the park I was drawn to one particular note, taped with duct tape to the metal police barrier that formed the shrine’s skeleton. It was from a girl named Miranda. From her handwriting, I guessed she was maybe six or seven. At the bottom of the page, Miranda had sketched a boy beneath a rainbow, labeled the boy you and drawn a halo above the boy and marked that halo. It was all pretty overwhelming, but the postscripts are what made me kneel for a while. Over the rainbow, Miranda had written two:
P.S. This is a picture of where I hope you
are.
P.P.S. The stones and rubber band bracelet are
from me. They are in the orange cup made of paper.)
MARKER III
Two days after I stopped at Sammy's shrine, I was running in the Marathon, pacing a dear friend. We’ve run it before. We know the course. We know the rough spots, and the places where the exuberant crowds take over for your aching lungs and legs. Mostly you run those miles through Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Bronx, and there are lots and lots of signs. You ignore them sometimes because most of them don’t say your name on it (especially if you have a name like mine) and you're just trying to run. But this year in East Harlem, on a desolate stretch of mile 19, a beautiful young woman was holding up a sign in big black scrawl. Her face was solemn as we passed her. The sign read:
Two days after I stopped at Sammy's shrine, I was running in the Marathon, pacing a dear friend. We’ve run it before. We know the course. We know the rough spots, and the places where the exuberant crowds take over for your aching lungs and legs. Mostly you run those miles through Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Bronx, and there are lots and lots of signs. You ignore them sometimes because most of them don’t say your name on it (especially if you have a name like mine) and you're just trying to run. But this year in East Harlem, on a desolate stretch of mile 19, a beautiful young woman was holding up a sign in big black scrawl. Her face was solemn as we passed her. The sign read:
I am proud of you, perfect stranger.
