Tag: New York City Page 1 of 3

Sleeping late

On December 30, 2024

I’ve never been a natural early morning riser. There is something so nice about waking from a poor night of sleep at around 8 in the morning, going out to the bathroom to pee and then coming back to bed to once again fall back to sleep, to dream, to wake again around 11 to start the day and eat what others would call lunch but I call breakfast.

This kind of routine was of course impossible once I had my son. Back then I woke at 6am, got myself ready for work, woke the boy at 7 to get him dressed and fed and then it was off to take him to Dagis or school and then be at a heavy day of work by 9. When he was still in Dagis we picked him up at 3pm. Once he started school, we would pick him up just before 5 from his after-school program. The hours at home were filled with making dinner, bathing the kid, doing homework with him, putting him to bed and often, many nights, going back to the computer to finish the work I didn’t get done before leaving for the day. And finally getting back into bed myself until the next day started bright and early. Well, maybe not so brightly during Stockholm’s dark winters.

But those days are gone – its rare now that I have to be at an early morning meeting – I can still do it if I have to – if it is out of my control to plan it. I don’t like it, but I can still get up early if forced to.

In 1974, I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the upper east side of Manhattan. It was just part-time. I was still attending art school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn – it was my last year there, my fifth year actually. I had switched from the Fashion Design program to Commercial Art after my second year at Pratt and in the process had lost a number of credits I needed to graduate. I had a choice of stuffing my final fourth school year with those extra needed credits or spreading my last batch of credited courses out into a fifth year. I loved being at Pratt and I was not in any great hurry of being out there in the real world, plus… I was and still am, a bit of a sluggard. So I decided to take that extra year and work part time at the Museum at the same time.

The way I worked at the Met was called per-diem, meaning on a day by day basis. The Admissions Department (the department where I worked, not one of the fancy curated art departments) gave me a schedule of days and times I was to come in, based on when I had no classes. But they could also call me at the last minute and ask me to come in to work on the same day. I skipped a lot of classes by going in to the museum instead of appearing in a classroom. It was the early 70s which were really still the 60s, so nobody really noticed if I was sitting in a classroom or not. I preferred to sit at the cash register giving out buttons to everyone who paid to visit the museum.

If you have ever seen or been to the Metropolitan Museum you would know that the front of that massive, pale stone building is faced with a wide array of many low steps leading from the front door to the fifth avenue sidewalks where all the hot dog venders sell their wares. We used to joke that the vendors filled their carts with water from the fountains that sprayed water on both sides of the staircase. They probably didn’t but I never bought their hot dogs. I mean…why take a chance. The stairs were the perfect place for natives and tourists alike to sit there in the sun to rest and chat and watch the stream of people walking by.

Back then, in 1974, when called in to work, I would take the hour long subway ride from my dingy and very slummy Park Slope Brooklyn neighborhood to exit the underground darkness at the 86th Street subway stop in the very fancy Upper East Side. A short walk got me to the museum on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. I would bound up the staircase, often taking 2 steps at a time, to finally arrive at the entrance where the guards nodded hello and let me in.

But that was then. Now when I find myself faced with a flight of steps, I immediately go looking for the elevator or escalator. At 73, stairs have become something to avoid if possible. It doesn’t mean that I am unable to climb them – I still can. But slowly.

And it seems that everything else I do is happening slowly too. Just getting out of bed is taking longer. Getting dressed too. If I don’t need to be anywhere past the borders of my island of Reimersholmen for days at a time I will just wear the exact same clothes over and over again. I rarely spend hours in front of the closet, deciding on how to assemble the perfect wardrobe for the day. Now it’s just a matter of taking that old cotton shirt and the cat hair covered sweatpants from the chair in the bedroom that they were tossed on the night before and if it’s chilly in the apartment, adding the bulky black cable-knit sweater that I bought with my mom the last time she was here visiting me in Stockholm. The holes in the elbows are now big enough to fit an entire cat through them but if my long sleeve t-shirt underneath is also black…who’s gonna notice. Just the process of putting everything on takes longer. And now, I make sure to sit down when putting on the pants.

I used to move quickly. I was spontaneous. I reacted to things instantly. I spoke rapidly, having been taught by growing up in my family to never let anyone finish their sentence. I was damn quick on my feet as I moved in three dimensional space. But that seems to be all gone now or at least on its way out the door. Except for the talking. I still talk fast, still not letting people finish their sentences. And this is something I get reprimanded for, especially here in Sweden where it is considered an unspoken sin. But I can’t fight upbringing.

So now…no longer moving quickly and frequently checking the ground while walking – I don’t want to be surprised by some uneven stretch of earth that will send me sprawling. I used to be able to hop over obstacles – now I go down like a sack of potatoes. And getting up again. That takes a lot longer. I no longer turn around suddenly – I might lose my balance. I check that the chair is under my butt before I even start to lower it. Chairs with arm rests are a great invention – as are railings along staircases. And things hurt when I walk. Thanks Mom for passing on to me your arthritic knees. Last week the back of my calf started to hurt when I walked – it started at the back of my ankle and slowly worked its way up to the middle of the calf. How did that happen? I don’t remember twisting anything or spraining a muscle. It just appeared. Was it because my leg wanted to remind me that I had a calf? Just in case I had forgotten?

All this slow moving is very tiring. It takes a lot of effort to just get started doing something. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do. And then by the time I am done thinking about it, it seems to be just the right time to take a nap. And I can sleep as long as I want and dream about racing up a long flight of stairs.

First the bell bottoms came back

By Hilarie

On May 30, 2020

In Uncategorized

The crowd on Day 1 of the Woodstock Festival on August 15, 1969. Clayton Call/Redferns

Woodstock Music Festival – 1969

Back in the 60s, my baby boomer generation rode the interstate buses into the south to protest segregation in the southern states. My generation protested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and were met with the use of extreme violence by the Chicago police force. My generation stood up and called out shady backroom politics. We demonstrated for clean water and clean air. We toppled a dishonest president. We ended an unjust war. We hailed the passing of Roe/Wade giving women the right to decide over their own bodies. We wore our bell bottoms and we changed the world. We thought we had fixed things.

The word Boomer seems to have become a bad word lately, connoting all kinds of unpleasant things about my generation. By now we have gotten old, and people have forgotten what we did.

I no longer live in New York, the city of my heart. I haven’t lived there for over 30 years. I view America from afar. When I meet someone new and we spend a bit of time exchanging the Cliff Notes of our lives, I usually summarize myself by saying “I’m an old hippy”. Perhaps this isn’t completely honest. Though I went around braless, I never lived in a commune. I didn’t practice free love and have sex with anyone who seemed interested. I attended a few peace marches but that was mainly because a boy I liked wanted to go. While I smoked pot on occasion I didn’t spend my days in a daze. I didn’t attend Woodstock. But I still feel I can nevertheless call myself an old hippy. That’s how I identified back then when I was young, wearing long flowered skirts and sandals (in the summer) and my hair a wild curly mass…for a short period of time. Life is usually lived in short periods of time. We are something for a while and then we evolve. Inside we stay who we are. It’s just our outside trappings that change. I gave up my patched bell bottomed jeans for mid-calf length flowy dresses that were replaced by broad-shouldered suits that became baggy-waist pants that turned into tunics over leggings. But I’m still me underneath.

I still love New York though I no longer belong there. I still love a good argument. I still believe people are fools, all of us, but we should at least be friendly and show consideration and respect. I still love science fiction and hate oysters. And while I believe in the equality of all human beings and their right to be able to live a decent life within a just system regardless of race or gender or social status or hairstyle or clothing choices, I still reserve the right to choose who I like and wish to be friends with. Though everybody is equal I have no desire to love everyone equally.

I read my electronic New York Times subscription from here in Stockholm. I read articles from CNN or the few stories I am allowed from the Washington Post without a paid subscription. I look at the things people share on Facebook and Twitter. And I get very scared. Black men get killed while jogging and a white woman threatens a black man with a bold-faced lie to the police about him endangering her. The only thing new about this is that they are being filmed, live as it is happening, like the reportage from the Vietnam war in the 60s and 70s. Synagogues are attacked. And churches. Men with military grade weaponry feel they have the right to threaten State capital buildings and the police just look on. Right wing fascists are rioting, burning buildings, reminding me of Kristallnacht in the 1930s, though this time it isn’t specifically aimed at only Jewish citizens. But the purpose is the same – to create havoc, to tumble society. Demonstrators are marching again, protesting injustice. And like at Kent State, the police are firing on them.

I read all this and it worries me, a lot. There is a vacuum in the place where the head of state of the USA should be. Instead there is a man totally unfit to be there, filled with anti everything that is good and decent and humane and sane. There is so much wrong with America now and once again it is all coming to the surface, into plain sight. My generation thought we fixed things. We had that hope at least. We obviously didn’t. Hans Rosling, the Swedish academic, believed that statistically the world was improving for the majority of people. But the things that are still wrong in the world can’t be fixed all in one fell swoop. Perhaps it is up to each generation to stand up and say “This is wrong” and demand change. Time to protest, time to demonstrate, time to march, time to stand up and be heard. Change for the better won’t be able to happen until the current administration is voted out and its enablers in the Republican Party are also voted out.

But right now, it’s the 60s all over again, baby. The struggle is here once more. Put your bell bottoms on and start getting on with it.

And just for a bit of memory and inspiration…My Generation by the Who.
Photo credit: The crowd on Day 1 of the Woodstock Festival on August 15, 1969.
Clayton Call/Redferns

Ursula Le Guin

By Hilarie

On March 25, 2018

In Uncategorized

Ursula Le Guin died recently. There was lots of information about her death in the news and social media. The general consensus on Twitter and Facebook was that it was so terribly sad that she had died. For her family and close friends, yes of course, it must have been very sad. But I didn’t know her personally. I only knew her through her books. And as far as I’m concerned, she is still alive because of those books.

I first started reading Science Fiction when I was 11 years old; The Martian Chronicles was the novel that got me hooked. By the time I was 14 I had gone through all my Dad’s collection of the classics; Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clark. I was a freshman in High School when I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings; it had just been published in paperback in the US and it was on the list of books my English teacher let us order from some book club. For the next 7 to 10 years, Tolkien’s fantasy world of Middle-earth was what occupied much of my reading time and shifted me from Science Fiction to Fantasy. During that time, I kept searching for other fantasy novels whose worlds were equal to Tolkien’s. I bought a lot of books that mostly left me feeling very disappointed. My bookshelf was filled with stories about elves and dwarfs and magic that I judged harshly and barely got through without lots of internal complaining. Tolkien remained king. Then sometime in the very early 70s I picked up a paperback copy of A Wizard of Earthsea. I don’t remember how I heard about it. Maybe I just liked the cover illustration. The inside content was even better. I went on to buy each subsequent book in the series. I bought The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore as soon as their paperback versions were released.

Also in the early 70s, I discovered The Science Fiction Shop. It was a tiny crowded bookstore in Greenwich Village that only sold Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was crowded with books, not people. It was the first and only one of its kind in NYC – Science Fiction hadn’t gotten as popular as it would become after the success of Star Wars. I still remember how it felt that first time I walked through its doors and looked around. You could see the entire store from the door. There were a few geeky looking guys amongst the racks and me! I was in heaven!

My method of choosing a new book was simple. If I found an author whose book I liked, I went to the shelf where their name was and bought another of their books. I kept buying their books till I ran out of new ones and then I went on to find another author. After Earthsea, I spent the rest of the 70s and 80s reading all of Le Guin’s books – none of which were fantasy but real Science Fiction, set in the far distant future. I read all of the Hainish novels and all her miscellaneous stuff too. She became one of my favorite authors of that time.

Books can be read for different reasons. In some books, the plot is the most important aspect and that is what you remember it for; in other books, you remember very vivid characters and not so much what they did and in some very rare books, you remember the ideas. Le Guin’s books left me with remembered ideas. Before writing this post, I had to go to Wikipedia to remind myself of the plots and the names of characters but the ideas I didn’t need help with. There have been three strong ideas from her books that have stayed with me ever since I first read them so long ago.

A Wizard of Earthsea taught me that names are very important and they have power; that everyone has their own “secret” name that only their closet friends can know. To know someone’s real name gives them power over you. I loved this idea when I first read it. Ever since I was a child, I hated my name – Hilarie. It was so odd. No one was named that! And it was spelled weird too. I wished I was named something normal like Mary or Sue or Carol. My mother used to console me by saying that when I grew up I could use just my middle name, Ruth, which at that time seemed a more normal name, to my way of thinking. And then I grew up! And couldn’t imagine using Ruth as my name. Hilarie was my true name – my name of power – that no one else had. And now in the world of social media and the internet I have discovered the wonderful reality of having an unusual name. There is no one else named like me. Even though it’s not a secret it nevertheless belongs only to me. And I find that wonderful.

I love when a writer of speculative fiction creates an entire cosmology with many stories and worlds to fill it. Isaac Asimov did this in all his Galactic Empire stories, Iain M. Banks did it with his novels set in The Culture. My favorite authors have been those who do a really believable job at world-building. You can see and feel and smell the worlds they create. Le Guin built her worlds with a deft hand in her novels and stories about the planets that belonged to the Ekumen, a loosely connected league of worlds which had once been seeded and colonised by a long-gone civilisation from a planet called Hain.

My biggest take-away from the Hainish novels was the idea that the Ekumen, in their attempt to reunite the Hainish worlds, sends only one person at a time, a single envoy, to a newly rediscovered planet; a planet that had long since forgotten their Hainish heritage. In the Hainish cosmology, faster-than-light space travel doesn’t exist, travel through the galaxy takes time. If you travel to another solar system, you say goodbye to everyone you once knew. The job of envoy must have been a very lonely assignment; one that often ended in death for many of them. I liked the idea that the best way to convince a race (or a whole world) to join you was not by sending a huge military force but to send one person who speaks for you, to whoever will listen and if the first person fails, you send another. The Left Hand of Darkness was the most important novel in this series and a book I often recommend to friends who “don’t read science fiction”.

Published in 1969, Left Hand is also a fantastic examination about gender, and how it affects the way we relate to the people we know. Geffen is the name of the planet in the book; a world undergoing a planet-wide ice age at the same time as its industrial revolution. Among the Hainish worlds, Geffen was different. Its people, while from the same original human stock, had mutated from having 2 distinct sexes to a race of beings who were “sexless” except for about 6 days each month when they went into “kemmer” becoming either male or female. Each individual had no way of knowing in advance which they would become. The same individual could both father a child and give birth to a child. All other days of the month, they were just human, neither male nor female, yet at the same time both. To this odd world comes an envoy from The Ekumen, a human male originally born on Earth. Through the eyes and emotions of Genly Ai, Le Guin examines the various ways gender affects our lives. Genly eventually learns to understand and even love a person who seems on the surface totally different from everything he had come to assume about being human.

In these #metoo days discussing gender discrimination and all the talk about the small percentage of women working in many diverse fields, this book should be required reading by anyone who thinks about the importance gender plays in our lives.

Click to see larger image of these other Le Guin books I also have.

When I moved permanently to Sweden, I packed up all my New York books in boxes and that is where they have been for over 20 years. I never had enough room to unpack them or shelf space to display them. But my storage room where the boxes have been patiently awaiting my return will soon have to be given up – the lease has been cancelled. I still don’t have enough book shelves for my weathered, yellow-paged paperbacks. So I am in the process now of revisiting them again for a short time; not rereading but reminding myself of the stories that helped to make me who I am. Some of those books I can say goodbye to without a second thought. But some of them I will thumb though softly, revisiting them with love. Le Guin’s stories are among those and like with any old love, I will fondly remember them forever.

Day of Atonement

By Hilarie

On October 10, 2016

In Uncategorized

This evening is the eve of the Jewish Holiday Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is probably one of the most important holidays in the Jewish Calendar. Unlike most of the other Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur is not celebrated by eating a large quantity of food. On Yom Kippur one is supposed to fast for the entire day. And one is supposed to atone for the sins you have committed in the past year – to say one is sorry, to ask for forgiveness and to forgive.

This evening is also the evening before I leave for my trip to New York City. I stand next to my bed and look at the piles of clothing and other things that I have been laying out – choosing what to bring and what to leave behind. Is this item what I want to take with me on my trip or is it something I want to and can leave behind me, unneeded?

I feel these piles are also an apt metaphor for Yom Kippur. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur one must ask forgiveness from those one has wronged. And on Yom Kippur you are judged whether you have done right. I have hurt people. I have said unkind things. For this I am so very sorry. And like the items on my bed that I choose not to bring with me on my trip, I would rather not carry my atonement and its subsequent forgiveness with me. It’s not enough to just ask for forgiveness. The other half of the equation is that forgiveness is given. Without that, the books can not be closed and the journey becomes harder to continue.

I guess when I was younger, I thought that by the time I had reached 65 I would have figured out Life, be settled – know where I have come from, know where I am, know where I am going. But even at 65, it is still all so confusing. Where am I going? How will I live my life? What am I doing?

Tomorrow I will be traveling to New York City – the city of my heart. The first time back to the East Coast in over four years. The place I left almost 30 years ago to live here in Stockholm. I will be staying there for a whole month – the longest time back there in over 20 years. I am no longer the same person that packed her bags in 1987 to move to a foreign land. How will it feel to be reunited with my heart? Will we even recognize each other?

And after that month, I will return here to my home, Stockholm, to pick up the pieces of my life once again, hopefully forgiven. With all my baggage, all the pieces taken with me and even those I thought to leave behind – all the pieces of my life.