Wednesday, February 18, 2009

When love sours

This morning as I was engaging in my morning routine--you know, watering the plant, taking a gaze outside to see what the weather was like--I spied an odd flash of red down in a concrete gulley outside my building. I took a closer glance, and...

my tiny blackened shell of a heart cracked, just a little bit:

























The mind reels with possibilities. A fit of rage? Disappointment over the cliché gift of teddy bear and flowers? Discovery of infidelity? When did Sir Teddy go flying out the window exactly? At 3am? Or as the once-happy couple breakfasted together? What an ignominious end--belly up, only three days after Valentine's!

Monday, February 16, 2009

Presidents' Day surprise

One of the (many) things I like about living New York is the high potential for coming across something totally unexpected. No matter how many years one lives here, it is inevitable that a wrong turn, an unfamiliar subway, or a new route to a familiar place will yield some hidden treasure or delightful surprise. Such an event happened to me back in November--while walking down the street with my cousin, I came upon this, just a couple of blocks from a very well-traveled (by me, I mean) area:



















Why, hello Berlin Wall! What are you doing here?


















During that first view back in November, I didn't have my camera. In the second visit, a friend had his...but we were thwarted by a cluster of tourists and businessmen eating lunch in the seating area in front of the wall. Today was the perfect day: a federal holiday cleared those businessmen right out of there (or perhaps the global recession took care of them; who knows?), tourists were elsewhere, and I was all alone to stare and ponder.

Finding things like this--and so totally out of context and place--is sort of jarring. I wonder how it was transported? Who paid for it, and why? Who decided to stick it in the middle of a block frequented mostly by corporate types who most likely just ignore it? Is that graffiti on the front German graffiti or New York-style defacing?

I will never know, I guess. But I know it's there, and for now that's just fine for me.