I am walking worse or, more accurately, painfully hobbling these days, so I get out much less. Though walking has become more burdensome, I still try to get out once or twice a day. If I can’t do anything more ambitious or pleasurable, I walk the three blocks to my coffee shop. On the way to the café, getting too easily tired, I often sit on my walker and watch everyday life play out. What I observe is the city’s daily activity, which at times merges with my memories of past days spent easily wandering and experiencing the city.
And, of course, the Trumpian political world and its barrage of destructive and corrupt decisions is always impinging on my thoughts. There is no escape from his draconian, unconscionable cuts of almost everything the government has done to serve the needs of people, from medical care to housing to education. The cuts are cruel and punitive, with no more justification than the need to be able to provide tax cuts for the rich.
On a couple of early mornings, I sit on my walker and watch the NYU students head for their breakfast coffee, walk their dogs, or drift to classes. Little eventful to see, but I gain a feeling for the routines that govern most people’s lives. There are aspects of the look of the streets that bother me—ubiquitous scaffolding that never comes down, and here or there a mound of garbage brushed by a house porter without care into the street.
Later one day, my wife and I go out to a museum—she being a sharp observer takes a photo of a Muslim cab driver placing a mat on the sidewalk so he could pray. The museum we walk to is the Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum, only seven blocks away—though nowadays the walk has become a daunting one. This exhibition celebrates Anonymous Was a Woman (AWAW), a grant program for mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. It features works by 41 of the 251 artists who received the award in its first quarter century. The exhibit doesn’t in the main excite me (though the last few exhibits seemed original and imaginative), but there is a painting by a well-known New York feminist painter, Ida Applebroog, “Monalisa,” that is a striking and defiant sexualization of the female body. It spans three large panels and is a photo of a clay female. After the exhibit, my wife easily walks home, while I struggle slowly back.
My trudging home brings back all the times I walked effortlessly from the West Village’s stunning, historic urbanscape of Commerce, Bank, and Charles across the Village to my home. Or those many London walks in SoHo, along the Thames, and in Hampstead and the beautiful Heath with its meadows, hills, ponds, and woods. I know it is fruitless to yearn for my younger self—I must be satisfied with a limited view—looking at the city from the seat of a walker.
