You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Flora and Fauna.”
This morning I made Ramen noodles with extra veggies in it, and peanut butter and Korean bean paste. Then took a walk, crossed Grand Central on over to Queens Boulevard where an Asian woman walking a little dog caught my eye. She saw my eye was caught by her, so when she got up close, I said “Hmmph” as I [...]
I don't know when it happened exactly, but it happened. I have become a cranky old man, closed and rigid and fixed in my ways, despite the fact that in my youth I’d resolved never to grow up, never to become like all the grown ups who lived in my world when I was growing up. My high school yearbook [...]
Wild turkeys roam the grounds of Staten Island University Hospital. When my mother was hospitalized in April 2011 with a respiratory infection, I had the opportunity to observe them in detail. Turkeys stand around a lot, sort of like escaped mental patients who suddenly find themselves free, but then what. One day, they might be inside a fence, another day [...]
We suspected it was illegal, but we had no choice. At the vet’s office in Park Slope, they told us cat cremation cost $125, and neither my boyfriend nor I had the money. Besides, cremation seemed too formal, too clinical, for Jed. He was always escaping out the window, taking self-guided tours of the neighborhood after nightfall. He was an [...]
I thought I’d been having a bad year—chewed up and spit out after a couple of months in the New York City public school system (which is a whole other story I was advised by my attorney not to write about until after our lawsuit was resolved)—but then I met the saddest, sorriest creature I’d ever seen. An anabantid, a.k.a [...]
This is a story about my grandmother, who was young in Manhattan in the 1920s. Speakeasies, nightclubs, drop-waisted dresses, bobbed hair, cloche hats, waist-length strands of dime-store pearls. Even for a middle-class workaday office girl like Frances Thornton, those were heady times. She was among the first of the gals in her office to bob her hair, which caused Chub, [...]
Be afraid, they tell us. Be very afraid. I read the Timeses, the Newses, the AM New Yorks. I watch the Ernie Anostoses, listen to the Brian Lehrers, check out the NY1s, peruse the Gothamists, and call the 311s, only to end up hearing the same message, the ongoing drumbeat pounding in my brain in 12-8 time. THE-BED-BUGS-ARE-COM-ING! THE-BED-BUGS-ARE-COM-ING! I [...]
I come home to find a message on my answering machine from the nurse at my daughter’s school. “We had a case of head lice in the 5th grade, so we did a school-wide check.” Pause. “Meredith has some nits.” I immediately think of The Thorn Birds, which I read when I was a kid. I know it was meant [...]
I hesitated before walking through the alleyway that led to my old backyard. I could see that my mother and father’s old fig tree was still there in the yard. It was late summer and there had just been a light rain. This would have been prime fig picking time back in the old days. I remembered that after a [...]
This morning I saw a dead bird on 52nd Street. It was lying on its back on the sidewalk in between Park and Madison Avenues, in front of a Duane Reade Pharmacy. Its feet were in the air. At first I wasn’t sure if it was dead. It looked like it was just dozing, sunning its chest and staring at [...]
Bill Dilworth may have one of New York's most relaxing jobs. He is keeper of the New York Earth Room, a permanent installation by the artist Walter DeMaria, sponsored by the Dia Foundation. The work has been on display at the same location at 141 Wooster Street for over ten years, and Mr. Dilworth has been its guardian for the [...]
The Museum of Modern Art on West Fifty-third Street Is interested only in the flower not the bulb. After the Dutch tulips finished blooming in the garden last year, They pulled them up and threw them away--that place has no heart. Some fortunately were rescued and came into my possession. I kept them all winter in a paper bag from [...]
It was an unseasonably cool Sunday evening in July, and, like the weather, I was feeling a bit out of sorts. I was looking for a new job and getting used to the pressures and angst of being in my first serious relationship. Walking on 78th Street between First and York, heading to the subway station after spending the weekend [...]
There was a while when it seemed like every year New York played host to a parade of hand-painted fiberglass animals. The cows were the most famous. The German shepherds were a lot less famous and they disappeared from the streets pretty quick. But, here and there, you'll still see one, sitting guard outside the entrance to a hospital or [...]
I saw Ed in the shadows on Perry street. A streelamp must have gone out because it was very dark. There was a helicopter circling the neighborhood, it's spotlight straffing. "A sign of things to come," he said, as though they were looking for him. A couple of houses down from where Ed sat there was a thickly planted bed [...]
We were looking for the old oak trees, the ones rumored to be down by the shoreline. The day was already sweat-lodge hot, at 8 a.m., the seagulls circling lazily in the morning light. We stood in the parking lot, plotting our route; the sweat boiled up under our long sleeved shirts and long pants—protection against the legions of mosquitoes [...]
This week’s meeting of the New York Companion Bird Club of Manhattan was held at the Jackson Hole Restaurant. This would be the first bird club meeting of my life. I have never liked birds very well. In my last year of undergraduate college, I transferred to San Francisco State University, and discovered that the cafeteria there was infested with [...]
I was a New York City Urban Park Ranger usually stationed in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, but for this day I was detailed out to Central Park, the park of my childhood. In Van Cortlandt Park I knew where the hophornbeam trees lived in a valley of white oaks and tulip poplars. I knew where the skunks made [...]
What follows are some stories about David Brown and his flower shop. But before I tell you about him, I have to explain why, whenever I look into the store window I now see, in addition to all the flowers, a face. For a period of several months David Brown was absent from his own store. He wasn't well. He's [...]
It was the beginning of summer and my two young sons had taken to counting Jaguars. “There’s one!” Alex, then eight, would cry, elated, from the backseat of the car. “Oh, there’s another one.” “Look over there—there’s two more!” five-year-old Ferran would trill. Anyone unfamiliar with the Hamptons might have assumed we were on a safari, mistaking my sons’ enthusiasm [...]
From mid March to early June (and again from mid October to mid December), the New York City Parks Department plants approximately 7,500 trees on the sidewalks in front of people's homes, in front of businesses, and on street medians. This is no small thing. A little bit of nature is being transplanted on your block, a la your tax [...]
On January 25 at 7:30 in the morning, two raccoons were found dead by Central Park personnel. One was found just below the reservoir and the other in the tangled stems of Shakespeare garden. Instead of just cleaning them up, as they might have done in different circumstances, they called the Urban Park Rangers. The Rangers too had been primed [...]
Two weeks after the shock of September 11th, I was sent to "ground zero" by the Parks Department Commissioner to make a quick evaluation of the damage to the plant life in the area. The Commissioner wanted to know what had survived, what plants would need to be replaced, how much it would all cost. He was eager to help [...]
Growing up, there were certain inarguable rules Mom set forth to ensure her kids' safety: don't take candy from strangers, power tools are off-limits unless your Father is present, avoid the yellow snow, and never, under any circumstance, spend the night in Central Park. But over Labor Day weekend, my girlfriend, Kim, and I threw caution to the Ramble and [...]
"Have you thought about what your Parks nickname should be?" Parks Commissioner Henry Stern asks me. He sits hunched over on a couch at his office inside a turret at the Arsenal, a red brick castle overlooking Central Park that for years was a military base and now serves as headquarters for the New York City Parks Dept. Dressed in [...]
