There's a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza (Donna)

This weekend my good friend from Ithaca, Donna Fleming, came to visit and I ran her ragged working through my bucket list.  So this blog entry will run through all the things we saw and experienced.  The old children's song There's a Hole in My Bucket keeps running through my head, because it felt like we were doing a million things to empty the bucket before I leave Brooklyn (I know, I'm mixing the metaphor).  I picked up Donna at the Cornell Club Sunday afternoon and we walked through Bryant Park where the performance art piece Walk the Walk had appeared the previous week.  I've posted video from Walk the Walk on my Facebook page and wonder whether my former colleagues (and Donna's current colleagues) Susan, Holly and Jodie feel this way in their daily routine at the Johnson School and Cornell.  Donna and I walked over the Times Square and took the 3 train over to Brooklyn Heights.  After depositing her bags in our apartment and getting the overview from the terrace, we took off to walk the Brooklyn Bridge and check out downtown Manhattan.  I introduced Donna to City Hall, St. Paul's Chapel (which she already knew) and the rebuilding at Ground Zero.  We walked east to the South Street Seaport and enjoyed the beautiful evening by eating tapas at a sidewalk table at a Brazilian seafood restaurant followed by Hagen Daz ice cream.  Many people were enjoying the beautiful evening, including about 15 Tibetan monks at the Seaport.  We ended the trip with a bucket list item #1: a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at night and back to 2 Pierrepont Street.

Tuesday we headed up to bucket list item 2 and 3: Union Square and Greenwich Village taking the 5 train from Borough Hall.  On the walk to the subway, Donna got to see the trailers and set-up for a movie being filmed on the steps of Borough Hall.  In Greenwich Village we saw the skinniest house in New York at 75  1/2 Bedford Street, where Edna St. Vincent Millary once lived.  We also saw Twin Peaks, a quirky house which has long welcomed artists and was featured in a NY Times article two Sundays ago.  Donna was quite pleased to recognize the house from the article and I was quite pleased to go back to the article and find 10 great photos of the interior.  Next we walked to 17th Street to the Rubin Museum which was a terrific recommendation from Donna.  This five year old museum houses 6 floors of art from the Himalayas, primarily Tibet and Nepal.  The bulk of the artwork is Buddhist religious art and the installations provide sensitive and important details on both the religion and the important features of the art.  The Rubins must have anticipated my fractured metaphor for this blog, for they had two exhibits on kicking the bucket.  Actually these were titled  "Remember That You Will Die/Death Across Cultures" and "Bardo/Tibetan Art of the Afterlife." We had a wonderful lunch at the Rubin cafe and I highly recommend this small museum to anyone-it certainly helped me better understand Ted and Greg's interest in Buddhism. While it wasn't on my bucket list, it should have been.   Back in the apartment I introduced Donna to another joy of living in Manhattan: ethnic food delivered to your doorway.  In this case we had Turkish food from Taze.  Donna twisted my arm and insisted on buying me desert at the Hagen-Daz on Montague Street, the "oldest Hagen Daz in the world established in 1975" but actually the oldest in the States.  While we ate the ice cream we wandered around Brooklyn Heights, exploring Grace Courtyard, Willow Street and the phony brownstone on Pierrepont Street that is really an emergency exit for the MTA.

Up early for more.  We drove through four boroughs on Tuesday-Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and finally Manhattan.   In the Bronx we came to #4 on the bucket list-the New York Botanical Garden. It was pouring the entire day, so we only reviewed the items inside the Conservatory, but there was plenty to see.  The permanent collection included an extensive recreation of a tropical rain forest as well as desert botanicals.  But my destination was the new exhibit on Emily Dickinson's Garden.

 For a gardener and lover of literature such as myself this was an exquisite combination of glorious bulbs, annuals and perenials highlighted with Dickinson's deceptively simple, intense poems.  Dickinson savored each word in each poem, pressing the words into a single beautiful object much like she pressed individual flowers into the 400 specimens in her herbarium.  The poems were then gathered into handwritten fascicles (a contemporary 19th century word for bouquets) which she either shared with friends or more commonly kept hidden.  Her sister Lavinia (Vinnie) discovered hundreds of these in a chest a few days after Emily's death.  For a wonderful discussion of the groundbreaking genius of Emily Dickinson, an Outlaw of Amherst, as opposed to the stereotyped reclusive old maid, read the article in the Sunday Times by Holland Carter.

It took us awhile to find our way out of the New York Botanical Gardens through the considerably more urban Bronx and over to The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan.  The Cloisters is a step back 700-1200 years to medieval Europe and to a time of "uniform" Christian faith and art.  Donna and I both noticed comparisons with the Buddhist art of the Far East, connections we probably would not have made if we hadn't been at the Rubin Museum the previous day. This was bucket list #5 for me, a must-do for my New York semester and I was not disappointed.  It would have been even better had we not been inundated by rain, but that leaves the opportunity for a sunny visit sometime in the future.  I could immediately connect with the symbolism and allegory of the triptych's, tapestries, reliquaries, stained glass and beautifully reconstructed architectural arches and cloistered courtyards. These illustrated episodes which emanate from my spiritual experience, just as a Buddhist immediately connects with a thangka.  I couldn't take many photos here, because of the low light and the prohibition on the use of flash, so I brought home the museum guide to enjoy these works of art in the future. 

I have discovered that even unexpected, "irritating" events can be more pleasant experiences when one has a bucket list and can approach the event as a unique experience.  On the way back, our access to the Henry Hudson Parkway was blocked by an accident.  So armed with my wonderful iPhone we found our way through upper Manhattan, past the Columbia Medical School (poor wet med school graduates were running in the rain with their blue and black gowns), and down the length of Broadway to complete my bucket list #6 desire to see Harlem and the Upper West Side.  I'll even end on a Pollyannish note and tell you why getting my car towed from the front of our apartment this morning provided me with a 7th bucket list accomplishment.  As I walked across Brookyn Heights I saw more of the old Brooklyn neighborhoods and ended up a the Brooklyn Navy Yard to retrieve my car.  Walking through the gates and looking at the large warehouses in the distance, I could imagine myself as Rosie the Riveter with my lunch box and job ensuring that those battleships were ready to go to help the troops in WWII.  (Paying an accumulated $415 in tickets and fines is our contribution to the city of New York's fiscal crisis and the increased police presence at Times Square).