The Manhattan Bridge arcs up from Chinatown and dips to DUMBO in Brooklyn. It’s a sturdy, workmanlike bridge, but it’s more fun to bike across than the more graceful Brooklyn Bridge to the south. Manhattan Bridge bikers get to look at the Brooklyn Bridge, for one thing. The bike path is right over the East River, instead of suspended over lanes of traffic. And there are no picture-taking tourists meandering backwards into the bike lane.

Exactly six months ago today, I biked home from work with Mark. We weren’t even sure ‘til we got there that the bridge had been reopened. He peered over the guardrail as we pedalled furiously, both panicked about getting to the other side. The stench of burning buildings followed us out over the water. We scared each other with wild speculation about what would happen someone drove a truck bomb to blow it up.

“Now we’d land in Chinatown…we’d probably survive. Now we’d get squashed on the FDR Drive. Now we’d land in the river…uh oh. Oh Jesus. There’s no way we could make it from here. Okay, getting lower. Yess! Yess! Brooklyn!”

In Brooklyn, we passed army checkpoints. Charred office documents still fluttered in the streets, and cars parked overnight were covered in a light gray dust. Every single snatch of conversation had the same tone, the same topic. We hadn’t seen the ‘Missing’ posters yet.

These are Mark’s photos of September 11th. I can’t look at them without tears now.

Subway haikus
Jay Street, 2 a.m.
No matter when you get there
You just missed the F

Carroll Gardens stop
Swipe three times then rush downstairs
It was a G train.

Regret in real time
Leelila finally came to town, and we had a quick dinner at Paris Commune. Then she dropped me back to the office to crank through some more work.

This is an upside-down way to live. Leelila will be in my life when I’m eighty, I hope. Vindigo won’t. Why then do I act as though it were the other way around?

Engrish Chocolate!
The sentimental taste is cozy for the heroines in the town.

Dervala to Ireland: Grow up
Ten years ago, the X Case made news in Ireland and around the world. A 14-year-old girl was made pregnant by a neighbor who had been abusing her for two years. Her horrified parents planned to take her to Britain for an abortion, and asked the local Gardai if they should keep sample tissue for DNA evidence. Instead, the Attorney General, Harry Whelehan, decided that under Ireland’s constitution he had a duty to prevent her from traveling for an abortion. The High Court supported him, but the Supreme Court overturned the case and ruled that pregnant women had the right to travel for an abortion in cases where the life of the mother was threatened, including by suicide.

The rapist was a trusted family friend, and the father of the girl’s best friend. Ireland is a country of ironies: she was left in his care when her parents went on a religious pilgrimage to Lourdes. He was a prominent businessman, but in order to protect the victim’s identity his name was not revealed at the time the case emerged. We did learn that he blustered and tried to pin the rape and pregnancy on a teenage boy in the neighborhood. The victim was brainwashed as surely as Lolita, fretting in her diary that if she ever got pregnant she would have to say it was A. (the neighbor boy) because otherwise the real father would go to jail since she was underage.

In 1994, he was sentenced to 14 years in jail. He was released after three years. Transcripts the appeal show clearly what an Old Boys club Ireland still is. The judge dwelled on how much this man had suffered by losing his business (subtext: he is One of Us). He acknowledged that the man had tried to pin his crime on an innocent teenager, but said it was irrelevant to the case. The defending barrister pointed out that, bad as his crimes were, it wasn’t rape, exactly, though she was twelve years old when it started. The judge seemed satisfied on this point, and stated that he was unlikely to offend again. We don’t know what evidence he had to support this opinion, but can guess it was because he was One of Us, and they are tempting little hussies, they are.

After his release he was granted a taxi licence. Within a year, he picked up a fare, a fifteen year old girl.
“You’re a lovely looking girl,” he told, and then he drove her to an alley where there were no security cameras and raped her repeatedly.
Irish girls and women are coolheaded—we have to be. She memorized his badge number, and they tracked him down.
On Thursday, this man was sentenced again. To just three more years.

On the same day, Ireland voted on a referendum that proposed to roll back the Supreme Court decision made following the X Case ten years before. The government sought to get rid of the provision that allowed suicidal women to travel for an abortion—a weird law that had local Health Boards paying the fare for young women to get Manchester abortions. The referendum also proposed a sentence of up to 12 years for anyone who procured an abortion, or helped procure one. It was not lost on the public that the X Case man got six years for his two rapes, but his victims could have got 24 years between them. The referendum was defeated, but by just ten thousand votes. Oddly, some of the most rabid pro-lifers campaigned for a No vote, believing that the proposed amendment did not go far enough to protect the unborn. I like to think it was their votes that tipped the balance.

Meanwhile, another rape victim, beaten black and blue by a man she met at a party, had to listen in court while the crime was described as ‘a social rape.’ Like croquet.

I hear the ugly, booming tones of these men who run the country in the judgments and the legislation I read. Their world is changing, and they are almost wily enough to stay ahead of the game. Schedule a referendum midweek, so the huge student population won’t be at home to vote. Distract the country with philosophical debates on the rights of the Unborn, so that the reality of how we treat the Born can be glossed over. Allow another country to clean up our messes, like a butcher in Buddhist Tibet.

But the world is changing, like it or not. One in nine Irish pregnancies ends in an abortion in Britain, according to estimates published in the Irish Times. Mr. Judge, Mr. Attorney General, Mr. Taoiseach: that means your daughters, your sisters, your girlfriends, your wives, your fourteen-year-old next-door neighbors are traveling for the abortions they can’t get at home. They’re just not telling you.

Normal blog service will be resumed.
I’ve been itching to post all week, but the project I’ve been working on for nine months suddenly went to pot. I can’t do much beyond cajoling, emailing, wheedling, yelling—I can’t build or fix software. At times like this, I wish I were an engineer. But ours is the little company that could, and though we get pushed around by the bigger guys, we usually prevail.

Valley of the Squinting Windows
My sister Claire lives in Astoria, Queens, at the last stop on the N train. Her landlords live downstairs. Charlie and Rose are in their eighties, and have remained alive only in order to monitor her goings-on, as far as we can tell. In the past year, she has learned to despise Charlie and Rose, whose blinds twitch whenever she has ‘company’.

The apartment was so poorly wired that if she plugged in her hairdryer or toaster oven, everything went dark. She would scrabble for her cellphone and brace herself for the barrage of accusations delivered in whining, old-lady Queens.
‘Claire, I told you you couldn’t plug in all those things together. Didn’t I? Didn’t I explain that you couldn’t plug in the hairdryer and have the TV on? No, I know you had the TV on. Otherwise the lights wouldn’t blow. Chawlie! Chawlie! Claire blew the lights again.’
Claire is usually firm with them, but as they’re half-deaf it washes over them.

Once I let myself into her apartment when she wasn’t there, and managed to blow the lights. I lit a candle and found Rose and Charlie’s number in her address book. Rose got ready to launch into her usual tirade.
‘This isn’t Claire. This is her sister. I blew the lights when I plugged in the toaster. I’m very worried for Claire. This wiring doesn’t seem to be safe. I’m afraid it’ll burn the apartment down and there aren’t any smoke detectors. You need to get it fixed.’

Rose was shocked. She sent Charlie shuffling up the stairs to look at the plugs, gathering evidence of Claire’s carelessness. But there wasn’t any. He was an apologetic little man.
‘My wife, you know’I guess the last person who lived here was an old lady, and she didn’t have no hairdryer or no toaster. I guess we should get this fixed. But my wife, you know’‘
It was fixed the following week. Claire enjoyed two days of peace until she got a call from Rose, yelling about imaginary houseguests. Next they took to calling her at work every day.

‘Claire? What did I tell you about the showah? There’s water dripping down through the ceiling. Ya have to put the showah curtain inside the tub, otherwise the water drips on the floor. No, I know ya have the showah curtain outside the tub. I just went upstairs to check.’

In desperation, she went across the hall to see Lisa, the only other tenant. Lisa peeped around the door.
‘Um, Lisa, I was wondering how you got along with Charlie and Rose.’
Lisa opened the door wide.
‘I hate them! And they hate me!’
Lisa’s moment of truth had come early, the day she moved in. Her boyfriend had helped her move. Charlie and Rose peered out all day, but she took no notice. The next morning, when he left, Rose climbed the stairs in a fury.
‘I won’t have you turn this into a house of ill-repute!’ she yelled.
Lisa didn’t yell back until months later, when Rose and Charlie challenged her on condom wrappers they had found while searching her trash. Now she’s moving out.

Claire’s epiphany came the day Charlie let himself in to fix the leaking sink in the bathroom (having finally given up on her shower curtain crimes). She came in to find he had mopped up the dirty water with her pajamas, now lying in a gritty puddle under the toilet bowl.

So, we know that a thousand dollars buys you a month in a small two-bedroom in an ugly house in Astoria, with an Italian grandma conscience thrown in for free. Anyone have any better ideas? Email me and I’ll pass them on. And I will try to put aside my fantasies of calling the housing board for the surprise inspection that might cause them to keel over at last, and let them make their own miserable old age.

Local Irish abortion referendum commentary from The Evil Gerald. Even worse: Foetuses split on abortion.

Anne Lovett was fifteen when her body was found in a grotto for the Virgin Mary in Granard. It was 1984. She died from exposure and childbirth trauma four hours after the birth of a child whose existence she had hidden for nine months. The local papers didn’t want to report the story, out of respect for the family. The national papers didn’t pick it up for a few weeks after that, but then the country was shocked out of its usual torpor. We twelve and thirteen-year-olds suddenly found ourselves scrutinized by teachers and parents. They gave us hesitant, oblique lectures.
“Now, you know…you wouldn’t…would you tell me if..?”

It turned out that local people had known about Anne Lovett. It’s not easy to hide a pregnancy, even under the baggy jumpers of a shy fifteen year old. They may have known for months that she was in trouble, in every sense. But no one interfered or intervened, no one asked if she needed help. Out of respect for the family.

I think about her often. She would be 32 now; her daughter would be 17, coming of age in a country where, like the rest of Europe, more than fifty per cent of babies are born outside marriage, and no one seems to mind any more. No hellfire sermons are preached about bastard babies, and welfare mothers are not the demons they are in the US. Many of these women are not welfare mothers anyway; rather, they have simply chosen not to marry their partners. That they can do so shows that Anne Lovett, with her gentle name and her perfect tabloid instinct (that grotto!) changed the country more than any referendum.

What I like best in the whole world
From Winnie-the-Pooh

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best?” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying,’ Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

“I like that too,” said Christopher Robin, “but what I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”