Luke, a South African living in Toronto, sends pictures from his great photo journal, Tripping:
    “Like Tim, the Toronto http://tripping.seeto.com/images/200403/20040328_windsurfer.jpg”>water http://tripping.seeto.com/images/200403/20040328_windsurfer2.jpg”>fanatics aren’t allowing less than heatwave temperatures to keep them out of the water.”

Are they all mad up there? It may explain why I like them so. I have home broadband internet access for the first time ever, which means streaming audio of the stately CBC radio, a daily fix of Canada that only rounds out Brooklyn’s charm. Though Tim is in many ways more of a New York nut than I am, he is homesick. A jobless recovery doesn’t welcome back a technology manager who most recently managed bears and wolves and campers. So he has gone back to Canada for a spring canoe trip with some other Toronto water fanatics, and to give thought to moving back to Lake Superior.

The mighty Gowanus ain’t the same without him.

It’s a gorgeous day in New York City. I’m at work in Chelsea, testing new message boards and making a sheepish list of all the things I forgot to add to the specification. Tim has taken a day off from hunting jobs and is circumnavigating Manhattan in his red blow-up kayak. He put in at Red Hook’s Valentino Pier at 7.30am, four hours after low water, timed to jump on the East River’s uptown tide. Right this instant he’s paddling through the Harlem River channel. I bet he forgot sunscreen.

After such an extended holiday, am I allowed to grumble about not getting to mess about in boats on a Wednesday afternoon in spring?

My Brooklyn territory is broad but bounded. Atlantic Avenue to the north, Gowanus Canal to the east, and the East River all around. It takes in the bail bond storefronts and Yemeni restaurants on Atlantic; the gussied-up Smith Street of bistros and yoga studios; the Italian brownstones and funeral homes of Carroll Gardens; and the ruined warehouses, needle parks, and healing waterfront of Red Hook.

It used to be called South Brooklyn. That was before the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway severed Red Hook, and long before the real estate brains figured out that the likes of me would be more easily sold on bite-sized chunks of brownstone newly packaged as Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens. (BoCoCa, they’re trying to call it now, but we’ll ignore that as long as decently possible.)

When solidly based I like to tramp through the rest of Brooklyn. The Canadian formerly known as Ranger Tim is a great partner on these expeditions. His bush explorer’s instincts translate seamlessly to Brooklyn streets, and he knows the city better than I do. Saturday mornings he hustles me out of the cave on Atlantic, and I blink like a mole when I hit the street. We start with a plan to get coffee but somehow it always turns into day-long adventure. We stroll to Fort Greene, climb the hill in the park, and inspect the over-priced shitake mushrooms in the miniature farmer’s market at the bottom. Coffee at Tillies—lukewarm, as it is in every hipster café in the borough. Then on through Clinton Hill. I am auditioning new neighborhoods for June, when I have to move again. I stop at every lamppost like a dog, and Tim stands patiently as I read the flyers. He knows I can’t pass printed matter.

The city planners are invoking eminent domain to bulldoze some blocks near the Atlantic Yards and build a basketball stadium and high-rise office space. The mastermind is Bruce Ratner, the developer who has not yet atoned for the squalid Metrotech Center he dumped on Jay Street in the 1970s. The flyers flap their protest in the March wind, urging people to meet, demonstrate, stake their claim. But it already feels hopeless. These are poor neighborhoods. Brooklyn Heights was rich enough to demand that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway be sunk out of sight in the 1950s, but Red Hook, a few blocks north south, was home to longshoremen, not lawyers. The expressway roared through it and the neighborhood died.

On Flatbush we stop at El Castillo del Jaguar for chicken soup, mofongo, a soursop shake, and yuca with onions. Ten bucks worth leaves us fat and happy, fueled for the walk up to the Brooklyn Public Library, which looks, Tim claims, like Franco’s mausoleum outside Madrid. It’s a good deal more lively, though, with free movies, readings, classes, art exhibits, people hanging out in the café, and staff shouting about printer access. I lounge and read Real Simple—a guilty pleasure, full of daft, earnest homemaking tips—while Tim scopes out the library. When we leave, I take a pamphlet on volunteering there, and wonder if I could ever get home early enough to be a homework helper.

Through Prospect Park, which Frederick Law Olmstead created when he’d finished practising on Central Park. In a city of eight million people, on a Saturday afternoon, you can still find wooded stretches so quiet it could be Kedey Island; I have to remind myself I’m not allowed pee outdoors in the big city. The snow hasn’t melted here, a few hundred feet above Brooklyn Heights. Tim stops and chats to each of the fishermen, and to the birders out with fancy binoculars. Small kids race by on Razor scooters. A gang gathers around a picnic table, fussing over their radio-controlled cars, which they race over the meadow.

We leave through the far end of Prospect Park and cut back down into Windsor Terrace. These are my peeps; every front window houses a shamrock (a week after what they insist on calling St Patty’s Day). An American flag, too, more often than not. It looks like firefighter territory, like the Boston of Mystic River. There’s a fine solid church built in 1880, around the time the Irish got some cash together. Windsor Terrace looks ready to be another Carroll Gardens; host to an influx of youngish professionals just as soon as the owner-occupiers figure out how much they can get for their middle floors.

We stop in Farrell’s, a hardcore drinking hole that slops out Budweiser in styrofoam pint glasses. The barman savages the ice-wells with a baseball bat. I am the only woman in the front room, and raise a silent toast to Shirley MacLaine, who won the right to enter here in 1973. I have to say, it’s not much of a prize, the opportunity to drink bad beer with these surly Irishmen. Given the choice, I’d rather hang out with the old lads from Naples who still stand on the street corner at Second Place, argufying and waving their sticks, as if fifty years on they still hadn’t realised it’s too damn cold in New York.

Onwards: down Prospect Park West and through Park Slope. This used to be ritzier than South Brooklyn, though no longer, I hear, now that Smith Street has tarted up. Park Slope smacks of the Upper West Side; plenty of New York Times readers wheeling double strollers to the cafés. At Fifth Avenue I need a swing break. There are excellent swings here, underused by real children, and if you kick hard enough your belly swoops deliciously.
“Okay, on three, I’m going to let go and jump right over the fence,” says Tim seriously, and the nine-year-old beside me looks fearful, afraid the old guy’s going to splat. Instead, we skid-skid-skid to a jerky stop, and continue down to the mighty Gowanus Canal and cross back into my home turf. There’s a sleek cigarette boat in the water now—a petrol hog—and rumours of a seal. Tim threatens a canoe trip as soon as spring breaks.

Down Smith Street—limping now, at six o’clock—and across to Court Street to buy some cranberry-chocolate bread at the new Uprising Bakery. I mutter about yuppie bread, but can’t resist this dense, dark boule after our fifteen-mile trek. We flop with Brie and bread and red wine, and watch American Splendor, a blogger’s movie if there ever was one.

Brooklyn makes me very happy.

Related links: The Brooklyn Papers’ guide to proposed Brooklyn development, with helpful maps. Thanks, Peter!

Via the Writer’s Almanac, whose daily emails come with two links: “Listen” (a Real Audio file) and, more promisingly, “How to Listen”.

For two years now, I’ve rented a storage locker in Long Island City, Queens. I never expected it to languish so long—I probably spent more to shelter it than the stuff is worth to me. On my brief trips to New York, I paid loving visits to Storage USA Unit 5B-15, as if my collection of books and clothes were an incarcerated relative. I would open the boxes nearest the door in search of better pants or a pair of shoes I wasn’t heartily sick of, and in return I stuffed in the camping gear I hadn’t used and the extra books lugged home from Bangkok or Mexico.

Now I’ve returned, and I have a three-month sublet on an apartment a few miles my locker. It’s a flimsy home, but it’s the first time I’ve had my name on the mailbox in a while. So my friend Peter volunteered to help me reclaim my things. He has a car, which seems grown-up and decadent in this city where the Magnetic Fields can sing:

I’m the luckiest guy
On the Lower East Side
‘Cos I’ve got wheels
And she wants to go for a ride

    “Where’s Albert?” I asked at the Storage USA office.
    “He don’t work here no more,” said the surly girl. Albert used to be the manager. We’d become friends during my visits. Every time he cut the lock on my locker he would tell me all about his Irish girlfriend, who was Trouble with a capital T, he said. I never managed to hold onto the locker key between visits.

Peter and I rolled two unwieldy dollies into the elevator. The fifth floor was deserted. The floors are open metal gridwork, so that above and below dark corridors of storage lockers stretch away, like an Escher woodcut. It gets me thinking about the stories behind each blue metal door; the break-ups, the dislocations, the hopes stacked in boxes.

It’s strange to reunite with the artefacts of an old life in front of someone else. Peter rolled his eyes as stray stockings and bras lolled out of the bags they’d been stuffed into.
    “How many frickin’ bags and backpacks do you own?” he asked, hauling them onto the dolly. I didn’t know. We wrestled down the velvet loveseat. To Peter, it was a Tetris problem; to me, a flood of memories of the day friends came to test the little sofa in Depression Modern before I handed over the price in clean fifties.

We dragged out bags of clothes, boxes of shoes, a small table and two chairs, a Razor scooter, boxes of makeup, a microwave. Peter packed the car with an eye for spatial relations that I will never have. He did two patient trips down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, tying down the back of the Jeep on the second run. We managed to rescue about half of my worldly goods.

Later, after work every evening, I unpacked boxes, littering the small apartment. My clothes smelled musty. I could hardly believe I owned so many pairs of knickers. I marvelled at my trousers, at all these skirts. I kept finding lipstick, bottles of Clarins Eau Dynamisante, expensive moisturisers. High heels. Hairdryers. It was like unwrapping cast-off presents from a glamorous older sister who didn’t know me as well as I wished she did.

Four nights into the unpacking marathon, I found a single black sock, embroidered with the number 9 on the sole. I stared at it. I remembered Caterina’s blog entry about 10socks, the Danish company that would ship you a box of black socks, wool and cotton, numbered for laundry convenience. It was one of the great mysteries of married life that my husband managed to poke holes in his socks with such regularity. 10socks promised a life of simple choices and matched socks. How could anything fall apart in such a life? How could you stick your toes through such ingenious, efficient Scandanavian socks? So I ordered them as a gift, and Jason laughed. In my enthusiasm I had forgotten to account for the sour Italian woman who did our laundry by the pound on Second Place. Her sort-and-fold service did not include collating Danish socks. They went astray and developed holes, just like all the others.

And here, three years later, was Danish sock number 9 without its partner, a foolish stowaway from the past. It smelled of storage when I wiped up tears with the toe.

Remembered some grievous oversights when I woke up this morning:

• Gallarus’ Oratory—1200 year old classic
• Inis Tuaisceart ( an fear marbh )
• Mary Lavin
• Mary Robinson
• Flann O’Brien
• Beckett’s Murphy
• Ciaran Carson’s poetry
• Damian Rice
• Jack B.
• Lard-cooked chips
• Cool regional accents, especially from Ballymena, Donegal, Wexford, Kerry, West Cork, and Louth.
• Conor McPherson, in the Project and on Broadway

• The NMRC in the Maltings, Cork

But this is the list of an old fart. I’ve come up with hardly anything from the last ten years for this personal glad-to-be list (though plenty gets filed on my cranky list). Suggestions and outraged reminders welcome, especially from Bernie’s students at the Tipperary Institute, who were commenting away yesterday.

    “Please blog some Irish stuff … it is St. Patricks Day for CHRISSSSSSAKES! “ says Halley.

Tough assignment. The new job has made a serious dent in my faffing/blogging time, and I’ve been in a New York state of mind since I hit JFK. I’ve Netflixed My Dinner With Andre , Moonstruck, and On the Waterfront. I made weekend pilgrimages to Chinatown and the Knitting Factory, BAM and Sunny’s Bar. I’m even getting the edited highlights of this year’s dragging winter, which I thought I’d managed to skip.

But who can refuse Halley Suitt? So here’s a list, transcribed from my notebook in no particular order, of things that make me glad to be Irish on this St. Patrick’s Day:

• Old men on bicycles
• Seamus Heaney
• Christy Moore
• Women in fleeces marching for exercise
• Bob Geldof
• Phil Lynott
• Father Ted
• John McGahern
• True delight in a fine day
• Garry Hynes
• Bus drivers who shout your stop, and wink when you don’t have enough change for the full fare
• Nancy Blake’s pub
• Smell of turf
• Canal bank walks
• Dublin grafitti
• Irish bloggers
• Rashers and eggs
• Coffee with (proper) whipped cream
• Butter
• Fine teachers
• Wildlife shows on primetime radio
• Wanderly Wagon
• Dervla Murphy
• Taytos
• James Joyce
• Nancy Blake’s pub
• The Bretzel Bakery
• Irish aid workers
• Roddy Doyle
• Everybody’s Bono stories
• Phrases like “a mouthful of prayers”
• Dublin pedestrians advancing against the lights like centurions
• Grown men talking about birds
• Warmth
• Chatting on the bus
• Guinness
• McCambridge’s brown bread
• Mary Coughlan
• Milleens cheese
• Brian Merriman and The Midnight Court
• Liam O’Flaherty
• Frank O’Connor
• The Ulster Cycle and the stories of Fionn McCumhaill
• Countess Markiewicz
• The National Gallery—free to all
• Irish placenames
• Nuala O’Faoileain
• Van Morrison
• John Hume

• The winter sky

What would you add or subtract, on this day when anyone can claim kinship?

“I spent three weeks in [New York] in January and found it [...] as full of people worth living near as I knew it would always be,” writes Wil from Tokyo. It is.

Going back to Losers’ Lounge felt like a reunion with old friends. This moveable feast was founded ten years ago by Joe McGinty and Nick Danger, and is gaining strength as the performers edge past forty. McGinty is the MC and keyboard player for The Kustard Kings, the tight band that backs a dozen or twenty downtown singers in a laidback monthly tribute to a chosen singer-songwriter. They’ve done Burt Bacharach, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, The Kinks, Harry Chapin, Elvis Presley, Roxy Music, Abba…and, well, name that tune. Last night, for St. Patrick’s week, they toasted Van Morrison. Next month, to celebrate Easter, Jesus is the featured artist, with the music of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Losers’ Lounge started at Fez, the basement under Time Café. A few years back they moved to the Westbeth Theater in the Meatpacking District, where café tables gave a cabaret air and the musicians always seemed to be having fun. Sadly, last night’s Van Morrison tribute at the Knitting Factory was an altogether slicker event sponsored by Guinness. They ran two shows back to back, and limited the number of singers drastically. Instead of the usual rambling three or four hour show, this was an hour and fifty minutes of greatest hits, though still studded with an oddity or two. David Terhune delivered a medley of the demo tapes he claimed a disgruntled Van had delivered when he was more pissed off than usual with his recording contract. “I see from your face you have ringworm,” he warbled, “Ringworm, ringworm…” Hmm.

Even if the show delivered only one song per dollar instead of the usual two, Van’s genius still made it a good deal. If you don’t know the man, perhaps Paul Durcan’s celebration, “The Drumshanbo Hustler”, can convince you to make his acquaintance.

You can hire the Losers for your wedding or bar mitzvah. On their website there’s a photo of Illeana Douglas in a veil duetting with Joe McGinty. His lanky, bedhead sex appeal makes him a younger brother to Bob Geldof, and I’ve nursed a crush on him ever since he dj’ed when my friends Cliff and Arlene married four years ago. Cliff is the official Losers’ Lounge cartoonist, and so he called in the favour of decent music, the only ingredient that turns a wedding into a party.The average American wedding costs in the region of $30,000 these days, apparently, which, amortised over the length of an average American marriage, comes out pricey. I am free of Bridezilla instincts, but if I ever did feel the urge to drop an annual wage on a public display of affection, I would fly the Losers to a beach on Lake Superior, import my pals from their continents, and dance barefoot for a day to interpretations that made me hear something new in my desert island discs.

She’s right. We are prudes, for all our fondness for swearing. When my sister first moved in with the step-toddlers in Ottawa, we were startled to hear them in the bath calmly discussing each others’ bits in the grown-up terms that still make Irish adults stutter.

    “Why? What did you call genitalia at that age?” asked their father.
    “We didn’t call it anything!” I hissed. “We didn’t talk about it!”
    “It was all called ‘bottom’. We didn’t make any distinctions beyond that,” said Claire. “We didn’t know there were any distinctions to be made.”
    “Daddy,” said Aidan thoughtfully, “does Car have a bagina or a teenis?”

Subletting is lifestyle tourism. This week I’m staying in a Williamsburg apartment that wafts oestrogen and litter box. The lavender sheets are made from wood pulp. Shiva, Parvati and their whole gang greet me everywhere I turn, and there’s a small altar in the fireplace. Books on Indian spiritualism are stacked in the bedroom, there are affirmations on the fridge, mirrors everywhere, and angsty girl music in the stereo. I’m living in Lilithville.

The cats are friendly. One is grossly obese; possibly a neutering problem. The other is an athlete who launches herself off the wardrobe and onto the bed. Affection is in short supply now that Mommy is away, but they seem mostly concerned with food. I cannot get used to the idea that breathing, non-human creatures move around in here. After living in the woods surrounded by real animals, this seems as exotic and absurd as moose in my bedroom. This pair are Furbies with more features, and I pity them as undignified dependents, incapable of catching their supper or breeding a litter. Cat-owners have coy theories that the felines are in charge, but the opposable thumb that works the tin-opener is the real boss.

Tomorrow I move to a cave on Atlantic Avenue for three months. I sublet it from Björn, a delightful Norwegian programmer. He has a server rack in his living room, geek toys everywhere, flat panel tvs, a raw-food juicer that excites him greatly, and Buddhist slogans on his whiteboard. There is very little furniture. It is so dark that the radio will tell me what to wear every day, and I dread it. SAD will turn me into a snivelling axe-murderer by July. But it’s cheap.