At Thanksgiving with Andrew’s family, I was paired up with another stray cat, Illona,* herself a reason to give thanks. “I work in Brooklyn,” she said shyly. I pressed her a little. “I work at a school.”

To be exact, she’s the principal of a bran-new public high school in Brooklyn, somewhere in the housing projects that loom between DUMBO and the lost village of Vinegar Hill. It welcomed its first hundred freshmen last September, and will double in size with the 2005 intake.

The theme of the school is Law and Justice, and she’s persuaded a fancy Manhattan law firm to help fund it. In the richest country in the world, public education depends in increasing part on corporate charity, and her kids are lucky to have a scrappy Bryn Mawr-Brooklynite to hustle for them. The law firm gives money for after-school programs, lends their contract movers to haul donated desks, and sends along their caterers and balloon-printers for the opening party. They book their senior staff for the monthly Lunch With Lawyers program for the kids.
    “Is that a treat or a punishment?” we asked. Last month they sent Bill Gates’ dad.

I’d joked about my big fat Italian Thanksgiving, but in fact, Andrew is a Connecticut charmer, preppy enough to wear a blazer to Thanksgiving. (In high school he sang in an a capella group hired to produce angelic noises for Martha Stewart’s Christmas party. To avoid clutter, she tucked them into the attic above the party room and forced them to sing into the floor vent. Then she tried to give them credit in her book instead of the cash they’d been promised for their choir’s trip. “They’re high school boys!” said their choirmaster, “They don’t give a shit about your book!”)

Now he’s a theater director, and his latest project is a production of Antigone with Illona’s freshmen students.
    “Antigone?” I asked. “With Brooklyn public school kids?”
    “Well, the text turned out to be a bit hard. So we’re doing it as improv. The chorus is a bunch of taxi drivers and deli owners, whining about the mayor.”

He and Illona swap stories about the kids. She seems to know every single name and family history. She’s very young, but not to a fourteen year old. “I’ve got the stare down. And the tone. If you don’t have the stare and the tone, you don’t make it through your first year of public teaching.”

She looks happy but exhausted, and glad to get decent food.
    “I eat crap,” she says cheerfully. “Pizza. Chinese.”
When she got the job in February, she started working 12 to 14 hour days to plan the school. Through the summer her work days stretched to sixteen hours while she set the budget, hired the staff, and recruited the students at school fairs. She still doesn’t know where the school will live next year; there’s a chronic shortage of space in New York. “If we could just stay with a hundred, I’d be so happy. I love these kids. It’s the thought of doubling that scares me. And again the year after.”

The day before she’d taken them all to a sister school in the Bronx for a bring-a-dish Thanksgiving. It’s a little secret, she says, that the MTA will give schools vouchers for free travel on the subway. She takes her kids all over the city, uses it so much that she’s afraid they’ll tot up at the end of the year that her hundred kids have taken 7,000 free trips or something. The Thanksgiving was a great success. The Bronx school hired a DJ, and the kids got real friendly. She had to walk around and separate them.
    “Are you joking? Or do you really separate them?” We have visions of Ferris Bueller’s principal.
    “Yes! We have to! You should see ‘em. At least during school hours, we’ve got to watch them. When they misbehave, they get sent to the wall. They can still dance, but they’ve got to keep at least one hand on the wall.”
Like the Hays Code. I grew up in a family of teachers, and in Illona’s splutters, I hear the giggles that sometimes escaped stone-faced puritans of my youth, when the other students weren’t listening.

Andrew has read about this thing in the New York Times, where the girls grind their butts into the boys’ crotches…
    “It’s called ‘dubbing’,” says Illona wearily.
    “Is that where the girls touch the floor at the same time? Or is that some other thing?” he asks. He says that his Connecticut high school pretty much stopped at Stir the Pot and Running Man. We speculate on whether Dubbing wouldn’t be a better theme for a high school than Law and Justice. Might go down better at the student recruitment fairs.
    “Let me tell you,” says Illona, “when you walk around, and they’re doing that stuff, and you’re saying, Alright, alright, get some daylight between you, you suddenly think, How did I become this person?”

She hasn’t yet turned thirty, but she’s a frazzled, proud mother of a hundred babies; newborn teenagers. All through the turkey, I kept thinking, why isn’t someone making a documentary of this woman’s work?

*Real name hidden from Google

Dear Liam,

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, and you’re six days old. I haven’t met you yet. In fact, my belief in your independent existence still wobbles a bit. You came two weeks early, and we had to shift the world to set an extra place for you this Thanksgiving. But you’re the most welcome guest we can imagine.

And so here you are. A boy. Not just a bump any more, elbowing corners into your mother’s belly, but a boy, with a name of your own.

(You’re going to have to teach me how to be friends with little boys, Liam. My world was always full of small girls—sisters, neighbours, and cousins. I know them well, even now. But my friends grew up to bring boy after boy into the world, of whom you’re the latest and the most dear.)

Your first choice was a good one. Those are lovely parents you found for yourself, and they’re ready for you. I wish you could remember them as they are now. You’ll see photos of them from this week: your drained and blissful ma, your dad babbling with pride. Their hair is still brown. What can I tell you about who they are now, at the beginning of your life?

Your daddy’s long and pensive Huguenot features are at odds with his enthusiasm. He still has a kid’s joy. When he’s caught in some wild exaggeration or some giggle at the wrong moment, he still ducks his head like the youngest brother he is. He is lovable, crusading, and generous to a fault. A note-perfect mimic who slips on characters to make your mother laugh. He’s forever tweaking his own Orange County WASPiness.

He gobbles information—people, books, events, opinions—and finds unexpected connections within them. When he comes back from long runs, through Holland Park or Dupont Circle, he is restocked with global theories.

He’s often outraged. Like your mother, he wants to make the world a better place for you, and right now, it’s not co-operating. You should have heard him sputter and speechify through this past election, his focus sharpened by a dozen years of absence. Maybe you came early just to cheer him back up.

Your mama is a different character. She’s always been more serious, which is why so many people love to make her laugh. She draws them to her and draws them out like Oprah. The titanium plates that once braced her spine have been removed, but a steely core remains. This is a mother who would slug a mammoth to get food for you, Liam, and she’d endure a thousand years of winter to keep you warm. She is smart enough, and persistent enough, to invent the wheel for your MacLaren stroller. And she has a genius for human beings. When you go out into the world, you’ll learn that she’s a rare listener, with rarer compassion.

The first time I spoke to your dad, your mother put him on the phone to me from Bosnia. She’d fallen in love, she said, and she wanted me to talk to this guy, who worked in Sarajevo. He had a radio announcer’s voice. From 4,000 miles away I liked him immediately.

The second time I spoke to him was at six in the morning, six weeks later. He was calling from The Hague, where your mother had just moved to take a new job at the War Crimes Tribunal. He had joined her for the first week, to help her settle in. Just before he left for Sarajevo, a car hit her bike and tossed her over the hood and onto the ground. Her back was broken. They knew no one in The Netherlands.

He never went back to Sarajevo. He stayed with her, spending every day at the hospital. He found a ground-floor flat for her to move into when they let her out of hospital. He fed her, talked to her, held her hand, supported her first steps, told her she was a babe in her blue surgical corset. (This is encouraging news for a person who can’t yet hold his own head up.) To keep her dignity, he invented Bruce, a camp and gossipy hairdresser who bathed her and clipped toenails.

She told me later that even with all that pain and fear, it was one of the happiest times of their lives. What a love story you come from.

I wonder what will happen in the eighty or ninety years that stretch before you. You’ve already had an interesting life as a passenger: made in Tehran, gestated in Dublin, made your entrance in DC. By birth, you’re Huguenot, Celt, Brit, Nortsoider, So-Cal dude, and Beltway insider. You own this century more than we do.

We can’t imagine what thoughts you’ll think in 2044, or 2094. We can’t even imagine what thoughts you have now at you stare milkily at your new mother. In a few years you’ll probably roll your eyes as your parents apologize yet again. (They both say “Sorry” more often than the entire population of Canada combined.) You’ll roll your eyes as ma presses fancy sandwiches and pumpkin muffins on you as you head for the bus. (She does it to me, too.) Dad’s Ultimate Frisbee League can only be a tremendous embarrassment. And we won’t even start on cringeworthy letters from your mother’s best friend.

Liam, I’m appointing myself fairy godmother, and as you know, we’re in the wish business. So tonight I wish you this: may you be as brave, bright, and beautiful as your birthright promises. And may you have the gift of choosing to be happy, no matter what the big world deals you.

It’s the beginning of a great adventure.

With very much love,

-Dervala

P.S. Halfway through writing this, I saw the first photos of you. You have your daddy’s muzzle, ears, and eyebrows. And auburn hair! Your pricked heel is covered with a band-aid. You have long toes.

From my dear friend Andrew. Last names changed to protect the Catholic guilty from Google inquisition.

I’m trying to give up reading for a week. Last month I tried to give it up for two weeks, and failed, so I aimed lower. It’s an experiment in soft addictions. Three days in, after countless slip-ups, I’m at the bargaining stage. Does Slate count? Slate doesn’t count because it’s on the internet and I’m at work, right? Reading at work doesn’t count. Look, I have a sandwich in my hand. What about Apartment Therapy?

Slate counts. I stuck a Post-It on my computer that says READ in a big circle with a line through it.
“What’s that?” said Peter, who likes to catalogue my eccentricities. I told him my theories on soft addictions. There’s another Post-It just below it that says BITE with a line through it. It’s about chewing my fingernails, still a major food group though I’m 32 years old.
“And you’re not going to bite me any more, baby?”
“Bite me,” I explained.

I notice the text deprivation most on the subway, where some day I’ll get shot for staring at people. I get interested in certain faces, and I can’t seem to listen in properly without staring, too. A book is protection against this reckless habit.

Without one, I set my iPod to my Bill Clinton Makeout Soundtrack for the Q Train ride home. The other headphone clones don’t seem compelled into the little shuffly dances I do when I have private music. Not that it mattered. Last night no one looked at each other. They nosed into their books, or stared carefully into space. They all looked drained, and it’s only November.

The King is right. “We can’t go awwn together,” I wanted to implore them, “ With suspicious minds.”

Twenty one years ago today I cried because my sister Caroline turned three. I didn’t believe she could ever be as lovable again as she’d been at two. Three seemed so mature and unsilly; practically school-age. Oddly enough, I was wrong. That whole year I kept a diary of her doings, which I keep meaning to look for when I go home.

I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved Caroline when she was a small girl. She was such a great kid. Blonde hair, big brown eyes, and a nose so neat that Claire and I convinced her that, through a terrible misfortune, she’d been born without one. Her voice came from deep in her shoes, so that people sometimes looked over her head to see who had spoken. She had a taste for the dregs of any wine glass she could get, and a vivid sense of humour. She would hang upside down from the next-door neighbour’s climbing frame, her little pot-belly sticking out as her dress flew over her face. The bigger kids taught her tricks they couldn’t do themselves, and she was always game.

In the bath, she and Claire played at being Auntie Winnie and Auntie May. In their nineties, three of our grand-aunts had ended up in adjoining rooms in a Tipperary nursing home, and Claire and Caroline thought it great fun to imagine that we would end up there, too. They practised pouring bathwater tea, saying rosaries, and being deaf and senile.
    “Now auntie Winnie would you like some tea?”
    “What? What are you saying? What?”
    “Auntie Winnie would you like some tea and a biscuit?”
    “No. I’ll have jelly and icecream.”

Caroline was only ten when I left home, so we don’t know each other well any more. She’s less than nine years younger, but Ireland’s changes have speeded up generational shifts. I’m dim-witted about property and prospects, but Caro has just become a homeowner. This flipping of birth order aspirations seems symbolic of the mirror world Ireland has become, where home is richer than away. I’m fascinated by the glossiness of her contemporaries, and I want to know how they’ll turn out. Especially my sister, who still has a spark of the fearless, cheerful toddler on the climbing frame. May she always keep it, even when we get to that nursing home.

And another happy birthday to Brooklyn Amy, star of a few recent posts here. She turns forty today.

Sunny acts as though everyone who arrives at his bar on Conover Street is a guest at his surprise birthday party. He is lean and a little stooped from a life of leaning into upper-body hugs, and when he looks into your eyes, you feel he forgives everything you’ve ever done. He’s in his sixties, and looks like a Botticelli angel.

Over the bar hangs a portrait of his grandfather. It is the same Italian face, but where Sunny has long grey curls, his are plastered flat from an Edwardian center-parting, and the mouth turns down in the look of a man who has a business to run. A serious matter, photography, in those days.

There’s another picture behind the bar, a cartoon of Sunny and his young Norwegian wife, arms stretched up to catch a blonde creature who flies like Superman against a night sky. It is Oda, their daughter, who became a three-year-old recently and was feted for a week. The caption is “Oda Kom Fra Stjernene”. I think it means “Oda Comes From the Stars.”

Sunny lives in hope that Oda will sleep a few extra hours some day. This week it hasn’t happened, with all the birthday excitement. “My God,” he says, shaking his head, “it’s ex-haus-ting.” But he knows he is a lucky man.

The bar is marked by a sign that says “BAR”. It was added in 1910, fifteen years or so after grandad opened the doors. Inside, the lit-up Schaefer Beer sign is a reminder that this borough was once a brewing capital, back when half the world’s trade was unloaded on the docks here at Red Hook, and this bar served longshoremen and sailors.

The well-loved junk has taken on the patina of four generations. A Gentleman Jim figure stands high in a corner, ready to come out fighting. Below him hangs a pair of ancient, cracked boxing gloves. There are bad frescoes of lighthouses and a painting of a mermaid and a dusty model ship. The orange Choking Victim poster, mandatory in all New York bars and restaurants, predates the striking graphic fishbone you see in the shiny new Smith Street places. Christmas lights are strung from a row of Toby jugs and caricatures. The vinyl booths are patched with duct tape, and the walls, beneath Sunny’s own paintings, are the color of Ambrosia Creamed Rice and flaking. Oda’s Pokemon is propped up on the whisky bottles, near a package of Barilla Orzo with Sunny’s face stuck on the front.

On the first Sunday of the month, Gabriel Cohen, from BookCourt on Court Street a local novelist, organizes a reading at Sunny’s. I go to plenty of readings around New York, but this is the one I look forward to. Readings are better with beer. Readings are better with beer in Red Hook. Gabriel is married to a poet and teacher who helps at the readings by tending the bar. Though I don’t know either of them, they look blessed to be together. She is grace itself. When the star writer arrives to find the place empty but for me, she slips Gabriel a shot of Jameson. It gives him the courage to explain that nobody ever finds Sunny’s easily. There are no subways here, and no street grid. It always takes them half an hour longer than they think.

He’s right. They arrive in twos and threes, filling the front bar. It’s a beautiful crisp Marathon Sunday, and before the reading starts people keep disappearing outside to look at the late afternoon sun on the waterfront. Red Hook is an urban wilderness, where retreating industry left the picked-clean carcasses of civil-war era warehouses. Some streets are still paved with cobbles laid in a circle, and here and there the sidewalks are littered with broken glass and grass that grows knee-high in the cracks. This is where yellow schoolbuses go to sleep, lined up like ducklings. Parked outside is a van with a windshield slogan “AINT SKEERED”. At the end of a Red Hook pier, on Coffey Street or Van Brunt, you feel you’re on the tip of the New World. It’s the most romantic neighborhood in New York.

Gabriel has set up free coffee and Italian pastries from Caputos Court Pastry in the back room. We listen to the readers, and clap, and chat. My friend Jake joins me for a long drunken chat about scientists and cities.

The bar is only open on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights, and a few unpredictable Sundays. A long-time Red Hook resident told me that just a few years ago, Sunny asked people to pay what they felt like for their drinks, though that has stopped now that the neighborhood is changing—wealthy people give less. He is still generous with free shots and beers. It’s his living room.

    “Would you like a candle?” says Sunny as it gets dark, and the way he says it makes clear that he is not offering a tealight in a glass as much as warmth, light, and sustenance to a traveler who has come a great distance, from the other side of the BQE. “And these people came all the way from France,” he marvels, waving at a new knot of friends at the bar. They’re here to support a marathon runner. He hugs them and tells them how honored he is that they would visit his bar, and in his excitement, his own Brooklyn accent slips into theirs.

UPDATE: Thanks to Gabriel for the corrections!

Amy works for American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that defends the dignity and worth of every individual. They organized the Eyes Wide Open exhibition that came to town during the Republican National Convention.

Eyes Wide Open showed a pair of boots for each American soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Most were bought from army surplus, though a few were donated by bereaved families. Pairs were added almost daily as the exhibition travelled around the country in the summer and fall. Each was tagged with a name.

Unfilled shoes are haunting. Think of the pile of dusty shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, each standing for for a person who was discarded. Naming the dead, too, is a powerful act—so powerful that we set up tribunals to give genocide victims back their names. It took Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial to reclaim real young men from Robert MacNamara’s efficient talk of “bodycounts”. We cannot imagine not having a name. We cannot imagine ourselves in bodybags or in mass graves, but we can imagine putting on a shoe.

In Bryant Park last August, almost a thousand pairs of tagged boots were laid out. Amy helped with security. Feelings were high that week as the town filled up with Republicans and protesters, and talk of September 11th flew again. A mother of a dead soldier walked past the exhibition—she hadn’t known it was on—and burst into tears in an attendant’s arms. She came back the next morning for a private viewing.

One young man, deep in the corridors of shoes, searched and found a name that meant something to him. He sat on the ground with his head in his hands and wept. Amy tried to give him some privacy by shielding the passage, but a small mob threaded around her, drawn by the sound of his grief. Five or six of them stood over him with cameras and clicked away. The young man kept sobbing, head bowed. She didn’t know if he saw the photographers, or their flashes.

They weren’t even professionals, she said—no press passes, just little digicams, clicking away, pleased to have got their Moment and chatting about it afterwards.
   “Photo bloggers,” I told her. Everything was recorded that week.
Amy, who lives mainly in an offline world, was bewildered. Why wouldn’t they respect this guy’s grief? Had we become so incapabable of experiencing anything directly that we must suck on other people’s feelings just to get a Moment?

Oh yes.

Ruskin taught people to draw, not so that they would become artists but so they would learn to see. The new snapparazzi hasn’t learned that yet, focused as they are on toys and speed. I doubt they would get in a grieving man’s face without a gadget that miniaturized him. If a tenth of the people with shiny new megapixel cameras took the time to see and feel without their digital extensions, we would start to see art beyond people taking pictures of their own reflections. Emotional vampires, trying to see if they exist.

Thanks, Mark, for leaving this in the comments to my previous post.

Saletan says it all. That’s why I’m backing Oprah in 2008.