WTC 1997

I've already written about my experience of 9/11 on this blog -- but I haven't gone back even further, to a visit I made to the World Trade Center in 1997.

There's not much to the story. At the time, I was living in Florida, and visiting New York with a friend. We went to the WTC and took photos on the plaza, looking up at the twin monoliths and Fritz Koenig's sculpture "The Sphere" in the center of the plaza's fountain.


A lot of people griped about the World Trade Center's architecture when the buildings were first erected -- that they were too big and too boxy. The most elegant element of their design, I think, was the way they were offset against each other on that open plaza -- not parallel or at a right angle, but just slightly askew. I also liked the arches formed by the building's converging lines on the lower floors.

We went into the lobby so we could go up to the viewing deck on the top of the building, but the line was really long. So we decided to skip it. Even after I moved to New York in 2000 I never went up in the World Trade Center, and after 9/11 I regretted not visiting it more thoroughly.

We did go to the underground shopping mall beneath the WTC. In fact, the only pertinent comment in my journal about that trip is: "We didn't go into the Trade Center, but we did stop at Structure, where I got a great shirt!"


My friend and I did go up in the Empire State Building, though, and I shot this photo of lower Manhattan from that vantage point. Manhattan never looked right to me after 9/11. The twin towers, as monolithic and boxy as they were, helped balance the skyline -- as if you could put the whole city on a teeter-totter with its fulcrum in Chelsea, and it would stay level. Now Midtown looks overly heavy.

On Labor Day weekend 2001, I walked beneath the World Trade Center with my stepmother and her mother, both visiting. We didn't go up in the building then, either, and certainly could never have imagined what would happen just a week later.

Sylvia Plath and Parliament Hill

I don't know why I didn't think of it before.

I've already mentioned that Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets. I've liked her poetry since I was a teenager, when I first came across her excellent, scary novel "The Bell Jar." Her poems "Mushrooms" and "Tulips" were in one of my high-school literature anthologies, and later I picked up a copy of "Ariel" at some used book store. I loved the way she combined words and sounds, and I suppose like any good drama-loving gay boy I was also drawn to the turmoil of her life -- her struggle with depression and mental illness and, ultimately, her legendary suicide.

Plath lived the last years of her life in England, mostly in London, with her husband Ted Hughes and their two young children. It occurred to me only a few days ago that I could go find her house, as well as some of the places she mentioned in her poetry. A self-directed Sylvia Plath literary walking tour!

So I looked up her former addresses, and found two in London -- a house on Chalcot Square where she lived from 1960-61, and another on Fitzroy Road where she lived later and eventually died in 1963.

I set out yesterday, after Tuesday's rain and wind had subsided, and took the Tube to a station near Regent's Park. Plath's homes are in Primrose Hill, a neighborhood northeast of the park near Camden Town.

First I went to Fitzroy Road. I saw as I approached the house that it bore a blue marker noting that someone distinguished had lived there.


But surprise! The marker isn't for Sylvia:


When she moved into the house in November 1962, Plath considered it a good omen that it was Yeats' former home. Having separated from the adulterous Hughes, she and her children occupied the top two floors. It was here on Feb. 11, 1963, during one of the coldest winters in London's recorded history, that Plath sealed off the kitchen from the rest of the house and put her head in the gas oven.

I next went to Plath's home on nearby Chalcot Square, where she lived while writing "The Bell Jar" and many of her famous poems, such as "Tulips." This house also bore a marker, and happily, this time, it was for Plath:



As I stood in the street in front of the house, I turned to look out at Chalcot Square, a small park with a playground, and tried to imagine what it looked like back then from her windows. Was she inspired by this house, this view? I wondered if any of the park's trees were alive 50 years ago. Had she walked beneath them?

Finally, I walked about two miles north to Hampstead Heath, a large park north of Chalk Farm and Kentish Town. Hampstead Heath is the location of Parliament Hill, the "bald hill" where "the new year hones its edge" in the opening lines of one of my favorite Plath poems, "Parliament Hill Fields."

Plath wrote "Parliament Hill Fields" in February 1961 while living at Chalcot Square. It's about a miscarriage she'd had the previous autumn, and her progression from mourning the lost child to embracing her living daughter and the realities of daily life. Basically, it's a poem about recovery.

I found Parliament Hill and climbed it. I sat on a bench at the top, looking out over the London skyline.


I'd brought along my copy of Plath's "Collected Poems," which won her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982, and I read "Parliament Hill Fields" as I sat on the bench.

Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge
Swaddles roof and tree.
It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
I suppose it's pointless to think of you at all.
Already your doll grip lets go.

I looked up, over Kentish Town, and imagined the smudgy sky fifty years ago. The experience of a miscarriage is uniquely female, but all of us move beyond personal disasters, and I imagined Plath coming to terms with her loss.

The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow:
You know me less constant,
Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.
I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy.
These faithful dark-boughed cypresses

Brood, rooted in their heaped losses.
Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.
I lose sight of you on your blind journey,
While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets
Unspool and spend themselves…

I realized while reading the poem that Plath wrote it two years to the day before her suicide. It came before many of the poems that made her famous -- the so-called "Ariel" poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." She was growing as a poet, and even with only two years left, she still had a tremendous amount to say.

Despite her depression and her untimely end, I've never thought of Plath as morbid. On the contrary, I've always found her work beautiful and even inspiring. As I left Parliament Hill for the long walk back home, I stopped and picked blackberries -- the topic of another favorite Plath poem -- and ate them straight from the bush.

One month!

Today begins the one-month countdown until our dogs arrive in England. They're scheduled to be picked up from our friend's house, where they've lived through hurricane flooding and the rumble of a distant earthquake, on Oct. 5. They'll be taken to a final veterinary appointment for an exam and a flea and tick treatment, and they'll board a plane on Oct. 6. They're due to arrive on our doorstep the following day.

Both Dave and I are eager to have them here. We knew it would be a long time until we saw them again, but I don't think either of us realized how long three months can seem.

There's also a simmering sense of anger, at least on my part, that we have to go through all this rigmarole in the first place. I understand the need to keep the U.K. free of rabies, but let's be real -- our dogs carry about as much rabies risk as I do myself. The more I've learned about the reasons for the six-month delay, the more specious it seems. Apparently six months is the outer limit of how long it can take for a rabies case to incubate. So, in theory, if they were exposed to rabies the day before their late-March shot (the shot they didn't really need since their vaccines were already current) it would not take longer than six months to appear.

Give me a break.

The U.K., it turns out, is changing these rules next year to bring them in line with the rest of the European Union. After January 1, pets coming from countries like the U.S. need only wait 21 days after a new vaccine. It seems an added injustice that we, Ernie and Ruby all had to suffer under this silly six-month rule, when the rule itself is being scrapped in just a few months' time.

Above all, Dave and I just want the dogs to survive until we can get them here. We just want to see them again and spend more time with them before their age and maladies make that impossible.

(Photo: Ladbroke Grove, Monday.)

Blustery

We're having a blustery day today, one worthy of Winnie-the-Pooh. The wind and rain are howling against our building and I've decided to pretty much stay in all day, because this just isn't walking-about weather. Hopefully our house won't blow down like Owl's.

I went walking yesterday up to Kensal Rise, north of where we live, and then east to Kilburn and down through Maida Vale to get back home. It was a nice long walk and the weather mostly cooperated -- I had good light for photography until I got within about 20 minutes of home, when it began raining. Dave got home from work at about the same time I got back, so we settled in together with our evening gin & tonics and talked about our days. (Other than walking, mine consisted mostly of reading and housework. Ah, the life of a house-husband!)

I gave up on the dog book I mentioned yesterday. It's a very rare thing for me to quit a book -- I usually press on to the end of virtually everything I start, on the theory that it could at any point suddenly get better. But I couldn't hack this one. Ugh.

Oh, and I learned on TV last night that Freddie Mercury would have turned 65 yesterday, had he not died of AIDS in 1991. Hard to imagine Freddie a senior citizen. I also learned to my surprise that he was born Farokh Bulsara, and grew up in India. I have some Queen on my iPod ("Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Killer Queen," probably their two most popular songs) but I was never a huge fan, so I somehow missed hearing about his ancestry. Fascinating.

(Photo: Ladbroke Grove, yesterday.)

Mint

I never knew that mint plants bloom -- but this is the mint on our kitchen windowsill, producing tiny white flowers. We're also growing basil, rosemary, chives and thyme. Dave loves chopping a few pieces off when he needs them for a recipe. But we've found that we use the rosemary and thyme much more than the basil, chives or mint, which may be why the mint has grown big enough to flower. (The chives are flowering too, but not as photogenically.)

Fall is definitely in the air here in London. The temperatures are already cool -- we've just finished the coolest August in years, apparently -- and the horse chestnut trees are already starting to look vaguely yellow-brown. When we were at Stonehenge on Saturday morning, Dave and I were both freezing -- the temperatures out in Salisbury reached a high of 66 degrees that day, whereas London was 73.

It's a quiet Monday around here. I'm just doing housework and reading "Inside of a Dog" by Alexandra Horowitz, a somewhat dry and tedious book about dogs and what they know and experience. By the way, I added a widget to the right side of my blog which I'll update to reflect whatever book I'm reading at the time -- that way those of you who occasionally ask about my reading habits will know what's on my nightstand.

Stonehenge

When I was a junior in high school, I did a report about Stonehenge that ignited a fierce desire to visit the prehistoric monument. It seemed so lonely and mysterious, standing out on the chilly, windswept Salisbury Plain, its purpose and creators unknown. I love remote places, and at the time -- fueled by '70s cultural fare like "Chariots of the Gods" -- I was fascinated by ruins of unknown origin.

My teacher -- the same teacher whose books I cooked -- gave me an A on the paper, and wrote, "I hope you get to see it one day. It is a spectacular site."

So when Dave and I happened to watch a National Geographic Channel show about Stonehenge last weekend, I thought, "There's no time like the present!" The next day, I booked us on a bus to Stonehenge.

This morning, Dave and I made our way to Victoria Coach Station, as the bus terminal is charmingly known, and set out for Stonehenge. The fact that I still have that high school report shows how much of a dork I am, and I brought it with me. A photograph of me at Stonehenge holding that report, written when I'd never left the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and the rest of the world existed only in my imagination, seemed like a terrific symbol of how far I've come and how much I've been privileged to do in my life.



Our bus trip wasn't ideal. We booked with a local tour company which, unfortunately, failed to keep the bus toilet very clean, giving the entire vehicle a malodorous air. (I called it the "Piss Bus.") Our driver was also ordered to make a side trip to Windsor Castle on the way home in order to pick up some mysterious bald guy -- those bald guys are so much trouble -- and that added an hour to the trip.

The monument itself was spectacular, though smaller than I thought it would be. All the accounts of Stonehenge emphasize the immense size of the rocks -- and they ARE immense, by any standard -- but when you keep hearing about their immensity and then finally see them, you can't help but think, "Oh, they're a bit smaller than I expected."

My favorite part of the visit was hearing that scientists have found more than 90 species of lichens growing on the rocks. They're easily visible from the path that circles the monument, along with the flocks of starlings that cluster atop the stones. Stonehenge is its own ecosystem.


English Heritage, which owns the monument and the surrounding land, has done an admirable job of preserving its isolated feel. Visitors are kept well back on the path, and any photo seems to show Stonehenge standing by itself, an abandoned, timeless ruin.

Dr. Samuel Johnson once said of similar structures: "To go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough." I disagreed with him in my high school report, and I disagree with him still. Stonehenge was well worth the trip.

Storefronts

When I went out for a walk early on Monday morning, before the big carnival, I enjoyed the bright sunlight and the quiet of the streets. Some of the closed stores seemed especially photogenic.