Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

I never thought I could get so excited about a slime mold.

But I learned, dear reader, I learned. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy, said Carl Sagan. He may have been looking upward at the stars, but we were attending very closely to what was all around us on the ground, and it was rapture. This was a private walk through Wildflower Island at Teatown Lake Reservation, the 875-acre nature preserve that’s just down the street from the Cabin. I had hiked the grounds around the lake often, but never made an appointment to visit the two-acre island. You have to go through a wrought-iron gate in a little wood entry house and across a bridge to get there. It’s kept locked, a secret portal to another world.

We were greeted by a great blue heron.

Diane Alden, a sagacious volunteer wildflower docent, went with me and some of my friends on the walk.

Wherever she went, her basket accompanied her, and I got the feeling that if we were lost she’d take out a small loaf of bread and trail crumbs to save us. Diane had much to tell us about the plants on either side of our path. If I were a better student, I would remember more of it. She said that 400 million years ago, plants came out of the water. Ferns came to live alongside the fungi. Our group saw a whirl of ferns wherever we looked, of all different types, and examined their crumbly brown spores.

“I love ferns,” said Diane. “Because they’re ancient — I love it.”

Lichen, she said, “is a marriage between an algae and a mushroom.” What? A lichen, it seems “eats a rock to make a place for a moss to make a house for a fern.” It’s all like a fairy tale, really, where algaes and mushrooms fall in love, lichens find rocks delicious and ferns move into new castles across town.

There were so many photo ops, all those shades of green.  Suzanne didn’t know she was so interested in mosses. (Give her credit for many of these pictures.) They don’t grow tall because they have no vascular structure to bring up the water. That’s why they wind up as soft emerald carpets at the bottom of trees.

We all swooned when the cumberland azalea came into sight.

It’s in the same family as the blueberry, oddly, and has a symbiotic relationship with the mushroom mycelium beneath its feet. The names of wildflowers were made up by genius poets: cattlesnake plantain, spotted wintergreen, interrupted fern, haircap moss. Princess pine, aka lichopodium, if you’re knowledgable, stands about eight inches high and looks exactly like a miniature Christmas tree. Diane had a friend who used to say she wished she could shrink and walk among them.

Bull frogs belch out their calls. Our own bullfrogs, Gil and my friend Henry, wondered if it would be permissable for them to take an independent stroll around the island. “That’s what the husbands do a lot,” said Diane graciously. We bent to see a small grove of lady’s slippers.

It was the pink lady’s slipper that caused this island to be preserved as a wildflower refuge. The endangered plants grew in such abundance here  and would not survive a move, so Teatown saved the whole shebang as a sanctuary for indigenous plants thirty years ago. The island itself was formed when the Swope family dammed Bailey Brook to create the lake in 1928. It used to be a farm, and you can still see the old stone  walls around the property.

This island is as good a place as any to establish the accuracy of the following formula:

Sedges have edges

and rushes are round

and grasses are hollow

right down to the ground.

We learned continuously, intensely, over the course of ninety minutes. “Think about the color of the blueberry,” Diane advised. “It’s to attract the birds. It seems obvious but it just occurred to me recently.”

We were touching buds, berries, stems, flowers, crouching to see more intently.

We had to look closely to find some species.

Josefa’s art mind was going wild with all this nature, and her pictures are amazing. Here’s one, through the loupe that allows us to see the tiniest details imaginable.

“Do you know what this is?” asked Diane, and I had a small mental triumph. Solomon’s Seal. How I knew, I don’t know. Perhaps I read it in a fairy tale?

The buttercup family is vast, and includes the columbine, thimbleweed, and even bugbane, said to help control hot flashes.

The mosquitos were closing in. We were on an island, after all. But some of us were getting a little cross.

Then something materialized out of that wicker basket of Diane’s, a mirror attached to a light, expandable rod. We were now privy to a new world, the log-attached underside of the false turkey tail mushroom.

We emerged to the island’s edge, where the water was crowded with water lilies in all their primitive glory. Deer swim across here, eager to munch on the island’s sweet flowers — Teatown has to cage the island’s handsome rhododendrons. Dragonflies, swooping by, date to the age of the dinosaurs. Diane, who knows about a lot more than wildflowers, explained that each one has two sets of wings, which it cannot collapse to land or to hide. Despite these constraints, they outmaneuver other insects — “dragonflies are better at capturing their prey than lions or tigers or bears,” said she. I once, however, saw a chipmunk devour a dragonfly, so I know they’re vulnerable.

Diane walks in the woods every Monday with some fellow flower lovers, two of whom are botanists.

They take note of every thing, from the tall, scraggly shapes of the deciduous azaleas to the tiniest, most crazily delicate seeds. And once they do, they note them all over again, and closely.

The first day of summer rolls out before us. We zoom south to Pier 45 on the lower west side of Manhattan, where we know we will find fantastic music played by an expert friend.

Nora Balaban is one of the foremost musicians in New York on the mbira, the Shona thumb piano of Zimbabwe. She arrives by bike to Hudson River Park, where we find a cross section of humanity and other species. (On the way down the island, stopping in the Inwood neighborhood, we passed an older gentleman carrying a goose in a wire crate. For dinner or companionship? Impossible to tell.) Here at the Pier, there’s a little bit of everything under the sun. Skates with the wheels on the outside, called land rollers.

The New York Water Taxi motoring in to dock, offloading both tourists and commuters.

Pedigreed puppies in a strict training regimen, no petting allowed.

Sunscreen-slicked Type A’s on cellphones.

Here at the pier, extensively remodeled and cleaned up by the city in recent years, we listen to the waves of the Hudson lightly slap the pilings. Directly south of us the Freedom Tower, still a work in progress,  balances at least one crane on top.

Speedo-clad sunbathers blanket the grass.

“Our audience is naked men with little thongs, and Gil,” says Nora. I’ve known Nora a very long time time, since junior high.

Everyone on Pier 45 seems rendered unconscious, lulled by sunbeams, water, clean green grass. “Summer afternoon,” said Henry James. “To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” Nora and her band, MbiraNYC, will follow a musician named Poingly (real name: Jason Glastetter) who renders a performance not unlike a person confined to a lunatic asylum, dashing back and forth, climbing, wailing, rending his clothes, all at top volume. His first album is titled, no kidding, I Suck.

The ancient pilings in the river seem stoic under the onslaught.

Poingly’s performance, and Nora’s, are sponsored by MakeMusicNew York, a free celebration across all five boroughs, with Israeli and Korean performances in Midtown, West Indian in Crown Heights, Chinese in Flushing and French and Indian in Central Park. Nora tells me it originated around seven years ago to commemorate the summer solstice.

You’ve probably seen an mbira at some point but didn’t know what the metal-pronged instrument was called.

The band takes the “stage,” with folding chairs under a wing-like shade screen, and begins. Its music mesmerizes.

Nora has traveled to Zimbabwe many times to study mbira. On an early trip, she took herself to Mozambique, accompanied by an American buddy and packing a Portuguese phrase book (Mozambique shook off Portuguese rule in 1975), to train on  timbila, the wooden xylophone, with Venancio Mbande. He was the premier timbila composer, performer, instrument maker and teacher in all of Mozambique. One of Nora’s bands is actually called Timbila. They play a fusion of African rhythms and rock ‘n’ roll that is funky and joyous.

Her heart belongs to the mbira, though, which you play nested in a calabash adorned with buzzing bottle caps, and for which Nora requires regular synthetic reinforcements of her fingernails.

She gives lessons, and doesn’t judge you for your age or your musical inexperience. My brother Andy studies with her, the son of a high school friend does, even the boyfriend of my daughter took a turn and was so inspired, she brought him a perfect, small instrument from Malawi.

I am leaning back on my elbows, the damp grass soaking into my jeans, without a care in the world. This music does that to you. My brain is melting and that is a pleasant thing. Others are inspired to dance, like the slender young man with the blond faux-hawk that Nora spotted  in the audience at one of her performances. “You’re mine!” she told him, and now he arrives, kissing everyone in the band, and starts his moves, whirling and crouching and stretching his rubbery self to the sky. “ Gil and I admire him. “He’s just not attached,” Gil marvels.

The hosho players switch off with the mbiras, one musician with his long locks tied back and black sunglasses, another tripping the light hosho in a pretty sundress, a late arrival in a flame-yellow top, hair sweeping her knees. People pass by. People doze. They feel they’ve been lifted up, swung in a breeze of music like an auditory hammock. They feel the voices of Nora and her ensemble are calling them from within some leafy glade. “This song is called Meat in the Forest,” Nora tells the audience, “Like hunting – let’s go get us some meat. Not meet in the forest.”

But here on the pier, in the sun, against the waves, we are meeting in the forest. I am sure of it.

After dinner we followed the outdoor sculpture trail through downtown Ossining, all the way to the river. The town is celebrating its 200^th year with all kinds of events and tours, but this seemed like the perfect way to mark a pristine late-spring evening, on a full stomach, wearing comfortable sandals and clutching a map that contained the artists’ philosophy for every one of 26 large-scale pieces.

I found myself being drawn to the environment around the sculptures as much as the works themselves. We walked up to Elizabeth Barksdale’s In a Sea of Grass, for example, and though I liked her justaposition of wood, steel and corrugated plastic roofing, what attracted me especially was the handsome building that served as its backdrop. Built in 1907 in the Beaux-Arts style, the Washington School was the educational heart of Ossining until the student base overflowed its capacity a quarter of a century later. I always like entablatures inscribed with words that someone at some time decided were central to the building’s purpose – here LANGUAGES stands at the forefront.

At the Ossining Public Library, which fortunately places no limit on the number of volumes card-holders can check out, I found a statue of myself.

Or at least it’s the elegant lady I’d like to see myself as, by Leonda Finke, and it’s also the most expensive piece in the show.

In front of the high school, sculpture and more distractions.

Chinese Firecrackers dangled from the broken branch of a big old pine on the front lawn. Did Fielding Brown choose the site because of the broken branch or break it as part of his art? Two songs danced through my head, Lucinda Williams’ Metal Firecracker (Once we rode together/
In a metal firecracker) and Ryan Adams’ Firecracker (I just wanna burn up hard and bright/I just wanna be your firecracker). Yet no sculpture could grab me in the gut as much as the mulberry tree at the path as we left, dropping its ripe berries to the stained sidewalk.

Childhood memories of tasting the fruit, spitting it out… over and over again. Why, I ask, would you try a mulberry more than once?

Across the street, a Havisham-cake in a mysterious bakery that always seems closed.

A few paces down stood a fine brick church with a sign that beckoned to me. .

A sculpture called Stamen had lemony chunks of glass lodged in it like the one in my garden Wizard Stick.

But calling to me from behind on the church door was a small interior-rhymed poem I liked more.

My favorite work, called Let’s Roll, stood in the middle of a busy V.

I liked as  much as  anything the sculptor’s statement on the back of my map. James Havens says:

I intend that my sculptures should contain enough information that the viewer is not confused or mystified by the artist’s intent. I wish to be considered a good journeyman ironworker who demonstrates a high degree of craftsmanship while using only the best materials to create enduring sculptures that speak to the highest aspirations of the human spirit.

The stainless steel symbol lives up to Havens’ intention, I would say, and I would like my own work to have a similarly high degree of craftsmanship.

Now what? The shadows had elongated on Main Street. But the Hudson at Ossining was still golden.

Sculptures were strewn across the bank. A mound of wood in Matthew Weber’s Cedar Cluster, like chewed beaver logs.

Too many artworks to digest.

But the most impressive sculpture of the town stood only blocks away.

Sing Sing prison, its original cell block installed in 1825, has earned at various times the coinages “up the river”, “the big house,” and  “the last mile.” The name comes from that of the Native American people, the “Sinck Sinck”, from whom the land was acquired in 1685. The village sprang up around it. The jail still operates as a maximum security facility with about 1,700 prisoners, even as children run and chase in playgrounds right outside its walls and the Hudson Line actually sends its trains right through the complex.

The kingdom of ruffians, invalids, and other misfits. You can drive right along the exterior walls and catch a glimpse through an open guardhouse door of a corrections officer reading the newspaper.

But the wall itself is the main attraction. No sculpture could approximate its power.

Just because you love libraries and you love books doesn’t necessarily mean you love clean, pristinely intact books in libraries. Libraries necessarily lead to wear and tear on books – the fact that a volume is somewhat tattered means it has been used. It has been loved.

I buy used books, and often they originate with libraries, which at some point have to offload old volumes to accommodate new stock.

On of my favorites is The Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta: At Home and in Society 1609-1760, by Mrs. John King Rensselaer, a member of New York Knickerbocker society during the Gilded Age and a founder of the Colonial Dames of America. The author was something of a firebrand, judging from a turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York Times article about her behavior during a New-York Historical Society meeting. “’Instead of an imposing edifice filled with treasures from Old New York what do we find?’ demanded Mrs. Van Rensselaer. ‘Only a deformed monstrosity filled with curiosities, ill arranged and badly assorted.’” Harrumph.

Her history, a feminist creation in its own way, was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1898, and bears a scrawled inscription that I’ve always told myself must read “Rensselaer.” Its pages are worn and soft and dogeared, stained at the edges. Its orange cloth binding with its marvelous faux-metal trim bears splits at the spine.

It’s an expired library book.

A little sleuthing explicates the book plate. The Wood Library is in Canandaigua, New York, on North Main Street, and is still going strong since its founding in 1857. Major Charles A. Richardson, who donated The Goede Vrouw, was a lifelong bachelor and Canandaigua resident, commissioned in the Civil War, who at the time of the book’s publication had recently been named to the commission charged with establishing the topographical features of the Gettysburg battlefield.

I like the idea of this century-old book by one staunch American given by another staunch American to a Main Street American library. And I like the book’s soft edges, its creases and stains, the carefully inked call number on its spine.

And that is why I find the series of photos of discarded and withdrawn library books by Kerry Mansfield so appealing. In “Expired,” her camera focuses intently on those soft edges, creases and stains. The yellowed, stamped check-out cards and paper pockets. Even some mildew. Behind it all, for me, the fever dream of library books stacked up, awaiting my attention on a summer day, the specter of stern librarians, kind librarians, the smell of library paste.

This artist says she loves paper more than she loves books. And these are artifacts, after all, not book reviews. But she’s taken 1,300 images so far, and for me that means you care.