Category Archives: New York City

October 22, 2015 · 6:48 pm

Tree Pose

I keep thinking about Tree Pose, one of my favorite things in yoga. Vriksasana in the Sanskrit. Here is how it goes. Standing in Tadasana, Mountain Pose, plant the foot of one leg on the ground, your weight evenly distributed between big and small toes, the arch of your foot held strong. If it is available to you, as my yoga instructor likes to say, cock your other leg so the knee is akimbo and the foot is placed somewhere between the thigh and heel of the grounded leg, hips open. Then raise your hands, either in namaste, clasped in front of your chest, or what I like – hold them high above your head.

What I also like: in my large class everyone holds the boughs of their tree exactly the way they want, so the mirror shows a forest, all straight trunks and long arms with fingers spread as people wish at that moment, pure individual preference.

I wanted to know more about how Tree Pose originated. Turns out that in the mythology behind the pose, a queen named Sita was abducted by a handsome devil of a king, Ravana (he happened to have 100 faces) and was forced to live in his compound, where she would enjoy all the luxuries of life.

Not only did she refuse to marry him, she refused to spend a single night in his palace. After all, she was already married to her dashing love Rama. Ravana vowed that if she did not accept him after one year he would cook and eat her. So Sita moved outside and lived among the ashoka trees (ashoka means “without sorrow”), trees known to be healers. Her attendents, Ravana’s minions, were women with terrifying faces of dogs, goats and fish, and they tried to get her to submit to the king. But Sita sat with her back against an ashoka tree and knew she would survive this. She focused on her love for Rama. Her desire climbed the branches and flew out into the world. The trees spoke to Sita, telling her to stay focused, be steady as a tree. When
Rama’s monkey came to spring her from her subjugation, she was ready.

My Downward Dog tends to collapse, my Warrior 2 is arthritic. I’ve never seen the point of Pigeon. But this yoga position and the story behind it I get. Hold yourself together, stay calm, and you will get through the worst of things. Even little trees can stand tall, like this Callery Pear in Ozone Park, Queens, just around the corner from the casino.

When was the last time you leaned your back against a tree and derived its strength? When was the last time you laid your hands on a tree trunk, on living bark? I don’t want to be ridiculous, but you can feel the thing breathe. Years ago we visited Black Hills National Forest outside Custer, South Dakota, where we were surrounded by Ponderosa and Jeffrey Pines. We pushed our noses up against the bark; warmed by the sun, it smells like butterscotch.

I like to think that when I assume Tree Pose, I may have butterscotch running through my veins. If it is available to me.

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Filed under Arborist, Culture, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, New York City, Trees, Writers, Writing

October 20, 2015 · 2:41 pm

Found Wanting

Here is what I don’t miss about living the life of a writer, the life I lived for 25 years of adulthood. I realized recently that even when I was happy and fulfilled, publishing my work, novels and nonfiction, I was continually in a state of wanting.

I wanted to write a good sentence.

… wanted to write a good paragraph.

…wanted … a page, a chapter, a book.

I wanted a jackpot, to win the lottery of book advances, to have publishers wrangle over my work.

I wanted my editor to pay attention to me .

… wanted him to love my book.

… wanted my publishing company to go all in on it, devote thought and resources to promoting it. I wanted to punish them when they didn’t: want, want, want.

Oh, you’re a writer, people always said. And it was fantastic to be that creature, a writer. Except when it wasn’t.

I wanted to see my book in the world.

I wanted to see the cover in a bookstore window.

I wanted readers.

… wanted readers to love my book.

… wanted readers to talk about my book, to talk to me about my book.

I wanted to talk about my book.

… wanted to talk to readers about me.

… wanted to talk in front of audiences.

… wanted to hear applause.

I wanted my book to be reviewed.

… reviewed in The New York Times.

…(USA Today would be okay.)

…I wanted notices in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

…I wanted those reviews to be starred.

…I wanted people to read the reviews and buy my book.

I wanted my peers to read my book.

I wanted people to see me in my book.

Oddly enough, I got all these things, just not enough. Could it ever be enough?

When I decided to take a hiatus from publishing I freed myself from all the wants. I didn’t know it would happen, that I would become an arborist, just that I needed a job and loved the idea of saving trees.

Wants are painful, even if you get what you want some of the time. You know the jewel-toned leaves on the forest floor, dreams right in front of you? You can touch them, but you can’t possibly collect them all. I was always caught up in the desire, and the reality invariably fell short. Gautama Buddha: Desire is the cause of all evil.

What do I want now that my work is so different? I want to be wantless. What’s right in front of me every day: a strong cup of coffee. A restroom near the site. Clear weather. Protecting a root. Seven hours of sleep. The foreman smiling at me, chewing his cigar. (He doesn’t know I’m a writer, and couldn’t care.) Not having to endure too much of a logjam on the drive back home. And again, saving a root. Simple.

Saving a root, I am saving myself.

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Filed under Arborist, Fiction, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, New York City, Publishing, Writers, Writing

October 14, 2015 · 2:46 pm

Mrs. Chekhov

I came around the corner to Dahill Street in Brooklyn on a Tuesday morning, wearing my orange safety vest, and there stood a little old lady with a neat blue dress and the white helmet coif that showed she spent time once a week at the beauty salon. Just standing there at the gate of her Brooklyn-red-brick house. Waiting for something.

Out of nowhere, she pulled me aside. Sometimes the vest serves as an invitation. “There’s a very good Italian place down the block,” she said. “Oh, he makes very good sandwiches.”

Not too many Italian delis around here these days, I thought, it’s mainly kosher now. Plus the streets here are semi industrial. But workers need sandwiches, so the sole remaining shop survived.

In front of the woman’s house stood a husky old oak, its bark tough and crusty, its heavy branches spreading high up over the sidewalk. A few blemishes, insect holes like eyes, but they only made it more beautiful.

“Listen,” she said, “Do you think the city would come cut my tree?”

I asked what the problem was.

“The squirrels are dropping those — what are they called?”

“Acorns,” I said. She was not young, this woman.

“Yes, acorns, and they’re dropping them on the roof of the house and making a terrible racket.”

“You want to cut the tree?” I said. “It’s a nice tree.”

“No! Just if they would come trim the branches,” she said. “I would never want them to cut the tree down. It’s 63 years old, I remember because it was planted the year after my son was born.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“You know,” she said, “in the summertime, everyone comes over and we sit under the tree. It’s so nice and cool in the shade.”

We stood on the stained streets of this shabby neighborhood, clogged with trucks, noisy, so changed from when she had her young son 63 years ago. And I thought of Chekhov, and the summer retreats of that time, and the racket of the acorns hitting the roof like the steady chopping sound of cherry trees in the background, off stage where you can’t see them.

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October 8, 2015 · 6:56 pm

Ms. Wiggy

I saw some striking wigs today. Gleaming, glinting, brunette, raven black, strawberry blonde. They don’t resemble real hair, and maybe that’s the point.

My job site was on the corner of Dayhill Road and 53rd Street, in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. The two Zelkova trees I was there to watch over had gnarled roots pushing up the sidewalk, important issues to attend to, but it wasn’t yet time to attend to them. So I spent the early morning watching the parade of moms dropping off their kids at the 3-in-1 school on the corner. The Al and Sonny Gindi Barkal Yeshiva, Tomer Deborah Girls School, and the Jack and Grace Cayre Elementary School.

Being Orthodox, the women all came out in the morning in their wigs. I have often wondered why, if the point of hiding one’s hair from the world is to be modest, to reserve its beauty for one’s husband only, why do these women wear kosher locks that are so flashy, which would seem only to call more attention from men outside the marriage bed. (Some Hasidic women actually shave their heads.) One of the mysteries, and just thinking about it shows my insensitivity, I’m sure.

A great wig is a rare find. I remember accompanying my friend Deb after her chemotherapy to one of the best wigmakers in Manhattan, near Columbus Circle. It was a glamorous place (they did a lot of show biz extensions) and she was treated like a queen as she had two wigs fitted, one her “good” wig and one her “bad” wig. In either one she looked as good as she ever had — beautiful — but there was still a slight brassiness to the hair’s texture.

I sat behind a man wearing a rug recently in a theater and the gloss of his hair nearly blinded me. His was plain. When periwigs were mainstays for men, in the eighteenth century, you could choose from dozens of imaginatively named styles, from the Adonis to the Cauliflower to the Ramilies, a romantic number that sported a black silk bow on its ponytail. If human hair was unavailable, the peruke maker would substitute materials from horse hair to fine metal wire.

It’s almost impossible to get a wig right.

Here come the moms, at school dismissal, and here comes their hair. So sleek and straight. Maybe the smoothness is what makes it look so artificial. I would bet that a hefty percentage of their wearers have soft, luscious waves framing their faces when the wigs come off, like Deb had before her chemo. But we’ll never know, will we?

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Filed under Arborist, Culture, Fashion, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, New York City, Trees, Writers

October 5, 2015 · 6:29 pm

Tree Wounds

How do you differentiate between ailing and healing, suffering and facing down adversity? Yesterday I was called in to evaluate the tree of a friend’s neighbor. It was a remarkable specimen.

A mammoth Norway Maple probably 70 feet tall and more than 75 years old, it had grown into the wall behind it and onto the bulging bedrock below it like a barnacle. It looked as if its roots had nothing but rock as a base, no soil. Of course trees the world over grow in stone. Georgia’s Stone Mountain is home to trees for which life would seem improbable.

But this maple had had some carpenter ants around its base, said the neighbor, a genial man who had just moved in with his young family. There was a hand-sized hole that felt damp on the inside. And above our heads, high up the trunk, bulged a just-birthed cream-colored fungus that he felt was suspicious.

To me the tree looked as solid as a brick. It had stood for 75 years, after all. This nice young man wanted me to tell him to take it down, afraid it was going to topple off its rock pedestal onto his house.

What about the wet hole, the fungi? They can indicate biotic problems. The hole can be an entrance for wood-rotting organisms, and sometimes appears watersoaked and has a bad odor ( I didn’t smell it.) The fungi isn’t a sign of peak health either.

Compartmentalization, I told him. Trees have an amazing capacity to heal themselves. They limit the spread of discoloration and decay by erecting walls beneath and above and on either side of the stressor. This is why you see so many otherwise healthy trees with holes in them – they suffered a wound in the past but patched themselves up. Trees are smart.

Something I could aspire to. When I’m jangled, my walls don’t necessarily partition off the wound and the disturbance of mind can spread unchecked.

Today, another tree wound, this one in autumn-mad Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The Sugar Maple stood in its cramped tree pit, surrounded by concrete pourers, gnarly roots braided around its base.

The talk began, on the part of watchful neighbors and some of the crew. This swarthy maple had a fine coating of thick green lichen.

It looked ancient, probably half a century or more of thrusting those gangly branches into the air. But, but… in one of the branches was a sizable hole. Not only one hole, but two connecting ones on either side of the limb so that you could actually see through it if you stood on your tiptoes.

Was it a victim of disease? Would the branch drop and pulverize a car? “This year, for sure,” one old timer said. Or was it a wounded soldier that given some patience would persevere? Could the maple compartmentalize its drastic (but poetic, I thought) wound? How do you predict what will happen? You can’t take down all the trees.

In the city or the suburbs – “the sticks” as my friend’s neighbor called his new environs – when will a wound get better? I wish I could say for sure. Tree, arborist, heal thyself.

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October 2, 2015 · 2:40 pm

My Cloak of Invisibility

Every day before I leave for the job I suit up in my orange fluorescent vest. I love these eleven things about it, in no particular order.

It marks me as a person of distinction.
It’s the first time in my life I’ve worn a uniform.
No matter whether or not I wear eye liner and mascara, I identify to others as a man. Cross-dressing: cool.
It’s the leopard skin pill box ubiquitous hat of construction.
People see right through me. All they understand is the vest. I could rob a bank in my reflective vest. It gives me total immunity.
It says I’m just a working grunt. The barista at the hipster café near the site barely deigns to meet my eyes. I’m a ghost. Not special, for a change. I’ve migrated from the chattering class to the working class. Yippee.
The men on the construction crews accept me somewhat more readily as we’re wearing the same uniform.
The vest never has to be washed. The dirtier the better, that’s the style.
It hides my homely workclothes – I’m the Orange is the New Black of arborists, says my daughter, wearing my baggy Carharts.
It’s transformative. It reminds me that I am different. Today I not only glow, I day glow.
Old ladies ask me questions about things on the street, thinking I know something about something. “Is this a city project?” “Is the city going to be doing the whole street?” “Who’s paying for this, anyway?” You are, lady. I’m just standing here wearing a vest.

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September 25, 2015 · 6:02 pm

Something Concrete

Today was the last day working concrete at the site on Morgan Avenue. The mixture of cement, sand, aggregate and other secret-recipe ingredients comes down the chute from the mixer truck as thick sludge, like lumpy chocolate pudding. The men stand in the wood sidewalk frame “floating the concrete” with long flat blades. One worker on his knees wears pads as he smoothes around the edges with a trowel. As they push and pull the floaters, the bumpy material miraculously comes together and regulates itself.

There is not much arborist work today.

All my root preservation is finished, the behemoth roots I found are safely tucked away in plastic under the concrete slabs. I can’t help here in any way, even picking up a leaf from the surface of the poured concrete – that would be an infraction of union rules. All I can do is take note, learn, and monitor.

On the other hand if I leave the leaf there, the contractor will get in trouble with the city. Sidewalks have to be perfect. Or as perfect as anything can be.

Once in a while the contractor himself picks up a floater and sweeps it across the wet concrete to settle it. Then the workers score the squares, measuring with a floss of a string and employing another long-handled tool. These scorings I think are not necessary in any practical sense but only aesthetic.

“Art always opts for the individual, the concrete,” said Jorge Luis Borges. “Art is not platonic.” But sometimes concrete is simply concrete.

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Filed under Arborist, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, New York City, Trees

September 24, 2015 · 5:40 pm

LinkedIn and Out

Once upon a time I had a job. It was actually a sequence of jobs – as a women’s magazine editorial assistant, then as a writer/researcher for an arts impresario, then an editorial director for a not-for-profit that advanced women’s careers. I was in my 20s. Working as the assistant to the health and horoscopes editor at Family Circle was pretty entertaining.

When I left the editorial life to become an author, though, I felt elated.

Years later, when I decided to take a hiatus from writing books, I hooked up with a career coach at my alma mater. What can I do? I asked her. I needed to work. I used to go into Manhattan once in a while to meet with her, and she would tell me that I hadn’t failed at my chosen metier, that I simply had to switch from one field to a related one using my fine-turned authorial skills. When she said switch, she would hold her hands in front of her and raise and move them to the side as though she were lifting something light to a place it better belonged .

How does someone who has written books for 25 years switch from one field to a related one? Reenter a work force where everyone is a teenager and has the computer skills of a genie and the moxie of a shark? I subscribed to adverts on Indeed.com. I sleuthed around cultural nonprofits to find a fit. Try and try, I couldn’t shake the fact that I was essentially a book author. I had speaking skills though, and I liked being outdoors, so I applied to work the sea lion exhibit at the Central Park Zoo. No deal.

The thing my career coach advocated most vehemently was that I get involved with LinkedIn, a site that I’d always regarded with bafflement. What was it for, anyway? Why did everyone want to connect with me all the time? Now I prettied up a resume to sound cheerful and proficient and started cold calling LinkedIn contacts. I felt like I was plastered with one of those dorky tags people wear at conventions.

I got some interviews. During one, after swallowing a cold pill, I got such bad cotton mouth that I had to excuse myself to go find a water fountain. Didn’t get the job. I didn’t get the job as writing center director, writing teacher, social media content writer. Everyone knows that sending c.v.’s is not how you get a job. So I returned again to LinkedIn. Would the director of the Intrepid Museum, the contact of a contact, have any ideas about how I could find work? No? So sorry.

Then it dawned on me. I didn’t want a deskbound, social media-obsessed editorial 9-5 any more than companies wanted a silver-haired overqualified author who spent a lot of time inside her head. I contacted the owner of a small company that had something to do with trees.

Trees. That was novel. Those leafy giants that swayed along the highway? When I was a kid, I remembered, I used to build houses out of acorn tops and pebbles in the hollow of a tree in my yard. Trees, it occurred to me, were magic. I would move from one end of the supply chain to another, from bound paper books, which ate up trees, to the living air-cleansing shade-providing originators themselves. The raw material of all literature. All I had to do was take a test, and then I would be sprung from my writing coop, out in the air, in Brooklyn, saving trees and watching the trucks go by.

Elated.

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September 21, 2015 · 5:21 pm

The Sidewalks of New York

What lies under the city sidewalk? Dirt. Sand. Rocks, bricks, miscellaneous debris. Skeletal remains of vermin. And thousands of miles of pipes.

And roots.

I found one today on the job, a gnarled and grizzled specimen, a time capsule from before the jungle of New York was so concrete. This London Plane root, a yard long and six inches at its fattest, had been severed by the backhoe as it excavated the old concrete sidewalk. It was still wet with life.

It made me think of those anguished lines by Neruda, in Walking Around:

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,

insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,

going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,

taking in and thinking, eating every day.

In a way, the metaphor is truer than the reality. We’re a lot more insecure than that root I found today, chopped through though it was by the backhoe.

I don’t know how they poured concrete a hundred years back, in the 1890’s, when the pop song “The Sidewalks of New York” was Taylor-Swift hot. Then the streets were mainly cobbles, Belgian paving blocks. Asphalt was relatively new. Some streets were still dirt, more country lane than city slicker. It must have been fantastic for a woman to sweep down a (relatively) clean sidewalk without befouling the hem of her skirts. Especially if she was responsible for cleaning those skirts.

Now a root in the city seems fantastic. On my first job going among the trees, in June, there was a foreman with a sticker on his hard hat that read Irish. His name was Sean, and he had a salt-and-pepper mustache and a twinkle in his eye. I had been tracing the progress of an excavation to install a new gas line, watching the roots as they materialized in the “moist guts of the earth.” Making sure they weren’t broken by the backhoe. I had to leave, and I asked Sean to keep an eye on a certain root I was concerned about. He smiled, with only a hint of irony.

“Ah,” said Sean, “the lovely root.”

Category Archives: New York City

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