Jean Zimmerman

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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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 12, 2015 · 9:16 pm

Feed the Tree

If you believe in the power of coincidence it won’t surprise you that the song I heard in my car on my way back from apple picking today, by Belly, the ’90s rock band, was Feed the Tree:

So take your hat off

When you’re talking to me

And be there when I feed the tree

I went apple picking in the most incongruous orchard I have ever seen — and I have seen orchards in my time. We lived for a while in a farmhouse in the middle of an old orchard upstate, where we were intoxicated every spring by the ineffable honey of apple blossoms (and the taste of blueberry dacquiries).

“You’ll like it – it’s a little different!” my brother Peter told me when we talked about going picking there. That was an understatement. Edward Gorey might have created Mr. Apples, which is run by a man named Philip Apple in High Falls, at the edge of the Catskills. There were ghost barns.

Mr. Apples had just two things available for purchase: pick your own apples and cider vinegar. His signage covered the place.

The trees themselves were overgrown, twisted and blackened, their leaves gone, and their apples had fallen to the ground in drifts of blemished fruit.

I loved this place, if only because it was so different from the corn maze-smiling scarecrow-fake pumpkin patch orchards you usually find in the Hudson Valley. It was a little hard to get past the produce, though. “There are some black spots,” said Mr. Apples. “When you get home, brush them with a cloth and the spots will come off.”

I can tell you that no amount of rubbing would take the spots off. “Organic style apple” was how he billed his product, and he said the spots were caused by humidity. They looked like they came out of Snow White. I bought half a bushel and will find some use for the poor things, maybe apple sauce.

After Apple Picking is Robert Frost’s fabulous poem about, yes, harvesting apples, but also about human frailty, a woodchuck and death, among other things.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

It is so complex and wonderful that you must take yourself to the Poetry Foundation and read it.

Since I began working as an arborist, the image comes into my head quite often: the tantrumming trees in The Wizard of Oz hurling apples.

The fruit I saw today would be suitable for throwing. And that’s a good thing. Joni Mitchell: Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT. Give me spots on my apples but leave me with the birds and bees.

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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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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 27, 2015 · 3:24 pm

The Memorial Birch

I love mementos. A pinkie size painted remembrance of a trip to Florence, a miniature silvered lucky acorn, an AA 3-month recovery coin – these all lurk around my desktop, giving me what I feel is some sort of immunity or talismanic power. Perhaps the oddest memento in the cabin, however, is a chunk of birch that was presented to Gil after both his parents had died.

His sister and her husband contrived this memorial candle holder, and made another one for each of their parents’ progeny. Embedded beneath both beeswax candles are the intermixed ashes of my parents-in-law.

This tree-urn seems magical and eery by turns. Do you light the candles or not? We tried once, I think, but it just seemed too strange.

Also, where do you keep the honorary log? I’m thinking yule log, here, but it’s not going to go in the fireplace, obviously, or on the coffee table, or on the table when we eat dinner. We want the memorial close, but not too close. We’ve come up with a compromise placement, on the porch, where the birch mirrors the logs of the house. The candles have gotten a little dusty, a little cobwebbed out there, but it’s all natural.

People often cast their loved ones’ ashes someplace beautiful, often over water. But it makes sense to me that my my in-laws are buried in wood. They loved forests and were environmentalists before their time. Also, even standard-issue coffins are wood. I’d like to be buried in a pine casket, That is, if I am not wrapped in a shroud and laid in a deep, worm-thick hole. It’s natural to want to become wood, be a part of a tree, because a tree is probably the best part of our world.

I heard in Nature magazine that a team of 38 scientists recently found our planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, many more than the previous estimate of 400 billion. Shocking. There are 422 trees for every living person. Plenty for wood coffins, and plenty for birch ash-urns.

And plenty too for another mode of burial I recently heard of. In Italy, a pair of designers invented a unique method which actually transforms the body of the deceased into a tree. It’s called the Capsula Mundi Project. The corpus, it is said, changes into nutrients for the tree that allow it to grow healthfully.

You get to pick the kind of tree you want planted above the pod in which you will be encased, in a fetal position. The capsule is completely biodegradable. The outcome is what the inventors are calling a memory forest, an alternative to lines of granite tombstones.

If we had this already, our memorial birch wouldn’t seem quite so lonely.

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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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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.”

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September 16, 2015 · 10:00 pm

The Pits

My job today was seeing after the health and happiness of two trees in new pits, #39 and #40 on the site survey, which were having their environs disturbed by the installation of a brand new sidewalk. It’s a discrete job. Somebody has to tell the foreman the dimensions of the new pits (82″ across, back to the playground seam). Someone, in this case, who isn’t a man. One of the things I do as the men around me install curbs, pour sidewalks, do all the lifting, the hauling, the digging: I give life to the new pits.

“It’s a man’s world,” sang James Brown in his rip-your-throat-out song, “but it ain’t nothing without a woman or a girl.” To these men on this construction site, I am mainly a fly on the wall (and I’d get a little more attention if I were a little more fly). Mainly the workers are, as my boss/friend promised when I started, “respectful.” They are, with an edge. There still exist Neanderthals in the concrete jungle — like the foreman who smiled viciously in my face when I came with a question, saying, “Yes, now, what do you want?”

No one asks me to get them coffee. They pretty much leave me alone, without that vicious smile or even a scowl. But what I do is extraneous to the main purpose of this world. The men work like dogs. Bad metaphor, they work much harder than any dog ever did. Sometimes I feel I’m here only as an audience for their macho performance. I am actually here because New York City requires that an arborist be present on construction sites that have trees. When arborists weren’t on sites, back in the seventies, there was a tree holocaust.

“They also serve that only stand and wait,” wrote Milton. I am waiting for the concrete to surround the new pits, which are supposed to provide a pristine environment for these London Plane trees to thrive, but are now full of fast food wrappers, used condoms and dog shit. “New York City is hard,” a worker originally from Togo told me. “You need to have the trees.” When Khruschev visited the city, he said, “I don’t like the life here in New York. There is no greenery. It would make a stone sick.” Construction workers with their backhoes and cement mixers vs. tree people with their 82″ squares of dirt might be a case of mine is bigger than yours. On the other hand, I feel, all these 40′ spreading Plane trees here are mine. It’s just simpler for everyone if I’m invisible. That’s easy because I’m not the girlfriend or wife but the same age as the silver-haired owner of this construction business.

James Brown: “He’s lost in the wilderness, he’s lost…”

Think I’ll go stand under the serviceberry tree down the block.

Its star shaped blossoms come out first of all the trees in spring, soon after the ground has thawed, when people in olden times had their first burial services after the long winter. I’m going to hang out under the serviceberry and see if I can serve somebody (thank you Mr. Dylan).

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September 14, 2015 · 5:23 pm

Out on My Fanny

Terrific reviews but no sales. Astounding rejection notices. What could be crueler for a writer?

Sadly and swiftly we fell to earth, Fanny and me. I was ready to vault into the next chapter of my life. I was enchanted by my subject and believed that everyone else would be equally enchanted.

But publishing is a peculiar institution, particularly these days. Two dozen editors looked at the proposal for A Dangerous Subject, the book that would take readers on a romp through Jacksonian America and the weirdness of the present day United States as well. (Note I don’t use the word read here, only looked at. How many editors have the time to read everything, actually? It’s a lost art.)

Some of them disliked the subject (“too small”). Many loved it. I remember my agent sharing with me one editor’s response: “omigod!” she wrote, and went on to say she’d had five proposals on her reading stack that night and had thrown them all aside to read about Fanny.

But like I said, publishing is peculiar. At the end of the day, lots of editors relished Fanny but they just couldn’t figure out “a way to publish the book.” In other words, to sell the hell out of it. Me and Fanny were too small to get our chance. And so we fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole, grasping at straws we passed along the way. Mawkish, but still.

And having nursed a novel and a nonfiction idea when neither would end up reaching any readers, after a quarter century in the business of book writing, I had to ask myself: Is that all there is?

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September 13, 2015 · 6:19 pm

Mmmmmm…

Mmuseumm isn’t a typical hoity toity museum but a 4×5 exhibition space tucked into an old elevator shaft in Cortlandt Alley, in Manhattan’s Tribeca. An eclectic assortment of collections and individual objects, it aspires according to artistic director Alex Kalman to be a “modern natural history museum devoted to the curation and exhibition of contemporary artifacts that illustrate the complexities of the modern world.” It’s been entertaining and mystifying visitors since 2012.

So you won’t find anything framed or pedestalled here. But you will find 12 eggs in a heated vitrine waiting to hatch, or a grouping of vicious looking fish hooks that one Doctor Robert Insley in Chatham, Mass., removed from a variety of patients.

Curious as to whether this diminutive place was a giant hoax or a cracked art installation or the real thing, whatever that might be – in other words, whether someone was laughing at me as I perused the rubber chicken wing and the real fake pork sandwich on the wall, I checked out a few facts on the web. It turned out that the thing that amazed me most, a collection of heads called Stranger Visions and credited to Heather Dewey-Hagborg, was the real thing.

Next to each head was a cigarette butt or piece of chewed gum or fingernail clipping. The bio-hacker brought the specimen to a lab, extracted its DNA, then ran the sequence through a facial algorithim and a 3D printer to find out what the gumchewer or smoker looked like. Yes, it might actually be a hoodwink. But it looks like those chicks might hatch.

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September 12, 2015 · 5:53 pm

A Silver Bullet

Gil and I thought we would take to the road on the trail of Fanny Trollope’s wanderings across America. My imagination itched to conjure up the Jacksonian past of the juvenile nation, which she wrote about so incisively in Domestic Manners of the Americans. It would be an in-depth look at the landscape Fanny Trollope found when she went among us, using her words as a jumping off point to explore a strange, exciting, transformative period in America.But I wanted to see these places in the present, too. I planned to call my book A Dangerous Subject, which lifted a phrase from Domestic Manners. Trollope employs it to describe the sprawl and spectacle of America, so overwhelming that it can barely be contained in language. The phrase could apply equally to the woman herself, or to any woman who dares to step outside accepted boundaries. As her contemporary Jane Austen wryly noted in Northanger Abbey, a woman “if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

Fanny always based her criticism in solid observation. I planned for my book to be in part a travelogue assessing the current American landscape. I would talk with all kinds of people, all across the spectrum of beliefs. I wanted to find out what’s really going on in all of the red state cloud-cuckoo lands. But I would settle for taking the temperature of those states on Fanny’s itinerary: Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and New York. I was particularly interested in examining the extensive Southern part of her circuit, as my family’s roots lie in Virginia, Maryland and Tennessee. What Fanny saw there was quite possibly what my great-great-greats were experiencing.

John Steinbeck, when he embarked on the circuit of the United States chronicled in Travels with Charley, rigged up a 1960 GMC truck with a camper for the journey. I thought I would be more rigorous about the truth in my narrative than Steinbeck’s hugely popular though largely fictionalized account. Like Charley. at its heart A Dangerous Subject would be a first-person narrative that attempts “to find out what Americans are like” (as Steinbeck announced his purpose), to portray, as they say about family, “the strangers you happen to be related to.”

If anyone would give me an advance to write it.

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Filed under Culture, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writing

September 11, 2015 · 7:30 pm

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I saved a tree on this industrial stretch of Williamsburg-neighboring Brooklyn today. Or at least I saved a root.

I was on a job at the city-owned Cooper Park Houses, constructed in 1953, which means that the London Plane trees circling the housing project had had plenty of time to grow stately and plump, even if they weren’t grown in a wilderness. These are their siblings in Central Park, the beauties with camouflage patterned bark.

The work day was almost over. When the crew dug up sidewalks in order to install new concrete, my role was to see that all at the border of tree and pavement was well. So far, uneventful. Then the engineers yelled for me, madly gesticulating. And there it was.

A long, red-brown root, encased in fill like an otter swimming through grit. I saw the Plantanus x Acerfolia it was attached to, waving its leafy limbs in a gust of wind. I made sure the workers at the site left the root intact. Preserving it was the only really important thing I did all day. But it was enough.

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Filed under Arborist, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography, Trees

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