bric a brac

Maybe these objects, too, were the residue of someone's attic or basement: they've ended up in an upmarket junk shop on Waverley Place. Oh, such fun to be in NY, even if I was scurrying to a dissertation defense at NYU in the certitude that I'd be late (I wasn't), and had to scurry back again to Administrative Chores. But I gave myself the rare treat after the defense of wandering around in the East Village, reflecting on how it's still the old, residential NY that I explored in the late 70s - but then always with the apprehension that one was about to walk onto a Very Unsafe Feeling Block. Now, there are street people pushing shopping carts, and elderly Ukrainian women leaning out of top floor windows, and a stooping gentleman planting out very spindly geraniums in his window boxes, but interspersed with these is an unmistakable air of young multi-racial hipsterdom. It's a New York with a very human scale, and I was instantly hatching - not fantail dove eggs, but plans to try and live there, somehow, for a month or so...I still carry around with me a feeling that NYC is home - or one of my homes - but that actually inhabiting it eludes me.