Tag: summer

Categories
New York City

Postcard from Rockaway

It barely qualifies as a day at the beach. But the two hours that I spent at Fort Tilden on Tuesday achieved their purpose, which was to help me beat the heat wave that has enveloped the city.

The temperature at the former U.S. Army installation that’s now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area was about 7 degrees lower than temperatures here in Manhattan.

The water registered 77 degrees, which feels body temperature on a day like today. I bobbed twice in the swells for about 15 minutes at a time. About 50 feet away, a pair of lifeguards in red trunks, one male, one female, perched atop a chair eight feet high, their legs stretched out in the sun.

Between trips to the water, I snacked from a Ziploc of shelled peanuts that I had packed, and read an article in The New Yorker about the evolution of civic and private power in San Francisco across three generations of the author’s family.

On the drive to the ocean, I was reminded that traffic here in New York — even during the middle of a weekday — is a force to reckon with. On the drive home, my skin cool and salty, my t-shirt smelling like the ocean, I barely minded.

Upon arriving at Fort Tilden, I took a few wrong turns to the beach. Of course, I could feel the ocean from where I stood. It was just beyond the scrubby trees. But in the three years since I last visited the fort, the National Park Service had closed some paths and opened others.

I found my way thanks to a retiree from Amsterdam who pushed a bicycle (right?!) and pointed to a path where all one had to do was to turn right.

As we walked, she asked me what I thought of a suggestion by a friend of hers, an American who she said had retired to Spain. He asked if he could use her U.S. address as his own for purposes of claiming Social Security. She said she had some concerns about that, as she receives Social Security, too.

I suggested she trust her instinct.. We thanked each other, and each went our way.

Categories
New York City

Heat dome

On Saturday at 7:00 p.m. in New York City the temperature was in the low 90s, which we imagine had something to do with a “heat dome” moving across the country. That sent us to the Angelika for a screening of Café Society, the new Woody Allen film.

Midway through the movie, we felt our pulse slow and the city cool. And by the time we emerged afterward onto Houston Street, a light wind had come up.

Categories
Life

In summertime, an old treat feels new again

king cone copySouth Africa may be the land of biltong, but my snack of choice lately is the King Cone. The frozen treat, commonly known as a drumstick, consists of ice cream in a waffle cone topped with a chocolate shell. It seems drumsticks are for sale in every grocery and convenience store here in the Kwa-Zulu Natal province.

Maybe it’s the summertime or that there seem to be fewer ice cream shops per capita here compared with the U.S., but it’s all I can do to avoid consuming a King Cone daily. The treat delivers about 360 calories and half a day’s ration of saturated fat, according to Nestle, the conglomerate that sells these things. My current tactic: buy one King Cone every fourth day. I devoured one on Wednesday and now look forward to Sunday.

The drumstick elicits memories of visiting the convenience store in the neighborhood where we lived as kids. That was years before frozen yogurt and Ben & Jerry’s. Back then if you wanted something frozen you sprang for a drumstick, a Popsicle, a Creamsicle, a Cap’n Crunch bar, a Heath bar or one of those ice bars that come in long plastic sleeves. (My favorite flavors: grape, lime or blue.)

Nestle cultivates the nostalgia. Even if you’re an adult it’s okay to like Saturday morning cartoons, grilled cheese for dinner and, of course, drumsticks, the company assured consumers last April in a sponsored post on BuzzFeed. Like many products nowadays, the drumstick has its own Facebook page. Nestle commissioned a musical tribute when the page notched its millionth fan.

Despite the hype – or maybe because of it – the drumstick has become my summer delight here in the Southern Hemisphere. The nostalgia has me on the lookout for other treats that brightened, or benighted, my childhood. Would anyone like a Tic Tac?

Categories
Favorite Places

My Favorite Places: Butler Library

butlerI like Butler Library on the campus of Columbia University. Make that love. Especially in summer. On the hottest days I head to Butler, where air conditioning, the ornamental ceilings, the portraits of Columbia’s leaders who gaze out from centuries past and the knowledge that two million volumes lie within reach offer both an invitation to ideas and a sense of repose.

In the main reading room the table lamps glow yellow and daylight fills the room. The place sounds lovely: fingers scroll on computer mice and MacBooks snap shut and people’s sandals clack across the tile floor.

The other day a girl across a table from me put down a cup of ice that made a satisfying pop. She wore a brick red shirt and typed on a MacBook Pro encased in a sleeve of the same color.

A guy to her right who wore a blue t-shirt closed a hardcover book with a soft thud. Someone’s muted iPhone buzzed. The air hummed. A man at the reference desk in a black t-shirt and madras shorts spoke in hushed tones with a librarian who wore a coral-colored sweater.

The acoustics of Butler have captivated others. One blogger, Gustavo Val, took his microphone to Butler’s Milstein reading room, where he recorded the “silent” environment:

“Additionally, other irregular sounds are present in this environment: the sound of someone getting up, someone coughing, footsteps over the marble floor, zippers, and the click of an opening door. Focusing our attention further other subtle sounds appear in our recording: the sound of turning pages and of fingers typing a computer keyboard.”

I bring long sleeves to ward off Butler’s chill, which is the opposite of my apartment, where the air grows hot and stale and my MacBook overheats and the city assaults me aurally.

Butler, with its Italian Renaissance design, opened in 1934. The building was financed by Edward Harkness, a harness maker and philanthropist who was among the early investors in Standard Oil, and designed by James Gamble Rogers. The building was initially called South Hall but later renamed in honor of Nicholas Murray Butler, who served as the Columbia’s president from 1902 to 1945.

At Butler’s core stands a 15-level stack of steel shelves that rises six floors. Inside the stacks “there is the deep quiet of protection and near-abandonment,” wrote Ben Ratliff, a music critic for the New York Times, who also counts Butler among his summer places. According to Ratliff:

“You hear the hum of the lights, turned on as needed; that’s it. There’s a phone to make outgoing calls on the fifth floor. To me the stacks are the most sacred space in the library, yet here nobody’s telling you not to talk. You’re on your own. It’s a situation for adults.”

Butler’s stacks make Ratliff “dopily happy,” which describes my feeling about the library generally. In the span of a few hours recently I pored over a history of New York State, discovered a two-volume set of Thoreau’s writings, flipped through a biography of Roger Williams and glanced at an atlas of the world.

Author Herman Wouk, who graduated from Columbia the year Butler opened, called the university a place of “doubled magic,” where “the best things of the moment were outside the rectangle of Columbia; the best things of all human history and thought were inside the rectangle.”

Butler embodies that magic. Buzzfeed recently ranked the library one of the 49 most breathtaking in the world.

I cannot imagine a more extraordinary place to be. “Outside it’s 100F,” a Butler partisan named Therese Grinceri tweeted on Friday. “Inside it’s lovely and cool @ Butler Library.”