15

And so I have spent the last five hours wandering New York.

I needed a walk and so I ventured into the rain and joined all of the world's voices and faces, down Broadway to Battery Park where I hoped to just move myself along the waterfront for a few hours. Once there, under the dying sycamores, I found the signs leading to the ferries for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and I decided to fall in with the drizzled crowd, the river of people and the Hudson.

The ferry ride to Ellis Island is one of the most enduring and authentic of America's myths, the myth of European Americans, that is. It is our portal to identity, to history, to suffering, to reclaiming identity, to so many of of constructed identities and ideologies, to so many constructed and fragmented stories and histories. Ellis Island stained us, blessed us, annointed us. Ellis Island was our witness.

For the whole journey, the sky was laden with heavy clouds and we could not escape the drizzle. Still, I stood on the deck, watching the river, the island shrouded in fog, as if cloaked in the mist of history, or memory, so that once it appeared, the city behind us disappeared. We were traveling in a ghostly time here on the river where nothing was visible except ourselves and the time we were entering, our collective memory, and the stories we needed to uncover. And, quite lovely, inside the ferry, among the Pakistanis and Jews and Italians and Poles, all of the generations of Americans and aliens, three sparrows were trapped inside, flying against the plexiglass windows, desperate to escape.

I spent some time walking the grounds, more attracted to the abandoned rear of the building, the decayed structure, than the museum's exhibits and the genealogies. My story, as it turns out, does not pass through Ellis Island, and so I felt alienated there, perhaps expecting too much than the constructed story could offer. I think I was looking for texture and music and grief, some kind of personal touchstone, and what I remembered, as I was toying with the computerized geneology, was that really, my grandfathers were essentially erased from history, from memory, and while I didn't feel insulted by that jab from memory, I felt as if I'd been displaced by the machinery of the exhibit. No problem, really, I spent some time writing. Had a Nathan's hot dog and some coffee and fought off an attack by a maurauding band of rough-looking gulls.

Back in Battery Park, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the sun came out, lovely! Took a good 90 minute hike along the river just eying the people, the Hudson, the architecture. Stopped several times to do some writing. On my way back to the hotel stopped at a bookstore and browsed through the poetry and philosophy sections and then did some more writing over coffee.

Now, back at the hotel, I am thinking about thinking, about how much my feel hurt, about how to get people (colleagues) to work together on exciting ideas that will lead us to a better future, get us out of a past that is stultifying us.

And I am thinking about the hundreds of dark men I saw today with dollies carrying their possessions in roped bags and suitcases, some are entrepreneurs, some are homeless, some are ill, some are dying, some are Americans, some are aliens, some are brilliant, some are not, but there are so many of them, and they do not look healthy and too many of the people around them seem to disregard them.

I write all of this while sitting in the 21st storey of the Millenium Hotel, looking out on the chasm left by the Twin Towers, now just a construction site at night, a ast openness, a kind of stillness, an emptiness, a void that the rest of the city circumnavigates in grave anxiety.