Ms. Irene

The television at Galaxy Diner was left on. I’m guessing that no one had ever been assigned the duty of turning it off, since Galaxy never closes.  It’s the 24 hour go to spot for a late night, after hours nosh.  But, it was closed.  In fact, up and down 9^th Avenue, restaurants and shops had shuttered up and taped their windows in preparation for Hurricane Irene.

“Oh law!  I heard Irene is about to whup up on New York.  Do you have a place to go?” My friend JL was texting me from the Carolinas.

“Yes,” I answered, “my favorite bar.”

“Be careful,” he warned.

I realized that my out of state friends were concerned about what they were seeing on the news, so I put aside the jovial remarks to assure them that the storm would probably do the most damage on the other side of town, and in low laying areas that were already being evacuated. 

JL was relieved.

“Oh no!  Don’t mess with Ms. Irene,” he texted, “she was one of our neighbors in the projects.  Nobody walked in her yard or bothered her after she had her gin. She chewed tobacco too. She wasn’t like my great grandmother or the other ladies who chewed snuff.”

Point taken.  Ms. Irene was on her way, and she was in a mood.

One by one, the businesses had begun to close, to allow employees to get home to their families before the weather worsened.  The owner of one local store was offering the services of his own car to get his workers home. The MTA had stopped running at noon that day. New York City was shutting down.

Well, almost. Being the city that never sleeps, there was the deli on the corner of 9^th and 46^th that remained open, and bars and restaurants that kept regular hours.  Hurricane parties sprung up around the neighborhood where, of course, they were serving Hurricane cocktails.

We ended up at House of Brews on 46^th Street, a regular hang out. There was a group of us from the neighborhood.  Most of us lived there, while the rest worked in the neighborhood, but had no easy way to get home.  They would be staying with friends in the area, or at the hotel across the street.  We drank, we danced and we sang, as the rain began to run from the sky and the water gathered on the sidewalk.

I was the first to leave the festivities.  I was tired, and I was hungry.  I wasn’t in the mood to prepare anything myself.  So, I decided to walk to Galaxy Diner, where I found no one but the tiny people in the television that had been left on.  Undaunted, I walked on.  This was 9^th Avenue.  Surely someone was serving something, somewhere.

Smiler’s 24 hour Deli was also closing. I didn’t even know Smiler’s had a gate. Although my beloved Galaxy was out of commission, Westway Diner was a trouper. I quickly texted my compadres back at the bar that they had a food option, before ordering up some comfort food –Cheeseburger and fries.  Vacations and natural disasters cancel diets every time.  Once again, I put my head down, and shoulder to the rain and made it home with my treasure.  In such a downpour, an umbrella was sometimes a mere gesture.  I popped in a DVD and settled in for the night.  In the morning, I awakened to a very wet city, but one that was, for the most part, still intact.



9th Avenue NYC after the storm

I sent JL a message, “Although I had much fun at the hurricane party, this side of town didn’t get much hurricane.”

“Ms. Irene was drunk!” He answered. “She got lost.”

I took a walk around the quiet neighborhood.   The usual Sunday Brunchers were missing.  Today, businesses were still closed and only a few stragglers, like me, roamed the empty streets.  Most New Yorkers depended on the MTA, which would not be up and running until the next day, following inspection of the rails and equipment.  This meant that workers living in the outer boroughs would find transportation difficult.

Plans for urban search and rescue were put into play. According to early field reports, some areas indeed suffered extreme flooding and wash outs.  Travel was impossible in some places. 

Although Ms. Irene had downgraded to a tropical storm by the time she hit New York City, she’d still left some major damage to the tri state area.  Ms. Irene had transitioned into what the New Jersey mayor called a “major flooding incident.”

By the time the water dried, there would be over 45 estimated casualties, and about 9 million people left in the dark. Damages reached an estimated $1 billion in the state of New York alone. Irene was declared a federal disaster.

Citizens debated about the amount of precaution the city had taken.  Some said it was too much.  To most of us, we were better off being safe, than sorry.

Cheers,

-Ceddy

9th Avenue NYC the morning after

The Pow Wow

The sun beat down like the tum-tum of the nearby drum, and as incessant, earnest and ancient.  “It’s amazing how something millions of miles away can do something like this,” Marc later said of Kim’s resultant sunburn. 

It’s amazing to me how an indigenous people can, for thousands of years, hold on to the traditions, culture and values of their ancient civilization, despite the blistering trials, changing landscape and brutal exploitation that threatened to rip it from their grasp.

The singers and drummers

I am referring to the more than forty Native American tribes who gathered this past weekend for the 33^rd Annual Thunderbird American Indian Mid-Summer Pow Wow to celebrate and share what they have preserved for generations. 

It was Sunday, the culmination of a three day intertribal festival, which included both traditional and modern food, vendor booths filled with artifacts, crafts and traditional garb, and dance competitions.  Marc, Kim and I took a scenic bus ride that led us away from the urban maze of Manhattan to the lush green of the Queens County Farm Museum in Floral Park where, in a clearing, we watched as representatives from the different tribes dance the traditional powwow dances of their people.

For the past three decades, the Thunderbird Native American Dancers has hosted the event which boasts representation from such tribes as the Cherokee, Aztec, Hopi, Navajo, and many more, arriving from all over the nation and as far away as the Caribbean. It has become New York’s largest, and longest running. The organization is well known in the New York area for offering ongoing services, such as monthly pow wows, craft and language workshops, and the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers Scholarship, to which proceeds from this event are contributed. 

Like the sun, these are a resilient and steadfast people. Their beauty and majesty brought to mind the vague memories of my great-grandmother, who was Cherokee. It made me wonder of my own heritage, as our time together had been brief.  This festival made me wish I’d had a stronger connection.  I admired the joy and enthusiasm of the young people who paraded and danced before me.  I was humbled by the pride and the determination of their guardians who teach generation after generation what had been taught to them by their guardians, and their guardians before, thus making it possible for us to share in these traditions today.

While the festivities had begun with the raising of the American flag, and a song honoring our veterans and soldiers, we were left with the profound words of the Director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and the MC, Louis Mofsie (aka Green Rainbow of Hope Tribe of Arizona, and the Winnebago Tribe of Wisconsin):

“We’ve had the chance to go down to Chinatown and to see the parade and all the Chinese people in their traditional dress and the dragons and the lines … we got to go to the German festival and see them in their traditional German dress…Well, this is our festival.  This is where we get together to sing our traditional songs and to wear our traditional garb.  The only difference is we didn’t come here from another country.  This is our country, and we’ve been here for thousands of year.”

As far as I can tell, we’ll be here thousands more.

Cheers,

-Ceddy

This is how to keep a heritage alive!