Change

On Monday morning I went to my first yoga class in New York City. It was a free class, but not so free because they managed to suck me in to a new member unlimited yoga $25-for-two-weeks deal. To get there on time today I woke up early, had my coffee and a little cereal, got dressed, brushed my teeth, put my yoga mat in my backpack, and squeezed my giant orange beach cruiser through our front door.

I was then stopped by an old Hispanic lady with long white hair wearing a nightgown (I have since seen her wear this several times) who exclaimed, as I fumbled trying to get my bike out our narrow door, “Wait! Don’t go down dose steps! He will hep you. Don’ step on dat!”

She was talking about, of course, the re-tiling job some men have been doing since we moved in. This means they cut tile in the courtyard right outside our window. Cutting tile. With a wet saw. All day. They are cutting this 90’s-looking pink and blue tile and simply putting it over the old, mosaic, earth-toned early 20th century tile that has adorned these hallways since, well, probably since our building was built.

Anyway, this old lady was watching over the men laying the tile, making sure they were doing a good job and making damned sure I wasn’t going to step on that newly-laid marble piece. “Okay mami, you don’ touch the step! Don’ touch!” She made the tiler take my bike downstairs and grabbed my hand, leading me down like a child who doesn’t know how to not step on a piece of marble. “Okay, you welcome mami. Mm hmm,” she nodded, like she was doing me a great favor. In her floral nightgown.

I think she's the same lady that is always screaming in Spanish at the tile workers outside.

I think she's also the same lady who hangs her laundry out on those old lines. Every. Single. Day.


May I digress? I know that the new tile will look a thousand times better than the old hexagonal tiles that probably haven’t been mopped in at least half a century, but I feel like this is a metaphor for life, or something like life: covering up the old with new, pretending like it never existed, and not doing the job properly in the first place. Not taking out the old tile, but just covering it with new pink ugly stuff. Pretending like the old stuff never existed. Which is sometimes what we do with our past, or what cities do with historic buildings.

When I lived in Phoenix, there were never any old buildings, at least none that I can remember. There were always buildings being torn down, new subdivisions going up, always new, new, new.

Omaha (at least downtown/midtown Omaha) is beautiful because the buildings stay old -- for the most part. And in Brooklyn, man, the buildings REALLY stay old. On the outside. I’d love to find out the history of our building because I bet it was built in the early 1900s, and I love living in a place filled with such history. I loved our last apartment on 38th Street because nothing had been renovated, really; the bell at the back door still rang when you pressed it, a real bell on our kitchen wall that the delivery boys probably rang for the milk or the groceries or whatever. Though it didn’t sound bell-like -- it was so rusty and old that it just kinda buzzed. But our doors were original doors, the wood floors were the original floors (all beat up and nasty), the small bedroom off the kitchen was the maid’s quarters, and the kitchen itself had no radiator because it was probably so flippin’ hot since that’s where the maid was all day, baking and cooking and ironing and all that.

I do like to imagine…

When I was little I used to wish so badly that I lived in the “Laura Ingalls Wilder” days. You know, the days of hard work and toil, horses, no cars, no electricity, big heavy dresses, no equal rights, where women tended house all day and the only things they had to look forward to were social events like Christmas ballroom dances. I don’t know what I was thinking about actually wanting to be transported to that time. But I still like to imagine the lives of our apartment’s past inhabitants. Which is why I’m sad about the tile.


I feel like our whole building is this mixture of antique versus modern: I mean, sure, our apartment has modern plumbing, we have our own fuse box with breakers instead of those orange bulb things I used to have to replace in the basement of our old apartment, and we have new windows with the movable screens (well, some of our windows don’t even have screens, but anyway…) but there is still evidence of an older life, of times when there was no Laundromat around the corner, but women had to hang their laundry on the clotheslines that still hang from the windows of every floor:

(Yes, I had to take that through a screen. Sorry.)

Or when gambling and playing was verboten and an egregious sin, when loitering meant trouble and those who did so would certainly heed this sign from the 30s/40s:


Or when the foyer was a piece of art, before it was covered in about 25 coats of paint.

I imagine it looked beautiful in the day, when everything was polished wood and clean little mosaic tiles. When the marble stairs weren’t worn in the middle by thousands of feet climbing them:


Or when (and this is my favorite) ten dollars was actually a lot of money for a fine (and when you could actually read the sign without 25 coats of paint):

I know you probably can't read it. It says "NOTICE: ANYONE PLACING ANY ENCUMBRANCE ON THIS BALCONY WILL BE FINED TEN DOLLARS."

Encumbrance! You'd be hard-pressed to find any sign that uses such big words today.