Dutch Word for Sea

My older one was very sweet.  She took it to paint a small, still of a blue jay, for my stepdad, her “ye ye” who’s down in the Westchester Medical Center with a stint in his jugular vein that is pouring new blood in whilst bad blood transfers out.  An ornithologist I am hopeful that this familiar bird will bring a smile.  He misses the outdoors. 

I drove down to my old terra firma Westchester County, New York.  I took the New York State Throughway until it was time to cut across the Tappan Zee, which isn’t called that any more and isn’t really there anymore.  It’s now the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge which is OK.  I have reasonably fond memories of Mario, Hamlet on the Hudson.  But if I was Andrew, who doesn’t need much to become upset, I’d be upset that the bridge, which bears my father’s name and which is otherwise, certainly attractive, doesn’t afford proper views from inside a car, when you cross it.  This is a bridge no-no.  You look south, you need to look through a mesh fence that obscures the views.  You look north you need to look through not just one but two more mesh fences on the other bridge, which ruin any view of the miraculous Hudson, in that direction. 

“Tappan Zee” is a cool sounding thing, to my ears.  It doesn’t really sound like anything that belongs to one or another language.  This, as it is apparently two words from two different languages, bolted together.  “Tappan” was apparently the sub-tribe of Lenni Lanape Indians who lived here and “Zee” is the Dutch word for “sea” as this is a particularly wide section of the mighty Hudson fjord. 

Crossing over it isn’t long before I’m passing through Tarrytown, which I’ve passed through surely a thousand times but never before realized that the name undoubtedly had something to do with the verb 'to tarry.' People must have stayed here on their way to Albany and some witty soul thought to memorialize the town’s utility and perhaps to promote the hamlet as well. 

Valhalla is the home of Thor and the other Nordic pantheon.  In Westchester it is appropriately the home of one of the largest grave sights in the state, which one of the parkways that cuts through as well as the Harlem Line train tracks pass within a view of.  Less suitably, it is also the home of the hospital I am heading towards.  All the parkways, the Saw Mill and the Sprain Brook and the Taconic, all of which have cool old names rather than the Floyd Jones Parkway, all cross here and soon I’ve pulled up to entrance, which I can not enter during Covid.

Wednesday, 6/24/20