Trees, Deliberate and Commanding

 

I know I’ve gone on and on about the one, Claude McKay.  Saturday morning, up early in spite of myself and I lay around as a sunny day appeared and finished the biography I’d been working on: “Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in Harlem,” by Wayne F. Cooper.   Mr. Cooper does a good job of filling in the many gaps that McKay’s own autobiography, or the more recent biography by Gary Holcomb, which only covers a subset of his life.  The theme he traces is McKay’s search for a mentor / father figure throughout his life, from his older brother, to Mr. Jekyll in Jamaica, Frank Harris and later Max Eastman in New York.  This searching seemingly culminates during his final years with a conversion to Catholicism.

 

Not for the first time do you read about a historical figure of such dignity struggling, unrecognized and want to reach out across the century and encourage Claude McKay to keep writing, to take care of himself.  He was, as Cooper suggests giving an early voice for ‘black power’ and no one around him was quite ready for it, in the way he was offering it.  He wrote to get paid.  His first effort was a best-seller. The subsequent works were even better but sold poorly.  Eventually no one would publish his work.  How excruciating to have had to sell one’s craft during the Great Depression.  How demoralizing for him at fifty to have to take a job as a riveter during the war, at some factory in New Jersey, where pushed himself to the point of suffering a stroke.  The black intelligentsia didn’t want him, the communists, aligned with Stalin, considered him an enemy.  And he was often his own worst foe. 

 

We drove down to the City today.  My older one had a friend from college who was doing an internship there in town.  She wanted a chance to meet up with another human, in person.  None of these guys understand much of New York’s geography and my gal innocently suggested we drop them off near Chelsea, drive up to the New York Botanical Garden for a look around, return downtown and pick them up so we could head over to Flushing for a proper Chinese dinner.  No one is comfortable in subways or Ubers during Covid and, well, OK, let’s try to do the itinerary as you've suggested. 

 

Down the throughway to the Palisades Parkway, over the GW and down the FDR to drop her off over near Twentieth and Sixth.  The little one was going to get some ramen on her own, then they’d rendezvous and we’d meet them back down here in about two hours so we weren’t late for our Haidilao dinner reservation.  Sunny day, heading up Sixth Avenue, just my wife and I now we got a call around Fifty Seventh Street suggesting we’d dropped them off in the wrong part of town.  She needed to be taken to Sixtieth and Second.  I groaned but eventually mastered myself.  Fortunately someone thought to push the restaurant reservation out by thirty minutes and in about that time we were once again finally heading to the Bronx.

The New York Botanical Garden is a place I never thought to visit when I lived in New York.  Stunning and perfectly aligned with my renewed interest in identifying trees, I marveled at the beautiful unencumbered maturation of two and three-hundred-year-old trees.  Before a large Victorian building in the center of the grounds was a row of mature Tulip Trees, deliberate and commanding.   But we only had twenty eight minutes or so to enjoy the grounds before concurring we’d need to leave now if we were to rendezvous and make out reservation.  We did, and the dinner was the best Chinese food we’d had in a restaurant in over a year.  Won’t be able to eat outside like that for much longer.

Saturday, 10/10/20