What do you give a City that has everything?

When you live in New York, you find yourself complaining about exorbitant rents, traffic jams, and never being able to get the restaurant reservation you want.  But every so often, you meet people who remind you that in the scheme of things, you’ve really just been sweating the small stuff. 

 

An addiction to alcohol nearly destroyed J’s life.  He couldn’t keep a job, his marriage had eroded, and his teenage daughter had stopped talking to him.  J was at rock bottom, but he was brave enough to walk into the Bowery Mission and ask for their help.  He committed himself to the Mission’s six-month program, which allowed him to live on-site amongst other men of his age and situation.  But the Bowery Mission also required J to work towards his own recovery.  As a program participant (“resident”), J had to regularly meet with a counsellor, and he was required to attend Church service, which he came to love – not so much for the religious elements, but more for the opportunity for self-reflection.  Other participants in J’s group came and went, but J knew it was doing him good and he stuck with it.

J has been sober for 13 months now. When he graduated from the Bowery Mission’s program, he relocated to another facility up in Harlem where he has maintained his clean-living lifestyle and is saving money to get into more permanent housing.  While J knows there’s no hope of getting back together with his wife, the fact that he has re-established contact with his daughter (now 21) is an obvious source of pride.

 

Like many other Bowery Mission alumni, J gives back to the organisation that he credits with saving his life.  Indeed, that’s where I met him yesterday – in the Bowery Mission kitchen, preparing the Easter Sunday lunch for the anticipated 300 residents and community members who would stop by.

Having volunteered at the Bowery Mission on Thanksgiving Day few years ago, I knew that volunteers were in abundance on big holidays and this Easter was no exception.  I strapped on the familiar red apron and J put me to work wiping down benches, filling saucepans, restocking cutlery supplies, and sorting through the donations of salad greens and vegetables that had come from restaurants and supermarkets across the city.

When our first cohort of hungry visitors came in, we dished up plates of sausages & peppers (capsicum), pasta, tomato spaghetti sauce, and side salad.  I cast myself in the role of Chief Parmesan Cheese Sprinkler, and for the briefest of times, I was terribly popular.

Once we had cleaned up, I headed out the back to flatten cardboard boxes for recycling, and to help the Mission staff fill garbage bags full of food that they simply couldn’t use - either because there was just too much of it (in the case of the bread), or that the food was perishable and wouldn’t last the day.  Mission staff mused that sometimes, there is such a thing as being too blessed.

 

When you volunteer at the Bowery Mission (and other places like it) you’ll be really busy; you’ll probably get dirty; and if you're anything like me, your feet and body will probably ache the next day.  But to my mind, whether you volunteer a few hours to work behind the scenes, or up front and engaging with the residents and community, it’s an easy way to give something back to a City that makes you feel so welcome.

Grab shell, dude!

Righteous!  Righteous!

You know that scene in "Finding Nemo" where the turtles take Nemo's Dad into the EAC ("East Australia Current")?  He starts off swimming along slowly, minding his own business. And then as quick as a flash, he's dragged into the slip-stream and moving at break-neck speed as the world zips by?  Well, relocating to New York can be a bit like that.  But I think the difference is, where Marlin's desperation to find Nemo meant he had no choice but to leap into the bustling current, we get the choice to hop in and out of the hustle-bustle of New York, and the City doesn't mind either way.

This is just my point of view of course, but I got to thinking more about it this morning at the second annual Downtown Literary Festival, hosted at the Bowery Poetry Club.  Until this week, I had no idea that the Festival or the Club even existed.  But on some random website or other, I saw the event advertised and it seemed an interesting reason to "grab shell" and jump into the chaos.

I fortified myself with much-needed caffeine from Think Coffee at the corner of Bowery and Bleecker, pretty much next door to Saxon & Parole (one of my favourite restaurants in the City).  The Poetry Club is only a block away from there, and I strode in with purpose, right on time.

The Literary Festival presents two full days of free public lectures, events, and book signings, spread out over several locations (not just the Poetry Club, but also the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe and the amazing McNally Jackson bookstore).  Saturday's program was largely for kids, so I let that one go and focussed on Sunday's program instead.  Rather than switch between the multiple locations today, I planted myself in a corner seat at the Poetry Club and settled in for a couple of hours.

Chickens are excellent poets.

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this Festival.  Was it going to be full of weird, cardigan-wearing chain smokers talking profoundly about authors I'd never read (or worse, never heard of)?  Would I be expected to ask a question or make a contribution?  Please God, I thought, don't let there be any audience participation.

I needn't have worried at all.  The Festival was very much a casual affair, with a great line-up of really interesting, New York-focussed panel discussions and readings.

The very first panel discussion was entitled, Natives and Newcomers: How Open is New York City? and so it was really appropriate to my situation, and that of a lot of transplants here.  The panel discussion also compared and contrasted how welcoming New York is versus London, so again that was a hugely relevant conversation for me.

The second session was a selection of readings from magazine articles, which veered into "weird" territory in parts, but was hugely amusing in others.  I was really taken with the reading about the book by The Onion's Baratunde Thurston called, "How To Be Black" - and particularly the (black) journalist's experiences of reading the satirical book on NYC public transport during Black History Month in February, and the various reactions she got.

My final panel discussion for the day was entitled "Vice and Virtue: Stories of Sin and Salvation".  This section was comprised of a short (but very evocative) account of a man's visit to a dominatrix in Amsterdam; a series of short poems on cross-dressing and encounters with a pimp on a Madrid dance floor; a girl's free-association diary entry that I absolutely could not follow; a fantastic recount of a bartender's memoir that struck very close to the bone ("Drinking With Men" by Rosie Schaap); and finally an eye-opening excerpt from a journalist's adventures at a Furry Convention.  Talk about a mixed bag!

With no audience participation necessary, the Downtown Literary Festival is an excellent reminder of the talent that resides here in New York.  It's about people who are brave enough to jump into the slip-stream of this energetic city and share their talents, and their stories of survival, with the rest of us.