Urban Cowboys and Starbucks in NYC

As I sat on the 1 train, heading downtown, three urban cowboys got into the car. Red and white sharply pressed shirts, string ties, tight, shiny jeans, and cowboy boots with spurs. One guitarist, one keyboardist, one lead singer. They sang Feliz Navidad. I gave them a couple of dollars but they moved on before I could snap a picture. They were rather good for traveling musicians.

Now, I am sitting somewhere which could be anywhere in this corporate world of ours. Starbucks on 72nd street and Broadway, and I have free wifi. It's bitterly cold but the streets are full of people. I think, for these next few days, they will give generously to the beggars who sit still on the frozen ground, watching the ankles of the world go by. Is it guilt or a desire to share the season? It doesn't matter to the recipients. They are just glad I think. They have warm rooms for the homeless and the rootless at various places in the city. It's hard to be without a place to call home, especially in this frantic city.

My coffee tastes the same as it does everywhere else. It's warming...and the caffeine buzz is almost instant.

To all my readers (yes, all 10 of you :-)...on this Chritmas Eve of 2009, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and as our corporate overlord Starbucks commands, Hope...and Joy! You better do it!

Another Year in Pompeii

My niece and I went to Pompeii over the Christmas weekend. How best to celebrate the winter solstice, the made-up birthday of Jesus, and shopping mania...than by visiting a city killed by an erupting volcano?

I had seen it in pictures and it seemed like a small place....some houses, some public buildings, that's it. But this really is a city. A city with no people, no life, left in ruins. It almost reminded me of New York City in I am Legend that I recently watched.

The walls are standing. In some places I walked past the entrance, around where large vats were sunk into the ground that once held soup, food, and drinks...ancient restaurants. I went into stores that once must have been redolent with the scent of spices and the rustle of silk. Into lavish homes with elegant pillars, immense reception rooms, internal gardens and beautiful fountains.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. What once was a proud city, with streets, a department of weights and measures, a temple dedicated to Jupiter, public squares and government buildings is now a desolate, abandoned shell still squarely in the sights of the killer that decimated it.

When will Vesuvius strike again. It looks large against the bright blue Italian sky, wreathed in mists and clouds that wind around its cratered peak. And yet we know it rumbles still. Still you can peer around its edge and smell the sulphur, see the bellows of smoke.

It's alive. An ancient, natural force that when pitted against man's hubris of claiming its land came up the victor.

So I wander through Pompeii, outside the normal tourist season, occasional raindrops sprinkling my skin, and in those empty streets I see the fate of my own transitory existence.

Here today! Gone tomorrow! In a flash! The tormented faces of the plaster casts of its ancient victims scream at me, frozen with fear, but yet so animated that I could reach out and touch them.

This was a home once, where children played. And there, a furtive couple kisses away from gazing eyes. There was commerce and life and everything must have seemed forever. Just as it does for us.

But Pompeii makes me stop. And look. And observe. And know...really know...this, all this around me is pure illusion. What is reality? It is the look on the stone face of someone who has seen death and destruction...but who in some semblance lives on, observing this new life that has sprung up around him. And he laughs as the sun dips low over the horizon.

Another year in Pompeii. Another blip in time.

Happy New Year All!

New Year in India

I leave for India tomorrow, to meet family and friends and attend the launch of my book. This is the first time in perhaps 15 years that I'll be in India for Christmas and New Year. Oh yes, and also Bakr-Eid which is essentially an orgy of blood, the bleating of terrified animals and people trying to outshine each other. Far removed from the spirit of sacrifice that the festival is supposed to be about.

Bringing in the new year, 2007, in India is strange. This coming year bisects my life in two. I will be exactly double the age I was when I arrived in the US. I was young, scared and excited and so desperately missing India. It's not like it is for newcomers now, with the Internet and cheap phone calls. To those of us who arrived in the late 80's and early 90's it was a complete shift. We wrote letters and awaited them eagerly. Phone calls were still too expensive to make regularly, especially on TA salaries.

So much has changed. Not just with communication but with me. I'm married, have a home and a family very different from the one I grew up in. My nieces are young women and my nephew is no longer a baby but a guitar toting member of a band.

I have mixed feelings. In some ways I feel my life is waning but in others the next 20 years are replete with promise and newness. It's not been bad so far. In the balance of all things....I've had a good life. I am loved and I love...and that's not too shabby.

But yes, as a new year and another birthday...a seminal birthday...approach I am also filled with regret for things I could have done, things I could have been. Regret is like autumn leaves drifting inexorably to the ground. There is not much I can do about the past. But perhaps I can work towards what is yet to come.

I will try and blog while I am in India but if I am not able to....Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings and a Very Happy New Year.

Hope it's a good one.