B&W Photography ~ Mother's Day in Manhattan ~ 5.13.12

Class Trip to FDR Home and the Culinary Institute of America

     Last week my twelve-year-old daughter, Charista, asked me to chaperone her seventh grade class trip. At first mention, the thought of a 6-hour round-trip bus ride with 75 middle-schoolers to Poughkeepsie, New York was the least appealing way for me to spend an entire Wednesday. And the tear-off permission slip made note that the bus would depart from the school promptly at 6:30 AM and would return approximately twelve hours later.  But of course her big, beautiful, pleading brown eyes won. How bad can a visit to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's home be, with lunch at the Culinary Institute of America?

    
      The alarm the morning of the trip rang at 5 AM and for the next hour, Charista ironed her hair, packed some snacks (she handed me a Ziploc bag of mini-pretzels in the car), carefully selected the clothes she'd wear in lieu of her uniform day and applied lip gloss carefully, because it was the onlymakeup I've reluctantly allowed her to start wearing. 

    

     It was a torrentially rainy morning and we parked across the street from her private school. We plucked out two giant golf umbrellas from the trunk, underneath the sedementary layers of tennis rackets, cases of bottled water, and folding beach chairs I use to watch her twin sisters' soccer games. 

      Disheveled and stressed, I was politely urged by Charista to hurry it up, play real-life Frogger across the four-lane boulevard, and get on the bus, as her friends had been texting her for the last few minutes that we were the last two to arrive.  Charista was probably thinking I was a slow-poke, but she was kind to her dear, old Mom, as always, and we crossed the street, holding hands and embarked the luxury bus to Hyde Park. 

      Charista has enjoyed a growth spurt recently, and was taller than I now, when I'm not wearing my standard four-inch heels, and soon I'm sure she'll surpass my 5'5" stature (to come to think of it, my heels get taller as she gets taller).  At the top of the stairs of the bus, we said hello to our friends in the first few rows and before I could say, "Can you believe the weather we're having," Charista spotted her friends, sprinted to the back of the bus, and disappeared into the gaggle of excited tweeners. I was left to sit by myself in a two-person row, close enough to the other moms to make pleasant chit-chat, but far away from them enough to daydream when the mood hit me. The day was looking up!

     
     As I stared out my window, flashbacks abounded.  This coming September, Charista would be in the eighth grade. She recently started review class for the Catholic High School entrance exams.  She had been "promoted" to the Senior2 from Junior1 division of swimmers at her city-wide swim team, and had been getting some attention from young men in her class and in her social circles, all the while maintaining an A+ average. 

     But in my heart, she will always be the little 7 lb. 4oz newborn the nurse handed to me when she was born twleve years ago, swaddled in the hospital-issued baby blanket, strawberry blonde hair and green eyes so beautiful. 

     Fast forward to 2012. Charista texts non-stop, takes pride in the kindness she shows her sisters and her friends, loves some guy name Harry Styles of One Direction fame, and is very sensitive and emotional, much like her mom.

     She is a happy child, of which I am proud, and she and her sisters make me laugh every single day of my life. They also cause other emotions, too, but I'll leave that for another blog post. She had recently said to me that I am one of the few people who gets her sense of humor, and I loved hearing that, because I've told her (and I mean it) that were she not my daughter, she would be my best friend.

     One particular memory of her Charista and her friends popped into my mind on the road to Poughkeepsie that morning.  I remembered when they were in the first grade and the big event for the students that year was a "Thanksgiving Feast" in their classroom right before the holiday break. 

     The moms who agreed to chaperone that Thanksgiving party were asked to dress up as Indians or Pilgrims.  I was a Pilgrim.  I looked ridiculous. I had scoured the internet for a Pilgrim costume that was not befitting of a Hugh Hefner Grotto Party and found a particularly boring one, with my giant shoe buckles and black and white skirt and apron and some sort of Pilgrim hat that barely covered my large head. 

     But the children were delighted, especially Charista, who took me by the hand as soon as I entered the door, excited to introduce me to her little 6-year-old pals. Charista was only 5-years-old at the time, because she skipped Pre-K under the advisement of the school admisinstration who tested her during the application process when she transferred over from another pre-school.

     Anyway, I stood there, dressed as a Pilgrim, as my eldest daughter rattled off the name of a dozen friends.  I don't clearly remember any of them. What I did memorize was the feeling of her tiny, 5-year-old hand in mine.

    

     Ok, so, back to the party. The children lined up patiently that day for a turn with a cooking brush to "baste" a poster-sized picture of a turkey tacked on the wall.  This was after they "sprinkled" feather seasonings on a rubber chicken on the teacher's desk, and formed a circle around their teacher to hear about the first Thanksgiving after a long, harsh winter. They said grace and feasted on pumpkin pie that I had brought. To say they were the cutest kids ever is an understatement in my memory.

     So we stepped off the bus in beautiful Hudson County, finally. Keeping up with Charista and her fresh-faced, fashionable, and well-mannered seventh-grade friends was a challenge. They travelled at lightning speed, darting from one exhibit to another.

     They enjoyed the documentary movie of FDR as a family man, and relished each other's company, all the while tolerating my requests to photograph them throughout the day, with both my iPhone and my "real" camera.  I was impressed that Charista was not embarrassed that I wore my Canon DSLR around my neck for the entirety of the trip.  I imagine another child would've rather died than be seen with her mother, snapping away, like a dorky tourist. I was proud of her.

     When a photo-op arose every few yards and I asked Charista and her friends to pose, they knew exactly which angle to turn, and how big to smile, where to place their hands and how high to tilt their chins. They knew precisely how to maximize their beauty for the camera. Impressive! 

     With the advent of the now-ubiquitous iPhone, these young ladies had taken a picture or two before. They also knew that instantly their photos would be uploaded to Facebook and Instagram by their friends on that trip within minutes. And I personally subscribe to the fact that everyone has a good side and a bad side.  These girls had figured it out but good.

     The tour wore on.  They were reflective in learning about FDR, and when they were asked by the tour guide who the other two United States Presidents were who were considered the best in American history, they answered George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

    
     Charista was amazed to find out that FDR had polio and that it had been such a common disease afflicting children in the 1930's and 1940's, before Jonas Salk had invented the polio vaccine.  She was surprised to hear that FDR had started the March of Dimes, after opening up his home in Georgia and its swimming pool as a rehab facility for children with polio.

     She was interested that he then started a national campaign for Americans to each donate a dime to help fund the battle against polio, thus earning his image on the American dime. I was personally surprised myself. I always thought it was Harry Truman.

     The lunch later that afternoon was quite delightful at the Culinary Institute of America and gave me a chance to talk to the other moms who were chaperoning the trip, comparing notes as to the types of reviews our children were taking for the specialized high school test, what our summer plans were, how many hours we allowed our thirteen-year-olds on social networking sites.

     The food was remarkably good and my glass of Chardonnay was excellent. The entire two hours were spent smiling and nodding and chewing, all the while keeping an eye on Charista and where she was sitting and with whom she was engaging in conversation, as she had a couple of faculty at her table. I try not to be too obvious and quickly look away when she glances my direction, but she knows I was watching. I'll always be watching.  She may be taller than I, but she is still my baby, after all.

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Here are some of the images I captured that wonderful day I spent with my eldest daughter, chaperoning her 7th grade class trip.  Please note the first three are photographs I took of reproductions found in the FDR library, Hyde Park, NY.

The Bronx Zoo

     Today in the mail I received my membership card to the Wildlife Conservation, otherwise known as the little laminated card that cost me $275 two weeks ago that entitles me "free" entry to the Bronx Zoo, the Prospect Zoo, the Queens Zoo, the New York Aquarium, and the Central Park Zoo.  And it is worth every penny.

     As a family of five, everywhere we turn, whether it's seeing "The Lorax" at the UA Theatres, learning about geology at Liberty Science Center, or going for Mexican on a Saturday night, it's about $150 any way you cut it, so naturally we become members whenever memberships are offered.


     The Bronx Zoo is one of my children's favorites and there never seems to be enough time to see all the attractions they'd like to see, mainly because they have very long attention spans.  My three daughters, ages 12, 8 and 8, can stare at birds or monkeys till the proverbial cows come home. 

     At our last trip there, I think I must've memorized the path one of the two giant tigers took, as Bronx Zoo enthusiasts marvelled at his tiger beauty!  He paced decidedly back and forth, and then up the rock canyon and then back down toward the pond, and then up again the little mountain.  Then he'd snooze there for what seemed like an eternity, only to emerge eventually up to the glass, where my kids can snap a few photos on their iPhones. And then he would turn again and retrace his path. 


     This lasted for close to almost 45 minutes and my daughters' interest waned not one iota. Amazing. Where are these beasts when I need them in my chaotic house during the week? Anyway, my girls' eyes were peeled, their mouths ajar, their voices giggled after having captured some cool photos of these beautiful mammals. They were thrilled. They were hypnotized. They were learning. And that is the beauty of the zoos in general. First-hand experiences with wildlife that would otherwise just be confined to color photos in textbooks.


     When my girls finally extracted themselves from this exhibit, we high-tailed it over to the Ethiopian highlands! The girls immediately forgot about their beloved tigers and feasted their eyeballs on.... the baboons. These charming creatures, all fluffy with manes of fur and interacting with each other with what seemed to me to be very human gestures (ie, holding their young close, fighting with each other fiercely and relentlessly--- this reminded me of my twins, especially), were situated in the “African Alps," which boasted the largest primate collection in the country.

     Then there was the Okapi calf, which one of the twins said looked like a hyena wearing zebra trousers, the Polar bear, the giraffe, the birds, the reptiles, the butterflies and a whole bunch of fish too many to mention. The afternoon flew by.

     The girls were rightly exhausted from wandering the trails of the Bronx Zoo, and even too tired to ride the famous Bug Carousel, but not too tired to get an ice cream cone before we found our way back to our minivan in their parking lot. Where it was parked. For free. Thank heaven for memberships.

The Supermoon    

     Evidently, photographers as a whole, generally get excited about a few certain things:  good, available light; street photography, especially when shot in black and white; decayed, abandoned buildings, and the more graffiti and rusty remnants, the better; and something called a Supermoon.  Yes, that's right, a Supermoon.  It's much like Superman or Supermom or Super-sized fast-food value meals.  The Supermoon.

     The Supermoon,  the full moon at its brightest and biggest in the entire year because of its extremely close proximity to the Earth in its elliptical orbit, got my friends in my photography circles all abuzz, talking it up as if the Pope himself were coming for a visit, or if the Jets were going to be playing in the Superbowl.  There were lengthy discussions on how marvelous it would be to behold, there were practice shots days taken days before. Lengthy conversations about camera settings at which they planned to shoot ensued, as well as where in New York City would be the best vantage points to capture the magnificence of the much-anticipated Supermoon.

     But of course, as intrigued as I was about something that would be so awe-inspiring as to be dubbed as "Super," I had better things to do than worry about a big, fat, bright moon. I had to be a mom.  It was the weekend, after all.  Who really cared about a large, big ball in the sky, which most of my friends who were not photographers had never even heard of.  Not me! I had things to do, kids to taxi around. Never mind also that that it was Cinco De Mayo, and the rest of the single world was plotting where they would consume the most Coronas and margaritas with their compadres.  I had a job to do. I have three children.

     So that Saturday, my girls, ages 12, 8, and 8 (yes, twins... please continue to pray for me), got it into their heads that they should go to the Bronx Zoo (prior to their swim meet later in the afternoon), where we had visited a couple of weeks earlier during their Easter break, because they had not adequately enjoyed all its exhibits and because they had not the desired time to ride the carousel of bugs, they explained. Nor did they fully enjoy monkees long enough or the tigers and the tiger parade around the tiger area behind the glass, where I'm pretty sure they had their noses pushed up against the glass for nearly an hour at the last visit. They made a pretty convincing argument to head up to the Bronx.

     But alas, times restraints dictated we go to the closer in proximity Staten Island Children's Museum, where the girls (well, the twins really;  my eldest daughter pretty much texted the entire time) were able to run amok on all three levels, building houses with giant wooden boards, pretend to rock-climb in the Arctic and rock-hop in the "Great Explorations" area.  They played ad-nauseum on the fire truck, and pretended to be ladybugs and veterinarians in "It's a Bugs Life."  The good news is that they had a great time. The bad news that they tired not one iota after a couple of hours of wild playing, which was a good thing, because off we went to a swim meet immediately thereafter.

     Swim meets for me are always fun nowadays as a spectator, because I have three swimmers in the meet, and not just one, which is how it was before the twins took up the sport competitively.  Because when you think about it, hours of driving and sitting in the stiflingly hot and humid indoor pool is really a sacrifice to watch only one of your darlings swim for a total of about 2 minutes over three events. So I'm lucky in that my three girls have a cumulative, approximate 9 minutes to reward me for all my troubles of driving them and feigning interest when other people's kids swim. It makes the boredom, well, less boring.

     The meet went "swimmingly" well, as the girls were triple and doubles winners each (which means they won two of their three of their events in which they raced, if not all of them), respectively to their descending ages, and the side effect for me was that they were aptly exhausted, finally, at meet's end.  So much so that my husband and I had no qualms about calling my in-laws for last-minute babysitting duties and embarking upon... (drum roll , please) the hunt for the Supermoon!

     The drive into Manhattan from Staten Island is always a glorious one, and not because we were leaving behind, at least for a few hours, the constant, sometimes delightful, but often annoying chatter of young children, but because the bridge into Brooklyn is the gorgeous Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. As night falls and Manhattan becomes lit up with a million twinkling lights, the splendor of New York City is unyielding. And even though there was oodles of traffic on the Gowanus, too... who cared? Not us! We were on furlough. 

     Now, mind you, the drive in a car with just my husband and me is quite different from when our girls are with us. The music is Frank Sinatra or Erasure, instead of One Direction and Justin Beiber. There is not a constant narrative of how many other cars on the highway have dogs as passengers or who was invited to whose party and who wasn't. There are no arguments about who gets what Go-Go and there is an absence of sharp crackling noises of the Cheetos bag being passed around because they are "starving," even though they were invariably just fed a nutritious lunch by yours truly an hour prior.  When the girls are at Grandma's, it is just Michael and me!

     The search for the Supermoon required first that we made a stop for dinner.  The sky looked cloudy and we thought we'd give it time to clear up with some mulligatawny soup. We went to Little India, around 6th Street and First Avenue, walking for a few blocks, perusing menus and some really gawdy storefronts along the way, but all smelling delicious, until we found an Indian restaurant that looked authentic enough so we knew it would be good, but modern enough so we didn't contract dysentery, should we need to use the facilities. 

     And we were not disappointed.  Everything was savory and just-right spicy. And cheap.  And good service to boot. Plus, there was live music, comprised of a solitary Indian man, cross-legged on an elevated platform, chanting, singing and strumming his sitar, right next to our table.  So an order of chicken tikka masala, shrimp vindaloo, nan and aloo-palak, not to mention a couple of drinks (leave it to us to have Taj beers on Cinco de mayo), later, we were full and happy. 

     And above all, we laughed.  We talked and we laughed and it was as if we were dating again (although I do recall when we actually WERE first dating, and he took me for Indian food for the first time, I was kind of offended how literally distasteful and way too spicy and not to my liking the indian cuisine was. Who'd ever think it'd be my favorite now?).

     That night, in search of the Supermoon, was reminscent of the days before the stresses of running two dental offices, the times before discussions of where our eldest daughter would consider attending high school in a couple of years, the days before mortgages and taxes and our parents' health issues.  It reminded me of our past, when we were younger... and happier. 

     Now mind you, our marriage is in good shape, don't get the wrong idea and start making a list of divorce lawyers to recommend to us. If you have been married for more than seven years, I think you can totally relate.  And if you can't, then I think you're lying. In our case, in the few weeks leading up to Supermoon weekend, things had been very stressful at work and the kids' swim, soccer, and softball schedules, not to mention piano and tennis lessons, were hectic. In additon, generally I was easily annoyed at something (or everything) poor Michael did or said, or even the WAY he did or said something (or everything).  You know, the normal stuff that couples married 16 and a half years feel.  At times. And at times more often than others.  It had been one of those times.

     But the night of the Supermoon, we were unfettered.The kids were safe and were NOT with us. I rambled on about my photography and some patients at the office, what I wanted to wear at our friends' upcoming wedding, my plans to redecorate one of the kids' bedrooms, how I would like him to have fixed the broken sliding door on our minivan, and did he like the color I had my nails done last week, all mundane stuff... but with one big difference:  I had Michael's undivided attention! It was long time in coming and quite refreshing.

     So after our mango ice cream, we sauntered out into the street and looked up. There was not a star to be seen. The sky was cloudy as can be, beyond the thick layer of fog hanging under it. We had hoped the sky would clear up, even for just a moment so I could just snap a couple of frames, my trusty Canon at the ready. No luck. All that hype for naught. No Supermoon. No incredible captures to post on my Facebook tomorrow or email my sisters and my closest photographer friends. No anything. None. Zippo. Nada. Kaput. 

     But what I did get in return that evening in the hunt for the elusive Supermoon, was an evening with my husband.  And we had a great time. And we had a lot of laughs and a belly full of great food in the most fabulous city in the world. I was reminded why he was my best friend and why I decided to accept his offer to go on a date with him in August of 1990. And why, after 22 years and three beautiful children together, I still like him. And for that I was grateful.