A Good Person

It's been a very long time since I've written for this blog. Much has happened in the past year. In May 2011, my mother finally passed away, and I was dramatically reminded of how much the artist relies on art at times like these, when all other means of communication seem inadequate to the task of expressing the depth of feeling generated by such an event.

I was surprised at how speechless my mother's death made me, how it seemed so much easier to speak in song or rhyme, anything other than prose, and grateful once again for the gift of language, in all its varied manifestations, which gives us the capacity to mark the complex and subtle importance of such events in meaningful and fulfilling ways.

I wrote four long poems in tribute to my mother's passing, and this experience reaffirmed for me the value of poetry in helping a writer come to terms with difficult and complex emotional states.

There are many good lessons my mother taught me, but among the most treasured are the ones I learned simply by virtue of her painful yet gracious existence in her declining years, and the surprising and remarkable enlightenment and artistic reawakening afforded by her death, as painful as it was to experience.

As an educator deeply devoted to her calling, she was, first and foremost, a good person, and her goodness remains an inspiration to me in my life.

Where I Was

I remember where I was on this day in 2001. I was on the William Floyd Estate in Suffolk County, New York, retrieving traps that had been set out the night before to catch mosquitoes that would be tested for West Nile Virus.

The all-natural beauty and tranquility of the William Floyd Estate, one of the last remnants of old southern Long Island, replete with forest, grassland, salt marsh, deer, osprey and willet, and flocks of glossy ibis and heron, stood in stark contrast to the high technology-assisted horrors of that day. So did the historic house and grounds, touching symbols of the optimism, faith, courage and insight of America's founders, who included William Floyd, co-signer of the Declaration of Independence.

It was a lovely autumn morning, so it was with reluctance that I left the estate to pick up a block of dry ice from Brookhaven National Laboratory. When I pulled the big Ford van into the parking lot at Brookhaven, I was still ignorant of the World Trade Center disaster, but that naivete was immediately dispelled when an employee rushed out of the building and told me that the twin towers had been hit.

At first, I didn't understand what he was saying; it seemed too far-fetched, too shocking to grasp, for someone used to the relatively unchaotic existence enjoyed by most Americans, free of explosions and the horror of war. But comprehension soon dawned on me when I turned on the radio and began listening.

I don't remember in detail what happened after that. There's a dark veil over my memory of the next several hours, the next days after that. There are snippets here and there of the strongest memories, like seeing video footage of people jumping out of the towers, unable to endure the torment of being burned to death alive, or hearing expressions of the anguish felt by those who witnessed the devastation firsthand.

I went to work on the Brooklyn docks in Red Hook that year, right across from the WTC site, where the fire was still burning. There was ash on the ground at Red Hook and the longshoremen had pinned to the bulletin boards any charred pages they found that had floated across the harbor from the site. One such page was from the records kept by Marsh and McLennan, who saw 295 of their employees die that day.

On this, the 9th anniversary of 9/11, I grieve for the victims and their families, and all those affected by that horrible conflagration.

What I Love at the P.O. -- A Tour of New York's Largest Green Roof

I've been a fan of the United States Postal Service for a very long time. Perhaps it's the architecture: those classic columns you see on so many Post Office buildings here in New York (I've always thought the magnificent columns at the General Post Office at 34th and 8th to be sheer poetry in concrete); those historic or quaint buildings you see out of town.

Perhaps it's the amazing amount of mail that circulates through the system (if I recall correctly, it's something like a million pieces a day at the sorting facility in New York City, with 2.5 million during the holiday season), with so little of it going astray or getting chewed up.

Or perhaps it's the invariably dramatic, democratic-people's-republic feel of standing on the inevitable line with my neighbors, good and bad, rich and poor, grumpy and congenial, an event that always reminds me of The Line, the play by Israel Horovitz.

You just have to try sending something to the Central African Republic (don't! -- give it instead to someone you know and trust to deliver) to really appreciate our venerable, home-grown institution, even though it has fallen out of favor in the high-speed Internet age and is short on money.

So I was disposed from the outset to have a great time getting a tour of the new green roof at the P.O sorting facility on 30th and 9th, sponsored by the Science Writers in New York (SWINY). But, as has come to be usual for me with SWINY-sponsored events, reality trumped my imagination once again.

The green roof at the P.O facility is currently the largest in New York and is a sublime, peaceful oasis of a place. A huge number and variety of hardy, colorful, low-lying plants, suited to hot summers, cold winters and arid conditions, fill enormous, densely packed, 4-inch high, metal-sided containers, in an area large enough that it takes several minutes to traverse its entirety along the meandering walkways.

For this event, the guides were Stuart Gaffin, a climatologist from Columbia University's Earth Institute, and a representative (whose name I didn’t catch) from the company who installed the roof: Tecta America.

From them I learned that the 4-inch thick green roof is capable of reducing roof rainwater runoff -- and its contribution to the overload of the city's sewage systems and pollution of the river -- by half, and cooling the roof from 170 degrees Fahrenheit or more on a black roof, to the much more tolerable ambient air temperature.

Due to the building's insulation, the direct cooling effect of the roof on the air inside the building is minimal, but the reduced temperature of the air processed by the building's air handlers does have a measurable and significant impact.

Because the plants absorb water and regulate temperature extremes through evapotranspiration, a green roof also protects the roof from weathering, potentially increasing the longevity of the structure by decades; and green roofs increase the biodiversity of the city, offering sorely needed habitat for butterflies and other beneficial insects.

Although white roofs are currently favored over green roofs because they are cheaper and quicker to implement, and have the potential to rapidly diminish the "heat-island" effect of a large city like New York, the only (although critical) environmental benefit white roofs offer is reduced temperatures, and since they quickly become grimy, keeping them white is an additional expense.

I think white roofs are essential as a short-term solution to reducing the city's substantial carbon footprint and effect on local air temperatures, but I agree with Dr. Gaffin that the superior environmental and structural benefits of green roofs should prove them to be the more cost efficient in the long term.

Because of security measures, I could not linger after the presentation, but the beauty of the waning light, the pleasant breeze off the Hudson River and the soothing presence of all those lush living plants were so enticing that I departed with reluctance.

Click here to see the video: Green Roofs: Ingenuity Sprouting from the Rooftops.