Coney Island (Passover Edition)

4/25/2008 6:24 AM

Yesterday we went to Coney Island. A lot more than that actually happened, but the trip to the edge of New York was the most interesting part. TO get there we had to bring Mason to the doctor (don’t like this orthopedist) and do a few other things. Chandler’s new friend Jasmine came by and woke her at the crack of 11 after Lennox and I had failed and she went out and floated around the big six schmoozing and kibitzing on the grounds. The fact that she’s made friends is probably the biggest news of this break, but today I’m writing about Coney Island.

We took the train and I started to write a poem before the other adults had found me. I’ll try and include the two lines and the idea here in a bit, but I was in a foul mood after the cost of escape velocity from our apartment was a huge fight with Mason about the brace that he is supposed to wear and Linda just exempted him from wearing after I had fought, been cried at, insulted and changed multiple shoes, laced braces and new shoes and generally acted like a butthead. As I treat my wasted ankle at 48 I think about how Mason should “____(^{insert macho platitude here}) ” to insure his athletic future.

We drove to the cousins’ house and took the F to the park. It was a fun ride with the kids running up and down the car looking out the window at the various sights below the F on McDonald Ave. My favorite is the Jewish Cemetery that you float over looking down at a century of graves (with some new shiny laser etched ones near the tracks so you can kinda see the eternal portraits chosen by the next of kin. It is in much better shape than Mt. Zion over here in Woodside/Maspeth which has me thinking about the anecdotal nature of the conclusions I’ve been drawing about Jewish cemeteries from my runs here in Queens.

The excitement of the park fully grabbed me as we crossed over Surf Avenue from the train. It is great how you can make it straight from the W. 8^th street Stillwell Ave station to the boardwalk with out having to touch the “common” ground of the city: I felt like I was floating over my cares and worries associated with life in NYC. Now, needless to say after my journal entry yesterday about Great Adventure I was not in the mood to totally forgive the Amusement Park Gods, but the fact that I was in New York and I hadn’t been hazed by a two our car ride or a $15 parking fee put me in a mood more amenable.

As we turned onto the boardwalk by the Aquarium I saw another reminder of the previous day’s excesses: a sea of Hasidim in black and white. Again the shock of seeing people whom I think of as particularly reserved and clannish out at the great American amusement park (really great and American, not the six flags/paramount llc brand) further reduced my resistance to the deities of common diversion. As we turned off the boardwalk and descended the stairs to Astroland I was literally shocked at how insanely crowded it was in April. Even in July and August it is generally not that crowded, and this time it was about ½ orthodox and conservative Jews. It was like looking at a puzzle or a test pattern where the dominant motifs (black and white) are overplayed for effect. It was stunning and beautiful aesthetically, a bit overwhelming as a parent and a consumer.

Great Adventure (Passover Edition)

4/24/2008 7:04 AM

We went to great adventure yesterday and had a great time, sort of. The drive through zoo (aka safari) was kinda neat, I especially liked the baboons and the ostriches picking at us and fighting across the yard.

I have to say the experience of going to a zoo in our car was weird, there was something quintessentially American about it, not in the good way. Each pod of people has an experience that is a) isolated and b) tainted by driving (dipped in traffic). The isolation is probably why this is such a popular experience, so you can see the unwashed animals without having to stand next to the unwashed masses. Driving slowly around the track jockeying for position with other (suburban) drivers reminds me too much of rush hour. I know that there were at least two times when people (men) zipped in front of us and kept us stuck where we were or took the spot in front of the (non-human) fauna that we had been waiting for. And don’t even get me started about those people who did open their windows to get better pictures (having reviewed ours I see why now).

I noticed in the various queues for the park (all automotive) that there were a lot of orthodox Jews. I have the middle-class liberal affinity for Hasidim, so I was kind of excited. I didn’t say anything to the kids when I saw a floatilla of four late-model minivans and a couple of nice Acura and Infiniti sedans off to the side of one of the roads with bearded men in white shirts and black hats kibitzing. I thought, “how cool, Hasids, must be because of Passover” (which B&H photo, where I’m buying a new camera soon, has been announcing that they are closed until next Monday for the holiday).

As we jockeyed for position in the next parking and purchasing lines in our car I felt like the park had been reserved for orthodox Jews. There was our car, a mid-90s Continental with Anti-UN bumperstickers and a sea of shiny family cars full of eastern-European Jews in their starched white shirts and modest skirts. Inside the park it seemed like about ¼ – 1/3 of the guests were there for Passover.

Not all of them had the old-world mien of the Hasids. There were more suburban looking men and women with Rangers gear and a couple of hippy families with colorful hand-embroidered yarmulkes that looked more functional and perhaps north-african. There were a few groups of young men who were hip-slick-and-cool, tricked out in the latest oversized warm-up-suites with three day growths and (in one case) black-leather yarmulkes.

The Country Kitchen, off by the waterfront and away from the main-(streetUSA)-drag, had an adhesive sign, not hand lettered, but also not part of the regular signage, that announced that this restaurant was Kosher, and the lines there were long and white-and-black. I wonder if the food there was any less greasy or less expensive. My stomach still aches from the food I ate yesterday.

It was right by there that I saw a young Hasid, say early 20s, who was obviously downsey (had downs syndrome). Ever since I saw the two downs-syndrome kids making out in Madison Square Park in 1984 I’ve had an affinity for this particular sort of “special person.” He was dressed like everyone else but more excited then most of the other orthodox adults there. He was holding his mother or grandmother’s hand and lobbying for some great-adventure-delight or another.

There were folks who looked like they were less into the starched formality of some of the families. While they technically had the same outfits, white shirts, black pants and shoes, fringe dangling off the belts as the others I noticed that they were wearing Marshall’s-type no-iron shirts and black chinos. These families were in marked contrast to the ultra-starched white shirts of the men who had custom slacks (suite-pants) and hand-made shoes. The variations go on and on, and since I am not an anthropologist I’ll leave these distinctions for better suited chroniclers to catalogue.

I will add, however, that two or three times I saw groups of men and boys off to the side, not totally public, but also not quite private, praying in small groups of about 10. The last time I saw them pray, off to the side by the exit, there seemed to be a rave-like quality to the unsynchronized quality of the floating and rocking back and forth that they did. There were a couple of pre-adolescent boys who seemed to have a rhythm of their own that was, well, rebellious, shocking and rocking.

I will spare you my usual anti-amusement-park diatribe, maybe I’ll look for an old one and post it up later.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

Happy New Year (Rat)

Happy New You

 

12/31/07 05:35:55 AM

Where has the year gone? Has it gone into the trash heap or the archives; I’m not sure which. Into the archives is another beautiful year with a wonderful family. We’ve just moved into an apartment which seems to fit us better. We, for the first time, are in a home big enough for all of us (the second bathroom is key).

Here is an outline of the biggies I can think of this minute:

New House

We love our new house and are looking forward to finishing moving in. Three bedrooms and two baths is the right fit for us. Mason has his own room and it is big enough to send him to. Chandler and Lennox are working out the wrinkles in their new quasi-cohabitation. Generally permission is granted to cross the armistice line; especially since Lenna got her princess netting and pink rug. It is strange to be in a modern building and the view, as I look over the BQE and east into Woodside and Rego Park and watch the sun rise as I write this the sky and the contours of the land are enthralling to me. I love watching when the LIRR rolls out of Woodside on the way to Jamaica: a long silvery snake a half a mile on.

Family

 

I am still so in Love With Linda that it scares me. She is the model for everything beautiful and desirable in my life. I wish I could be with her more and, paradoxically, more like her. I am blessed to be chosen by her to spend these days together with her.

Chandler continues to thrive at the TAG school she’s in. She has a lot of homework and does it without complaint, though she looks at the confections of Cable TV as the just and right compensation for her work. At least is is mostly Disnified Pre-Tween Confections, though she will be a teenager on February 23^rd.

Mason and I survived the soccer season (he’s quite good) with me as coach, though he declined to play winter league indoors. Mason’s way with words continues to amaze Linda and I mostly because he is not the squeaky wheel. Out of -or out from under- the hubbub of the family Mason will make a wry comment that puts everything that we are all elbowing to the front to try and frame just so into context. He does so uproariously and seemingly without effort.

Lennox is growing up so fast in so many ways. Just like with her sister we are often fooled into thinking that she’s older because she’s so damned verbal. She is also sassy in a way Chandler can only dream of (and rue). So when she puts her hand on her splayed hip and rolls her eyes as she wipes stray locks out of her eyes explaining “whatever, duh!” we lose track of her age (5) and size (just right). We start trying to reason with the sarcastic teenager that she apes rather than the Kindergartener that she is. Needless to say we miss having Kindergarten across the street, but we’ll see how this move will effect our lives (passive aggressively I think the earlier wake-up and travel will be good for the family).

School Year

I loved my Fall 1 Classes and I am really enjoying the Lit Elective classes I am teaching. The Contemporary African American Fiction and the Black Lit Survey have been soul-expanding (as much as teaching a class can be). I love the students at LaGuardia CC. Teaching them is a dream come true. In many of their faces and papers I see myself struggling intellectually to come into my own. It is a humbling flashback when I see the same misunderstandings that I made in someone else’s paper. It is a merciful reminder of my current domestic bliss when I see the sturm und drang of youthful courting around campus. I look forward to working on my own intellectual and academic development this next year.

Amir’s Murder

The horror of Amir Hassan Reed’s murder this year has put a lot of things into perspective. I am so grateful to be alive, which I generally take for granted. I take life, mine and my beautiful family’s to be a given that shall continue along, but it “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I had taken it for granted that I would wake up to the same cast that I went to sleep with. It is rare that such a Cause Célèbre visits our lives, and I had often wished that my life would intersect with drama and fame. Sigh, I wish that I had marked my door with blood so this angel never came. What I found most annoying and titillating was the comments left on the SFGate site articles: people who knew the least seemed to make the strongest comments. This puts all of my “Willie-Neckbone-Expertise” into perspective: the more I think I know, the less I know.

48 Years

I turned 48 this December. I remember in 1974 thinking that it would be the year 2000 when I was 40. It seemed so abstract and distant (and of course I took it for granted that I would live that long). Well until this year I’ve held up well. During the spring my Achilles tendons started to act up (and I didn’t go to the doctor). In the Fall, playing soccer with Mason I tore up my ankle (and I didn’t go to the doctor). This December my ankle got infected and I went to the doctor. I will go to physical therapy soon because I really miss my morning runs through Sunnyside, Woodside, Maspeth and Long Island City. I’m feeling trapped by my infirmity in spite of the fact that I did go for a bike ride yesterday. Linda is sick this morning so I don’t think I’ll have that luxury.

Dreams

I still haven’t written the great American novel, but I have been working on a story. I haven’t published my dissertation, but I hope to. I want to do more original scholarship rather than just “willie-neckbone” out opinions on things I know little about. So I will continue to do as the Sanskrit Proverb suggests:

Look to this day
For it is life
The very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and verities of existence,
The bliss of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of power –

For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well-lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

Happy New YOU, Love Stafford.

Kiko Rides Again

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale, because I haven’t posted anything in a while. He’s back, our delivery guy, (if only your intrepid scribe was as dedicated and regular as Kiko). Here Kiko meets another aspect of the City Cycling world, a character named Croak. There’s more the pipeline, though if I don’t start getting some feedback… (It’s hard to keep going without hits and feedback, of course it is possible that it sucks.)

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.  IF this link doesn’t work you can search “Kiko” on this blog and feel your way back to the beginning by hitting “previous entries” two or three times.

Once The Blue and Gold Line had caught them Mike taught Kiko about riding in a pack, swapping places at the end of the line, and talking about how to figure out where the wind was coming from and how to fid the best place to draft off of people in the pack. By explaining, without actually executing, mike told Kiko the basics of working your way to the front, climbing the grapevine, and, again, holding your line in a pack, which took equal parts nerve and skill.

As they were breaking up for the day Mike, impressed as much by Kiko’s teachability as his natural skill and stamina, went to the van he had brought the bikes in and got Kiko a set of cycling togs, a pair of shoes (with pedals) and a helmet. He explained a bit of the rational for wearing tight colorful clothes, using the Blue and Gold Line as an example. He pointed out how the Jeans and T-Shirt made him look less able, and how “the kit” (the cycling term for uniform) would cut down on some of the resistance (social and physical), and asked him to come meet him the next week at the same place. 

When they met the next week Mike had a new guy with him. His name was Croak and he looked vaguely familiar to Kiko. He was thin and mean looking in spite of the affable smile that rode beneath the pencil thin mustache on his beige skin. Croak was obviously a black man, though his skin was the color of a paper bag and he had no hair to speak of. Kiko could just make out the outline of a receding hairline in the microscopically barbered hair that was left on his skull. He wore a faded Campagnolo hat that had odd creases ironed into it on the back of his head that reminded him of the soldier’s hats back home. His gaudy “kit” advertised an Italian banking concern in florescent colors from his shoes to his hat and gloves everything matched; the bike and handlebar tape even sang the praises of Tuscan-low-rate-mortagages.

Prophet Housing

12/18/07 04:56:38 AM

So our new lives in our new apartment have started. I took Chandler to meet Aneka at 46^th Street on the seven train. We were there so early Chandler has renegotiated for an extra 10 minutes of sleep today. I was a work by 7:30 and If I continue to do this I’ll have time to go to the gym in morning. Apparently Lennox and Mason’s drop off also went well. Linda and I went to Costco to buy a TV, which I think we’ve put off in the hopes that we can buy the kids more of what they want this “holiday” season. Funny thing about that ironic use of quotation marked holiday.

I found a copy of Khalil Ghibran’s The Prophet (that I had bought on telegraph avenue used) and in it was a bookmark. The page it marked was the Prophet’s response to the Mason. “’Ironic,’ thought I, it is addressed to my son.” But the opening line is “Then a [M]ason came forth and said speak to us of Houses” (34). So, since I spent the evening unpacking my seemingly endless supply of things and assembling them I was intrigued by the synchronicity of the bookmarking.¹ This is the electronics (and modern) version of feathering my nest. We’ve got to get all of the twigs and grass just right so that the chicks and their parents will all fit comfortably. I imagine a bird’s nest of wires, surge protectors, USB cables and transformer power lines in which we comfortably cuddle together. (God, how I digress.)

The first few “stanzas” were pure anti-city, and I’ll include a bit here as an illustration: “Would the valleys your streets and the green paths your alleys… [and] In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together” (35). These nods to the bucolic piss me off. Besides the fact that the human condition is social, and there would be no wilderness if we spread people out like that, even in 1922, I just want to dissent a bit further on this romanticization of the bucolic.

(Digression Alert) I remember one week when Scott and I lived on Maui. This was before we got food stamps, in deed it might be why I got food stamps. We had “no visible means of support” and we had alienated those off of whom we could beg. But there was a mango tree and an avocado tree that were in season near where we were camping. We could fill ourselves nicely on these huge trees for the cost of a climb. Guavas, I think were also ripe in a pasture a couple of miles away. Before seven days had passed I was crazy and hungry though my stomach never went empty. There is a reason that we are a social and agrarian species. The hunter gatherer thing is too much work. (I think it is also why we are omnivores, but that is another rant.)

Then the prophet gets to why I am writing this now:

Tell me have you [peace, remembrances and beauty] in your houses?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.

Though its hands are silken, its hear is of iron.

It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeers at the dignity of the flesh.

It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.²

Verily the lust for comfort murders the the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

But you, children o space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. (36)

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet (Poem)

 

We’re moving tomorrow and I found two poems I had written that I thought I had keyed in.  I’ll key ‘em in now.  The first was about the shy young woman I saw heading to Aviation HS one morning.  Refined and restrained, though she was obviously one of the kids, she seemed apart.

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet

High school phalanx / A boisterous wedge
Tumbling Down / Off the concrete EL

Unapproachable / In stylized youth
A garden of  / Performed individualism

Petals and thorns / Of hidden beauty
Instant adolescent / Fauna wilderness

In the rigid  / Individualism
Is a patch of / Conformity

We’re all sad and scared about moving. I’m nervous as hell. I’ve been snapping at the kids and crabby with Ms. L.  We love it here and I want to spill my guts about it, but I found these poems instead, so I’ll post them and see where it leads.

Thanksgiving Inflation

11/23/07

So Wednesday we went to see the Balloons blown up for the Thanksgiving day parade over by the Museum of Natural History. This is the second year that we’ve done it and I hope it becomes a family annual tradition. There were clock-management issues and Lennox was carried off and on for the last mile. But let me start at the beginning.

The evening started with a subway ride to the upper west side where we waited for about 20 minutes to get a seat at La Caridad. The food was, as usual, great and I had it in my head that it was Friday and consequently had a hankering for Bacalau. I have anew favorite dish there because they brought me, perhaps as an act of mercy, huevos mesclado con bacalao with red beans and yellow rice. I might stil have to go there tonight, the real Friday night for the Bacalao Guisado, but that is another story. We all had our usual favorites: chuletas fritas, arroz amarillo y frijoles negros, aroz amarillio con camarones, aguacate, platanos maduros, cebollas y ajo (mas ajo por favor). I like to eat at La Caridad because no one ever wants desert or walks away half full.

Because we are moving we had an errand to run before we went to the balloons. We went up to Aunty Odella’s house to see the wood floors that she installed over the linoleum of her Mitchell Lama apartment. This was a beautiful warm fall evening walk up Broadway to 92^nd street. I love to walk about Manhattan and see all of the people out. This is one of the reasons, I think, that we wanted to move our family to New York. Walking in Manhattan is a grand parade of the mad rush of humanity that is New York.

The families, couples, singles, and lonelyhearts parade cheek and jowl with servant class, homeless, shopclerks and underclass in an interesting pastiche of humanity found only in major cities with pedestrian cultures. I think my favorite are the lone wolves who parade around on the New Upper West Side, tied to a neighborhood they no longer fit in with or understand by their rent-controlled leases. When we walk around Queens we get a different sort of diversity, but that is for a different entry.

The kids, though seemingly unaware of the parade of humanity in all of its nuances, watch and learn from these excursions. I think it is important to expose them to the life of Manhattan because they can see people living in the complex harmony of this city. When we take them to Paris or Barcelona or London (which I hope we do) they will see much the same thing in different flavors. There is nothing like the grand stroll in a major metropolis.

As we walked after Aunty Odella’s (Auntie Mame in this tale) down Columbus we started to see the exodus of families kids from the inflation. The closer we got the more there were with their faces lit up in amazement, or red with temper tantrums. Restaurants were full of kids being fed whatever was handy, pizza, foccacio at upscale restaurants, sandwiches from delis and Mickey-D’s was packed. This was the opposite sort of mismanagement of kids’ evenings. We went and got them good food first, while others had their kids done and fed them whatever afterwards. The classic kid management issue: too tired or too hungry. You cannot avoid it unless you are a Von Trapp type operation with rigid discipline and absolute obedience. Such families are said to exist in Utah and Alabama where conditions are harsher.

Lennox was staggering with exhaustion but the sight of the Balloons perked her up a little bit. When she saw the first few balloons she was excited, but by the time we got to the giant Ronald McDonald laying prostrate before a 20′ earth in some sort of weird tableau of globalization she was through.

http://gothamist.com/

She gamely endured the rest of the balloons, that we all find amazing (the Koons silver weather bunny was my favorite this year) and continued her bleary eyed forced march with as much dignity and good attitude as you can expect out of a kindergärtner who had gone to school 15 hours before.

In the crowd there were a few characters worth mentioning. There were the two “models” tall women with lots of make-up and perfume who wore super high heels that Chandler drew my attention to. In the crush of we dowdy breeders they seemed particularly out of place. I don’t think that Chandler noticed that the women were probably closer to my age than hers and seemed a bit long in the tooth to be clacking along in designer wear on precarious shoes with war-paint on. Right after they sashayed away from us in the crowd we saw a grandfather there with his kids. He had a full white Santa beard at least 6” long, a strong hard Christmas belly, an infectious white ethnic laugh and a Harley-Davidson-Viet-Nam-Vet type vest. Mason gestured with his mouth to get Chandler to recognize Santa in his civvies and they shared a wry laugh together as Santa snapped a picture of his grandkids with their haggard parents. I think that the trip to the Balloons was Sargent-Major Santa’s idea, but I could be wrong.

I think most important for me was watching the very tall father with bright red hair seethe repeatedly between clenched teeth “There are going to be serious consequences for this. There will be dramatic punishments for this behavior,” and a few other impotent bromides in a Möbius strip to his two tall think red-headed kids who were delighting in the spectacle of Schreck. I have been that tall gangly wannabe ruler of my children. But on thanksgiving eve, I was not. We had a wonderful time.

Bike Racing Team

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale, because I haven’t posted anything in a while. He’s back, our hombre duro de las bicilcletas, aand he’s going to peek into another world today. More observations of work in NYC, and not the kind for people who go to college. There is some recreation here too, and the kind for the Manhattan-Types. There’s more the pipeline, though if I don’t start getting some feedback… (It’s hard to keep going without hits and feedback, of course it is possible that it sucks.)

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.

The team of a certain Manhattan Bike shop, with their matching Blue and Gold kits that had passed them with a series of smirks eight faces long on the way out of the city had to work harder than they ever had to catch them on the way back across the golf course at the border of Queens. They figured it was ‘cause they were tired, in need of nourishment in the form of the food-like-stuff the team provided in little bottles and foil packets. They had no idea that this was the raw debut of something new in cycling, this was Kiko, unleashed.

Team Manhattan, the Blue and Gold Line, did catch them after about a mile of perfect drafting and flawless transitions of the lead. It was actually, were you there to watch, a superior act of teamwork: they looked like an iridescent blue and gold zipper with each rider taking his turn until he was completely shot and then falling back and catching onto the end of the line in perfect time and harmony. They had never, even I the race out at the old air strip Floyd Bennett Field where the exposure to the wind made teamwork paramount in their victory, worked so well together. At that race it was enough to clearly, convincingly, win, out here in their weekly “leave Manhattan” practice it was barely enough to reel in a guy in commercial togs and one in jeans. Had Marcal, the captain, thought to ask them to join it would have been a coup, instead their smirks just rode back to where Kiko had left the bike with the basket locked up.