Of Pitbull, Presley, and Pascal’s Wager

"I'm not trying to pick you up," she began, and from long experience I knew what was coming next. It was an older woman, so she was going to comment on my hair.

"But you have very nice hair." I looked up and smiled. "And eyes."

Three hours later I staggered out of Starbucks, the weight of seven decades piggybacking me out onto the snowdrifted sidewalk. Jackson Heights shone bright after a marathon session in the dim cafe, and my head resounded with tales of earthquakes, murder and Mick Jagger.

Ellen was from a Greek island, one of the Ionians—the "Seven Islands," she called them, though there are many more than seven. Aristotle Onassis had owned one of them, Skorpios, in Greece's better days, though by the time he and Jackie O had tied their knot Ellen was long gone, riding the trade winds (and a convenient family marriage) to the States.

Her family had owned a beautiful house in Greece—her eyes glinted with memories as she described it to me—which they'd abandoned after an earthquake, Ellen claimed, had split the earth open as she watched.

She recalled the foreshocks, her mother collecting Ellen and her siblings and herding them outside.

"The neighbors said 'You're crazy,'" she said, smirking at the recollection. She sat back in her chair, staring back in time and across the Atlantic. Her mother was justified: in the orchard where they took refuge, they were free from the cascading dangers of that family manse.

There was a definite nostalgia to her Greek memories, but she hasn't returned since 1995. "I don't have any family anymore. I don't know anybody"—and besides, the country isn't exactly the most appealing destination at the moment. Greece's recent economic troubles have dried up the tourist faucet and her professorial sister, who takes a group of students for a month in Greece every January, faced an empty signup sheet this year.

There weren't any terrorists. Greece wasn't a dangerous place. But to the well-heeled traveler a poor place, like a poor person, is usually suspect.

Five million words you’ve just gotta read

Upon reaching an entirely meaningless and inaccurate milestone on Goodreads, I've been inspired to put together a list of my favorite 50 books of all time. Ask me next week and it'll be different.

I reluctantly limited each author to only one book, otherwise I could never have winnowed the list down to just 50 entries. The books are in no particular order, but those marked with an asterisk are the ones I would, gun to my head and for highly varied reasons, call my top ten. (At this particular juncture in time.)


* Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
One of Kerouac's later works, Big Sur chronicles the author's terrifying, thinly fictionalized descent into desperate paranoia following his sudden celebrity after the publication of the generation-defining novel On the Road. Other Kerouac works that should be on this list: Tristessa, The Dharma Bums.
   
Whiteman (Tony D'Souza)
A fiercely written, deeply felt novel of Cote d'Ivoire. Recommended by a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer; it came out of nowhere to become one of my favorite books in years.
   
* The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri)
Poetic, gruesome, gorgeous, unapologetically political, repugnantly zealous. One of the most amazing achievements in the history of literature. And yes, you should read beyond Inferno.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
The story of a Dutch clerk on Dejima, the tiny island that is Japan's only outlet into the greater world as the 19th century dawns. Other Mitchell works that should be on this list: Cloud Atlas.

In the Company of Frogs

One frog’s fountain flows forth magnificently, a glittering spuming arc in the late-afternoon light. His brother’s perpetual drool splutters out into a sad little puddle at his feet. An elderly man totters over, reaching into the weaker stream to rinse his hands. Spying him, a young boy dashes over and covers the mouth of the more enthusiastic frog, shielding the old man from an inadvertent shower. The man doesn’t notice, but I do, and I raise my polystyrene food container to the boy in salute.

Bounded by the Bowery, Essex, East Broadway and Grand, this chunk of Chinatown in Manhattan may be my very favorite part of the city. It helps that my top cheap meal—$1 pork dumplings and $1.25 veggie sesame pancakes at Prosperity Dumpling on Eldridge—is here, but even at those rare times when I’m not craving pork orbs swimming in soy sauce, sriracha and soup broth, a stroll through this section of town gives me both acute relief from Manhattan’s concrete sterility and fond reminiscences of eastern travels.

Streets here could have been airlifted wholesale from Hong Kong, complete with vertical signs lettered in sharp-edged characters, boba tea outlets with names like Quickly and Kung Fu, and cross-continental walking tours of Chinese cuisine. (Including the delicious, cumin-laced lamb burger from Xi’an Famous Foods, imported from one of China's most epically historic cities.)

But on this swampy afternoon I’m not too keen on walking, so I grab my dumplings and settle into the little playground at the corner of Hester and Eldridge. I choose the corner with the frog fountains, of course, where the gurgling of water dilutes the street noise ever so slightly. At the other end of the square, the play equipment swarms with children recently released from their school shackles. The benches are staked out by chattering elders, who I imagine have been holding court since sunrise.

A little girl wobbles over to the handwashing frog, her dark kinked hair flowing in lush twin cataracts down to her shoulders. With wide-eyed toddler goodwill she’s smiling at everything—the fountains, the doting park patrons, even me. Her gap-toothed older sister keeps watch from afar.

We’re between buildings and shade settles over the square, tempering the summer heat. Fewer children venture over to the cooling fountains as I inhale my tenth dumpling. On the adjacent bench, one of a quartet of gossiping old women breaks off from her group to perch on a frog, grinning like she’s that same little girl from minutes earlier, advanced eighty years or so in body if not in spirit. She knows she’s being irreverent and juvenile, and doesn’t care one jot.

She’s living in the moment, in the company of frogs.