Avast Ye Glummies, or The Homely Glory of New York

It's a hard winter in the East this February. And it may be starting to get to me. To help myself I'm  seeing if I can put together a decent post of some of the pictures I've taken of New York. For me, fighting off the glums means short circuiting their message, the feeling that I've lost ability, intelligence, vision or talent (looks are so long gone they've fallen off the list.)  Insecurities go vast if not refuted or transended.

The New York I love, the New York I see through child-like eyes, is where I love taking pictures in hope that I can get my delight across.

 Above, along one of the Beaux Arts side streets in the East 60's, is a mansion that obviously didn't get the manditory "we are chic," memo. Bless the uninhibited inhabitants and their taste.

Part of the fun of the Upper East Side is the juxtaposition of high swank with more earthy realities. Buildings, no matter how grand, still need pragmatic things like maintenance and back alleys for the garbage.

And then, there are always kids going to the Park.

  

And the Park, even in winter, is perhaps the greatest glory of New York.

It might seem silly taking so many pictures of rocks, paths and sward. But to a child, especially a child who played before all the fences went up, these rocks, paths and sward were worlds. Nannies got left sitting on the benches outside the playground; kids, approx. ages 4-10, scampered off to the mountains, towns, houses and ships that awaited them.

Can you honestly tell me this is not a ship?

Of course it's a ship, one of two ships we used to sail, race, board, wreck and, of course, rescue.  Now the playground is enlarged and modernized. Fences forbid people from leaving the paths. The old gazebo that had so come apart that the only thing holding it up was the wisteria growing thru it is now so spanking and large that it dwarfs the highest rock that was our hideout. What do the kids do today? Actually play in the sanctioned playground? Egads, whats the world coming to? Yet imagination can be sparked off by almost anything, and the city, Thank God,  has an abundance of almost anything.