My friend Shirley Sender
died much too soon and whenever I am in New York I think of her. This trip was no exception.
On the Lexington
bus headed downtown, I passed (too fast to take a shot) a restaurant awning Shirley.
I was going to see
one of Shirley’s best friends (one of two Nancys) who’d recently had open-heart
surgery and (thank the Lord) was doing very well. Despite feeling as if she had been rammed by a
car and a truck (one in front and one in back),
Nancy was sitting up, talking, taking short walks, and wise-cracking like her pre-surgery self.
She was at Beth
Israel Medical Center, down on First and 16th, in a spacious room (bigger
than her West Village apartment, with French doors no less!) and a beautiful
view — despite the scaffolding that wrapped the building outside her window. In addition to seeing Nancy doing so well,
meeting her multiple friends (Bryan, Dodie, Christina & Josh) and sharing stories, I got the
pleasure of perusing the neighborhood once I left.
Stuyvesant Square Park — actually two lovely parks, back-to-back on either side of the avenue. Though it was November, the leaves were turning and falling all around me, still there in the park were flowers in bloom…
a beautiful strong and stalwart church standing guard — ready to slay dragons if needed…
and the quiet majesty of the Quaker presence — with their meeting house from 1786 (with plain but elegant moveable bench-pews painted dove-gray with worn red velvet cushions) and their Friends school. Here I visited another friend-of-a-friend who was tending children while their Quaker parents communed in the hall upstairs.
The Quakers have their own tenets of truth. Some emblazoned outside for all to see…
and other more subtly displayed to embed in one’s conscience. Inside, where the children stayed and played while their parents discussed the problems of the world and how their social activism could help, I found a little truth for my own.
I was wearing the scimitar pin Nancy saved for me from Shirley’s collection.
Maybe I’ll be slaying some dragons of my own.
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