Giving Jonah his nightly backrub (how's that for service? Actually, Eve is first choice for this duty, but I get called in when she is away or resting), I looked out the window and it struck me how different this last view of the day is compared to Amherst. Here, from our eighth-floor apartment, he or Aviva or Ruthie (the nightly musical beds continues here) can see a horizon of tall buildings, in a way a picture-perfect image of a city -- the distant view of twinkling lights as the moon rises above them. It reminds me of the feeling of going one flight up from my six floor walkup in Soho (where I had a Jacob Riis-like view across the air shaft to the next tenement) and suddenly finding myself able to see from the world Trade Center towers up to the Empire State Building with one twist of the neck. Or arriving in the New York Public Library and finding inside that heavy marble colossus the Main Reading Room, one of the grandest and lightest spaces I’d ever been in.
There is something powerfully uplifting and inspiring for the imagination about the distant views within a city.
And then I think of Jonah's view from his room at home. With the rhododendron bush pushing its flowers right under his windows, he could look out onto the trees hanging over our house or, in winter, could see right into West Cemetery and Emily Dickinson's gravestone. Some of my fondest memories are waking up slowly and listening to that same chickadee sing his song from the maple tree right outside my window.
I wonder how dreams and thoughts and life direction might be shaped by that last view of the day.
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