PRIDE AND MEMORY
This is the weekend that Gay Pride parades take place in New York, San Francisco and other cities, cause for celebration. But, it also seems fitting to mention the relatively new New York City AIDS Memorial. Located in the West Village at the intersection of W. 12th Street, 7th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue, it was just dedicated in December 2016. Over the years, more than 100,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS. 
The former St. Vincent’s Hospital (1849-2010), located here, had the first and the largest AIDS ward on the east coast. It’s a hospital with a laudable history as it treated survivors of the Titanic shipwreck (1912) and victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911).
The memorial is situated on St. Vincent’s Triangle and consists of a circular water feature in the center framed by an open slanted metal canopy whose grid incorporates a symbolic repeating triangle pattern. Inscribed in the pavement are words from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself.” The imagery is powerful, the place peaceful.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss by Martha Cooley
I was immediately immersed in Cooley’s memoir and caught up in life in the small Italian village she and her husband retreat to for a caesura, a pause in their lives, of 14 months. Cooley is on sabbatical and has a novel to complete, but she views this as unplanned time and space to reflect on the deaths over the past decade or so of eight dear friends. Many of them died of illness too soon and others died by their own hand. Alongside this reflection on lives lost, runs the thread of her mother’s fragile health and impending demise. Her mother is approaching ninety and has been blind since Cooley was a child, but her blindness is an undiscussed, even un-referred to topic which puzzles this daughter.
The memoir is a series of richly detailed short essays which started life as journal entries. You learn about the feral cats and the resident dogs in the village and about il professore who owns the nearby castle and is the closest thing to village royalty. You get a sense of Cooley’s Italian husband and their warm and mutually fulfilling marriage. You also share in her self-questioning and her doubts about her writing and her accomplishments.
Cooley is also a poet as well as a novelist and her writing is very lyrical. She is attuned to nature’s creatures and to the sounds, or lack thereof, that comprise the fabric of this stretch of time. I liked her inclusion of Italian words and phrases (some not translated) and of lines of favorite poets (T.S. Eliot, e.g.). I admired her candor in describing relationships, particularly with her mother, calling it one of her FFFRs, fraught female familial relationships. A lovely book in so many ways.
Note: All photos ©JWFarrington except that of Martha Cooley from her publisher’s website.
