What is happening to nature?

To live alongside the beautiful Hudson River and stunning vistas to Manhattan with all it's wonderful happenings and light shadings is a constant enjoyment. The whole coast line however has now been built up, first there was one building (mine, good 40 years ago), than two, and now non-stop high-rises and gated communities — many of them  beautiful and tasteful, some are  not,  and they are interspersed with shopping malls and movie houses and many many eating spots and bars, marinas. Everything is at your fingertips.

To reach any of these establishments one needs to take  River Road, which once-upon-a-time was a little innocent road but has now in a frightful way developed into  a highway (almost) with a constantly zooming traffic. Along River Road, on the other side, are the high and magnificently looming Palisades, tall  and towering wooded cliffs — absolutely gorgeous.

Now imagine what I saw yesterday with Stefan — at the riverside tucked between a huge fancy shopping center  and another huge apartment dwelling is a useless and gray looking, fenced in spot which cannot be built upon because the ground is contaminated and unsafe; it is a brownfield area due to the old factories which once stood there and supported this old port town Edgewater. With other words this is a  fenced in no-man's land surrounded by all these new buildings and across from Manhattan.

And here I found them, these three deer, staring at me, standing in this unsafe environment, drinking from the water, picking from whatever is available. How did they get there? Did they come from the Palisades Cliffs, which are also built up a bit here and there, and did they cross the River Road to end up in this little piece of no-man's land not good enough for human beings but good enough for them? Sad.

Molly Sweeney — an Irish tale

I listened to an interview on NPR with the actress Geraldine Hughes about the play "Molly Sweeney."  It sounded so great that sure enough we ended up at this very small Irish Repertory Theatre for a Matinee performance. The stage was tiny and the seats were arranged in front and on the side. It guarantees a close up view and feels very intimate. Three wonderful actors — the husband, the doctor and Molley Sweeney. Molly is a confident, beautiful and life-affirming woman who is blind since she was 10 months old and she is happily adjusted; her head is held always straight up and she "looks" forward, her eyes are partially closed and constantly move up and down. Although she is clinically blind she explains at the beginning that she has her own way of seeing and she has more than come to terms with the world as she knows it.

The story is told by the three narrators in alternating monologues and we learn what happens when the restless husband and the once famous doctor decide to have her undergo a sight restoring operation. The medical miracle has terrible consequences. When the bandages come off, remarkable revelations ensue. Molly is unable to adjust to her new ability to see and ends up in a mental hospital. Her husband moves on and the doctor resigns and also packs up his things. In between there is a moral lesson implying that one should not argue with nature. At least that's what I read into it.

The play was written by Brian Friel who skillfully unfolds this mesmerizing and heartbreaking story in two acts. The stage is bare with three chairs only and large windows in the background. There is no costume change, no decoration, just spellbinding acting by these three actors. Finished writing this I wonder why I called it "an Irish tale" — it's a tale of great humanity that just doesn't belong only to the Irish but to all of us. But only the Irish can present it like this, plain and wordy and thought provoking.