Sixteen Tons, Whaddaya Get?

Deb in the City here, another day older and deeper in debt.

OK, I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here and if you are too young to know what a record is and how a record player operates just consult the Wikipedia. It’s an old-fashioned way of saying that I am repeating myself.

But seriously Troy manufactured so much it is staggering.

The ink to print all the money in the US.

Fire hydrants and the valves for the locks on the Panama Canal.

However, there are more important present day matters to attend to than the glories of local industry past. Like, for instance, how to make peace with Sam. If we were really living in the past life of Troy, she’d probably be working over at the nail factory like every other able-bodied 19th century child.

Alas, I cannot send her to hard labor everyday and must find another way to raise her.

I searched around Troy for what I hoped would make her happy but Troy did not have what I needed.

So I hopped on the bus and headed for Albany, the big city. After asking the locals for Latino products, I was sent to this place.

Now the name Frank and Giovanni’s did not really inspire confidence since those are Italian names, the last time I looked. But once I got inside this bustling store, my prayers were answered.

Yes friends, cactus from Mexico comes in a jar and I purchased some. I can’t take Sam to her dad in Guadalajara but maybe I can bring a little of Guadalajara to her. She’s just a little kid with a deadbeat dad and I’m a desperate nanny.

When I was in the store I asked a clerk with a Bluetooth in his ear if Frank or Giovanni were there, sort of as a joke, since from the Latino product line, it was clearly not possible to buy anything Italian in the store. Bluetooth guy pointed me in the direction of Frank, however.

Frank owns the store and bought it with financing help from the Italian former owners and he has a good business feeding the surrounding community with yucca, plantains, and all Goya products. Everyone in the busy store cheerfully chatted with one another in high-octane Spanish and Frank went effortlessly back and forth between them and me in English.

There was a Puerto Rican flag above the register and I asked Frank where he was from and he said “I’m from the Bronx”. I didn’t ask him if his name was Frank back home. But I’ll have to next time I go for tortillas

This is Deb in the City, shifting through the diasporas, saying ciao, adios and farewell.

Horseshoes, Shirts and Other Marvels of Troy

The other thing about Troy, NY that is not like ancient Troy is that so far I have not seen Brad Pitt anywhere.

I have been hoping to catch a glimpse of him in his superhot Trojan outfit from that documentary movie he was in but so far, no Brad.

Meanwhile, I have discovered a whole other side of the tracks of Troy, that’s not all Hollywood and epic wars. This small city was a giant of manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution and starting in the mid 1800’s, the town just could not make enough stuff for the rest of the world to use.



First, iron! This is what remains of the Burden Iron Works, which was once a huge complex of buildings devoted to iron and its products that was worthy of Vulcan himself. Mister Burden was a sort of genius of metal and invented a machine that made one horseshoe a second for about fifty years. Not to brag, but Troy, New York basically made all of the horseshoes for the Civil War! For the winning side, just to clarify.

Next, shirts! This building was once the home of the Cluett-Peabody Company, which any Trojan over the age of 40 can tell you, made collars, cuffs and entire shirts as part of the pervasive shirt empire marketed under the Arrow name. Troy was once called "Collar City" because at one point this powerful town produced 90% of all the removable shirt collars and cuffs in the world.



Next, inventors! This is the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, which has been a kind of factory for geniuses since 1820 something and Troy has kicked out hundreds of the world’s craftiest minds. The inventors of the Ferris Wheel, sunscreen, fire sprinklers and the guy who invented the Brooklyn Bridge all went to RPI.

I went wandering around the campus and I got to talking to this lady, Barbara Dean who works at the school. She told me her father Christy Morris, an English immigrant to Troy, had gotten a sneak-degree from RPI by figuring out what courses he needed in engineering and then quietly sitting in the back row of all the classes. He could not afford to pay for the education, but he got it anyway and went on to work for the shirt empire and then across the river at the arsenal.

Barbara said her father had a precise and inventive mind and he was always looking at things and figuring out how to improve them. He used this gift at the arsenal for many years, saving our government and all of us that employ the government lots and lots of money.

Oh, Mister Christy Morris, how we could use you now!

This is Deb in the City, leaving plenty of room for improvement, saying so long from the former shirt capitol of the known universe.

Modern Troy

Hello internet! You have clicked on Deb in the City, the official blog of me, Deb.

Deb in the City is my desperate-cry-for-help coping mechanism. I have recently moved to a new place and I’m trying not to freak out (too late). Thanks for tuning in to my cheerful display of adjustment.

OK, can’t say I saw this one coming but I now live in Troy. No, not ancient Troy over in modern Turkey but modern Troy over in upstate New York. I can’t believe I am here. First of all, I get to live in this incredible house.

Look at the tree in the front yard. Isn't it brave?

OK, to be honest, this house is not in Troy proper. It’s a little north of the city in a beautiful community with a name all its own.



Yes, Sheldon Hills at Halfmoon is where I really live. It has an incredible clubhouse and basically, you get a whole lifestyle when you buy a house at Sheldon Hills at Halfmoon. It’s gated community living, minus the actual gates.

Troy is what the guidebooks like to call a gem of a Victorian city. But, where is Troy’s ancient past? Where are they hiding the horse full of sneaky Greeks? I poked around town but found nothing but a few Grecian columns here and there. Then, I stumbled upon the Parthenon, over at the Russell Sage College.

And in much better shape than the ancient one plus, it has air conditioning and central heat. The modern Trojans are an industrious people and I’m thinking of capitalizing on the name myself and starting "Trojan Nanny: child distraction services".

Give a call and a giant My Lil’ Pony appears on your lawn and once the children are mesmerized, I am deployed from within to wreak nanny calm within your walled citadel.

This is Deb in the City, saying so long from inside the belly of a horse. But a horse with very, very pretty hair.

Celebs in the City

OK, I learned about this place from watching Sex in the City, just like everybody else in the world. New York is the city where the streets are paved with famous people. So to see the town, I found a few famous-person-was-seen-here web sites, got a little info and headed towards the city.



First stop, Sarah Jessica Parker territory. I went to her neighborhood, the West Village and prowled but no SJP. Was hoping for a glimpse of her with her adorable son with their cranky nanny, but nothing.



I did get a close-up of her trash can though.


Then I headed over to Union Square because I really was hoping to see Ethan Hawke who hangs out at the Starbucks there, according to the Google.

But I got there and wtf, which Starbucks?




There are three, if you count the one in Barnes and Noble.







I tried them all and no Ethan. I need to try a more reliable famous-people web site. Maybe Celebrity Blackberry Sightings?

It is just not that easy to find famous people. They move around too much. Even getting myself on the Twitter celebrity-sightings instant feed, I just could not get to Queen Latifah’s location before she had moved on from the Madame X lounge.

Then, just when I had moved on from celebrity stalking, I was back on Long Island at the Syosset Starbucks and I totally saw Alicia Keys in the drive-through!

She lives in Muttontown. And OK, she was in The Nanny Diaries so we would have a lot to talk about. I’m just sayin’.


This is Deb in the City, celebrating my triumph with a humungo holiday pumpkin spice latte, saying baaaa from Muttontown.

Old New York, New New York

"I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me."

And curious questionings they are, Mr. Whitman. Deb needs to know, for instance, where does one buy churros in this town? I needed to find something to try and make peace with the child since I’m clearly on my own here. She’s just a little kid with a deadbeat dad.


On the train going towards what I thought might yield churros results, I smiled at this woman and gave her the secret nanny solidarity glance.
She was wrangling two toddlers and I lacked my nanny prop of the child to indicate I was of her clan so I don’t think my united front registered with her but she was cheerful and smiling still.

Then my prayers were answered at the Metropolitan Avenue stop.



Churros, two for a dollar, right there in the subway! I tried to ask the lady selling them if she’d made them but she was too busy texting someone to answer my questions.



G train churros. How fantastico is that? I cannot take the child to Mexico to her dad but maybe I can bring a little of Mexico to the child.

Once more I arrived at Fort Greene and I meandered into DARE Bookstore, over on Lafayette Ave run by Desmond, the store’s owner-operator.



Desmond is another Jamaican transplant to Brooklyn, and has lived here for decades. He was chatting with another customer when I walked in and he said he was so grateful to have lived during the times he had. He saw his first tv when he moved to NY at age 17 and got to see a black man elected president.



But Desmond also said that he was about to close his store, which specializes in African American literature. His main source of income is the contract he has with the city department of education and he lost his account, along with about 100 other small contractors, when the city chose to use one giant megacorporation instead.

Desmond has plans though which involve moving to a warmer climate and building up his own publishing house, DARE Books. "I never expected anything from anyone", he told me. Perhaps in our Obama-victory nation, Desmond can soon afford the luxury of expectations.

This is Deb, living just enough, just enough for the city.

Emporers of the Empire State

Ended up in Brooklyn again today, at the Green-Wood Cemetery in search of the emperors of the empires and I was not disappointed. First of all, this place is beautiful and anyone can get to it by taking the R train to 25th street and walking a couple of blocks up the hill towards the trees. It’s so lovely actually, that in the 1850’s it rivaled Niagara Falls as the main tourist attraction in the country and over half a million people visited annually to have picnics with the departed.

Green-Wood is bursting with famous “permanent residents” and I was humbled to pay my respects to them and thank them in a small way for their mighty contributions to this earthly life.

First stop, Leonard Bernstein, Emperor of Broadway and the New York Philharmonic.



Next I found Peter Cooper.



19th century industrialist who built the first steam locomotive, made a fortune in glue and iron production, laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable and invented, with the help of his wife Sarah, what we now know as Jell-O. He had little formal education and could not spell, and because of this created the Cooper Union for Science and Art which still confers degrees in engineering, art and architecture, free of cost. Cooper was the emperor of philanthropy, setting the standard for successful industrialists that give back to the community. We miss you, Pete.

I was wandering around looking for the grave of prematurely departed artist Jean Michel Basquiat



When a cemetery security car rolled by and the driver asked if I was “off to see the wizard”. He directed me to a grave nearby.


Occupied permanently by Frank Morgan, the actor who played the wizard in the movie, along with four other characters.

The security officer, Tommy
was taking pictures of the various monuments to note any damage for the maintenance records of Green-Wood. He has been working there for only a few months but spent his whole life in the neighborhood, and was raised in a house that overlooked the cemetery. He started playing there when he was four years old and clearly loves the place. It’s nice to work here, I said and he replied that he never wants to leave. I asked the next logical question: will you spend eternity here?

Tommy answered happily that he had already got that settled and that he owned two plots in the place but he wasn’t sure which one he’d be buried in. I gotta see who moves in around me, you know. Yeah, you don’t want noisy neighbors for the afterlife, I said. That’s right, Tommy smiled.

This is Tommy’s favorite monument in the place, the lady on the stairs, as he called her:



She was murdered and she’s just beautiful, he said.

Of course this got me thinking about my own memorial and what that should look like. First of all, granite or bronze or a combo is a must. Marble just does not hold up over time. I cannot claim to be the Emperor of the nanny empire, not yet anyway. I have my aspirations. My fellow nannies of this city are ripe and ready to recognize their status as caretakers to the future, so maybe that’s my calling. A little community organizing can get you far these days so who knows.

Deb in the City, contemplating eternity but trying to stay in the moment, saying so long.

Living for the City

Hello there internet. In case you've forgotten, I am Deb and you have clicked on my blog, Deb in the City, which is my coping mechanism to deal with my recent move to a new place. I now unbelievably live in New York. New York City, just like I pictured it, as the blind poet sang. I can’t believe it. OK, I get to live in an incredible house.



And as you can probably tell it’s not really in New York City proper. It’s in Nassau County, Syosset to be more precise. It’s in a beautiful planned community with its own name:



Yes, Stone Hill at Muttontown is where I live. If you go to the web site of Stone Hill at Muttontown, you can hear the soothing theme music and take the virtual tour and see the clubhouse where there’s an indoor pool and you can see a picture of the gates of this gated community. All this, right off the Jericho Turnpike.

But I’m really close to “the city” as the locals call the big town at the western end of the Long Island Railroad and I am drawn there, like a moth to a bug zapper. Pretty hard to get a handle on this giant melting pot and I find a psychic oven mitt of willingness to get lost helpful.

The commuter train required me to change at Jamaica, something I thought geographically impossible, but New York City does have everything, Jamaica included. I duly transferred towards Flatbush and emerged right into Walt Whitman’s “Brooklyn of ample hills” and began my wandering, as Walt would have done. Fort Greene was his neighborhood, after all.

The economic downturn has me in a thrifty mood so I found myself in the Goodwill where I struck up a conversation with fellow home economist, Patrice.


Who it turns out, really is from Jamaica! Patrice was buying things to fill up her barrel of goods to ship back to Jamaica for her family there before she returns for a visit in January. She misses her mother and her sisters, she told me and the hot peppers back home, "that keep you healthy". Patrice is also a fellow nanny and the woman she has worked for the last 20 years recently got fired from her job at one of the famously-collapsed citadels of finance. Patrice does not know if she will have a job for much longer.

Patrice got me thinking that this high-end nanny lifestyle does not offer that much security and I wondered is there a nanny union? We could band together, pool a little money each month and microfinance each other during tough times.

This is Deb in the City, thinking globally but acting locally, saying so long from Long Island.

On a Mission

Headed to the Mission district today and was bombarded with purchase options from everywhere in Latin America. It’s muy fantastico over there and right away I found what I was looking for in one of the many many produce outlets on Mission.

Cactus! So pretty! But also so peligroso. The thorns are still on them but I am in luck because safety cactus comes in a jar.



The guy who owns the produce place was behind the counter and he was amazing. Check out the giant original oil painting behind him, the Virgin of Guadalupe appears to the cowboy grocer. Only in the Mission, friends.









The Mission is a 99 cent store jackpot and I wandered into this great big place at around 18th. I bought myself a nice windup alarm clock, that features a chicken image on the face, with a head that bobs up and down and pecks with each tick of the clock.




I started chatting with the guy behind the counter, Ramon.

Ramon it turns out is not latino, though he speaks Spanish and English. He also speaks Farsi because he is originally from Afghanistan. He asked me if I voted and I said yes and he said he voted for Obama. "We have to give him a chance", he said. Ramon got the money to open his 99 cent emporium by going back to his country and working for the US Department of Defense. "Good money", he said, "220 thousand a year." I asked him if it was dangerous and he said "Look, someone can come here and boom boom shoot me. Only God knows when it is your turn to go. And until then God protects me." I hope Ramon, you are right about that. So far, so good, my friend.

I forgot to ask him what his name was back in his country. I doubt it is Ramon.This is Moe, sifting through the diasporas, saying adios and salaam and farewell from the Mission.

Windmills of my Mind

Today I hopped the 71 Muni bus from The Haight where I had spent some of the afternoon wandering around while trying to convince myself that I really do need medical marijuana to control my restless leg syndrome. No, seriously I do have restless leg. And don’t leave a lot of comments about how it doesn’t really exist. You try my legs on for a night.

Anyway, the 71 was a long ride so I had time to chat with the driver, a nice fellow from, as he said, “the Phillipines, m’am”. Today was his day off and this was not his regular route and he’d taken an extra shift for the overtime. His family lives in a house he bought in Sacramento and he sees them only on his days off. He was shy so didn’t want me to take his picture but here he is, picking up a customer.

What can I say? I’m a public transit romantic. This driver stays with his brother when he is in the city working. His whole family is part of the largest export product of the Phillipines, labor. Human beings who work hard are the primary resource of that country. Nurses, teachers, construction workers, domestic help, cover bands at nightclubs, Filipinos do it all and they do it all over the world.


The 71 deposited me once more at the beach on another gray, otherworldly day. Wandering along the edge of the ocean, lost in damp thoughts, this emerged:

I was having a psychedelic experience, completely drug-free. Yes, that is a Dutch windmill, not 300 yards from the coast of the Pacific. It’s actually the largest Dutch windmill in the world, having the largest sails, according to the plaque that’s stuck on it. It was built to pump water from an underground well to irrigate the “useless” sand dunes of the 19th century that are now the lush and beautiful Golden Gate Park.

A sign said that the garden beneath the windmill is the “Queen Wilhemina Tulip Garden”. Alas, tulips are out of season, as you can see from the flowerless beds in the foreground. But this is San Francisco, so queens are never out of season and the scrubby underbrush trails around the windmill play host to a robust crop of them.

It hard to see the gents I saw go into this shrub together and in the spirit of keeping the anonymous in anonymous sex, I let them have their encounter, minus the prying eyes of the internet. There are plenty of other sites for that, if you really have an interest.

Icons, literally

Today I went on an excursion, out to the beaches of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

It was all gray and fogged in again. Not the California of the Beach Boys today but that of the Mamas and the Papas when all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray. Dreamy.

I wandered around the nearby residential neighborhood, which was once called Carville, because disused horse-drawn streetcars had been sold to beachgoers in the late 19th century to be used for beach shacks. A few houses still exist that are made of the old cars, though it’s impossible to tell from the street nowadays. Maybe this one is one, since it’s so skinny and they used to just pile the cars on top of each other:











Here’s the interior of one house that still exists, though I couldn’t find it on the street. The benches that the passengers sat on are still intact along with the gas lamps at either end.

Didn’t find a house made of a street car but I did find a house of the lord over on Geary that could have been plucked from the steppes of Russia.

This is the Holy Virgin Joy of All Who Sorrow Russian Orthodox Cathedral

The various eastern orthodoxies really know how to do a cathedral. With its golden onion tops and wall-to-wall iconographic interior, the cathedral definitely hails from the “more is more” school of interior decoration.

Pictures of saints, icons in the truest sense of the word, are amazing but I have to say the real flesh and bones of an actual saint really ups the ante.



This is Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco a for-real saint, taking visitors at his earthly resting place in the cathedral. I must admit, I did not take this picture myself but got it off the web. I wanted to go inside and see Saint John but I did not have a skirt on and I did not wish to be disrespectful. The Orthodoxies of the world have dress codes which are more strict that my nanny dress code. The Holy See does not recognize catalogue items from the Limited or track suits.

Nonetheless, I will return with proper attire another day. Not that I am some sort of obsessive who is into dark tourism of the religious sort, but seriously, I’ve only been here a little while and I’ve already seen the relics of a Buddha, and the relics of a Russian saint make for a nice fusion of perspectives.

This is Moe, striving for balance in these polemical times, saying so long.

Open Your Golden Gates

To everything, turn, turn, turn.

Now, I'm in San Francisco, CA, which is not someplace I ever dreamed I’d live. OK, that’s not true because doesn’t everyone with half a brain dream of living in San Francisco? But given my history of under-employment, the Bay Area never seemed like a practical choice.

But here I am and I can’t believe it. I get to live in this incredible house.

Actually I get to share the incredible house that the cars live here. There are more of them than there are people at this point. The house really isn’t IN San Francisco proper as you can tell by the amount of yard and stuff. It’s in Walnut Creek, far from the wagging fingers of the public transit vigilantes. This is still California after all and it’s nice to be able to feel cozy with your vehicles under one roof. Or six roofs, as the case may be.

So, sure there’s plenty of cars in California, just like they told me there would be. I just got here so stereotypes are a nice shorthand way of getting a grip on the place. There’s the California beaches and the ocean, another icon. Though it’s cold and gray now that daylight savings time has begun, it’s still beautiful out there on the edge of the wild Pacific.





Other icons of San Francisco: Victorian houses and gays and cable cars and cults. Eventually I will encounter them all.

Let me give you a for-instance. I was over on 22nd street and went inside this building:


I thought it was another gothic-esque church but it’s been repurposed by the Hua Zang Si Buddhists. Here’s their main Buddha which resides on the second floor:

There are offerings to the various Buddhas all over the place. This one has one thousand golden cups of water in front of him along with fruit and incense and sound, which are all part of the Buddha gift bag.

In the middle of the room is this glass case. It’s kind of hard to tell what it is from the picture and it’s also hard to tell when you are standing right in front of it.



This is a sculpture of Mt. Sumera, which is an important place in Buddhist cosmology and is basically due north of the known world, where we are now. So, to me here in San Francisco, it’s like Marin. Inside that sculpture are two sacred relics, actual pieces of Satyamuni, the medicine Buddha.

It got me thinking about starting my own spiritual movement, the Nanny Orthodox Temple.



I have a captive audience of ready-made followers at the park. We will meet in our small cabals in plain view at Gymborees and fast food coffee shops like Dunkin' Donuts where there will be colorful distraction for our tiny bundles of responsibility, necessary while we plot a spiritual path for ourselves from the comfort of our tracks suits.
I think these ladies are an underutilized source of strength and I want to harness the power of nannies for enlightenment. Lately, just about anything has a ring of possibility to it, doesn’t it?

This is Moe saying goodbye while continuing my search for Nirvana in the Bay Area.