Pages from a Sketchbook

V.

December seventeenth, 2015. Upper East Side, East 71st Street and Lexington Avenue. The evening stretches across a cloudless sky, over the balcony where I sit with ink and paper, gazing at the stars, thinking, intermittently, about Christmas lights and Eddie John.

I was at Bergdorf Goodman yesterday looking at window displays at the Women's storefront, when a Korean man walked up to me and said, Photography please? For mother of dead child. Home, across waves. I dropped my tote bag on the sidewalk, as he positioned himself in front of the 'Crown Jewels', and took three photographs on his phone -two vertical, one horizontal, without flash. He shook my hand, and thanked me, as I noticed the reflections of two sparkling lions floating across his eyeballs. Last time New York, bad lung cancer. They say metastases into my brain, he remarked. A chortle resurfaced. And he left, a shadow following him, resizing in dimensionality across pleats of lights strung from poles like sparkling sequins. I never got his name, and I forgot my tote bag. But I thought of oleander, the plant, its red pigmentation, and mother of a dead child on Christmas.

When I reached 'Gliterrati -Swarovski', I paused for a minute and put eye drops on my left eye. Passersby were headed South to Saks Fifth Avenue, and tourists with expensive cameras chattered about the miracle of New York during autumn and the holiday-time. I had felt nostalgic all day after seeing a photograph of Mother on Facebook at an aunt's birthday party on Belvedere Road, as I stared at the wrinkles bunching around her eyes as a pronouncement of age and wept out loud; my mother, who I have not seen in five whole years, and who I can only recollect through photographs and images. And seeing mothers embracing sons and grandsons in the middle of the holiday crowd, only escalated my nostalgia. Despite my misgivings, I stared at the Gliterrati display for several minutes, and noticed in its midst a pair of diamond chandeliers, tiered cakes made of zircon, three mannequins studded with peridots and emerald cloaks, a guitar made of amethyst, a candle made of ruby, and ice cream cones made of sapphire. Strings of garnet hung from the ceiling, and fake flames of tourmaline quivered to mechanized gusts of ventilation, internalized within the seams of a Swarovski display. The set sparkled and dazzled with flashes of lights, and occasionally, volcanoes of pearls spurt in angles and fell to the floor, trailing tracks designed with citrine and bloodstones. Cherry blossoms of rubies sprouted at the edges, and curtains of twill aquamarine hung below. A gliterrati, literally, so bold and powerful, so magical and magnificent, that the intensity of the moment along with nostalgia made me cry, quietly, as the tears fell and disappeared into my skin.