It is the last evening of this turn of the calendar, and it need not have any special significance. But not surprisingly we cannot resist looking back — as, really, we should every day (but this we do resist!) of the year.

At this time last year I was in another place, watching the sunset from another vantage point. It was very pretty from there, but it was not the right place.

I have been in a lot of places. I have had a lot of places. Perhaps this one  is the right place.  (The picture at left is, as the one I link to above was at the time, the late afternoon view from my office window.  The new one overlooks 42nd Street in Manhattan, but barely.)

But of course there are places that are not only identified by zip codes, and these are the places we really are, no matter where our mail goes. I have been a lot of places in 2007, including ones I thought I would never be in again, and ones I never dreamed I’d be in at all. Sometimes I struggle to understand why God — one of Whose Hebrew names, Ha-Makom, best translated as “the Omnipresent,” literally means, “the Place” — has led me to some of them. Undeniably, however, I am far richer not only for having been to them, and out of them, but for this wondering, too.

I am grateful that there has always been a place for me. Some people would do anything to have a place, a real place, of their own tonight, notwithstanding their mindless reveling or pointed pondering. And because of my journeys this year from place to place, my heart is with them, in ways I could never have known.

Perhaps, in fact, this is the answer to not only my wondering, but my wandering. Read the rest of this entry »

Walkway over FDR Drive

Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman.

Walkway over the FDR Drive to the East River, sometimes one of my favorite places, at around 50th Street.

Interior of rotunda, New York Supreme Court, New York County

Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman.

For the week, the day, the year. And what a year.  And then some?

These are some pictures I took on the way home on a day when the phones hardly rang.  These were taken with a Kodak Easyshare Z740.

At dusk, the GE Building (30 Rockefeller Center) and candy-cane bus sign.  Or is it a stop sign for candy-cane trucks?

Looking south on Park Avenue, from about 58th Street.

Giant snowflake over the intersection of 57th Street and Fifth Avenues, in front of the Crown Building, commemorating commerce, shopping and great heaps of money quite beautifully.