The Old Croton Aqueduct was part of the drinking water conduit for old New York. Reservoirs upstate fed into the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County and from there down the aqueduct to the city. The tunnels and the pumphouses are no longer in use; occasionally a tour group enters the abandoned Ossining pumphouse and climbs down the stairs to the brick tunnels. It is a spectacular space.

I was pleased enough with one of the photos to use a version as the cover art for my Why Am I Awake? collection.

We'd caught the Bollywood fever and were deep in the proselytizing phase. Carolyn and I made an arrangement with the library in Ossining to run a series of six classic Hindi films over as many months. We agonized for weeks until settling on the six titles seen in the poster above.

We made short promo vids for every film that we showed. At that point we’d been into Hindi cinema for almost a decade. It’s one of the only times in my life where I’ve seen an obscure interest end up making cash, in this case the job Carolyn got when her publishing house began to fall apart. Her knowledge of Bollywood was useful to her new employer.

We’d graduated from Saraswati Grocery, the mom-and-pop spice shop up in Fishkill where we'd rented Hindi films, initially on VHS, later on DVD. I recall the first two titles we we got: Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994). These were both recommended to us by mom-and-pop, and in 2024 I still have tunes from Hum Aapke running through my head. To date, as Indians say, an idiom that is perfect and charming.

C and I made trips to India in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2019. We dragged H along on the first three, and Carolyn went on to do more by herself. On on very first trip we were lucky enough to get onto a location for Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, and also visited the studio set of a much smaller-scale film, My Name is Anthony Gonsalves.