The New Paper Column: De La Vega

Spring has finally come to New York.

Walking around the city these days, you can see it in the sea of T-shirts. You can feel it in the breezy winds no longer freezing your skin off.

You can hear it in the hobo who has started shouting “All You Need Is Love!” at every person that walks along Third Avenue.

Springtime in New York is indeed a wonderful time. It is capable of softening and soothing everything and everyone, even New Yorkers.

Just the other day, one of my floormates was extremely annoyed at his computer game. Instead of punching and (further) cracking the sheet of mirror on our common room wall, he merely screamed. That’s springtime in New York for you.

As for myself, I’m wandering the streets more often, now that I no longer risk hypothermia if I get lost.

I’ve discovered a few more alternative cafes, a shop that sells only chess pieces, and a bookstore that also sells discarded street signs.

But best of all, I’ve rediscovered De La Vega.

I saw a De La Vega on my first day in New York. My virgin De La Vega was a goldfish bowl that held two goldfishes, with the words “Glass Bowl Living” inscribed by the side.

It was done in chalk, and the weather was turning bad. It rained that night, and by the next day the drawing on the sidewalk was gone.

Over the next few months I came across De La Vega’s sporadically.

One morning in October I woke up and found my dorm’s courtyard completely scrawled over with De La Vega’s.

He had come in the a.m. hours, invited by the guards.

I kept a lookout for his work afterwards, but after January, when the snows had come and the weather worsened, he seemed to vanish entirely.

Gone were the deceptively innocent drawings that depicted complicated social issues, the hilarious caricatures that reimagined his mother as Chewbacca and other movie icons, and the murals of just everyday people.

I worried. For a while.

I wondered if he had been prosecuted by the police, or whether he had simply given up, frustrated with the people that kept smearing and distorting his artwork.

But then homework piled up, my allowance started thinning out, and between grades and money, De La Vega disappeared.

But two days ago I was taking a walk through Alphabet City, trying to ignore the voice in my head screaming “Final Exams! Final Exams!”, and there it was.

Underneath a tree with pink flowers, amidst the gloss of the city: a chalk drawing of a goldfish bowl, inscribed on the side with the words “Glass Bowl Living”.

In less than a month I will return to Singapore. I will miss many things about New York. Coldstone Ice Cream. Netflix. The Strand Bookstore.

But if there’s one thing that I desperately wish to see in Singapore, it is a De La Vega.

Singapore has weathered many seasons and many storms. Is it not time for springtime in Singapore yet?