May 28, 1995

HOW do you measure 16 years? At the community gardens on the Lower East Side, where existence is carved out of lulls in housing construction and time is measured in the life cycles of tomatoes, peppers and daffodils, 16 years is the stuff of legend. That is the age of the garden at Ninth Street and Avenue C, at least as close as anyone can tell. Neighborhood and garden old-timers are quick to recollect sometimes contradictory histories. But they all agree that it was Augustin (Nin) Garcia, a crotchety maintenance worker at the housing projects along Avenue D, who, perhaps drawn by the enormous and beautiful willow tree that still guards the Ninth Street side, first cleared a small plot in 1979.

Viewed from inside the Beltway, it often seems as if everything has changed in American politics. Viewed from Middle America, it looks more like politics as usual. Listen to the voters hereabouts talking about the big political guns back East, and you still hear very few kind words. Not for the winners three years ago, the Democrats, or for the winners last year, the Republicans, or for the candidates who are already gearing up to run for President next year.

I WAS leading a two-man safari from the farm store's loading dock -- me and the warehouse guy with 50 pounds of birdseed on his shoulder -- when I pushed a button on the gizmo in my hand. Twenty-five feet away, the Cadillac's mammoth trunk lid oozed majestically to a full gape. "Hey," my minion asked, "did you do that?"

IT was shortly before 4 on a Wednesday afternoon, and on the third floor of the Department of Public Safety building in Meriden, a rather obscure but increasingly important committee of seven was hearing a tale of domestic quarrels, depression and what was said to be substance abuse. The narrator, a man from Stamford in his late 40's had a ponytail of gray-black hair trailing over his shirt collar. He acknowledged in subdued tones that he has suffered from emotional problems owing to service in the military but denied that he took any medication other than Valium, and that by prescription only. Nor, he said, did he point a handgun at the head of a former live-in girlfriend and then at himself, as the Stamford police claimed when they had his pistol permit taken away.

For Casongo Malele, the news that her sister was being moved from Ward 3 to Ward 2 in the overtaxed hospital here, the epicenter of Zaire's Ebola virus epidemic, was a sign of hope. Like nearly everyone in this city of 500,000, Miss Malele, a 24-year-old student, had come to regard Ward 3 as a sort of terminus for those stricken by the disease, whose symptoms of bloody diarrhea and vomiting are now known and dreaded by all here.