Sudden Storm

Even though the clouds have been piling up since I came home from work, the storm still seems to come on quickly, like a single yelling voice turning into a shouting crowd. The lush green backyards out our kitchen window are tossed by the wind and rain, the trees gyrating back and forth in the frothing air.

“I wonder what the front looks like,” I muse as I cook, but Katie is already on her way to her studio to look out on the street.

“It’s a river,” she informs me on her return.

New York

“Oooohhhh, take me off your mailing list, for kids who think it still exists, for those who think it still exists,” the singer wails in my headphones as he laments a New York that used to be. We’re going over the bridge again, a very Groundhog Day sort of feeling, and I’m looking upriver past the glittering spans of the Williamsburg Bridge up into Queens.

The train passes over something on the third rail that sparks like a flash bulb going off, white light obliterating anything more that ten feet from the train, and everything in that circle stark and harsh.

Then the spark is gone, and the New York City shyly returns, a little less bright to my eyes than it was a second ago, but still there, still glittering, after all.

Looks Like Rain?

Katie is sitting on the front steps of our building when I arrive home from my shift at the doctor’s office, waiting for the guys who are delivering her chest of drawers that she recently purchased. She sees me coming down the street, and even though she’s clearly pretty tired, she manages a smile.

I take off my bag and sit next to her, and we talk about our respective days, and rate the steady parade of dogs out for their evening strolls. 

“That cloud,” Katie says with a worried look, pointing up at a dark gray customer that seems to have come out of nowhere, “moved in about five minutes ago, and the guys are bringing the piece in a pickup truck."

Working a Double

The words on my phone blur, and I wasn’t really reading them anyway. I blink hard, once, twice, and then open my eyes as wide as I can and try to look at something else for a second.

The aisles of the market are somewhat full, but not packed, and nobody seems to be buying stuff. A balding man and his wife at a nearby booth bend closely over a counter crowded with boring, basic jewelry at least half of which I know for a fact was imported from China, and they seem to be frozen for a moment, like figures on a screen that are just about to start moving, and I watch them for a while before I look away.

I Miss Drive-Ins

One of the characters in this movie lives behind a drive-in movie theater, and the shot of him driving back to his house gets the sound of a drive-in exactly right: all the tinny little speakers that are meant to go in your car windows blaring out the sound track to the movie so that it carries in a faint chorus across the parking lot.

When I was a kid, the DeAnza drive-in in Tucson would have a swap meet in the hours before dark. My parents would take us there, and I would run around in the deepening dusk as the vendors packed up their wares and folded their tables in preparation for the movie to start.

The hot desert air would cool, and I would find my way back to the station wagon where my dad was fiddling with the heavy, metal speaker to get it hooked over the door, and the sound would come on, the screen would light up, and the magic would begin.

All In the Timing

“Key lime pies!” Katie exclaims in delight on seeing them in the display at the pastry shop.

“Oh, I’m sorry, someone called in and reserved every single one of those,” the woman behind the counter says with a frown.

There’s a silent pause, a moment of exquisite tension as the woman behind the counter and Katie lock eyes, and then, almost simultaneously, they both start to grin.

“I’m glad it’s not true, but I really appreciate that joke being made,” Katie says, laughing.

Liminal

A huge yellow moon lifts above the clouds as we ride the Manhattan Bridge in a taxi over the East River to Brooklyn. The everloud glittering towers and spires of the island behind us are quiet, and ahead of us, Long Island waits for us with its own problems and beauties.

Bridges are connections between the spaces, which is what makes them beautiful. They are like fall and spring, and their loveliness comes from the fact that we cannot remain on them, but must use them to get to where we are going.