Helping the Lost

There’s only one turnstile at this subway entrance, and this woman’s inability to figure out how to swipe her MetroCard through the reader has caused a serious line to form behind her.

Finally, the green “Go” sign lights up, but then she pushes the turnstile around without going through it, and everyone in the line groans.

The woman behind her walks her to one side, gently explaining her mistake, and then goes through, seemingly leaving the woman stranded outside the subway.

But then she comes around to the fire exit door, slams her hip into the bar, and lets the woman in with a grim smile, leaving before the woman can thank her.

Witchy

I’m exhausted from a long night and an early morning, sitting at the front desk of the doctor’s office.

“Okay, if you could just fill out these forms, three pages, make sure you fill in every line, sign the third page...,” I say to the patient in front of me, when I sense the woman I work with behind me.

“Hey little boy, want some candy?” she says in a witchy voice, then cackles at her own joke as she puts three small pieces of chocolate next to me.

“You know that got creepy, right?” I interrupt myself to say to her, which brings on another fit of cackling.

Ah, Youth

The two kids behind the counter at the Uhaul are flirting pretty hard, and they don’t care who sees.

When he asks to borrow her scanner to complete my transaction, she hands it to him with a wicked smile and a saucy, “Tap it.”

This gets a big, knowing laugh from him, and then he shakes his head and sings quietly, in a thick Caribbean accent, “Me ‘fraid the pussy bite me.”

Now they’re both laughing, totally in their own world, and I just stand, smiling, pretending I don’t know what’s going on, happy just to see them enjoying themselves, each other, their youth.

Sarcasm is Impolite, But Appropirate

“So a lot of the problems between, say, the Hutus and the Tutsis, I mean, it would be ahistorical to not see how that came from colonialism, so a lot of the racism in specifically Africa supports and comes from white supremacy,” I say to Katie as she’s getting ready for bed. “Anyway,” I sigh, “it’s complicated.”

“Oh, wait,” Katie says from the bathroom as she pretends to take notes on her hand, “you say racism is complicated?”

I laugh as she continues, still pretending to write, “I just want to make sure I get all this."

They Can’t All Be Deep

After several weeks of eating lunch in a sort-of park (really more a patch of grass with some public art and a couple of benches) that took almost fifteen minutes to walk to from my work, today I ate lunch in Fort Greene Park, which is a real-ass park, with hills and paths and trees and lots of grass and a graceful, tall memorial to the Prison Ships Martyrs. It was less than five minutes away.

I climbed up some stone steps and followed a coarsely graveled concrete path to a bench where I sat and ate a sandwich while, far below, the Mr. Softee ice-cream truck played it’s cheerful, incessant song over and over.

I was reading while I ate, so it took me a while to notice that I had dripped a little bit of food on my pants; then it started to rain.

Not Talking to Me

The grocery store doesn’t seem to have the brand of turkey dogs that Katie likes, but I’m lingering by the packaged meats section, hoping they’ll magically materialize. 

“Disgusting,” a low voice behind me says, and I turn to see an older black woman watching me with a sour look. “All this meat, don’t even know what’s in it, killing things, chemicals, disgusting.”

I consider engaging, but after a moment’s thought decide that she wouldn’t care if I was a vegetarian even if she knew, and so I retreat into the white New Yorker’s standard gambit of “they must be talking to someone else."

New Panhandling Technique

We’re standing on the corner after the play, chatting away about nothing, just enjoying one another, when a skinny man in a navy blue hoodie walks up

He asks for change, we don’t have any, but instead of that being the end of it, he gets agitated and starts saying he “won’t take no for an answer.”

Now this kind of bullshit may work on the tourists, but we’ve been here a while, so it goes back and forth for a minute until finally, Katie steps forward and says, in her most serious Katie voice, “We don’t have anything to give you.”

Something snaps in his eyes, he says, “I give up,” and he’s walks into the crosswalk and lies down in the middle of the intersection; an SUV drives up, honks, and then goes around his prone form.