“I have a question,” Katie says, “and it’s not about the show or politics or anything.”
“Okay,” I say, pausing The West Wing, which we’ve been watching.
“Why hasn’t Trump been talking about how he got shot at?” she asks. “Because if I was running his campaign,” she continues as I consider this, “I would have him talking about how, like ‘I got shot for you,’ at every ravenous Republican rally,”
“My shoulder hurts,” Katie says, demonstrating like she’s dancing in an 80s music video with an exaggerated roll of her right shoulder. “I don’t know, though, I only did a little work today….”
“Is it ‘cause we danced last night?” which we did, at the concert.
“Oh god!” she exclaims, stricken with the knowledge that time continues to march on.
I spot him halfway down the block: a full-sized, rough-coat, brindle dachshund coming down the steps and out the little iron gate of one of Park Slopes innumerable brownstones.
So I do what you do when confronted by beauty and grace, that is, my face erupts with a goofy smile, and I make direct eye contact with him. His scruffy little beard lifts in a dignified acknowledgement of my tribute and I think we’re basically done here.
But his owner, seeing my delight, somehow thinks it’s appropriate to insert himself into our interaction with what seems to me as a slightly can-I-help-you “Hi,” but I choose to ignore his tone, give him a friendly, “Hello, great dog,” and keep it moving.
“Okay, well, it’s really important that I speak to them today, so please have them call me, okay?” I tell the customer service rep after waiting on hold for over a half-hour.
“Absolutely, sir, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help you more today,” he says, so I reassure him that I know he did all he could, and hang up.
After my doctor’s appointment, I walk into the library, and pull out my phone to double check for any calls.
...and see the voicemail from the call that I missed as I was crossing Eastern Parkway to get here, not five minutes before.
We’re waiting for the light under the BQE when Katie points to a car parked on the sidewalk across the street.
The parking job is a real dick-move: it’s unnecessary (a summer weekend in NYC means everyone is out of town, leaving plenty of spaces and no need to park on the actual sidewalk) and completely inconsiderate in the way that it takes up so much room that it blocks anyone from actually being able to walk on the sidewalk without having to go into the street. Plus the car has this very aggressively macho-muscle-car look to it, with a gray paint job and dark, dark tinted windows.
“That’s a cop,” Katie says, and then repeats it: “That’s a cop.”
“These books are heavy, off putting, and have a good chance of making you dry heave!” Katie says, quoting a book recommendation video, then she repeats it. “A good chance of making you dry heave!”
“It’s not for me,” I say, waving my hand.
“I mean, maybe I’ll like something on it,” she says, pressing play.
After they’ve strapped my feet together and attached me to the machine that will pump a chemical into my veins that allows the bigger machine to read my insides with greater accuracy, after they’ve put plugs in my ears to ensure I don’t go deaf from the buzzing mechanical symphony of physics and enormous magnetic fields that will see through my skin like a man looks through a window to check the weather, after all of this preparation for what is effectively a miracle of science..., we hit a snag.
Now three people are futzing with the table upon which I am trussed and blanketed, raising it, examining the readout, lowering it, shoving it into place with a jarring clunk, consulting, shaking it back and forth, wiggling it, several more clunks and finally a smooth slide into place.
You know that feeling when the ride operator at the carnival checks the straps and the shoulder pull-down bar, just to make sure everything’s kosher, before the chair upon which your very life depends lifts off at ridiculous speed to spin you through space, but you notice when he does it he has to really shake it once or twice, like maybe he’s not entirely confident, but finally he leaves it, because, you know, good enough? I have a brief moment of trepidation as the open maw of the machine receives me and the cacophony of the scan begins.
He’s bent with depression or weary from work, his head in his hands across the car from us as we ride the Q Train into Manhattan.
At Canal Street, a woman hauling an inappropriately wheeled suitcase attempts to board, when one of the wheels slips between the platform and the train, becoming wedged.
Her cries of alarm become more frantic as she struggles with her bag, and suddenly the guy across the car is up, along with another guy and Katie, and Katie and the second guy are holding the door, while the first guy, the depression guy, is down on his knees, hauling away with all his might until he pops the wheel out, freeing the bag, the woman gets on the train, and everyone goes back to their seat as if nothing happened.
The guy goes back to his pose, head in hand, but when I say, “Hey, man, nice job,” he looks up, face transformed in a smile.
We lay on inflatable loungers in the park, eating snacks and watching the women play softball.
The sun came out from the clouds and went back behind the clouds and the breeze chased it, and a redheaded dog came over, all floppy and friendly, and then ran away, and we stopped watching the game and read for a while, and a lady laughed and laughed until we thought she might hurt herself.
Then a hawk flew over, and another, and another, and a man walked by with a cat perched on his shoulder looking very mysterious like he belonged in a souk in a 1930s Boys’ Adventure Novel.
And the afternoon turned to dusk and the breeze and the sun took their game over the river, and a twilight of fireflies sparked their bodies into brightness as the warm air cooled and it got too dark for us to read.
We see him every time we walk by this section of the drive that circles Prospect Park: a man sitting on the guardrail with a speaker playing some pop song or other, holding a handful of burning incense sticks, grooving in place to the music.
A couple of the mob of bicyclists smile and give him a wave, which he returns with a huge smile of his own and a shout of, “Blessings!”
I imagine him blessing every one of the bicyclists and walkers circumambulating the park with his music and his grooving little sit-down dance, and them taking those blessings around and around the park, turning it into a giant 3.3 mile in circumference prayer wheel, sending positive energy all over Brooklyn, and I tell Katie this vision.
“As long as you put another guy just like him on the big hill at the other end,” she replies.
When we walk out of the movie theater, spun through the revolving door and out onto the street, I immediately feel the contrast between the air-conditioned interior and the breezy summer night air.
We head toward the subway, and the artificial cold evaporates out of our skin and bones, to be replaced by a gentle relaxation. I think about the harsh lighting down in the station, the noise of the trains, the same-old-same-old regularity of which subway car we get on, the crowded trains....
“Why don’t we walk home?” I suggest, and Katie agrees.
As the train pulls in, Katie and I step to one side of the door, like you do, to let the passengers inside off before we get on.
Another woman, an old, stooped, gray-haired woman in a shapeless gray and black dress with a thoughtless pattern printed on it, steps directly in front of the door and, when it opens, desperately shoves her way into the car to grab a seat before anyone can get off, earning herself a few dirty looks from her fellow passengers in the process.
Later, the old lady and I are seated next to each other, and a family pushing a baby carriage gets on the train and parks the carriage in front of us, presenting us with a beautiful, brown little baby with fat little fingers and toes, who, after considering us with a certain amount of confusion for a moment, favors us with the most beatific, loving blessing of a toothless smile.
The old lady leans over to the parents of this angel beaming at us and asks, “How old is she?"
I find a seat on the train and sit down with a sigh. The guy across from me is a middle-aged latino fellow with a gym bag and sweats on, headphones in, and right next to him on the bench is a single folded dollar bill.
I do the raised chin thing with eye contact, try to get his attention to tell him about the money, but he narrows his eyes to almost slits, like he’s squinting at something outside the train, and refuses to meet my eye.
I raise my chin again and he, still not meeting my eye, shakes his head, so I shrug and go back to writing.
As we’re finishing lunch with our friend for her birthday, in the middle of the conversation, her husband who hasn’t been feeling well stands up with a silent grimace and abruptly walks outside.
“Well, goodbye,” she says to his back with a mild exasperation, but I’m not offended. I know that expression, the sudden stab of pain that short circuits thought, making any position sitting still a torture, when you can either walk or writhe.
“No big deal,” I say, and we continue as if nothing happened.
The receptionist at the hospital is doing her best, since the automatic check-in machines that dot the airy, two-story, white stone lobby seem not to be working, and while the line is pretty long, it’s moving at a good clip.
When I finally get to the front at her enormous desk, she, all professional, asks the usual, name, date of birth, phone, but after a moment, her bored countenance shifts and she looks up at me apologetically.
“Your appointment is for... July seventeenth,” she says, hesitantly, as if expecting me to blow up at her.
A beat, then I give her a smile and say, “Ah, well I guess you just freed up my morning, didn’t you?"
I put my card in the little tray they give you with the receipt in it and space out looking around this cute Chinese restaurant. The neon characters in the window are rainbow hued, but individually, like one’s blue, one’s red, one’s orange - you get it.
A guy comes up with one of those hand held devices to run my card, and as he picks up my card I see that he has two thumbs on his one hand, one on top of the other, next to four normal fingers, and each of his thumbs has a perfect, immaculately manicured nail.
I am a man of the world, so I don’t stare or react in any way whatsoever, because that would be rude, and unkind, but I will admit to you, dear reader, that I did take a moment, internally, and confirm to myself that I was not in fact hallucinating, because for just a second that seemed, not just possible, but likely.
The house manager of the Broadway show we’re attending has taken a shine to us, and after the show ends finds us to say goodbye.
We joke about the wood-fire pizza places in Brooklyn Katie recommended, and then he gives us each a hug before we leave.
Seeing the cane I’ve been walking with, after hugging me he fixes me with an intense look, and grabbing my shoulder with his bony hand, says, “Be whole and healed, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I take a beat to process this, then, with a smile, say, “Hey, I’ll take whatever help I can get!"
On the weekends, Grand Army Plaza at the north end of Prospect Park fills with white tents for the greenmarket, like mushrooms that appear after a storm. They make a miniature city, with little streets that fill up with shoppers and their dogs, their bikes, their strollers, all milling about, buying apples and cheese and bread and cabbages, arms full of flowers and potted plants.
Today, though, walking through the plaza on my way to the library, the plaza is empty, a vast expanse up the sky, criss-crossed by bicyclists streaking through the void, with a lone woman down by Eastern Parkway feeding a mob of pigeons.
The pigeons revolve around her, like worshipers around a shrine, or groupies around a pop star, circling as a single organism, parts of them breaking off and rousing up in a flurry of wings to settle on her shoulders and outstretched arms before diving back to the ground where she scatters sheets of seed for them to eat, and as I walk past I avert my eyes, somehow embarrassed by this naked display of adoration, the birds for the food, the woman for the birds.
“Oooh, who’s this?” Katie asks as the music curls from the kitchen speakers like the scent of onions and garlic cooking in the pan, drums popping, horns all spicy. The fried rice she’s making sizzles like high-hat cymbals, umami like bass.
I do a half-assed quick-stepping dance across the tiles, then perch on the stool, phone in hand. “Buena Vista Social Club,” I say proudly, checking the playlist.
The sudden torrential downpour drove all the stroller-moms in from the streets, rapidly filling up the small cafe in which my friend and I chose to meet, and one of the babies has taken quite a shine to my friend, staring with intense, un-baby-like concentration.
“Ooooh, he must be an ‘old soul,’” my friend says, waggling his fingers at the fascinated child. I’m always embarrassed to make too much eye-contact with babies I haven’t been formally introduced to, but I smile gamely.
“Or,” he says, considering, “maybe he’s just never seen a black person before."
“We gotta just get the same amount of juice on each plate,” I tell the cats as I divide the can of rendered chicken between them for their dinner. “Don’t want either of you terrorists getting weird about it.”
I see some movement out the open window I’m standing next to, and look down to find our downstairs neighbor out on her deck, sweeping up the fallen flowers that have dusted it all in yellow, and she looks up at me.
“Hey there!” I say with a smile, knowing that she heard every word of the preceding. and she looks up with a smile of her own and waves.
There’s a part of my journey home from Katie’s studio, when I cross over the parkway and into my neighborhood-proper, when the character of things changes.
The trees have sheltered these streets for forty or fifty years, the houses have been here way longer than that. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s sunset, and I’m going downhill, slipping through traffic while the cars sit fuming at stoplights, idling murderously.
I find myself praying in that sort of inarticulate way that sometimes happens, wordlessly grateful for the road, the tires, the traffic, the trees, leaves like stained glass, for standing, for moving through the world, like everything around me is a church, a temple, a shrine.
I lean out over the rail of the 19th floor rooftop deck and look down to feel the nauseated thrill of gravity. To my left, the tall buildings shoulder their way up the coast of Manhattan to vanish in the shallows of the Bronx, while directly below me, scatterings of people play in the park or relax on the lawn as twilight creeps in from the east, shadowing the sun across the water into New Jersey.
Like the stars we never see, the buildings begin their glitter seemingly all at once, but sprinkled across the skyline so you couldn’t know which one you saw first to wish on.
Katie comes up behind me, puts her hand on my back, I turn and see her smiling, and I put my hand out to stroke her hair, smiling too.
Everyone and their dog came to the park today, and this guy brought his corgi. He decides he’s gotta check on something, and the corgi is like, “Absolutely, my man, let’s go,” but the guy tells him to stay with the group, he’ll be right back, points him back to where the group is sitting in the shade, with the fat bees humming under the shady trees and all the food is there, and it’s great.
The corgi considers this for a bit, his head cocked to one side, and decides, nah, I should definitely tag along, just in case things get weird or whatever, runs after him, and the guy stops, tries to send him back, corgi isn’t having it, and this goes on for a couple rounds, with him walking away repeatedly, pursued by a small, willful dog, until finally the guy shouts to his friend/partner, asks him to call the dog, who, called by another person who has some authority, goes back to the group, albeit reluctantly and with deep misgivings as to the wisdom of this course of action.
Wonder how that second guy feels, knowing he’s definitely the spare human?
The playground for the “Hellenic Classical School” is a half-block of 18th street between Fifth and Fourth Avenues that they’ve cordoned off with matte steel crowd-control fences, and since we seem to have arrived at recess, we have to get off our scooters and walk them on the sidewalk beside where the kids are playing.
The street is riotous with kids being kids: a game of baseball has spilled onto the sidewalk and we almost get beaned as we pass; several simultaneous games of what might be tag, but could also just be girls chasing boys to try to get the boys to chase them, roil across the blacktop; two long-haired girls huddle in the shade, their knees folded up to their chests, their faces pale and grave as they discuss whatever solemnities grade-school girls discuss.
Another scrum of children tumble onto the sidewalk, and a lone woman, sturdy and blonde and harried looking, yells at them to stay in the street. “You’re doing a good job,” Katie says to her, and the woman smiles a defeated, slightly feral smile before putting her attention back on the chaos in front of her.
“If you like that one, she’s got a shorter book called Ceremony that’s supposed to be very good, but I haven’t read it,” I tell Katie.
“It is good,” a voice in the hall outside her studio calls, and I stick my head out to see a young woman, another artist, sitting on the floor a few doors down.
“Yeah, I haven’t read it,” I repeat, “but I have been to a party at the author’s house,” I continue, realizing as I say it what a schmuck I sound like.
As she makes a la-di-DA kind of face, I quickly bend over and mime picking something up, adding, “Oh, hey, dropped that name, let me just grab it, there.”
Katie’s alma mater has this weird connection to bricks which I’m not going to go into here - it’s long and not very interesting - but suffice to say that it’s one of those bits of information that sort of sticks in one’s brain, to the point that I think about it whenever I see buildings made of brick.
Because you don’t see buildings made of bricks very much these days, since it’s easier to make them out of steel frames and concrete, cheaper too.
So as I’m sitting in the courtyard of the building where Katie has her studio, enjoying the sun and watching the planes overhead glide down the sky on their approach to LaGuardia, I saw starlings and sparrows flying up into little nests where the bricks on the facade had fallen away. And I couldn’t help thinking about what this buliding used to be, back when they made entire buildings out of brick - maybe a factory, or an office building - and what will happen in the future, when we’re all gone, and the birds take the place over, and the planes are gone, and the vines start pulling the bricks down, one by one.
“I’d like to order a thunderstorm,” Katie says plaintively. The light from the front windows is gray and sallow.
“Sure, you can ask for whatever you want, but maybe don’t be too attached to the outcome, you know?” I reply, and she does her best not to pout.
Not five minutes later, the little home assistant lights up with an alert: “The national weather service has issued a Severe Thunderstorm Watch for Park Slope, beginning...,” and Katie turns to me with a look of triumph and joy, her arms raised in victory above her head.
A boy with a rugby ball throws it underhand, granny-style, straight up into the blue sky over the park, putting a spin on it as he does, and catches it as it comes down. He does this over and over, trying to get it to go higher with each throw, showing no signs of boredom or weariness.
I get why people like to watch other people play sports. There is something so pure in the concentration, so completely unaffected and authentic, that it becomes like seeing a person’s soul, in a way that they would never let you see it otherwise.
“It’s like Sam and Frodo going to Mordor,” I say looking at the sky. This is not a new thought, though maybe the first time I’ve shared it with Katie, about the way the sky looks when it’s overcast in a particular way - it’s the way I’ve always described it to myself, ever since I was a kid.
Katie’s face is carefully composed, betraying nothing, but she knows when an info dump is coming, and, graciously playing her part, she says, “What’s that?”
“Well, the sky, it sort looks the way I imagine the sky looked over..., oh what is that place..., Ithilien, right after Faramir lets Sam and Frodo go on toward Mordor after he catches Gollum at the forbidden pool, you remember the forbidden pool?” I begin, and we’re off, cheerfully striding on our own quest down the Brooklyn streets to pick up Buffalo Wings for dinner.
We’re standing outside Katie’s studio, waiting for the car to come pick us up and take us to our storage locker. A couple blocks uphill from us, I can see the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, one of Robert Moses’s great monuments to his vision of car culture for the city - a huge elevated expressway that cuts through the heart of the boroughs, with almost no regard for the neighborhoods that subsist underneath it.
From where we’re standing I can see - high above the broken down cars and graffitied garages, above the piles of trash and broken sidewalks - rivers of cars flowing up and down the BQE, turgid and slow one direction, swift and streaming the other, both ways shining and flashing in the sun.
“You know, we can see them up there, but they don’t even think about us down here at all,” I say, and Katie looks up at them flying by, and nods.
An alert glows ghostly on the smart-home assistant, but the dark room this late in the morning when I awake tells me all I need to know: storm’s coming.
I wake Katie in the eerie darkness, knowing she won’t want to miss the thunder and lightning when it arrives. She comes out of sleep groggy and disheveled, pulls the leopard-print eye mask over her tangled locks, and sits blinking on the side of the bed.
I explain the coming weather encouragingly, and after a couple minutes, she takes a deep breath, stands, and trudges to the kitchen to make coffee.
“You seem like you know which one is best,” he says in lightly accented english. We’re both standing in front of the decongestants, looking at the little cards they make you take up to the pharmacist in place of boxes since people use the good stuff (pseudoephedrine) to make meth.
I explain to him that the stuff that you can buy off the shelf (phenylephrine HCL) has been shown in recent studies to be about as effective as a placebo, but then, in the middle of my explanation, I become suddenly shy - like, what if I’m misremembering the studies, or what if he’s allergic to pseudoephedrine and him buying the real stuff actually kills him?
“...which is why I buy it, anyway, but, you know, your mileage may vary,” I trail off lamely, even as he continues to nod enthusiastically.
“I don’t get as much traffic when you’re with me,” Katie says as we’re stopped on our scooters at the light on the way home from her studio, and she’s right - the streets seem quiet and empty for a Monday evening. “You’re my good luck commuting buddy!”
I feel a sudden pang of anxiety: what if mentioning it breaks the spell, and in typical parable style now, instead of being a good luck charm, I become an albatross, attracting all the cars in increasingly dangerous and malevolent ways.
“Yeah, it’s like when we’re taking airplanes,” I laugh, concealing my nerves, knowing that the only way to keep God on His toes is to pretend he doesn’t scare me.
I get tired more easily than before, these days, but I’m learning to take more rest instead of pushing myself and paying for it later, so we’re sitting on a bench in the shade as the vendors for the street fair finish setting up. The smells of roasting corn and grilling sausage mix in a delicious aroma, a familiar smell that reminds me of running around carnivals and fairs when I was a kid, and I close my eyes, inhaling, and remember.
Behind us, on the playground, a band starts playing a jazzy, upbeat tune that sounds a bit like the music they play at a funeral in New Orleans - snare drum, trombone, saxophone, and a tuba holding down the bass. The music gets louder and louder, until the players march out of the gate, followed by costumed adults dressed as fish and other undersea creatures, and then a whole bouquet of children carrying enormous paper flowers on tall wire stems, and Katie and I are smiling as the group marches out into the street; my weariness lifts, and I can almost imagine getting up and dancing along.
“What’s going on with those two birds and that hawk?” Katie asks, pointing over the trees toward the park exit. High in the sky, two, then three birds are whirling around a hawk soaring lazily above the treetops, swooping in and attacking the hawk’s tail or pecking at its head.
When we get underneath them, we can hear the screeches of the birds, now five, as they harass the hawk in order to protect a nest, or maybe just to be territorial assholes, and I say to Katie, “How are other people not seeing this?”
We stand under the battle, our necks craned, watching the birds press their assault until finally the hawk gives up on whatever it was hoping to accomplish and flies off, and the birds go back to whatever peaceful things they were doing on a lovely spring day.
It’s early evening, I guess, but the cloud cover, an unsettled gray that leaves the air cool but clammy, makes it hard to tell just what time it might be. The slices of pizza we’re taking home smell heavenly, and Katie offers me the box to huff.
I take a huge whiff, and as i’m doing so, a woman comes out of her brownstone and we happen to lock eyes for an awkward moment as I’m nose deep in a pizza box in front of her stoop.
After a few frozen seconds, she gives us a big smile, waves hello, and we smile back and continue on our way, just two kids snorting pizza in the Brooklyn dusk.
“The crowd seems really… young,” my friend Rick says. We’ve found a place to perch while the band continues pummeling the audience, me resting my knees and hips, Rick resting his feet.
“Guess we should get used to it,” I say, and then the band hits a blistering climax, rising up in a crescendo fit to lift the rafters. Something in my heart that does not know my age pushes me to my feet, and I’m back out on the floor, swaying in the waves of sound, feeling the bass drum rearrange the rhythms of my heart.
“The movie theater I used to work at was razed to the ground,” Katie says, slashing with her hand like she’s chopping down a tree.
“Oh yeah,” our friend John says, “mine was just abandoned, so....”
They continue regaling each other with horror stories of teenage labor, but my mind leaps ahead, far into the future, imagines the places we worked like dogs, or played as kids, the buildings we used to dream and eat in, the churches we sat in on Sundays, bored and far from transcendent, the schools we escaped or hid in, all the places that shaped us with their constrictions or carved us with their sharp edges, all of them decaying, empty, built over, or simply gone to grass in an empty field as if they never were.
A cold wind blows through me as I come back to myself, sitting on the couch in my cluttered, happy home, returning from a world I will never see.
I’m thumbing through my phone in search of a photo to give the hairdresser that might show her the way to correct the mop I’m currently carrying around on my head. I’ve worn my hair long for most of my life, but with the white coming in and the coarseness of it all, the length serves only to make me look kind of old.
Katie holds up her phone, a picture of me from a wedding a couple years ago on the screen, saying, “You’re very handsome in this one.”
It’s not bad - the five-head, the crows feet, the crooked grin, all look like me, but like a seriously uncool version - but I suddenly realize that what I consider the cool version of me may not be the one she actually fell in love with, or married, and may have been seriously overrated (by me).
Katie and I are grabbing lunch from the frozen food section in the dollar store near her art studio. The pickings are slim, but we find a couple of items ($1.25 a piece!) and stand in the only open register line, waiting to pay.
“Whoa, they got kombucha at the dollar store?” a man behind me in the drinks aisle says.
After a moment he continues, “Well, it probably ain’t good kombucha, but I’m getting it.”
The couple sitting across the car clearly thought that this end of the subway would be a good private place to have their argument, and her body vibrates like a spring with barely suppressed tension.
“It’s just, no let me finish, just why do you feel the need for me to be small around your friends?” she seethes, and Katie tightens her grip on my arm while we conscientiously direct our eyes to anywhere but them.
Later, as we’re walking home from the subway, I remark, “It’s like we weren’t even there.”
“And by the way, congrats to us on becoming invisibly middle-aged,” Katie adds, high-fiving me.
LL Cool J drives the computer animated beer train in the commercial, bringing frigid winds and a rime of ice to everything he passes before hurtling the train through the wall of this nice man’s house in a hail of rubble with a silly quip and an enormous, cheesy grin - deeply uncool.
“I always think of Shakespeare, Benedict in Much Ado, when I see rappers selling out like this,” I tell Katie, who’s on her phone, studiously ignoring the ad. “’When I said I would die a gangster, I did not think I should live to be so old!’”
“Or so rich!” she adds.
I’m in the kitchen, washing up after dinner, listening to my new favorite song. It gets to the bridge, his voice rises from a desultory baritone up into soaring, heart-rending heights, and I want Katie, who’s also in the kitchen, to hear it.
I had a friend, years ago, who didn’t care all that much about music, always talking over the best parts, or worse, just ignoring some songs altogether, so I got into the bad habit of pointing out my favorite parts to get his attention, which often led to me talking over the good parts.
Today I just turn off the water so I can hear better, and the good part fills the room - her ears work, so why make a big deal out of it?
I’ve been reading too much lately, and not writing enough.
Eating too much, and not cooking.
Talking too much, not listening.
So I made ice cream from scratch, which took hours, just to feel like I accomplished something; it was delicious.
The brownstones on either side are staid and respectable, but in the middle of the block, constructed in the same style, stands an entirely different beast altogether.
A padlocked high fence encircles an overgrown front yard, and all the windows stare out on this residential Brooklyn street with blind, boarded-up eyes, but it’s really the facade that sets this seemingly uninhabited three-story building apart. Back in what looks like the nineties, to judge by the artwork, someone, or several someones, covered the entire front of this building in graffiti - flowers transforming into tessellated birds, into abstract line art the color of the patina on the Statue of Liberty.
On the top floor, almost invisible from where i’m standing on the street, there is a portrait the height of the entire floor of a woman in a tank top, smiling a little awkwardly, and I can’t help but think she might be the one referred to in the small heart by the door on the first floor, inside of which is written the word “Mom.”
Some kids on the Long Meadow are playing Ultimate Frisbee, 3-on-3, not pros or anything, just for fun, and one of them makes a decent catch.
Some older kids walking past start clapping, making a big deal about the catch, and it takes me a few seconds (because of the way my brain works, or doesn’t) to realize they’re being sarcastic.
So now my sense of justice is engaged, and I’m furious, absolutely livid, and I spend the next fifteen minutes walking through a gorgeous day, blue sky, new spring leaves, yadda-yadda, just fuming, rehearsing all the things I’d say, ruminating over the terrible things people have said to me, suddenly I’m thinking about videos of people having fights on subways and outside bars, and I arrive at Dog Beach without having seen anything of the intervening walk.
I sit in the sun, I read, I watch a dog that doesn’t like getting wet overcome her fear and go in up to her chest to retrieve a ball, my breathing slows, I take a sip of water, then another.
Even with a cane, I’m still moving pretty well down the stairs at the theater, but the official-looking woman carrying the orchid doesn’t seem to think so - she bounds impatiently past us, down the wrong side, and disappears into the office.
The line to the ladies room is pretty long, and takes up most of the lobby, but here’s orchid lady to boss everyone around. “Okay everybody, move to the right, doing great, move to the right, move to the right, doing great, doing great,” she says patronizingly.
I try to imagine what it’s like to feel such ownership over a place that you can see the people for whom it’s made as an annoying hinderance to its smooth function, but when I watch how slowly most of the people move, how some of them stand around in the middle of things, uncomprehending, I guess I kind of get it.
The couple lounging across the bench beside Dog Beach aren’t making any friends this afternoon. Their enormous Bluetooth speaker might not offend quite so badly, were they not blaring the early 2000s greatest-jingoistic-country hits, violating the peace of Prospect Park with lyrics promising to put the proverbial boot up Saddam Hussein’s ass.
As the music reiterates how proud they are to be Americans insofar as that relates to the country’s continued military dominance in the name of a rather vaguely defined “freedom,” one part of the couple leans awkwardly out over the muddy pond, taking a picture of something out on the water.
As she extends her phone unsteadily, her partner laces his fingers in a handful of her t-shirt, bracing his feet on the slick paving stones to counterbalance her considerable bulk until, satisfied, they climb aboard their mini scooter and they and their music mercifully recede into the late afternoon sun.
A haze covers Brooklyn today, nudging the temperature up and disguising everything under a glare, so when we walk to the park I decide to wear sunglasses.
Normally, I avoid sunglasses because I have this weird sense, when I wear them, that I’ve put this barrier between me and the world - I feel dissociated from everything, like it’s no longer real, and while I look like I’m walking around like a normal person, I’m actually hidden inside, peering out from behind my glasses where no one can find me. Not only that, but when I look at things, the colors, the depth, everything is different, leaving me feeling even more separate and alienated.
But lying on the grass, wearing sunglasses, staring up at the sky through the branches of a tree, I find myself noticing the edges of each individual leaf, the depth of the sky, the clouds that pass overhead, their texture and weight, and I’m glad I’m not blinded by the glare, that I feel like I’m part of the day.
The shelves gape like open mouths, shoved full of words, each book a tooth, gritting against the texts.
You can look for years, searching every mouth for the magic words to set yourself free - philosophy or fiction, theology, poetry, the mystics, words, words, words.
A wave of dizziness passes through me, reading the titles on the spines, so much time wasted looking for something to solve my problems in bookstores, libraries, universities.
“I think I need to eat something,” I tell Katie, and she nods solemnly.
Pick up a cut nail from the sidewalk beneath a construction shed on Union Street. Note the shape: ancient, wedged, and blunt. Think of Jesus if you’re so inclined, of carpenters, of wood and built things. Slip the nail into your pocket, along with the rest of the poem, and continue your walk home.
I drag through the day at half-speed, lethargic even after a full night’s sleep. When Katie comes home after her appointments, I’ve managed to vacuum a couple rooms and sweep up a little, and we lie down for a nap before we have to go out again for the night.
I settle down on my side, slow my breathing, and gradually relax, and I’m almost able to fall into sleep when the relaxation snaps with a sudden spasm, a muscle in my legs contracting, as if a spring that had been held in place by tension is loosed and kicks out at random, and I have to start the process all over again. Maybe this is how you know that you’ve relaxed enough - when the governor switches off and the body gets rid of all the weird seizures it’s been repressing all day acting normal.
Writing about music, the cliche goes, is about as useful as dancing about architecture.
But we saw a dance show today which included in its subjects The Sears Tower in Chicago (which is now called the Willis Tower for reasons), and it made me cry. The dancers blazed across the stage, their bodies beautiful and mobile, pumping their limbs and leaping into the air, lifted by emotion and each other, and I don’t know how to speak of them without resorting to sentimental platitudes.
And to be fair, they weren’t dancing about architecture, but I’m still the one here, failing the words, seeing them hours later when I close my eyes, hoping I make one thing in my life as beautiful as what I saw today.
“Be careful,” she says as I adjust the chin strap on my helmet and click the little dial in the back that makes it tight around the back of my head.
“I will,” I reply, wheeling my scooter out into the hall. She’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen, watching me leave, her brow furrowed a little.
“Seriously, be careful,” she says again, and her face clears, a decision she’s making, and she gives me a smile before I go.
We hike the Long Meadow, my backpack bouncing on my back, stepping across divots and over hillocks where memories of winter’s rain and cold have heaved up the ground in uneven patches of thick green grass and exposed earth. Today, the sun is shining life into the world, and every tree that isn’t fat with blossoms is covered in a fuzzy new green halo to try and capture their share.
We set up shop in the sunshine on a slight rise with a view up and down the park, spreading out a blanket and lying down to watch the people and read. Katie pulls her hat over her eyes and falls asleep, while I stare at the line between the tree tops and the deepest indigo sky I’ve ever seen, and the tiny planes on their way to Europe pass far, far overhead, halfway between us and God.
“God, what is that?” Katie says looking over my shoulder. Towering over the heads of the crowd, deeper into the heart of darkness that is Times Square, we see a man wearing an enormous panda suit, lumbering through the masses. Many people work the hordes of travelers dressed in dirty, tattered costumes as low-rent versions of Spider-Man, Batman, Mickey or Minnie Mouse, Elmo, Grover, Deadpool, posing for pictures with the tourists and then shaking them down for tips after the fact, but this panda suit is at least nine feet tall, and mildly terrifying.
“It’s the next stage of evolution for the costume guys,” I tell Katie, loud enough so that hopefully other people will hear, and she smiles indulgently and only rolls her eyes a little.
The man with the clipboard steps in front of us as we’re about to cross the street. “Are you a registered voter in Brooklyn?”
He wants us to sign his petition to get a candidate on the ballot, but when we see who it is (an extreme left-wing candidate whose presence will serve only to split the vote and allow for a greater chance of a right-wing win) we almost hand him the clipboard back, but we give each other a look and sigh.
“Everybody gets a chance,” Katie mutters, signing, and I do the same.
The very professional and only slightly harried phlebotomist apologizes for not being allowed to insert an IV. “We’re a little short on nurses today.”
Are you familiar with the phenomenon of possession? Reader, with all sincerity I tell you I heard issue from my own mouth, unbidden but impossible to arrest, the voice of my father, dead lo these almost three years, saying, “Oh, I’d say you’re plenty tall.”
She laughed politely, and Katie, bless her, forced a laugh to cover my shame (contractually obligated as she is to laugh at moments like these), but all I could do was mutter, “Thank you for laughing at my dumb joke” as she slid the needle in.
Despite the cold, despite carrying a cane, my hair too long and much more grey than when I first haunted these streets, I still glow with a mild, pleasant frisson when I walk down by NYU.
I can see the ghosts of the weed guys patrolling the entrances to Washington Square Park (“Green? Trees? Smoke-smoke-smoke”), outlaws rendered superfluous by the dull respectability of law. And across the park squats the staid old brick nunnery where an ex-girlfriend exiled herself in despair after we broke up, before she transformed herself into a photographer and disappeared for years.
And all around, in the present, the students: insecure and absolutely certain, loudly pronouncing their loves and opinions to impress one another, feeling their awkward incompleteness and yet more graceful and full of life than they may ever be again in their lives, walking these streets like lions or children, greeting each other with joy, arm in arm, lonely, anxious, suicidal, foolish, radiant, brilliant, beautiful, not knowing or caring how wonderful it is to be young, how fast it goes away.
The woman standing ahead of me in line for the unisex bathroom stalls in the Whole Foods has all the trappings of a tourist: the leggings and puffer vest, the baseball cap, the Fanny pack around her waist instead of as a crossbody.
“Is there a ladies room?” she asks me.
My hackles raise a little, since there are obvious signs that prominently show symbols for both men and women, but maybe she’s just worried, and NOT making some kind of political statement, so I ignore the implications of what she said, and just address the content.
“You’re fine,” I reply, attempting in my tone to convey both a casual familiarity with unisex bathrooms, and also a friendly, relaxed demeanor to let her know that she doesn’t need to worry about being around men in a bathroom, unless she says something weird about gender or something.
A friend of ours is getting rid of some things from her apartment, and we’re carrying some bags and boxes and bins full of fun items home.
A woman stops Katie as she’s adjusting the weight on the bin in her arms to say, “Oh, was Manhattan Vintage good, because we’re on our way there now!”
Confused, but friendly, we start to answer, until we realize that the logo on one of the canvas totes Katie has over her shoulder says “I ❤️ Manhattan Vintage.”
After we’ve cleared up the confusion (we’re not coming from Manhattan Vintage, even though it looks like we just bought some really fun vintage items) and are continuing our journey home, Katie remarks, “Forgot what bag I was carrying.”
I finally look up from my phone to notice that almost forty-five minutes have passed since the doctor said he’d be “right back.”
With a sigh, I slip my sneakers on. The rest of my outfit consists of a t-shirt, thin, elastic-banded, disposable shorts that the nurse provided because my jeans didn’t roll up enough to give the doctor access to my knee, and some “fun” yellow socks I wore under my jeans that with everything else make me look a little like I might be on my first day of homelessness.
I approach the nurses station, ignoring the looks I’m getting, and gently ask, “Hey, did somebody forget about me?”
She taps lightly on the back of the car blocking the crosswalk as we maneuver around it. The driver calls out angrily, “Why you touching my car?”
“Because you are in people’s way!” Katie fires back.
She resumes chatting with me, completely unconcerned, as we continue walking to the library, but it’s about a block before I’m able to listen again, because a piece of me is still back at that crosswalk, waiting for that guy to get out of his car, and going over various methods for knocking him down if he did, like I know how to fight or something.
