Water of Kindness

The crosstown bus is crowded - packed with all the people who would normally be riding the broken L train - but the driver patiently gets them all on, and extends the ramp so people using walkers and wheelchairs can board.

An older woman in colorful headdress and matching dress pushes her walker up the ramp like a queen boarding a ship and parks at the front of the bus. Then, at the next stoplight, she reaches into the basket of her walker, pulls out a water bottle, walks it up to the driver, and hands it to him with a smile.

He takes gratefully and thanks her, and she waves off his thanks and makes her way back to her walker, where she and I exchange a smile.

Provider

While I wash dinner’s dishes, the cat sits in the hall just outside the kitchen with a most severe expression, waiting for me to get over my incredible stupidity and feed her.

“The cat is so disappointed in me,” I tell Katie.

“So disappointed,” she agrees. “I think the only reason she’s not as disappointed in me is that she think you feed both of us.”

Coming On Fall

“Joan Shelley,” says Katie, coming into the bedroom from her shower, her shoulders above the towel wrapped around her still glistening and pink. “Like the River Loves the Sea.”

So I put on a song from the album, and sit listening, and for a moment it’s like I always listen to music, with my heart tense, primed and expectant for some kind of epiphany, some revelation of ecstasy.

But after a minute, I realize that living in this feeling isn’t really listening, per se, so I let my heart relax, and the song, a delicate, folky thing that makes no gesture toward grand, quietly works its way into me, and it is somehow, lying in bed with the air conditioning still on and a few weeks of summer still left to pass through, it is somehow fall, and the leaves in my mind are turning from green to gold and fire.

Trompe L'Oeil

A trick of perspective turns the subway map 3D, stretching and flattering it out while simultaneously deepening the page. The farms and parks of Queens seem to extend out into the distance, while JFK and Coney Island curve down into Jamaica Bay.

Manhattan stays the same, though. Its obdurate grid floats on the Hudson, self assured as always, uncompromising, face-front to the world.

Schadenfreude

Katie works in her studio at the end of the house while I lie on the couch in the living room watching Bill Hader get interviewed on YouTube.

“Wow! Jimmy Fallon is getting fat!” I yell to her.

“Good!” she yells back.

That Kind of Cat Person

“I don’t want to be one of those cat ladies,” the woman says, gesturing grandly. Nobody’s coming into the booth to buy stuff right now, so I don’t worry about it.

“Why not?” I ask. “If you like cats, and you’re not causing anybody trouble, why not just sort of lean into it?”

“Well,” she concedes, “maybe I just don’t want to end up on ‘Hoarders.’"

Pretty as a Picture

“Excuse me, who made this?” the patient asks, pointing to the blue and grey print up on the wall opposite my desk.

“Oh, that’s Matisse,” I say. “He was around in the middle of the twentieth century, and toward the end of his life he did a lot of work with cutout shapes that he arranged to look like people.” 

“May I take a picture of it?” she asks shyly.