Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Nothing, I Guess?

“What are you doing?” asks the little boy.

I cast a wary eye across the plaza to where the group of adults who are supervising him and his playmates are sitting, and think for a moment how I want to engage this.

“I’m reading,” I say, setting down my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and holding up my book.

“But what are you doing?” he asks again, failing to keep the exasperation from his voice.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

A Common Scam

The guy sitting one bench over on the subway has a small pile of CD-ROMs in his lap, with obviously home-printed labels and insert cards. His eyes are closed as we ride across the bridge.

I remember my first week in New York, walking through Times Square, when a guy came up to me and, in increasingly aggressive tones, “sold" me his rap CD for ten bucks (which, of course, turned out to be blank - a very common scam).

The guy with the CDs on my train gets off at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, and I wonder who he’s gonna try to scam tonight, or if he’s just hustling for his music.

Monday, July 29, 2019

Truest Words

The world slides past my exhausted eyes as the cab takes me from our move-in morning at the booth to my shift at the doctor’s office, but I rouse myself enough to ask the driver if he minds if I eat my breakfast sandwich in his car.

“You gotta eat,” he says with a friendly smile.

When I’m done, he rummages in his bag for a moment, then pulls out a bottle of water, saying, “It’s too hot outside.”

Whether from being worn out, or from his kindness, my thanks are very emotional, but he waves off my gratitude, adding, “No one’s coming down to save us, so we have to take care of each other."

A Change In The Weather

A strange night-wind kicks up just as we leave the U-Haul place after dropping off the truck, making Katie and I squint into the dusty bluster.

“Wind usually means a change, but it’s just gonna be ninety-one tomorrow, too,” Katie says as we walk down Fourth Avenue past the park.

A few blocks later, we feel a few drops of rain that quickly change into a downpour that soaks through our clothes.

“Well, there’s the change,” Katie says, laughing.

Saturday, July 27, 2019

No More Drama

Our neighbor’s dog Val growls at the black lab as it walks by, and Katie and the lab (and the lab’s owner) step off the left of our stoop to chat. Katie coos and fawns over the lab, giving her scratches and pets, while Val retreats behind her owner’s legs.

Her growls and barks become increasingly plaintive as the lab and Katie ignore her, until finally she ventures over, tail tentatively wagging, to sniff butts with with newcomer.

She quickly panics again, though, and gives a snarl to the lab, who responds with a single deep, chesty bark that sends Val between my legs with a fearful look, while the lab settles herself down on the sidewalk with a sigh, as if she’s tired of all the drama.

Friday, July 26, 2019

A Version of Heaven

I step off the curb, then step back onto the sidewalk, for no reason.

A few seconds later, an SUV takes the turn a little tight and passes through the space I just was.

I continue on my way, crossing the street and walking the block to my home, but I imagine a “Sliding Doors” sort of moment where I actually got hit by a car - like, what if I actually did get hit by a car just a second ago, and this is my version of the afterlife.

I get upstairs, and there, sitting on the couch looking at her phone, is the woman I love, and the cat comes up and demands pets, and I am home, in my favorite place, with my favorite people, on a Friday night.

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Produce is a Serious Matter

I go pick a pint of peaches but stop to briefly consider: they all look alike to me, but is it possible one is “best”?

“They’re all hard as rocks,” the guy running the market says matter-of-factly.

“Ah,” I reply knowingly, “dinosaur eggs.”

“It makes it so they transport well,” he says, fixing me with a look as if to suggest that my flippancy is very much frowned upon.

Field Report on Native Fauna In and Around Ft. Greene Park

I leave the hospital to go sit in the park for lunch and see, walking under the scaffolding along the curb beside the parked cars, a cat. She holds, in her mouth, the body of a mouse, and after giving me only the briefest of looks, she speeds along to other destinations known only to her.

Later, I sit on a bench beside a lawn in a plaza at the top of a hill beneath a sky that looks like it came from a Japanese animation: pure blue, thick clouds that would probably taste like soft mounds of whipped cream if you ate them, a benevolent sun that seems incapable of the killing heat he inflicted on us only a few days ago.  A female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail flaps lazily over the grass, and I watch her black wings with mild interest until she’s out of sight, then go back to my book.

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Hercules

The server begins to pick up our dishes after dinner, stacking the plates on one arm as he gathers everything up. 

He clearly has no intention of making more than one trip, and so the pile on his arm grows to be rather large indeed, but still he keeps stacking.

After asking Katie’s mother to hand him a knife that he inexplicably missed, Katie’s father offers him a loose straw with a gently mocking smile. 

“Ah, the perfect addition to my collection,” the server says as he takes the straw, returning the smile.

Monday, July 22, 2019

When The Sky Opens Up

“The ground is wet but we are not,” Katie texts me before I get off work, and so I leave my umbrella at my desk when I go.

The sky looks relatively clear while I walk to the subway, but by the time I get to my neighborhood, it has darkened in a very threatening way.

I almost make it home before the sky opens up, but fat, wet drops begin plopping all around about two blocks away, and then there’s nothing for it but to run.

And run I do through the sudden deluge as it begins to pour, but it doesn’t save me, so that when I get upstairs, Katie looks at my bedraggled, soaked self and says, in genuine surprise, “Is it raining?"

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Vaping

The MTA app on my phone, along with Google Maps, both say that the bus is approaching right now. But as I sit at the bus stop in the scorching summer sun I'm pretty sure I can see the bus they are referring to across the street from me, and it is very much parked.

I watch the bus for a good twenty minutes before I notice the guy sitting in one of the passenger seats, looking at his phone, and I can’t tell for sure, but I think he’s driver, sitting there just chilling out.

Then I see him pull something away from his mouth, and a thick, fat vape cloud billows out of his lungs, and for some reason the thought of my bus driver vaping away comfortably in an air-conditioned bus while I sit beneath a blazing furnace of sky in the middle of a heat way just fills me with rage.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

Watching the movie Yesterday, which is about a young musician who wakes up from a cycling accident to find that he is the only person in the world who has ever heard of or heard the songs of The Beatles, and proceeds to pass their catalog off as his own.

It’s a good movie, buoyed by an amazing soundtrack, but the best part of it is its ability to create a space in which it’s possible to actually hear the Beatles music again as if for the first time.

I find myself remembering finding, at the tender age of twelve or so, an unlabeled cassette tape in my sister’s collection (where I stole all of my most important music) which had, on one side, Queen’s A Night At The Opera and on the other, The Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

I hear those tunes again in my head now - the way they sounded like nothing I had ever heard before, the way they seemed to point a way forward to what I wanted to be, the kind of like I wanted to lead - and even though the movie isn’t as dramatic or intense as all that, I find tears streaming down my cheeks, and I cover my mouth with my napkin to make sure I don’t sob too loudly.

The Service Industry

“No, man, you gotta put the phone number on there,” he says sternly to the older Asian man behind the counter at the laundry. He stabs the laundry ticket with his finger, and repeats, “Put it on there.”

“'Cause people, they need to get their stuff back,” he says, with a sweeping gesture to take in all the old articles of clothing people have left behind over the years that are hanging from the ceiling and stacked on the shelves (nevermind that I personally know, having gone to this same laundry for years, that the previous owner sold the shop to the current owner twenty years ago on the condition that he leave all of the very old lost items exactly as they were when he bought the shop).

Still, after that interaction has ended, I still feel kind of bad going up to the counter to drop off my laundry and saying to that same older Asian man, “Please have this ready for me by eight o’clock today."

Friday, July 19, 2019

Where Else?

After Facebook throws up a “Six years ago today” post on Katie’s timeline, I go back in my blog to see what we were doing.

Turns out we went to Ikea, and go irritated with each other, and I snapped at her, and she snapped at me.

When I relate this to Katie, she looks at me incredulously. “You put that on the Internet?” she asks.

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Haunted

Nothing seems quite right - I’m hungry, but I don’t want to cook; tired, but I don’t want to sleep; feeling creative, but everything I make seems awful to me; my side of the room is messy, but I don’t want to pick up or clean, and I certainly feel guilty as Katie becomes industrious and starts picking up her side of the room.

I take a bag of garbage downstairs, drop it in the bin, and then continue through the vestibule to the outer door, where I stand on the stoop and watch the rain. The storm is supposedly the remnants of the hurricane that battered New Orleans earlier this month, but it still has a lot of energy and water in it, so it’s really coming down, sheets of rain against the streetlights, and the gutters are running like rivers.

I stand watching it, feeling uncomfortable in my own skin for the first time in ages; there’s only a few cars and a couple of delivery guys on e-bikes hurrying though the rain to their destinations, and I wonder if something that I thought was gone has returned.

DINKs

“So we’ve got four adults and a child coming,” I tell the hostess.

“Does the child need a high-chair?” she asks.

The child is four years old, so I don’t think so, but I text Katie, “Ask her parents if she needs a high chair.”

“I don’t really know how kids work,” I add.

Monday, July 15, 2019

Against Pity

The very old man in the waiting room with the sad, thousand-yard-stare and the seemingly only-marginally-engaged caretaker is breaking my heart. I find myself pining after my wife, and hoping that neither of us has to live long without the other when we get old.

After his appointment, as he’s shuffling toward the door, his caretaker asks him how his appointment went, and he says in a flat voice, “Looks like they’re gonna have to cut off the ear.”

As she reels in shock at this revelation, he glances over, catches my eye, and winks.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Congrats, It’s a Spike

I feel foolish, but I’m too far from home to walk it, so there’s nothing for it: I have to go in this bike shop to get my flat fixed.

They take my bike in the back while I pace the front of the store like an expectant father in a cliched cartoon from the Fifties.

“Well, when I’m fixing a flat, I don’t rest until I find the cause,” the repairman says finally, as he comes out from behind the counter holding my wheel.

“I think this is it,” he finishes with a small smile, holding up a thin piece of metal about an inch long.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

Time is a River

"I forgot it was Saturday,” Katie texts me as I’m sitting in the shade eating lunch down by the East River.

Suddenly I have this vision of a day bounded by the four corners of a box on the calendar, squared off and completely denatured, a box called Saturday following a box called Friday, followed by a box called Sunday, and so on, forever.

That isn't how time is truly, though, but to see it as it is terrifies us: days unmoored from the work week, the vertigo of freedom, the singular flow of time as everything changes.

The saying goes, “The days are long but the years are short,” but what day is it really but today, sitting by the river watching it flow past, the same river, but never the same?

Friday, July 12, 2019

I Wrote This On My Phone

NYC used to be a city of driven, fast walkers, all of us too busy, too stressed, too on our way to look up and gawk at the spectacle of commerce and culture throwing skyscrapers toward the sun. You could tell a tourist by the way they looked around.

The two women walking in front of me this morning on the way to the subway stroll down the sidewalk, not looking around, heads still down, but their eyes and minds deep inside the small glass tiles in their hands. One stops up short as an electric car passes silently inches away from her in the intersection, and she looks up, mildly annoyed her reverie was broken, and then puts her face back in the glass and continues her morning stroll.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

The Times Better Get to Changing

“Did I ever tell you about Mr. from my freshman year of high school?” I ask Katie as I take out my contacts.

“The creepy band director who slept with one of his students?” she replies.

“Yes! but it turns out after my slightly cursory Google search that I can’t find out if he ever got charged with a crime, and then I’m pretty sure he moved to Nevada and got a job as a band director there, so I’m guessing not?” I say.

“Every woman needs to carry around a brick in their purse so that when they feel that rage they can just chuck it through the nearest window,” she says, wringing out the shirt she’s washing in the sink with just a tiny bit of extra twisting, like she’s visualizing a neck.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Born In the Sign of Water

I am covered in sweat by the time I get to the pool on this hot summer day, and I lock up my bike and head inside.

The locker room is moist and smells like urine, so I hurry up and change into my swimsuit and head out on the deck.

I haven’t swam laps, like really swam the way I used to, in more than five years, I think, and certainly not since I had cancer.

When I dive in, the water is shockingly cold, but only for a moment, and I instantly feel at home in a way that nowhere else on earth can really match.

It’s a Stretch

I start off writing about spilling ice cream, and then Katie reminds me of how we made pizza from scratch earlier in the day.

“You could talk about the gluten,” she says, and I remember us stretching the dough out on the pan. It would stretch out and then contract back, and we would gently knead it with our fingertips until it stayed in the shape we wanted.

“You stretch your muscles out every morning,” she says, referring to my yoga practice, “and we stretched the gluten the same way."

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

A Medicine For Melancholy

As we walk across the meadow near the entrance to the park, I can feel my anxiety fading. We lie on a hill and stare at the sky, and I think about whether or not I can see the air between me and the clouds moving, until a hawk sweeps through my field of vision, and I lean my head backwards to watch it go.

We walk over to the pond to enjoy the dogs swimming and chasing each other around until we both have relaxed almost completely, then we start to walk back home.

As we pass into a shady grove, Katie says, “Isn’t it nice to know that the best cure for anxiety for both of us is a free walk in the park?"

Saturday, July 6, 2019

Window Crib

I look up from the bike lane to the apartment buildings on the other side of the road. They’re the usual midcentury four story boredoms of brick and a dearth of imagination, with bars over the windows from when Williamsburg was a bit dicier of a neighborhood.

Up on the third floor, however, in one of the windows where the bars have been built out to accommodate a window air-conditioning unit, a small child sits in the little nook where the air-conditioner would be, suspended out over nothing, curled up and calm.

She sees me, gawking at her, and she smiles a pleased, knowing smile, while she slowly raises her hand to wave at me.

Friday, July 5, 2019

Different Responses to Stress

“Okay, I’ll be right down,” I hear Katie on the phone in the other room where she’s been napping.

I instantly sit up in the bedroom where I’ve been napping and mentally prepare to do something, though I’m not sure what.

“They’re downstairs right now with the delivery,” she says, coming into the bedroom and grabbing clothes.

“Please don’t laugh at that,” she says, because I am as I hunt frantically for my shoes.

Dog Beach

There’s a spot in the park where people bring their dogs to swim in a pond, and they call it “Dog Beach.”

Today we went down to Dog Beach to watch the dogs. A pit bull swam back and forth like he was looking to try out for the olympic team.

When his owner managed to get him out he whined and pulled at the leash, but she didn’t let him go back in. 

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Scorpio Rising

“I think it’s Scorpio,” I say, pointing out the three stars and the tail.

“I don’t think Scorpio is as big a deal as people think it is,” Katie says thoughtfully as we head back toward the park entrance.

“That is so you: inexplicable opinions held with deep conviction,” I say, laughing.

“We were just looking at the sky, so I don’t think it’s inexplicable at all,”she replies, sounding only mildly offended.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Cooking With Gas (CO2)

“Brown sugar can help..., wait,” Katie says, stopping me before I go off, as I usually do, without listening to the whole thing. “Baking soda will also interact with the excess vinegar and turn it into carbon dioxide,” she says, more firmly.

I sprinkle less than a quarter-teaspoon into the too-vinegary black beans, and sure enough, they furiously foam up with fine brownish-black bubbles and then subside. A quick tasting shows them to be, if not perfect, then at least miles better than what they were just a moment ago.

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

I.G.Y.

Laying back on the deck chair by the rooftop pool, I can feel tiny sparks on my skin as the sun gently unknits strands of my DNA.

On the runway far down below, passenger jets loft themselves majestically into the air, as if by magic, and the sheer impossibility of such large, heavy objects doing such a thing, while still resolutely continuing to do so, over and over, is very soothing.

Katie lifts her phone here and there, and takes photos of herself, and of me, of our food, our drinks, the planes, the inexhaustible white of the pool deck and furniture and all, and I watch the runway and think empty thoughts.

Two women pose in the pool with the runways behind them, and a third woman takes a picture of them, while far away, a black plume of smoke rises from a burning fuselage which has been lit on fire, we are told by the softly murmuring management, “as a training exercise."