Helping

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.

Or A Storybook

Katie’s dress is covered in dragons and hearts, birds, swirls or color, stars, and snakes (among other things).

My linen shirt is embroidered with leaves and stems, sunflowers, purple plants, and suns, in natural and unnatural colors.

“I like your outfits,” some one says to Katie as we’re standing in line to make our purchases at the thrift store.

Katie thanks him and replies, “We kinda look like we stepped out of the same cartoon.” 

Afternoon In The Park

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.

Prayer Wheel

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.

A Nice Night For A Walk

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.

I Probably Wouldn’t Like It Either

The heatwave broken, the trees toss their heads back and forth in the blustering wind as we walk through the cooling park near dusk. 

On our way out of the park, a couple clip a leash to something in a backpack, and we watch to see a tabby slowly raise its head out of the bag to cautiously survey the surroundings.

“A cat won’t like such a rambunctious, windy day,” Katie says sympathetically.

“If their ancestors roamed the Serengeti killing all the birds like little murder machines, they should be able to handle a little wind,” I say dismissively, but I know what she means.

Slapstick Summer

Despite my having grown up in Tucson, I find the heat in New York City to be entirely intolerable - sticky, foul, oppressive, entirely a different sort of beast from the desert heat, which while savage, has a certain bleaching, blowtorch purity.

That being said, a good air conditioner in the window is a godsend, and I’m privileged enough to need to move mine from one window to another so that I don’t give myself freezer burn by having it blow directly on me when I’m sitting in my favorite spot in the living room.

It’s been running for a couple weeks in its current spot, so we make sure it’s off and unplugged as I haul it from the right front window to the left, but there’s always a moment of terror when we actually take it OUT of the window, the intrusive thought being that it will somehow tumble from its perch down onto the street below, where it will crush, say, a baby in a stroller or an old man with a walker or an immigrant family who just got here from Nicaragua or a puppy out for its first walk, etc. etc. etc.

So I have my arms wrapped tightly around it, pulling it out of the window and tipping it towards me to keep the demons of gravity at bay, and the waste water that has accumulated inside it over the past few weeks dumps out all over me and pours a small flood onto the floor.