2020 Weather is On-Brand

My work keeps me below street level, one floor down, with limited access to windows, for most of the daylight hours. 

So when I come out of work this evening, the gust of wind and spray of water in my face are my only foreshadowing to the absolute deluge in progress in Manhattan. The sky has that yellowish, sickly pallor or a bad storm, while the wind vents its spleen on the construction site just down the street by ripping up pressboard barriers and hurtling them across the sidewalk. 

A security guard at the construction site and I alternate between taking video of the sheets of rain and nodding to one another until, in a howl of fury from the sky, it starts to hail, and I can't help but laugh.

Why You'd Want To Live There

"We just moved to New York from L.A. this week so I could start my residency in radiology," she says as she slips her feet into the sensible black pumps I chose for her.

"Wow! Seems like a good move," I say, but her expression quickly shows me I've made a misstep.

"I mean, a good lateral move," I backtrack, and she seems to accept that. 

Cloudy Skies

"Finally I have a dog to report!" I exclaim to the confused looking lady with a small white dog in her purse.

After I explain to her that I am under obligation to compile a report of every dog I see on the shoe floor while I'm at work, she allows me to approach.

When I offer my hand, palm down, knuckles first, for the dog to smell, she says, "Oh, he can't see, and his nose doesn't really work, either."

The dog, white with a few pink, bald spots peeping through on his scalp, stares off into nothing with eyes the color of a stormy ocean sky, clouded grey with white whorls, and when I draw my ignored hand away, he yawns.

Powerbar

"Sorry to interrupt," begins the litany of the beggar on the train, and it continues in a monotone drone during which I continue to read. 

He finishes his recitation, and shuffles down the car, intoning "Can you help?" at intervals, all according to script so far, when I remember the powerbar I neglected to eat for a snack today. I hand it to him, and he accepts it, and then he sits down two seats away from me, which is, of course, entirely too close for social distancing, and so I, without fuss, rise and move away to stand in the doorway.

He sits there for a while, sorting through his haul for the car, while I continue to read, until I've almost forgotten about him, whereupon he gets off at the next stop, and I look down to see that he's left the food I gave him on the seat, uneaten.

Another Day In The Park

A huge dragonfly hovers and darts above us in Prospect Park meadow, and then disappears as the breeze kicks up a little. The blue sky is rough with thin clouds, and the guy twenty feet away has finally ended his conference call, so he and his dog are just sitting quietly, enjoying the shade.

Katie sighs, "I can finally smell the trees!" A hawk climbs a circling thermal higher and higher, and then he, too, disappears.

Re-opening

"I'm just happy to be out shopping," my first customer in three months says. "Back in March I caught Covid-19 and was in the hospital for ten days." 

Beneath my mask I try to smile encouragingly. "Well, I'm glad you're here today," I tell her.

It Is So Choice

"You going home to vote?" I ask my co-worker as we walk downstairs from the stockroom.

"Yeah, I got my absentee ballot but I forgot to fill it out," she sighs.

"Oh, Katie and I voted absentee - it's awesome. I highly recommend it if you have the means."

A Good Time

We go around the circle at work, our manager calling on us as we raise our hands, and we tell the group how we identify racial, ethnically, culturally, or otherwise, and what pronouns we’d like to use.

It’s going pretty well, and a few of us raise our hands at the same time, but the manager calls on two Afro-Latino women before me, and they tell stories of racism in their communities.

“Scott had his hand up,” someone helpfully points out after they’re done.

“Oh, I think now is a good time for me to listen,” I reply, half-jokingly.

Street Books

I started going through my books, purging a little, getting things I hadn't read yet or had no intention of reading again out of the house. I managed to leave a small offering of books out for the streets on our stoop.

As Katie and I came back from a walk we saw an older couple going through the box, picking one and walking away, with the gentleman saying something to the lady he was with.

She must not have heard, because as he walked by he repeated in an irritated  tone, "I took it because I said I'd never read the second part of Angels in America."

What Scares The Suburbs

"Is that harp music?" Katie asks. 

I sit up and look around the part of the park where we're sitting enjoying the sunshine. "I don't know," I say, "but that definitely sounds like singing."

Down the path in the direction I pointed comes a sizable, orderly group of protesters, chanting over and over, "Black lives matter!"

Pink and Blue

"So you're gonna need to separate the boy's and girl's clothes after you size them," my manager tells me, and she leaves me to it.

At first the whole idea kind of irritates me - they're clothes for babies, for God's sake. I thought we were past this sort of thing.

But it tuns out to be quite easy for me to separate out the boy's clothes from the girl's, and I'm done with my task in less than a half-hour.

What Does That Mean?

"I trusted my boyfriend to shave the sides," he says, "but this front part is just going to curl until the barbershops open."

"Can't wait," I say, taking off my hat to let my hair spill out. "I mean, look at this," I add, shaking my long bangs down to cover my face.

"I'll be honest," one co-worker says, looking at my unruly mop, "I thought your hair was just like that."

Telling On Myself

One of the managers is called out by a younger employee for wearing a Run DMC t-shirt.

"Yes," she admits proudly, "I saw them live. That's how old I am."

Later I tell her I saw them too, with the Sugar Hill Gang, and she looks shocked.

I've Got One Like You At Home

"Don't you stand over there, thinking you're taller than me," my co-worker calls across the mostly deserted sales floor to another male co-worker who is, clearly, taller than her.

"But I am taller than you," he explains calmly.

"No, you're not, you're not, because I feel taller," she retorts. "And neither are you!" she says, turning on me.

Naked

The dog pond in Prospect Park, an actual pond, with plants and wildlife and whatnot, contains two dogs and one small child when we arrive. The dogs splash about and collect sticks from the water to bring back to shore, and chase each other with reckless, doggy abandon, while the child, a kid of about four years or so, paddles and splashes as well, yelling at his mom, who is relaxed in her attentiveness and seems unconcerned by everything.

The dogs continue to paddle, but the kid, after some negotiations with his mom, comes back onto dry land, and promptly strips naked to get into dry clothes, and everybody just sort of ignores it. I notice the naked kid, which is momentarily startling, but then figure that if nobody else cares why should I, and go back to watching the dogs, who seem just as comfortable with not wearing clothes as the kid.

No Treats

We lie in the sun on the slope of the grassy hill, staring up at the leaves. A black and yellow Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly floats lazily by, while a cloud passes behind a radio tower in front of a deep blue sky.

A dog wanders to the end of its leash and, seeing us, begins making eyes. "Watch your treats," his owner says, like she's seen this sort of thing before.

The Robot Is Productive

I prefer talking to people, working one-on-one with them to get them what they need, but in lieu of that, this solitary work will do nicely. I pull a small pile of boxes full of shoes off the shelves, scan their barcodes with a shimmering red laser, print out a new barcode and price on dark red stickers, slap that new barcode over the old one, and move on to the next. It is mindless, repetitive work, but it allows me to fall into a light trance, finding the exact number of moves needed to complete the task with minimal effort then, once that problem is solved to my satisfaction, to listen to music and make up songs in my head.

I argue with people who aren't there about how they wear their masks, I think about what I was doing a year ago, I make up lyrics to songs I haven't written yet, and then, when their cadence grows too insistent, I pause in my robotic productivity and write them in a note on my phone, as not to forget.

Unclean

Dressing for work when your spouse is asleep, even if she’s okay with the lights being turned on, can be a dicey proposition. When it’s been a bit tough to do laundry, and you’re rushing, and you’ve maybe not been the most attentive to sartorial concerns because you barely left the house for three months. and you’re dressing in low light to be considerate of your sleeping partner, it can be downright risky.

So when I step out the door into the full light of a sunny June day and look down at my bag to make sure I have my keys, I notice the... is it maybe spatter from the time I made pancakes a few months ago, or what exactly is it? Regardless, these pants are in no way clean enough to be presentable for work, and the bus rumbles past as I run back upstairs to change.

Instant Regret

I'm working with the anti-theft sensors they put on clothes today. They consist of a piece that looks like a giant thumbtack that pierces the fabric, and a piece that then fits over the end of the pin part, locking it in place until it is removed with a powerful magnet by a bored cashier making minimum wage.

I'm trying to be efficient, so I pick up a huge handful of the thumbtack parts, only to realize as I'm doing so that something designed to pierce fabric is also, inadvertently, designed to pierce skin. 

I immediately regret picking up this handful of plastic cactus as one of the sharp points stabs my knuckle and another slips underneath my fingernail, and voice my regret with the universal signifyer, "Ow!"

The Right Bus

I jog across the street to the bus stop just in time to catch the bus, and settle into my seat breathing hard.

After I've calmed down a bit and we've traveled a few blocks, I look up from my book to notice we've stopped by the side of the road, and I realize that I was in such a hurry to get on that I can't remember which bus I actually got on.

When I get up to ask, though, the bus driver cuts me off, explaining, "I'm way ahead of schedule, so I'll have to stop here for a few minutes."

"That's fine, I just wanted to make sure I got on the right bus," I tell her

"Normal"

There's a few people on the street this early, mostly dog walkers and the occasional healthcare worker, identifiable by their scrubs. The sky is blue, the air (what I can taste and smell through my mask) is clean, and something about the morning reminds me of a normal day.

Even the sight of every person wearing a mask is welcome, and it occurs to me that, if that becomes "normal" I will be okay with it. It practically seems normal now.

Break Things

I pick up the bottle of Campari by the neck, and the weight of it in my hand feels... good. Like something that would be nice to smash on a wall or a chair, to swing at the head of an offensive person, to chuck at a window or a car.

"When you pick up a bottle, to you ever get the urge to just smash it?" I ask Katie as I place it back on the bar cart.

"I have to fight off the urge to break a bottle every time I pick one up," she replies with an intense grin.

What Is The Law?

We walk past the Jewish day care on a warm Saturday afternoon. Ten or so kids play in the yard, banging on pans, throwing balls, chasing each other around the small fenced-in yard, and all overseen by two slightly harried looking younger women.

It's Saturday, the traditional Jewish day of rest when no work should be done, so I ask Katie, "Do you think it's possible for work to become play, or for play to become work?"

We go back and forth about it for awhile, but end up speculating whether or not the women watching the kids are considered under the law to be "working" even though they very clearly are.

After Curfew

As I take the trash downstairs to the curb for pickup, a small but perceptible wave of anxiety blossoms in my gut. Although the likelihood of anyone, cops or otherwise, being outside this late on my very quiet Brooklyn block is vanishingly slim, the thought of being caught out after curfew makes me tap my front pocket to make sure my wallet with my ID is there.

I step down the stairs and drop off the bags, and take a quick look around. A light rain sparkles in the street lights and falls on the parked cars that line the road, but there isn't a soul around.

Ghost Rider

Legs pumping, heart pounding, every breath as deep as I can make it as we ride our bikes up the final hill in Prospect Park. I can taste my own breath in my mask, but I don't mind, because the sun and the air feel good on my skin, I'm outside, and despite everything happening in the world, I am grateful to be alive.

I coast down the other side waiting for Katie to catch up. "I am a ghost, because I just died going up that hill," she informs me as she rides up.

King of Squirrels

We pause at the fence of the empty park, a few yards down from the padlocked gate, to watch a squirrel eat what looks like a muffin, maybe? or the remains of a bagel? He (or she) looks to be one of those elusive black squirrels, but a particularly fine specimen, with reddish tufts haloing the healthy dark fur of his back and haunches. He ignores us completely as we ooh and aah over his magnificence.

"No picture will do you justice," Katie says, even as she attempts to take a picture.

The Other Way

Katie and I have had a few arguments today, but evening has come and we're calm, happy, and relaxed on the couch.

"I've been trying to be more assertive lately, not avoid conflict, say what I mean. That may be why," I tell her.

"You should go back to the other way," she says simply, taking a bite of her ice cream bar, and we both start laughing.