BLOGGO
Things noticed.
showers & sheeps
In a place I used to work, I’d take refreshing naps in the rooms reserved for taking refreshing showers. Nobody was taking showers in these rooms and I really needed the naps. 20-30 minutes in length, I would resume work feeling renewed and a little self-satisfied at having snuck a little sandman, why does America discriminate something so natural, time. I remember waking up once on the cold tile floor to the sound of “thwap…thwap…thwap…thwap …thwap…thwap…thwap…”, coming from the adjoining shower/ slumber room. I lay there in my dissociative, dreamy, not quite back from the Land of Nod state of my mind thinking two things: what the hell is that thwap noise? and, did I lock the door? I lay there for a bit in the pitch black, work- deprivation chamber, awaiting the clarity I was sure would come. Through the mind molasses, I slowly worked out 3 things: I did lock the door, the person next door was jumping rope (with a thin leather one), and I wasn’t ready to get up.
The metronomic thwapping was perfect lullabye cadence and soon I was back to sleep.
You may puzzle over this bit of non-designated activity in the shower rooms, but it is not in my nature.
The cost of cozy
Stupid bus.
Sometimes the stupid bus feels like it will never stupid come.
The steel bench doesn’t help. Its cold, hard ways do not a good sit make. You see people intervene with objects, trying to improve the comfort. Newspapers, sweaters, cardboard, foam, their hands, but usually not cereal.
If you’re the older woman who catches the 61 at the base of the Pulaski Bridge, cereal is not off-limits.
The bus was never coming. I was sitting on the steel bunch bench waiting for the 61. A woman came and sat next to me. She soon agreed that the 61 was going to be awhile. She wasn’t going to endure without some adjustments. In my peripheral vision, and to the tune of Artie Shaw’s My Blue Heaven that was coming in through my iPod, I watched this woman take out a big box of Rice Krispies cereal from her bag of groceries and stick it under her rump and crush down onto it. I marveled at her gumption and wondered if this was a tried and true method or was she inventing on the fly. Whatever the case, it was working.
For about 30 seconds. Then it wasn’t.
The bag let out a sharp pop, the cardboard swung open its gates, and a stream of rice krispies cascaded to the cold sidewalk below, lowering her slowly to the bench surface. And suddenly bus 61 roared upon us, lending some added craziness to the scene.
She tried to save what she could of her cereal and published the right emotion to the situation: she started cackling.
“AHHHHHHHH! It broke!”, she yelled and smiled at me.
“I was impressed you made it that long!”, I encouraged.
Then we both scrambled to ready our metrocards and join the line of others, some who saw the rice krispy scene and others who did not.
Gloves
Pushing along in a river of people in midday Manhattan I saw a woman in the street approaching the sidewalk; an older woman. She was assessing the step, trying to find the right rhythm for the distance remaining. Her concentration made her lips pierce. Another guy saw this; a young guy. Without words he held out his hand, at a high point; a regal level. Her velvet glove accepted his glove and she hoisted herself onto the curb. He released, and shuffled along to resume his agenda, anonymously.