Observations

  My infusion wound up on the same day as ACT UP’s Grand Central action demanding money for AIDS and healthcare instead of ICE and warfare.     Even though I can’t get arrested     until we’re sure the bones in my neck have fused, I would have shown up to do support, but despite a lot of effort, Misty could not get another infusion slot before Pride.     I had to do it before Pride because being around a lot of people with waning, end of the month antibody levels is inviting trouble.   I showed up at the infusion center and Kayla got the IV in easily enough, but couldn’t draw blood from labs from it, so she used my hand for that.  She asked me about my cats and told me that she is planning to bring her senior cat to New York – he’s been staying with her mother in California.  “He was just in the hospital,” she said.  “He had a urinary blockage.”  “from crystals?” I asked and she nodded.  “The holis...

  6/25/26   The guardianship report was finished, but still had to be notarized.  Usually David, our volunteer notary, stops by our office but he couldn’t do it on short notice, so I agreed to meet him at his office at NYU Law School at 9am.  That was already early by my standards, but then John Henry, who lives in Gloucester, got assigned to a job in CT, and decided to use the relative proximity to come fix my kitchen light, which we both thought was out due to a bad fuse.  He wanted to miss rush hour, so he showed up at 7:30am and by the time I left at 8, he was down in the basement tinkering with the fuse box.   The semester’s over at NYU, so the main entrance was closed and I had to go around to the Macdougal St. side where a security guard equipped with all kinds of monitors and tech ignored all of it in favor of a battered clump of stapled papers where she quickly found David’s extension.  I got on the elevator with an older u...

  Waiting for the N today, a man standing nearby asked me how long I had to keep the collar on. “A total of 6 weeks,” I told him.  “Did you just have it done?” “I had it done in May.” I had a fusion,” he said, gesturing to his neck. “ This is my third spine surgery,” I replied.  I had a lumbar laminectomy, and a cervical decompression and now this.” “The lumbar one must be worse,” he said.  “It is because you can’t really sit or stand,” I told him.   The train came, we got on and he sat beside me. “After my surgery     I fell 10 feet off a ladder while I was visiting my mother in Florida. I thought I hurt my shoulder because I landed on it so the next day when I couldn’t lift my arm I went to urgent care. They did an X-ray and then called me back to say I needed a CT scan. I had broken one of the titanium screws and shattered the spacer between the discs and fractured the bone.     So then I had to have surgery again. The surge...

  Midnight Koalas  Somehow, I never really realized how close together the anniversary of Kate’s death and Father’s Day are. This year though, hip deep in the icy swamp of grief, they feel like successive blows slamming into me one after another. Today was an odd confluence of events.  We held our Pride party for the clients full of bright rainbows and happy chatter as the young people ate their way through double the fried chicken we’d ordered (thanks to the generosity of Charles’ Pan Fried). And at the same time there was the quiet sadness of the ancient photo on  my laptop, Dad’s muscled arms lifting my baby self way up to see the leaves on a tree in Central Park. Layered on top of that was my worry about Connor, who did not show up for breakfast this morning, and was still nowhere to be seen when I left for the day. I knew he was probably napping in the closet, but when a senior cat with cancer changes his routine, it can be a bad sign.  Tonight I h...

        I woke up this morning and said to Sapphire, who was lounging near my shoulder waiting for me to wake up and fill the bowls, “What the hell kind of dream was that?” The entire dream was a close up of pressing an elevator button. It was     just a round silver button, no indication of up or down, which might have given it a bit more significance.      Picking up some things the cats had been bowling off the shelves, I found myself holding a framed picture of myself as a toddler that Kate had found, rescued from the basement, and kept on her bureau, and the grief hit me hard and fast like a summer storm.  There was no point in looking for an awning to hide under, I have learned that you just have to let it pour until the sun breaks through.     The list of mindless chores was especially long today because I went into the office despite being off on Wednesday.  I had been invited to ...

        After another night of broken sleep, I spent the morning groggily making my way through the endless list of chores – dishes, cat litter, weeding.     As my hands completed familiar tasks, my unhelpful mind, still focused on these three days - her death, a day of not knowing, and then finding her. It kept trying to drift back through the years and I kept having to yank it back like a poorly trained dog on a short leash.      I was on the D train, hurtling over the Manhattan bridge, when I started to doze off and the memories broke through, as sharp and clear as ever. The movie projector in my mind kept playing clips- her neighbor saying on the phone as I rushed across Brooklyn, “I don’t think she’s breathing”, the outstretched dark blue arm of the cop as he said “you don’t want to go in there”, the medical examiner showing me a photo of her tattoo, saying “her face is unrecognizable”.  And the blood on the floo...