Observations

      Today was an infusion day, so afterwards I was once again on the 9th Ave bus.  It was somewhat crowded, so all the disabled seats upfront were taken when a very elderly, frail lady got on.  "One of you is going to have to give me a seat," she announced and several slightly less old and frail people moved further back in the bus.  A couple of stops later, a woman with long white hair and a walker got on and started to settle across from her.  "Do you need this seat?" asked the frail lady.  The new woman, taking this as an invitation, moved across the aisle.  "Actually, this is better for me," she said.  "It's better for me, too, said the First Lady, refusing to give up her seat, the first on the bus. She put her hand on the configuration of poles between her seat and the door.  "This is the only way I can get up," she said to the Second Lady, who by then had sat beside her.  "I had a tumor," she said.  "I went in...

It has been one of those weeks when it feels like my body has forgotten how to fall asleep, keeping me up later and later each night. By thursday even the sounds of the rain combined with purring and one cat softly snoring couldn’t help me fall asleep.  Finally, at 5am I crashed but I had to be up at 8am for an early meeting at work.   I groggily threw on my clothes and refilled the cats’ fountain, thought about breakfast but was too tired to figure it out. It was still raining, plastering the fallen leaves to the pavement, so I pulled on my bright purple raincoat that always reminds me of Kate, since she was the one that brought the color to our lives.  I tried to zip it and couldn’t do it with the splint- you need your thumb to grip a zipper tab, so I just did the snaps instead and left annoyed. The battered wooden front door had swollen from all the rain and the lock wouldn’t line up properly. “Fuck it,” I thought for the third time that morning, put my keys in my...

  On my way into the city, a young man next to me asked how to get to Tompkins Square.     Laughing, I told him I got sentenced to 10 days of cleaning that park and that I still feel protective towards it.     He was puzzled, so I explained that I was arrested at a protest and this was our community service.     He asked if everyone at the protest had to do it and I told him just 16 of us were arrested. “Everyone else ran?” he asked, so I explained that it was just us doing the action. I asked him if he had heard of Rachel Corrie and he had not so I explained briefly about how the IDF bulldozed her to death, and then I told him how we chained ourselves together with our arms inside PVC pipes and blocked the avenue outside the Israeli bank.     They usually go easy on protest cases, I told him, but this was in 2003 before there was much support for anti-occupation activism so we were tried, convicted and sentenced.   “I wasn’t in the US b...

  The NY Marathon got me coming and going today.     The marathon passes through Bay Ridge early in the route but even hours later when I left the police had every intersection roped off and patrol cars blocking the avenues.     Later, when I left Dad’s house to head to work, the surrounding streets were full of people leaving the marathon, which ends in Central Park.     The ones wrapped in bright orange ponchos were easy to spot, the ones just wearing medals around their neck more subtle.     Then there were the supporters, groups of people lugging homemade signs, and the marathon volunteers in their matching sweatshirts. A bunch of marathoners were on the 9 th  ave bus when I got on.  The driver, who came down 9 th  Ave so fast he almost missed the stop and had to suddenly stop several feet away, didn’t bother to lower the steps, which I can manage these days, but then an old man getting on further down fell flat on his...

  It’s the kind of day where you’re crying before breakfast and you don’t even know why.     The temperature crashed into winter last night and I’m not ready.     I got exactly one window covered yesterday, and I woke up to the sound of Smokey trying to get it loose so he can sit outside on the upstairs windowsill.   I used to like the winter, the silence of walking home late on a January night through empty streets with nothing but the frosty air and dark blue starry sky above.   I enjoyed the visceral crunch of the fresh snow hiding the drab and grubby sidewalks.  I used to laugh at the cats’ puzzled faces when I brought them a bowl of snow from the front yard and it disappeared while they were sniffing it and taking tentative licks. Now I’m afraid of it.  Getting through a NYC winter without heat takes a lot of determination and creativity, constantly figuring out workarounds like using paper plates when the bitterness ...

            A cold wind was blowing this morning, and I knew I needed to bundle up to spend an hour outside protesting, so I was digging into the bottoms of bins, dredging up things I hadn’t worn in a year, when a message came from A., a client we are trying to save from eviction because she was so deeply depressed that she did not recertify for her housing.     I can’t imagine what would have happened with a housing court case on a Saturday but it turned out to be a whole different issue.     A was contacting me from her mother’s house, where they had just returned from the hospital.     Her mother, a 50 year old with a pile of psych diagnoses and crack addiction, was demanding another of her opiod pain meds even though it was way too soon.     Afraid of an overdose, A refused and then her mother attacked her and attempted to strangle her to try to get the pills.     Afraid of her mother’s reaction if...