Observations

  April 16,     2026       Heading in to “the City” as Manhattan is often called by long-time Bay Ridge denizens, I ran into Samuel, who greeted me enthusiastically.  He’s one of those constantly energetic people that make me a little tired just to think about.  I had been up battling with my mind for most of the night and felt like a zombie, but he was undeterred. “What’s up?”! he said loudly even though I was right next to him.          I actually like Samuel – he has told me many stories about how he was working in corporate IT for a business that sent him to big finance companies to set up their systems and then they were hired by Safe Horizon, a non-profit.  “I had to promise not to tell where these buildings were because they were Safe Houses for battered women,” he said and then went on, “I saw that they had these classes and stuff, to help the women get their lives back,...

4/15/26       It was a rough night between my sadness at the news that Hampshire College, my alma mater and the place I met Kate is closing and my jitters about my appointment with the Director of Complex Spine Surgery today. At about 7:30am, I answered my phone and a heavily accented voice informed me that she was one of our clients, living in a shelter, and had no summer clothes. The list of clothing resources was at the office, so I promised to get back to her and made myself the strongest cup of Earl Grey I have ever had.       When I got to Mt. Sinai, the young man checking people in, who will hopefully never have a personal reason to know the difference, tried to send me to neurology rather than neurosurgery. Once I clarified, he said “8th Fl.” and pointed the way to an elevator. When I got out, I thought I was in the wrong place, because there was nothing but long grey halls in both directions with very little signage and the s...

Rounding the corner of my extremely annoying hedge, I ran right into an older bearded man who lives down the block. I don’t know his name, but I know him by his dog. When the dog first arrived, he was a tiny puppy, only 8 weeks, no identifiable breed but a striking tobacco brown coat with white socks and paws and blue eyes. His owner told me he had brought him up from the south. It was clear early on that he was going to be a big dog- his white paws were way out of proportion to his tiny body. Since then whenever I run into them, he is bigger and bigger and now he is the size of a lab but his fur is longer. He knows me so as soon as he saw me, he reared up and put his paws on me and started licking my hands. Then he started sniffing me. “Do you smell the cats?” I asked him. “Does he like cats?” I ask his owner. “Not particularly, he’s just a people person.” I am still laughing to myself about this description after I wish them a good day and continue on. I passed the corner and...

April 9 2026 On my way to work I stopped at the deli to get some tea. The tuxedo kitten who used to wrap around my ankles is now a big guy lounging on the top shelf behind the register while supervising all the transactions. The young woman ahead of me is pulling colorful cups out of a container on the counter while waiting for her mom to pick up. “Mom! They have jellies, they’re like jello with fruit?? They have them in Jamaica, so I have to get some!” Either her mother is loud, or her volume is up high because I hear her mother say in a heavy accent “They don’t call them that in Jamaica. The conversation has caught the attention of the other person waiting, a tall black man. “Are you from Jamaica he asks?” “I was born there,” she said. “I came here when I was 7.” “Why don’t you sound Jamaican ?” he asked teasingly, and I heard the traces of his own accent. “My mother never talked to us like that growing up,” she starts to explain and then gets flustered . “Mom! It’s your fault, y...

April 3 2026 I stepped out my front door into weather that felt like morning in the Catskills. Kind of chilly, kind of wet - if we had a pond, frogs would be laying their clusters of translucent gelatinous eggs. Walking down 97th st, clutching a can of beans to put in my neighbors’ free food box because if I put them in my bag I would definitely have forgotten, I wondered why I was thinking about the Catskills. I haven’t been there in decades. Then it hit me, a sense memory from the years I spent at the Little Red School House. It had to have been from when I was less than 9 - I left Little Red after that as the widening gap between my scholarship and the tuition became too much for my dad to cover. Every spring at Little Red they would pack us all on a bus and take us to “the farm,” a place in the Catskills where we spent a week variously covered in snow, mud or straw. On the train, the guy asking for money had a different schtick than the usual “can you spare a dollar?” “A go...

I was heading from my office to Union Square for a brain MRI when a man with an accent I couldn’t place, not quite Russian but close, remarked on how many commuter buses were parked on the streets surrounding the Port Authority. “It’s because so many more people commute from New Jersey than when they built the bus station. It can’t hold them all. They’re building a new one,” I told him. “How long will it take?” he wanted to know. “They’re saying ten years.” I know a lot about this because my office is half a block from the old Port Authority on one side and half a block from the temporary one they’re building on the other side. The Pastor and I have been to multiple community meetings, and I testified at a City Council hearing about it. “That’s how long they’re saying for the construction at JFK, too” he said. “Government projects,” I told him. “If a private developer is building something it goes up really fast.” “The government spends so much money on maintaining the City,...