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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...
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From Jamaica to the Pelvic Floor

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...
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A commute

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...
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Thin Slices

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,...
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Help that doesn't help

Some idiot keeps leaving their plastic recycling on top of my garbage shed, which is easily accessible from the street since my neighbor stole my fence (long story). It would be just a mild annoyance except that people in search of returnable items untie the bag, leave it open, the wind blows and plastic items wind up scattered all over. I had just finished picking it all up with my grabber and putting it in a garbage bag - part of my day off housekeeping efforts - when I got a message from a former client I haven’t heard from in a long time. “I’m in the hospital right now and I’m having a few issues,” he wrote. When I texted him back, it turned out that he had been in the hospital for months after arriving there in a diabetic coma and can’t currently walk. A couple of weeks ago he was sexually assaulted by another patient, and now he has been told he is being transferred to Pelham Parkway nursing home. He did some research and found a lawsuit from a former employee abou...
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A problem with organizing in America

Today a young Spanish speaking woman showed up at the door asking for me. She turned out to be the sister of a client. She had come to ask me if our psychiatrist and I can write a letter to help get her brother, a gay man, out of ICE detention. He’s being held up in Goshen, NY two hours north of the City, and I hate to imagine what he is going through up there. I tell her I’m not sure it will help, that the system lacks compassion, but that we will try. First, though, I am going to speak to his lawyer to make sure we don’t accidentally say anything that could make the situation worse. I could see her anxiety when she walked in, but as we talked she relaxed, and when we finished with her brother’s situation, she decided to ask if I can help her too. She lost her work permit and needs to replace it. We went over the form, and she asked me about the fee – this administration has jacked up the prices for everything immigration related, so the filing fee for this is a whopping $4...
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Policy Fallout

On the way to Manhattan this morning we were really crawling and a young Chinese man near me was listening to American country/pop songs in Chinese, or rather, we all were, involuntarily. I recognized some of the songs, which melodically were almost the same as their American versions. I went to high school with a lot of Chinese students, and I know spoken Chinese is a tonal language, with the four tones – five if you count lack of tone – adding to the meaning of the words. As I listened to this guy’s music, I was struck by the lack of tonality as the melody took precedence and I wondered if that detracted from the meaning of the lyrics. Last night Sunday dinner was packed and loud, but E, a quiet girl who mostly speaks Spanish, approached me at the desk and handed me a letter from NYC. The letter was informing her that the Emergency Housing Voucher program, that pays for an apartment for her and her two year old, is out of money and that although they are trying to find another p...
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