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W 55th St

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  Juggling my work bag and the compost, I stepped out into the cloudy day, reluctantly ready to head to Dad’s place for the first time in at least ten years. I need to get a sense of the situation so I can start emptying it out and prepping it for sale. The magnitude of the project is overwhelming.        Latching my front door, because I lost my keys again and can’t lock it, I’m thinking about keys and I suddenly realize I didn’t take Dad’s keys. Somewhere in my brain, I seem to think he’s still there to buzz me in like he did so many times when I found myself in Manhattan with a gap in my schedule and just showed up.     Keys retrieved, I stopped on my way into Manhattan for some cleaning supplies - if nothing else, it must be very dusty.  As I approached, his door I was struck again by the names on the bells- not only his, but neighbors I know aren’t around anymore, especially his dutch friend Mia from the apartment above him. Unlocking th...
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Hermit Crab

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       Super stressed, I woke up in the middle of the night.     While my hands, on autopilot, started opening cans for the cats who think that they must be fed immediately whenever I wake up, my mind was focused on the image I woke up with – a seashell.     Not just a random shell, but one that had housed a hermit crab.     On their own, hermit crabs are not pretty animals—they look similar to other kinds of crabs.     But hermit crabs are nature’s recyclers – they live their lives in shells discarded by other creatures, carrying the shell with them as they move like a part of them. As I focused on the image, the hazy wisps of a dream took shape in my memory.  In the dream, I am the crab, detaching from my constraining shell and leaving it abandoned on the beach. Still not fully awake, I thought to myself that the shell is my life with all its stress and sadness- the impossible to pay bills, the physical pain, the fa...
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Trump at the UN (again)

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     The arrival of the orange turd in NYC for the UN session could not be left unchallenged. I got up before dawn, rounded up my arrest essentials- ID, keys, phone, train fare- and made sure to put on lace free shoes.      When I stopped at the arabic bodega to buy my tea, the owner - who I watched studying for his citizenship exam and eagerly told me when he first voted -  knew right away by the early hour that something was afoot. “Trump is at the UN,” I told him, saying nothing about protests. He broke into a broad smile. “You always do the right thing,” he said.      I missed the R by a few seconds and, worried about being late, I made up the time by jumping from the R to the N to the D to the 4. Arriving on the 4 platform in downtown Brooklyn, I immediately spotted Ken S. “I know where you’re going,” I said to him. On the train we talked about animals, pets past and present, the temperamental nature of bunnies who will stomp t...
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Trauma Class

       Today, after meeting my new psych resident, a blue-eyed young woman with long hair and a floor length skirt who turned the usual first appointment on its head by asking what I thought she should know about me. It’s an interesting approach, which makes the appointment less about robotically filling in answers on the computer and puts the direction of the conversation in the hands of the patient.  Unfortunately she could not answer when I asked if she would be specializing in adult or child psych, which matters to me bc if she decides on child, I will only have her for a year vs two if she stays in the adult track. She is my third psychiatrist at this clinic, a rate of turnover which is not ideal for any healthcare setting but esp psychiatry.  But in our fucked up system, where the majority of psychiatrists demand cash and a lot of it, I’m lucky to have anybody competent.      Later on, I made my way to  Downtown Brooklyn, to City...
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Battle of the Sheet

  Get home tired. Cat has puked on sheet. Get out another sheet. Prepare for battle. Pep talk, you can do this without Kate S, look this sheet has stripes, surely they go top to bottom. Start trying to put in sheet. Tug one way, then the other way. Marley plops herself down like a paperweight then gets mad at my tugging and starts taking swipes when I get close. Sheet seems to be defective. I wonder if it shrank in the wash. Then I think, what if this is not the sheet where the stripes go top to bottom. What if that sheet was a different house or two decades ago? What if this sheet goes side to side? I know this sheet came from Target. I plug in my phone, wait for it to power up, go to the Target website, see the sheets with horizontal stripes. Remove Marley, turn the sheet around. Success! But now I am full of sheet fighting adrenaline and I don’t know how I am going to sleep.
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25 years

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       I was in the basement feeding the cats before I left for work when the phone rang, and I heard my grandfather’s voice on the answering machine. Afraid that something had happened to my grandmother who was battling breast cancer, I ran up the stairs and grabbed the phone just as it rang again. "They bombed the World Trade Center," said my grandfather, who had seen it on television in Kansas. "Grandpa," I said, perplexed,  "that happened in 1993."   I was a senior in high school then, staring out the south-facing window of Stuyvesant’s brand new building on Chambers Street with a clear view of the Towers. I was one of many students who walked back to Brooklyn over the bridge that day because there was no subway service.'[;;;;;;        "No," Grandpa said,  "two planes hit the towers." As soon as I hung up the phone and sat down, it rang again and it was my close friend Collin calling from Hawaii where he had just seen it on the ...
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MRI Love Connection

  There was a long delay for the MRI yesterday and I was getting hungry, so I was kind of grouchy when I followed the yellow footprints down the hall to the glass doors of the MRI 1 waiting area.   Through the doors, the waiting area was deserted except for a very young woman in the crimson scrubs of a home attendant sprawled on a chair with her phone, clearly waiting.  She didn’t look up when I sat down next to her, but when a muscular, tattooed young man in the uniform of the hospital’s janitorial service showed up and started gathering trash bags and piling them on his cart, her phone was forgotten.  She started admiring his tattoos, and he told her he was planning to do some on his legs.  “They’re nice,” she said.  “The colors are good.”  “I get them all at once,” he said “I don’t go back and forth.”  He wasn’t just talking about tattoos, he was showing her he had the money for them. I couldn’t hear everything onc...
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