Labor Day

I woke up this morning with a mystery pain in the outer part of my left ankle. I have no idea what you can possibly do to your ankle while in bed, and I hope it will fade as I go about my day but it doesn't, I feel it with every step. But today is Labor Day and the Workers over Billionaires protest, so I take my painful ankle to Trump Tower and find a spot where I can lean against the barricade and take the weight off that ankle. A variety of activists start gathering in two awkward rows down the side walk with a space in the middle for people to walk through. One man has an excellent handmade marionette of Trump, and another woman is wearing a hat in the shape of a naked, headless chicken. A guy comes with a drumset, tries to set up in the bike lane but the police shoo him onto the sidewalk. Karen comes along, very irritated and tells me a cop has threatened to arrest her for sidewalk chalking, apparently not too familiar with free speech. She uses the crowd to shield her from his observation. A younger woman, maybe in her 30s, is standing next to me. "I didn't bring a sign," she says anxiously. "I have a stack but I didn't bring one." She stands around for a bit, then decides to go home and get one. A small commotion moves through the crowd, a young black woman with a mic and a camera man, who keeps trying to talk to protestors, and several Troll Patrol people, pointing their giant "right wing troll" arrows at them and encouraging people to not engage, or to drown them out by chanting. The younger woman reappears with her sign. The police start moving the barricades out, finally giving us the bus lane. Closer to the traffic, I can see how many passengers are filming the protest and I can see the drivers smiling and nodding in agreement, along with a few who ignore us or glare. There's another flurry of movement in the crowd and along come several people dressed in costumes, some as chickens and others as tacos. A brass band appears, Tuba and all, along with a card table and chairs, which are used to organizes boxes of actual tacos to hand out to the crowd. As a vegetarian I avoid unknown foods, but I watch while Ellen unwraps hers and opens it to see what's inside, "chicken," she says. Earlier, I commented to her that the officer in charge seemed extra stressed and hostile and she pointed out that today is Juve and so many police are in Brooklyn that the others are stretched thin. The band starts playing which side are you on and I think of Pete, but they don't do the verses, just the chorus, which gets monotonous. If there was a plan to march, I missed it but the crowd starts marching north. I wasn't planning to marshal and I don't have my vest, but I automatically hang back in rear marshal position, shepherding the stragglers. The younger woman is once again beside me, so I say "I've been back marshaling so much lately it's become a habit." "How do I become a marshal?" she asks. "I've been wanting to get more involved." So I tell her about marshal training, direct her to the Rise and Resist website. The march disperses at Central Park, and I get on the R, and fall asleep. A group of about 6 early teen boys, dressed in black with carefully maintained white sneakers is chattering on the bench across from me, but I can sleep through that. I get woken up by singing - someone has gotten on at the other end and is singing his way down the aisle panhandling. One of the boy gives him a dollar, and he stops near us while he waits for the next station. He admires their sneakers, then tells them he got his for $20 someplace. I don't hear where. The boys are polite, if a little uncertain, they don't ignore him the way people so often do with the homeless. I am so deeply asleep when we get to Bay Ridge I almost don't want to wake up, but I groggily get out of the station and stop in the nearby diner hoping that a cup of tea will wake me up. Bay Ridge has a senior center, but the diner often feels like one as well. Two old men in different shades of red shirts, one balder than the other, are sitting at a table near me. They are done, have paid, but are still sitting there. Another old man, this one in olive green with a blue cane, comes in. He immediately begins yelling at one of the seated guys about how he owed him $5 from years ago He’s standing only a few feet from the other guys’ table, still yelling about the $5 and it seems like the balder of the guys is about to get up to confront him. The tall middle eastern waiter in the backwards baseball cap hurriedly puts his body between the two, asks the olive green guy to calm down, and shepherds him to a seat at the counter. He sits but he is still yelling, "You’re talking behind my back every time I see you!" The waiter asks him to stop again. "I don’t want to hear people talking behind my back!" he yells. "I gave $400 to a girl who has cancer. I didn’t want the money back. I just don’t want people talking behind my back. He’s the one I owe the $5, but you’re always talking!" "Come over here and do something about it," says the balder one. The waiter has reached his limit. “If you want to fight go out there! Not in here!” he barks, pointing at the sidewalk beyond the windows. This is a ridiculous statement, considering that nobody involved in this is less than 75 yrs old. "I’m going to a break a table over his head," says the balding guy. Another old man, in blue plaid sleeves, comes in and tells the balding guy, "calm down, do you want to get in trouble the way I got in trouble?" At this I perk up my ears, it sounds like it might be an interesting story. But having stopped the balding guy, and seeing that the olive green guy is somewhat sulkily drinking his coffee with his back to the room, blue plaid guy leaves, apparently having only come to calm this situation down. This makes me wonder if it’s a continuation of something that started earlier, somewhere else because how else would he have known that these two were likely to clash. Olive green guy seems to get involved in the weather report on the screen wedged between the tiny boxes of cereal and the many types of tea, heavy on the various kinds of zingers. Walking home from the diner, I glance down and see part of a dead pigeon on the sidewalk. I don't deal well with dead animals so I want to look away quickly but then I realize this is not just a regular pigeon, it was wearing a band. I can't see the whole band, but just the letters "giullo". I wish I had gloves, but they're in my work bag, in my narcan kit, so I just take a photo, which I post on a big pigeon and dove rescue group, in hopes that anyone who is looking for this bird will see it.