Keep Colbert, Dump Trump

Walking to the subway, l notice that the newish Georgian restaurant has a for rent sign. I feel bad because I have watched them set it up and I’m sure it represents a lot of hope. I think people in Bay Ridge would have liked the food but most of them are not even aware that Georgia is a country and the business owners didn’t help by labeling their owning in Georgian and then writing only the unfamiliar names of the dishes on their sidewalk menu out front. I think about Mrs Hickey, two doors down ,and how upset she was when the home attendants her children foisted on her after her husband died started cooking her food from their native countries instead of the bland Irish food she was used to. The same thing happened to my mother during chemo, when she was going into the hospital for three days a month and then coming out only to be assigned a different home attendant ,but my mother was delighted. She liked trying different food although she was not as adventurous as my dad who would eat literally everything including the spiciest peppers he could find in Mexico long before spice that could burn your mouth off was a trend. My mother’s problem with her attendants was errands- she would give them lists in her beautiful penmanship and send them up court st to places like Mazzoni’s hardware for twine to tie the recycling. But they didn’t necessarily know words like twine in English and so what they brought back was hit or miss. Try “string” or “rope” I would tell her, but her literary vocabulary was part of who she was. The other problem with home attendants, which remains a problem, was that a lot of what she needed done was not part of what they were allowed to do. For instance, as the summer got hotter, she needed the one AC in the house hoisted into her bedroom window. The Caribbean and African ladies were happy to make her tea and sit and tell her about their countries, which she found fascinating, but it didn’t help with the hot flashes that were intensifying as the chemo sent her into sudden menopause. Luckily, one time she came home from the hospital to find that she had been assigned Jackie, a tall muscular Brooklyn native from the Red Hook Projects near our house. Jackie was not one to worry about the rules and lifting an AC was no problem for her. It would have been great to keep her but my mother went into the hospital again, her case closed and when it reopened 3 days later they sent someone else. When I descended into the subway, three MTA employees were gathered around the station booth while one of them, his hands glad in bright blue gloves, poked around an open hatch in the side of the booth. The woman in the fluorescent customer safety vest is saying “they never ask the people who actually do these things. They should have a panel, let us look things over because otherwise they do things that don’t actually work.” I wonder if she is talking about the OMNY system but I am already cutting it close for my infusion so I don’t linger. At the infusion center the chatty blonde nurse felt for a vein, but after so many blood draws and IVs over the years, she can’t find one so she tells the tech to bring her the vein finder. She held it over my arm and the dark lines of my veins against the neon background reminded me of a GPS, a map of the route to my heart. It’s not busy, so I don’t have to wait as long for them to send the medication up. As it drips the nurse starts to worry about the increasing redness in my face. I’ve had medication reactions before- itching in my ears during my first rituximab infusion sent Steve Q running for help and then several nurses slammed syringes of Benadryl and prednisone into my arm. After that I always took the Benadryl and prednisone first. But IVIG has never bothered me and my face didn’t itch, so I kept reassuring her that I was ok. After the infusion, a little woozy but determined, I grabbed some tea and headed over to the Ed Sullivan theater. I was early and it was drizzling so I hung out under an awning watching people line up to be in the audience at the Colbert show. It’s one of many things that happen in NYC that as a resident of NYC it would never occur to me to do. At 4pm, Rise and Resisters started showing up and we each took a sign, various slogans criticizing CBS and Paramount for their ties to paramount. A lane right in front of the theater was conveniently barricaded, so we stood in that space in a row with our signs facing the people going in. “Keep Colbert, Dump Trump,” we chanted. It was nice to be pleasantly received by everyone except a single woman walking by who shouted pro trump bullshit as she passed.