Observations

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...

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...

I woke up tired, which is not great on a day when you have to marshal a big march. I started gathering necessary items – water, snacks, ID (just in case). Connor was watching from his spot near my pillow and - realizing that I was packing to head out instead of spending my day off at home with cats- began to glare as hard as he could. It was a chilly morning with a cold wind blowing but I don’t like to marshal in my bulky winter coat - the back often involves a lot of big arm gestures, guiding people into the march and things like delivery bikes away from the march - so I layered one sweatshirt over another. Heading to the marshal meet up, in a public space on 57th st, I found myself thinking about Dad. That whole neighborhood makes me think of him. I know he would march if he could – I remember him coming to pro-choice marches when I was too young to go alone, strolling along with a cigar in his hand. My mother told me about how they went to the March on Washington in DC. M...

Between several hours talking a client through a crisis and then a friend, I had only slept for four hours yesterday when my cats began creating a ruckus. They know the alarm goes off at 8am, and it was only 7am, so I struggled my way awake to find out what was going on. Before I opened my eyes, I ran my hand over Connor, who sleeps right next to me. I felt something sticky on his tail and figured he’d gotten it in the food dish. Putting on my glasses I saw that what was on his tail were some clumps of blood. Then I noticed blood spotting the sheets, on the water dish, on both of Connor’s front paws. His nose was bleeding. He’s had an ongoing issue with a scabby nose that comes and goes. The vet has never been able to say anything more about it than it’s probably a virus from his kittenhood reactivating. But it’s only bled once before, a few months ago, and nothing like this. I wonder if the steroids for his cancer are making his skin more fragile. We’re past due for his f...

The best part of having been doing this work for as long as I have is that the work is very much like planting seeds. It takes a long time for things to take root in peoples lives, to grow and then to bloom. Last night we were short a worker, and the others were so busy with clients they couldn’t get dinner completely cleaned up before they had to go lead group. I stayed in the basement wiping tables and clearing away a few left behind plates and cups, thinking about the time I spent as a young waitress. Looking through the kitchen door, I noticed suds leaking from the sink and spreading across the floor, so I texted the Pastor. Everyone had gone upstairs to group except one trans girl who is so paranoid she will only sleep inside on the rare nights it is so cold that we stay open. She was sound asleep with her face on the table next to her half eaten salad. I finished cleaning, but I figured I would let her sleep until we closed, so I sat back down. At the front door a fligh...

I got a text the other day. It was just one word from an unknown number, but it had a familiarity to it that set off the familiar chain of flight or fight responses. Calm down, I told myself, it reminds you of the Asshole but it could be anyone. I refocused, went about my day, but ever since then there has been just a little bit of extra alertness. This morning, after months of silence, a text that’s definitely from the Asshole showed up. I know about trauma - my graduate work was on trauma at a time when new thinking was transforming the concept. Hell, my day-to-day work is all trauma all the time. Yet I’m startled when these few sentences send me plummeting to the bottom of an empty elevator shaft. The last time I saw the Asshole, they were just back from a few months out of the country. They showed up not just at my front door but in my bedroom early in the morning. I was getting dressed to go marshal a march and then they started trying to stop me from going because they tho...

Today was the protest in Observation of ACT UP's 39th anniversay. I joined in 1990, so it's "only" been 35 years for me, but still hard to imagine that it has been that long. It's a protest about money for AIDS and healthcare, not warfare, a perennial theme, but it also has a theme of remembering Mark Milano. I pushed for a civil disobedience in honor of Mark, who did so much of it in his lifetime, and Ryan ran with that, so there was a plan to block 6th ave with banners at the very end. We started out at the AIDS memorial, an oddly shaped spot where the microphones tend to be set up so that anyone sitting is either behind them on the stone benches or too far away on the park benches closer to 7th Ave. The beginning of these things is always a lot of greeting and mingling, with activists you see all the time and some you see more rarely. Banners are hung, t-shirts get sold, and the speeches begin. I was half-heartedly following along on the planning chat ...

I was at work when Dr. C, who did both of my spine surgeries called. He had shown my MRI to another neurosurgeon, the ominous sounding “Director of Complex Spinal Surgery,” and now I have to go see him. I don’t want more spinal surgery, complex or not, so I was not in the best mood as I hammered out the grant due the next day. After work, I was standing in Walgreens pondering the floor soap and wishing they had less toxic options. I was thinking about the news of Cesar Chavez’ assaults on women and girls spreading across the Internet and press and remembering the bitterness with which my mother told me about how the male leadership of SDS treated the female members at Columbia in the late ‘60s. My mom had a lot of stories like that, about being a young organist and being chased around the organ by a predatory man, about the man she invited home who raped her and left her to have an illegal abortion. She had less blatant stories of sexism too, about how as a female journalist she...

On my way to get yet another MRI, this time with contrast, I encounter Karlo, one of my middle eastern neighbors. “Someone broke into my apartment yesterday,” he says .“My window overlooks the roof of a garage and they pretended to be construction workers and hopped the fence and got on the roof of the garage. From there, they somehow opened my locked double-hung window, they didn’t even break the glass They took a bunch of cash. We called the police and they came and took a report and dusted for fingerprints. They told us not to keep much cash in the house. They looked at the building’s cameras and there were two guys, one was wearing a white sweater.” “That sounds hard to keep clean,” I say, “If you are climbing on roofs and jumping fences.” “They had their faces covered,” he says. “The fingerprints might be more useful,” I say. “If they have ever been arrested before, their fingerprints will be in the system”. When I get to Union Square, I am waiting with a much old...

I’m doctored out. The super specialization of American medical training means that you can wind up with a snowballing number of doctors and appointments as each one sends you to somebody else. Today is Dr Park, the breast surgeon who took over for Dr Cait who actually did my surgery a couple of years ago, slicing what looked like the smile of a smiley face along the bottom of my left nipple so skillfully that now you would not know anything had happened. This is a major contrast to the procedure I had in 2003 at St Vincent’s, where Dr Axelrod, a well-known breast surgeon, decided to operate without anesthesia because my liver enzymes were high on the day of the procedure. They had me lie with my arms outstretched like jesus on the cross, and tied them down, and then covered my eyes with something that resembled a pillowcase so I couldn’t see. She used local pain medication, but I could still feel the pulling and the prodding, and then sharp pain when she ventured beyond ...

Today was Erik Bottcher’s swearing in as State Senator. There’s a cold wind blowing and it’s a little hard to be enthusiastic about another one of these events in a single weekend, but Erik has volunteered in the kitchen at New Alt, and watched the clients perform at Craft Your Truth, and we have a thing where I text him upcoming demos and he shows up when he can. I put on another dress, my ankles freezing with every wintery gust, and head to the Museum of Natural History. For this event we were let in through the staff entrance on 77th St. and walked through an exhibit about American Indians to get to the auditorium. Looking at the displays as I passed, I thought about the controversy that is raging about the provenance of these and so many other artifacts, and whether they should be returned to the societies they were taken from. The program hadn’t started yet, so Erik and I shared a quick laugh about how he was chatting so much during Brad’s event he missed himself being in...

Today Brad Hoylman-Sigal was being sworn in at Alice Tully Hall, so I pulled out a sweater dress and headed into Manhattan on my day off. Despite my best efforts at dodging the cats before I left, they had managed to get some hairs on my dress and I was busy brushing them off when an older middle eastern man asked me where I was going. When I explained that it was the swearing in of the Manhattan Borough President, he said "so you're involved in politics." I explained that this is not really about politocs exactly, that I run a nonprofit and that relationships with local politicians are important both for fundraisinng and for help with other things. "Do you think Trump thinks of all this himself?" he asks. "No," I reply. "I think ideas are being fed to him." "Who do you think is telling him what to do?" he asks. "I think it's a combination," I say. "There are the people who wrote Project 2026, which i...

March 12th, 2026 The warm, sunny weather that brought New Yorkers- people, dogs and squirrels- out dashing around for the past couple of days gave way to an intense thunderstorm last night. Amid the flashes of lightning and pouring rain, I went into the second bedroom to fill up April and Sapphire’s bowls and heard a loud dripping sound. Searching the room, I spotted drip marks and followed them up to a crack in the ceiling, with big drops welling and then falling, pulled down by their own weight. I put a pan under the drip to catch the water and went to bed. Even as I gathered Smokey - who has been clingy since his outdoor adventure - into my arms I was thinking, now the roof is leaking. One more fucking thing. The next day is so damp and persistently grey that I feel like I have woken up in London. My joints- knees, shoulders, wrists and hands- hurt so much I wish I could spend the day like Smokey, who curls up so close to the heater than sometimes the room smells like hot- but n...

Every few years, one doctor or another decides that my latest neurological symptoms look enough like MS that they send me back to Dr K, the MS specialist. Then we go through a bunch of rigamarole involving reflex hammers and vibrations and testing sensation by poking me with something sharp. She orders a brain MRI, and then she decides that it doesn’t meet the criteria for MS and sets me loose for a few more years until the pattern repeats again. This time it’s my spine surgeon who, after deciding that the random tingling that keeps happening in half my face is not related to the hardware he put in my neck, has sent me to back to Dr K. So I was making my way up to the Mt Sinai MS Center on E 98th in a pretty grumpy mood because this feels like a waste of time and also I really really don’t want to add MS to my list of medical crap. Suddenly, my crabby thoughts about neurology were interrupted by a young man who said, “I was born in Lebanon but I came here when I was one ...

I was not paying much attention to the older black man with the graying beard sitting next to me on the train with a book in his lap until he slid closer to me to let a young woman sit down on his other side. There wasn’t enough room for her friend to sit down too, but there was an empty seat on the other side of the pole next to me so I stood up and took that seat, the man shifted over and the other young woman sat down. By then he was smiling broadly, a striking smile. “I just went to the comedy club with a friend I haven’t seen in 30 years he told me,” pulling up a photo of himself posing with three women against a Harlem Comedy Club backdrop. Pointing out one he said, “she used to work at the Javitz Center with me, but she left in 1991, and those are her friends.” The photo blinked off the screen and was replaced by his screen saver, a photo of himself, much younger, posing with two women for a Newport cigarette ad. The glasses and grey beard were gone, but it was the same broad ...

2/28/26 Ships blowing their fog horns as they passed under the Verrazano and into the Narrows woke me before dawn. Connor’s focused stare, willing me to feed him to make up for the dinner he rejected the night before, probably contributed. The thing about Trump being president, is that you wake up thinking, what now? This morning it’s another disaster – the US joining with Israel to bomb Iran. I don’t support the oppressive Iranian regime, but US intervention anywhere is rarely effective and it’s pretty clear that Trump’s agenda in this, whether it be oil, power, greed or distracting the populace has nothing to do with the people of Iran. This is the 7th country he’s bombed since his 2nd term began. He treats our military powers like a toddler with a toy, apparently oblivious to the potential consequences. So far an elementary school has been bombed killing dozens of little girls, three American soldiers have been killed, five soldiers are seriously injured, and the conflict is s...