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 good way to tell you’re in a bad neighborhood is when you see a lot of churches,” he said, making his way down the car. “Don’t beat your children or they’ll turn out like me,” he told a woman as she handed him a dollar.” Then exciting, a piece of advice I appreciated, “don’t be like Donald Trump.” The next person asking for money was also unusual. A young woman in her 20s carrying an open sketchbook, she kept showing people her art and asking if they wanted to buy it or donate for art school. I thought she might be better off setting up somewhere stationary because it was hard for anyone to really look at her art on a crowded, moving train. I had a client who used to sell her art on the sidewalk, and she did pretty well until her air brush equipment got stolen from her friend’s place. She kept it there because there is a very long list of things the shelters won’t let you bring in. She couldn’t hold down a regular job because she and another client of mine were gay bashed on the street in Bushwick late one night. The attackers hit her over the head with a piece of plexiglass that was lying on the ground and caused such a serious brain injury that when I sat by her bed day after day for a week, nobody could tell me if she was going to wake up. The doctors had to remove part of her skull to let her brain swell. They stashed it in her abdomen to keep the bone alive so they could eventually re-attach it. She survived, but she didn’t get the traumatic brain injury rehab she should have had. Despite the fact that roughly 2.5 million people experience brain injuries every year in the U.S. there are very few specialized TBI rehab programs. At the time, NYC only had two – one at NYU, which didn’t take Medicaid, and one at Bellevue. She started the program at Bellevue, but many of the paraprofessional staff were from Caribbean countries where LGBTQ people are not tolerated. When her friend and I showed up to visit a few days into her stay, we found her very distressed. She told us the staff had made her pull down her pants so they could see the genitalia she was born with. She left the program against medical advice soon after that and the lack of rehab exacerbated what would have already been a significant impairment in her functioning, she used to have to call me all the time from places like the bank so I could explain to them what she needed because she could not remember the right words. There was footage of the two guys who attacked her – they left her lying there almost dead and gone to buy snacks at a bodega. The police made a wanted poster but then made no effort to hang them up, so we organized volunteers to go around putting them in stores, etc. The guys were arrested, and I was asked to testify about the lasting effects of the injury. I’m not a big fan of our so-called “justice” system, but I was glad to see the guy who hurt her locked up. Before her injury she was constantly making art. After, years went by and the art seemed dormant but finally it started to emerge again, like early spring bulbs poking up after heavy April rain.