Electricity
6/25/26
The guardianship report was finished, but still had to be notarized. Usually David, our volunteer notary, stops by our office but he couldn’t do it on short notice, so I agreed to meet him at his office at NYU Law School at 9am. That was already early by my standards, but then John Henry, who lives in Gloucester, got assigned to a job in CT, and decided to use the relative proximity to come fix my kitchen light, which we both thought was out due to a bad fuse. He wanted to miss rush hour, so he showed up at 7:30am and by the time I left at 8, he was down in the basement tinkering with the fuse box.
The semester’s over at NYU, so the main entrance was closed and I had to go around to the Macdougal St. side where a security guard equipped with all kinds of monitors and tech ignored all of it in favor of a battered clump of stapled papers where she quickly found David’s extension. I got on the elevator with an older uniformed woman pushing a large cart piled with toilet paper. “You have the important stuff,” I said to her, and she started to laugh.
I found my way to David’s cubicle, with its bulletin board covered in pro-palestine messages. He notarized the report and then walked out with me, in search of coffee. I told him that later I’d be speaking at a luncheon at a big law firm and he eyed my dress and jewelry. “Performing femininity?” he asked and I nodded. No matter what I do, I’m never going to look like I belong at a Madison Ave. law firm, but I can at least accomplish the look some of my friends call “hippie social worker.”
Arriving at the office before anyone else, I scanned the many pages of the report and submitted them, then gathered handouts and business cards for the presentation. My friend Al, another lesbian cat lady, is a paralegal there and she convinced their DEI committee to do this event for Pride. Getting crosstown, which should have been an easy bus ride, was complicated by the World Cup charter buses lined up from 10th to 8th Ave waiting to shuttle fans to Met Life stadium.
Offitt Kurman occupies a floor of a huge office building on Madison Ave with a vast gleaming lobby and the kind of elevators where instead of pressing up or down, you press the floor and it tells you which elevator to take. Arriving on their floor, I found Al, and two of the DEI committee members, a tall easy going white woman who later told me she specializes in housing discrimination cases, and a black woman who turned out to be an accountant (and also the only black person I saw there, other than a man pushing a hand truck). They had come from the Maryland office specifically for the event. I had misunderstood the plan, assuming I would be speaking during the luncheon, but it turned out to be an hour of lunch first, and then the speakers, so I was stuck chatting with Al and the housing lawyer, who told me about her three young sons and their vacation in the Outer Banks. I couldn’t help but notice that their sprawling office seemed kind of empty, which made sense when she apologized for it being a smaller turn out – “summer hours,” she said.
Eventually about ten lawyers settled into chairs around the table and another 40 or logged in from their offices around the country. After some fussing with the technology until everyone could hear, I began my presentation. I always start with a client story to pull people in, and then I talk about the work we do. There were a variety of questions, and I wound up explaining the limited routes out of shelter into permanent housing, and about the way landlords refuse people coming out of the shelters, leaving thousands of people with vouchers that might as well be monopoly money. They had created their own link for financial donations, and I explained the angel list, as well as the kind of items we always need donated.
After me, an older lawyer in purple began her presentation about GENDA. I know the material so well I could have given that presentation too, but with the table between me and the door, I couldn’t slip away politely, so I sat through her presentation, trying not to think about the work piling up at the office. After the meeting ended, the lawyer who had been speaking told me that her daughter had transitioned at 16, and that she had been worried when she came out at her high school, but that the other students had accepted it easily. I told her I had observed over the years that young people were becoming less and less attached to the concept of the gender binary and how the idea of gender as a spectrum seemed as normal to them as the binary did to a lot of adults.
They had collected a couple of heavy boxes of hygiene supplies for us, so they piled the boxes and me into an uber back to the office. By then, the World Cup shuttle buses had shut down 40th St completely, so I had to text Misty to have some staff meet the car at 39th st to take the boxes. We always have a lot of places, mostly corporations, collect hygiene supplies for us during Pride. When groups approach us about volunteering as an organization of some kind, we give them several options, but in this DEI-challenged time, almost everyone opted for the easiest, least visible option so our storage is completely overwhelmed by donated hygiene supplies.
I got back to the office just in time for two new intakes who arrived together. Rachel took one and I took the other. It turned out that they were a couple, a 17 year old trans girl and her 18 year old girlfriend, who had left New Hampshire and gone to Boston first, where they discovered a lack of resources and decided to continue on to NYC. They wanted to be housed together as a couple, but the youth shelters don’t do that. To be housed together, they would need a domestic partnership so they could go to the adult couples’ shelter, but in order to do that they needed ID, which would take a few weeks. In the meantime, we sent them to the AFC drop-in center, where they planned to introduce themselves as best friends who had run away together.
By closing time I was yawning while drinking Red Bull and it was a relief to head home. I was planning to have a quick dinner, feed the cats, and go to bed, but when I opened the refrigerator, I realized that in the process of getting the kitchen light working, John had knocked out power to the fridge. When I called him, he told me he had turned off several fuses that he didn’t think were doing anything, and disconnected two entirely, to reduce the burden on my ancient wiring. There are more than a dozen fuses, and neither of us had a clue which one had been powering the fridge, so I had to go back and forth to the basement, turning on various ones and then checking the fridge. I was running out of options and John was starting to worry it was one of the disconnected ones and thinking he would have to come from CT early in the morning again, when I noticed one fuse slightly out of alignment. I gave it a hard shove back into position, and the problem was solved.
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